Not Made of Things That Appear

I. The Same Street

Take a dog out on a leash and watch where they stop.

There will be a place on the sidewalk where they stop and there is nothing. Not nothing to them — they're reading, with obvious concentration, and the reading is taking longer than you'd like. Someone came through here. Someone was frightened here, or sick, or ate something worth knowing about a block back. You're standing over the same square foot of concrete and there is nothing on it. You look down and check. It's a sidewalk.

Now walk them inside and point at something on the far wall, and they look at your hand, then at your face, then very possibly where you're pointing, because dogs are unusual among animals in following a human finger at all. What they won't do is find the thing on the wall interesting, and they aren't being slow. The far wall is furniture in your world; in theirs, it's a long way off and made mostly of nothing much.

Most of what they know about the street, they know by smelling it. Most of what you know about the street, you know by looking at it. Between the two of you there is one street and two accounts of it that barely overlap, and neither of you can check either account against the street.

You want to say you're both getting a piece of it — that between you, and a bat, and a bee, the whole thing could be assembled. I'd like to say that too. Put the two side by side and ask which one is the street. Theirs is a landscape of chemical traces laid down in time, with a shape and a history and almost no geometry. Yours is a still, silent grid of colored surfaces at measured distances. Those aren't two views of one scene from two angles; they're two different kinds of thing, built out of two different materials, for two different animals.

So which is the street?

Neither. And there's no third one in the house. Nothing on that walk is the street rather than somebody's version of it — yours feels like the street and not like a version, and that feeling is worth nothing, because theirs feels the same way to them. A nose doesn't announce itself as an instrument. Whatever a rendering is made of, it doesn't come with a note attached saying that it's one.

Which leaves a question that sounds like a trick and isn't. If the street isn't either of the streets you have, what do you have?

II. A Default With Nothing Under It

Look at something red.

The red is not out there. What's out there is light of a certain frequency, and a frequency is a number; it isn't red, and there's nothing about it that is red, and if every creature with eyes went extinct tomorrow the number would go on and the red would not. Red is manufactured. It's made in the dark, behind your face, out of a rate of arrival, and then handed to you as a property of a tomato.

And it isn't a lie. The red tracks the frequency reliably enough that you can find the ripe fruit in the leaves, which is what the whole apparatus was built for. So here's a thing that's useful and not veridical at once, with no tension between the two. It works because it's an invention. A readout of the actual frequency, in numbers, would be worse at getting you fed.

Widen that. Selection is the only process that had any hand in building your senses, and selection has never been in the business of truth. It pays for offspring. Where a true perception and a useful one come apart it pays for the useful one and pays nothing for the difference — which is not a suspicion about evolution but what evolution says about itself, and it has been made precise. Donald Hoffman and his collaborators modeled perceptual strategies as competing organisms and found that strategies tuned to fitness payoffs drive strategies tuned to seeing the world's structure straight to extinction.¹

The result is narrower than it sounds and narrower than the book it appears in. It concerns perceptual strategies inside a formal model. It doesn't show the world lacks structure of its own, it doesn't show space and time are unreal, and it doesn't show mind is fundamental. Perception being non-veridical is consistent with a mind-independent world out there that we simply model badly, the way a bad map is still a map of somewhere.

It's also contested on its own ground, and the sharpest reply is about you. Grant the mathematics and deny its reach: the skeptical conclusion holds for creatures whose senses run on single cues, and fails for creatures that combine complementary information arriving by different routes — for whom chasing usefulness drives the picture toward agent-independent fact rather than away from it. Anything with eyes and ears and hands and instruments and other people to compare notes with is the second kind. So is the animal on the leash.²

Take all of that at full strength and something small is still standing. The reason a person believes the furniture of experience is the furniture of the world is that it feels immediate. It doesn't feel like a rendering. It feels like the room. And immediacy is exactly what an interface is engineered to deliver — a good one is invisible, which is what makes it good. So the feeling that we're looking at the world rather than at a version of it has no standing at all. It's the one thing we should have expected either way.

What's gone is the reason for a default. A default with no reason left under it is a habit.

And notice how little that costs. It doesn't matter whether your rendering of the street is accurate. It matters that it's a rendering.

The tradition got there long before anyone measured a photoreceptor, and said it in seven words:

For now we see through a glass, darkly.³

Not a complaint about poor eyesight. A statement about the medium. What arrives has come through something, and what has come through something is not the thing.

