Immaterialism (pt. 2)
Ever since I first speculated on such matters, I liked to think of myself as a transcendental pantheist, with a definite attraction to the saga of Jesus. It was only rather late in the game that I had to conclude there must be more than an aesthetic connection.
Transcendentalism remained but poetry to the prose of my earnest engagement with physics. But physics never yielded to my need for a true depth of understanding of the world. A random encounter with the notion of the Anthropic principle reawakened my desire for wholeness. For almost five years I struggled to find wholeness within a quantum dualism of mind and matter. But that slim thread or loophole never seemed sufficiently robust to explain all that needed explaining. Even quantum dualism was still verging on the incoherence of Cartesianism.
Once one has opened the door to the possibility of mind on a cosmic scale, all the qualities are drained out of matter, and one is left with the purely mathematical abstractions of physics. The only hurdle to cosmic coherence was the obvious stratagem of subsuming those abstractions to the mental realm. It was still a big leap, and there were more than a few 'sleepless nights'. I continued to be haunted by dinosaurs among other things. Barney may have saved me. Yes, almost.
I realized that my leap from science to immaterialism was a luxury that my fellow scientists could ill-afford. I never seriously considered it to be an intellectual possibility until the advent of the Internet. But by that time I was already well launched into the Aquarium stratagem, which lasted nearly ten years. Now here I am praying to Google for the deliverance of this story.
7/4/02