Now hold your hand up in front of your face.

What you have there is not your hand. What you have is the seeing of it — a patch of color and edge, arriving, with a warmth on the skin and a sense of where the arm is. Every further fact you have ever learned about that hand came through the same door. The bones came from a photograph on a light box. The cells came from a stain under a lens. The atoms came from an argument built on instruments read by eyes. All of it arrived as more appearing.

You have never encountered matter. You have encountered the appearing of it, and so has everyone who ever told you anything about it.

That isn't a paradox and it isn't skepticism. It's an inventory, and it comes out lopsided in a way that's easy to state and hard to get around. Awareness is the one thing whose existence isn't an inference. It isn't the best-supported item on the list; it's the item the list is written on. Everything else — the hand, the room, the street, the dog, the frequency behind the red — is known through it, which is to say inferred from what shows up in it.

Matter, then, is a hypothesis. Not a wild one. The best-tested idea in the history of our species, confirmed past counting, and I wouldn't spend a sentence arguing against any particular thing it says. But it is a hypothesis about the contents of awareness — proposed from inside awareness, tested by further appearing inside awareness, and never stepped outside of.

Physicalism says the hypothesis is the fundamental thing and the awareness is something the hypothesis produced. It asks the one undeniable item to be explained by an inference drawn from it. It has to, because the alternative was closed off before the question was put: the world was handed over to mechanism because mechanism kept working, mind was left as the thing still to be accounted for, and the division of labor has been in force so long that it reads as rigor rather than as a turn somebody took.

You're about to say I've run two different kinds of first together. That everything is known through awareness is a fact about the order of knowing, and says nothing about the order of being — fire is known through experience too, and fire is not made of experience. That's right, and it's what keeps any of this from being a proof.

What it doesn't do is put the default back. It leaves two candidates for what is fundamental, one of them given and the other inferred, and the case for laying the inferred one underneath turns out to be a case about success: treating the world as mechanism has worked spectacularly, for four hundred years, at prediction and control. Which is a powerful argument for using the hypothesis. It isn't an argument that the hypothesis is the deeper of the two things, and it has been doing duty as one.

The world is not what I found awareness inside of. Awareness is what I found the world inside of.

III. Two Accounts

Both sides here are carrying a debt, and the two are not the same size.

Open the physicalist's account first. There is one item on it.

Somewhere right now there's a room with a person in a scanner and a wall of instruments around them. The instruments are very good. Which regions are active, in what order; which cells fired, at what threshold, in what pattern — all of that they'll tell you. Interfere in the right place and the person's experience changes the way the model predicted. Do it in another place and the person stops having experiences altogether, on schedule, reversibly, which happens in hospitals every day and is one of the plainest triumphs there is. The predictions are good enough to be clinical. None of that is in dispute and none of it is small.

What the wall of instruments will not tell you is that it hurt.

Not which process — that's known, or knowable, and the knowing gets better every year. Why any process at all is undergone. Why there is something it is like to be the person in the scanner, rather than the whole business running through in the dark, exactly as described, with nobody home. Ask it precisely and it doesn't reduce to a gap in the data. It's a question about what kind of explanation could be given, and the honest answer, from the people who have worked on it hardest, is that nobody can say what one would even look like.⁴

That's a debt rather than a puzzle. Everywhere else science closed a gap, we could describe in advance what closing it would consist of: you'd find the mechanism, and the mechanism would show why the thing had to happen. Here nobody can write down the form of a successful answer, which is why the question keeps getting called hard rather than unsolved.⁵ There are serious theories — accounts of what the brain integrates, what it broadcasts to the rest of itself, what it models about its own states. Each describes a mechanism in real detail and each has work behind it. What none of them supplies is why the mechanism is undergone instead of merely run. And the one position that meets the question head-on answers that the undergoing was a misdescription all along, which declines the debt rather than paying it.⁶

That's a live position and it may be right. It isn't a payment.

Now the other account. It's longer — four items, and they are all real charges.

Item one: there are obviously many of us. If mind is what there is, and it's one, why can't I read yours? A single fundamental consciousness ought to be seamless, and what we've got is billions of sealed rooms, each with a view out and none with a view across.⁷

Item two: the world holds still. Two people can argue about a table. The argument is possible because the table isn't either person's table — push on it and it pushes back with a force that has nothing to do with what either of them wanted, measure it twice and get the same number, leave the room and come back and it's where you left it. It doesn't cheat in the ways that would be convenient.

Item three: the world doesn't care. The bus kills the believer as fast as the skeptic. Fervor doesn't move it. Attention doesn't move it.

Item four: the world runs on tissue. Damage the brain and the person goes — the memory, the temperament, sometimes everything. Which looks less like an interface and more like a machine that was making the whole show.

Take them in order.

The first is paid, and not by me. One consciousness taken as a dreamer, and each of us a finite aspect of it that has forgotten, on purpose, in order to have an experience rather than author one — that argument is made at length in The Novelist DM, and a person in a dream is genuinely surprised by a world made wholly of themselves. And the separateness it produces isn't a defect needing an apology. The Distance That Love Needs argues the twoness is the design — union is not merger, love happens between two, and closing the distance to zero would abolish one of the two it needed. The sealed rooms are what a world has to have in it if anybody in it is going to say You.

The second is paid by the thing that raised it. A shared world requires exactly that regularity. It isn't evidence against a mind; it's what a mind must supply if the world is going to be somewhere others can live, act, learn and be held to anything. Take the regularity away and there's nothing left to be faithful about. And the regularities are as real as they ever were — every law that describes them describes them exactly as well as it did this morning. Nothing gets demoted. What changes is the answer to a question physics doesn't ask, which is regularities of what, and that answer was never in the equations, because nothing in an equation says what it's an equation about.

The third pays itself. The consciousness that would be fundamental is not mine, and one that isn't mine is precisely one that doesn't check with me before the bus arrives. So the indifference of the world argues against a very small thesis nobody here is defending, and mildly for this one — a world that answered to its inhabitants' wishes is what you'd expect if each of them were fundamental, which is the thing being denied.

The fourth is a draw, and it's the strongest of the four. It's decisive against one claim: that my mind is fundamental. Nobody is claiming that. What it doesn't settle is what it's usually taken to settle, because the same evidence sits equally well with two pictures. If the brain produces experience, wrecking it should end experience. If the brain localizes and constrains an experience it doesn't produce — if it's where a life is narrowed to a point of view — wrecking it should also end that life's view, the way wrecking a radio ends the music in the room. Damage to a receiver and damage to a generator look the same from outside. That doesn't establish the receiver; it would be the same overreach running the other way. It's a draw.

So: four charges, three answered and one drawn. Against one charge that cannot be specified, let alone met.

That isn't proof, and I'm not dressing it as one. A metaphysics doesn't get proofs, and an account with an answer to a hard question is not thereby true. It's where the burden sits. Given two positions that each owe an explanation, and one has produced a serious one while the other cannot say what producing one would mean, the default belongs to the first.

It's the second we teach in schools.

IV. The Name Is in the First Person

There is a man on a mountain talking to a fire, and he asks for a name.

The question is a reasonable one, and he's being sent to people who will want to know which god this is — of what domain, with what powers, standing where in the order of things. A name in that world is a nature; it tells you what you're dealing with. So he asks the sensible thing, and what comes back is not the kind of answer he asked for:

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and [They] said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.⁸

That is not a noun. It isn't a domain, a power or a rank. It's a first-person sentence about being, offered as a name, to a man who asked what he was dealing with. The tradition's own answer to what is fundamental is awareness saying so in the first person, and it has been sitting on the third page of the book the whole time.

It goes past most readers, and I think I know why: we come to those pages looking for a manufacturer. We want to know who made the stuff, out of what, and when — and the text obliges so well at the surface that it's easy to miss that it never describes anybody making anything out of anything.

It didn't go past me, and I can take no credit for that. I met Vedanta about fifteen years before I opened a Bible, and came to the burning bush already holding a vocabulary in which I AM is not a strange thing for God to say.

Look at how things come to be there. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.⁹ The mechanism is speech. Not assembly, not shaping, not raw material worked into form — an utterance, and the thing is there. Then the New Testament opens by naming what was there first and closes the loophole in the same breath: In the beginning was the Word… All things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made.¹⁰ The second clause does the heavy work. It isn't enough to say the Word came first; the sentence goes on to deny that anything got in another way. There is no pile of stuff that arrived by a different door and was then organized.

And then a sentence that says the thing outright, so plainly that I don't know how to improve on it:

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.¹¹

What is seen is not made of appearings. The ground of what shows up is not itself a further thing that shows up. That's the claim in the tradition's own sentence, written by someone with no interest in this argument, long before anybody had a word like physicalism to be wrong about.

None of these texts was written to settle a modern dispute about the fundamental nature of reality, and reading Hebrews as a treatise on ontology is reading it for something its author was not doing — that chapter is a catalogue of people who trusted, and the verse is there to say what trusting understands. So the claim has to be smaller, and the smaller one is enough: the tradition never described a world made of stuff. Wherever it says how things come to be, it says word, speech, and not out of what appears. The mechanical world we take for the tradition's own furniture came later, and from somewhere else, and got read back in so thoroughly that its absence from the text is invisible. This reading is native. It isn't the only thing the texts are doing.

And there's one more, from a man improvising in front of a hostile crowd, who reaches for the preposition that gives the whole thing away:

For in [Them] we live, and move, and have our being.¹²

Not near Them. Not made by Them and set down at a distance to run. In. And the noun he lands on, having said live and move and needing a third, is being — the word this whole argument has been about, arriving in a sentence about where we are.¹³

V. What It Does Not Buy

Three things get read off this that it doesn't license.

It does not mean the world answers to you. This is the one that matters, because it's a paraphrase away and it inverts everything. If what is fundamental is a consciousness that is God's, and I am a finite aspect of it that has forgotten as much, then being fundamental is exactly the property that isn't mine. The reading that turns this into a technique — attend correctly and the world will supply — needs a self sitting at the center with the leverage, and everything above spends its length dissolving that self. It isn't an extension of the claim. It's the claim with the one indispensable term swapped out. The Machine You Expect refused it directly, and Nothing to Get refused its cousin, where the point was that you can't acquire by strategy what is only ever given.

It does not mean you are alone. Solipsism needs my consciousness to be the primary one, and every part of this cuts the other way — the table two people can argue about, the world that doesn't consult me, the sealed rooms conceded above and not explained away. One dreamer is not one dreamer's dream. If anything it makes the stranger less optional than materialism does, since on a mind-first account there's no interpretation on which they're furniture.

It does not mean the suffering isn't real. Here's where a mind-first metaphysics does its worst damage, and it does it by a move that sounds like consolation. If the world is mind, someone will say, then the cancer is mind, and mind can be corrected, so the cancer is in some sense not there. That doesn't follow. If everything real is of one substance, pain is made of the same thing the table is made of, and the table didn't get less real when we relocated it. The argument distributes evenly or not at all. You can't use it to thin out the parts you'd rather were thinner while leaving the parts you're standing on solid. A pain made of the fundamental thing is not a lesser pain. It's a pain with better standing than the atoms were ever going to give it.

Why a world like this contains what it contains, I can't tell you, and I'd rather leave it a question than hand somebody a reason that only works on paper. What I can say is that nothing here gives anybody permission to tell a person in pain that their pain is a mistake in their thinking.

And the people holding the picture I've been arguing against aren't fools. I was taught the world was made of stuff, and I still see it that way most hours of most days. It isn't a stupidity anybody chose. It's the water.

VI. The Last Picture

The dog was never wrong about the street; they'd only have been wrong if they'd concluded that their street was the street — and nothing in their world could have told them otherwise, because a rendering doesn't come with a note saying that it's a rendering. That isn't a limitation of noses. It's what it is to be inside something.

This tradition has spent a long time taking pictures down. A picture of God made of pigment, a picture made of grammar, a picture made of paper and a concordance, a picture made with hands and then defended as though the defending were faithfulness. Each came down the same way — not by being replaced with a better picture, but by somebody noticing it was a picture at all.

A world made of stuff is a picture. It got past every one of those demolitions by not looking like a picture of anything, and by arriving in the vocabulary the demolitions were conducted in — the frame the iconoclasts were standing in while they worked.

What you have is not the street and never was. What you have is the seeing, which you didn't make, in a life you didn't start, in a being that was going before you got here and isn't yours either. In [Them] we live, and move, and have our being is either a beautiful thing to say or a description of where you are. Everything above has been an argument that it is a description.

Take a dog out on a leash and watch where they stop — they're reading their own version of the street. So are you.

Footnotes

1. Donald D. Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). The technical results: J. T. Mark, B. B. Marion and D. D. Hoffman, "Natural selection and veridical perceptions," Journal of Theoretical Biology 266, no. 4 (2010): 504–515, which introduces interface games and finds veridical strategies driven to extinction by strategies tuned to payoff; D. D. Hoffman, M. Singh and C. Prakash, "The Interface Theory of Perception," Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 22, no. 6 (2015): 1480–1506; and C. Prakash, K. D. Stephens, D. D. Hoffman, M. Singh and C. Fields, "Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception," Acta Biotheoretica 69, no. 3 (2021): 319–341, which proves the theorem and measures how the dominance of the payoff strategy grows with the size of the perceptual space. The theorem is conditional in a way the body's sentence has to respect: it concerns agents whose perception is an inference to states of an objective world, under fitness functions that don't track the world's structure. Hoffman's term for his own positive proposal is conscious realism: the objective world consists of interacting conscious agents, with the spacetime interface emerging from them. Hoffman distinguishes it from panpsychism, which attributes consciousness to physical objects. That is a program he is pursuing rather than a result he has in hand, and nothing here travels on it. ↩

2. Manolo Martínez, "Usefulness Drives Representations to Truth: A Family of Counterexamples to Hoffman's Interface Theory of Perception," Grazer Philosophische Studien 96, no. 3 (2019): 319–341. Martínez grants the game-theoretic argument and confines it: it works for cue-driven agents, in Kim Sterelny's sense, and where the information reaching an agent by different routes is synergistic — complementary, and combined — maximizing usefulness involves construing a picture of agent-independent, objective matters of fact. Other objections run alongside it, from the assignment of fitness to arbitrary world states to the charge that an evolutionary argument against the reliability of perception undercuts the perceptual evidence for evolution. Hoffman and his collaborators have answered commentators at length, and the dispute is live rather than closed. ↩

3. 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV). Scripture throughout is the King James, quoted with one editorial convention disclosed here and then applied without further comment: pronouns for God take this house's capital — He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father — where the King James lowercases them. Raising a case alters no word, in the way the King James's own small-capital LORD alters no word. Where a word is changed rather than its case, the change is bracketed and the source wording is recorded in the note. ↩

4. Joseph Levine, "Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64, no. 4 (1983): 354–361. The claim is not that physical explanation of experience has failed, but that no one has specified what a successful one would consist of. ↩

5. David Chalmers, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200–219, and The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–450. ↩

6. The three sketched in order: integrated information (Giulio Tononi, "An information integration theory of consciousness," BMC Neuroscience 5 (2004): art. 42), the global neuronal workspace (Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux, "Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Conscious Processing," Neuron 70, no. 2 (2011): 200–227), and higher-order and self-modeling accounts. The position that declines the question is illusionism — Keith Frankish, "Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness," Journal of Consciousness Studies 23, nos. 11–12 (2016): 11–39 — which holds that phenomenal consciousness is itself the thing to be explained away. It is a declined debt rather than a bad answer: if illusionism is right, the inventory we opened with has no premise, and that is the honest form of the disagreement. ↩

7. The objection has a name in the recent literature — the decomposition problem, or the problem of how one universal consciousness comes to be many private ones. It is the standing objection to any idealism. The answer drawn on here belongs to the two essays linked below it. ↩

8. Exodus 3:14 (KJV). The King James reads and he said, Thus shalt thou say; the bracketed [They] said is this house's pronoun for God, recorded here unaltered so the substitution is visibly the author's. The question Moses asks is at 3:13 — What is [Their] name? what shall I say unto them?, where the King James reads his: the referent is God, so the house pronoun governs and the bracket marks the substitution. The divine name proper, rendered in the King James by small-capital LORD, arrives at 3:15, a verse later than the I AM and by a different route. ↩

9. Genesis 1:3 (KJV). ↩

10. John 1:1, 1:3 (KJV). The same closure is reached from a different direction — from omnipotence and omnipresence taken strictly — in The Novelist DM, which argues that granting any one thing a single watt of power of its own makes God large but no longer all-powerful. ↩

11. Hebrews 11:3 (KJV), and the source of this essay's title. ↩

12. Acts 17:28 (KJV), from Paul's speech at Athens. The King James reads For in him we live, and move, and have our being; the bracketed [Them] is this house's pronoun for God, and the source wording is recorded here so the substitution is the author's and visibly so. Four verses earlier in the same speech: God that made the world and all things therein… dwelleth not in temples made with hands. ↩

13. What this publication reasons from is a God who is present rather than posited — Brother Lawrence's GOD, whom I considered always as with me, often as in me (The Practice of the Presence of God, Second Letter) — a Someone in whom we live, and not a being one has. ↩