Is the World Made of Language?

Milen Martchev

Abstract
This paper examines whether the statement that the world is 'made of language', or that it is 'akin to
language', as has been put forward under slightly different guises in the past by certain philosophers,
linguists and scientists, can be construed to offer a meaningful and deeper than superficially metaphorical
insight into human cognitive reality and perhaps even physical reality itself. In the process, the nature of
language and codes, some contemporary developments in scientific discourse in the area of fundamental
physics, as well as the apparent recent surge in the use of 'consciousness' as a world-explaining metaphor
will be considered. Chief among the arguments made here is that no matter what strategy we choose to go
by in order to explain existence, and even if the human mind can conceive of the possibility of some kind of
'ultimate' or 'unitary' reality, then that reality, whatever it may be, resides where language and thought
cannot penetrate; conversely, any humanly conceivable state of affairs necessarily begins where language
and logic doat the level of duality and binary oppositions.

1. Introduction
During the last decade or so of the previous century, American philosopher,
ethnobotanist and explorer of consciousness Terence McKenna would frequently
remark that the world is 'made of language' (cf., for example, McKenna et al. 1990;
McKenna 1994a, 1994b). This is certainly not something one hears very often and
McKenna did have a penchant for exploring, on occasion, 'far-out' ideas out of
intellectual curiosity, but we can be sure that he was seriously committed to this notion
and did not entertain it just vaguely metaphorically, as he would explicitly say things
like: 'We're born into what William James calls a "blooming buzzing confusion", but by
the acquisition of words we mosaic over various sectors of this blooming buzzing
confusion with words. We replace the unknown with the known through the
substitution of words and by the time a child is two or three they have completely
created a cultural mosaic of words that is interposed between them and reality. Reality
from that point on is only an unconfirmed rumour brought through the medium of
language and every culture accentuates different parts of reality so that, in a sense,
every culture is a different reality. Language is the stuff of the world, not quarks or
wave-packets or neutrinos, but language. Everything is made of language' (McKenna et
al. 1990).
When asked to comment on such a statement, neuroscientist, fellow consciousness
explorer and pioneering dolphin communication researcher John C. Lilly tersely
replied: 'No, reality is not made of language' (Lilly 1998). As someone interested in
'higher' states of consciousness, he viewed language rather as a barrier to perceiving
those alternate realities. In the same interview he also says: 'You're not allowed to
remember once you go into [higher states of consciousness]. It's union with God. That's
the true yoga, and so you're nonhuman, so there's no way you can recount what
happened. You have no way of saying it, because it's beyond language. All those states
are beyond language. Language is a very poor instrument to express it... The descriptive
[use of language] is very poor, and William James said that the other realities are

separated from this one by the filmiest of screens. I found that this screen is language,
so you have to abandon it when you're going to these other realities.'
So, apart from the fact that both these unorthodox philosophers like to quote William
James, we have no agreement as to the nature of the world in regard to language, and
many people will undoubtedly react to McKenna's statement with a Lilly-like
dismissiveness, if perhaps for their own reasons. Our suspicion is that if Lilly and
McKenna had agreed on exactly what they meant by 'language', then their notions
would appear quite complementary and not so greatly at odds. In that way, language
does separate us from a common reality, including when it talks about itself.
Obviously, the word language can nowadays be used to denote things beyond the
human tongues, as in written language, computer languages, body language, the
language of love and information, among others. In this article, we will explore the
question of whether there is some sense in which we could meaningfully say that the
world is made of language and what that might entail. For the purpose, we will take a
look at the role of metaphors in our relationship to reality, binary codes, recent
developments in physics and cosmology, and the revival of 'consciousness' as a natureexplanatory paradigm. The least that can be promised at this stage is that if the reader
happens to agree with the validity of any of the arguments made in the following
sections, then the reality of them in his or her mind will have been entirely brought
about by language.

2. Code
In a way, everything that makes up our mental and psychological experience of life is a
metaphor. A word often stands for something that we have experienced or seen,
although linguists have long since noticed that 'stand for' is not quite a satisfactory
model of what language does. The signifier and signified dyad (leaving other more
complicated systems aside) that comprises the Saussurean linguistic sign are both
abstract mental constructs. The actual thing signified is only inferred to be outside in

the case of objects in our surroundings, but in reality exists as a kind of mental
projection inside our heads and the rest of our cognitive sensorium. Inversely, a newly
acquired word or phrase can plant an idea in us without having previously experienced
the signified entity in any other way.
If 'metaphor' can be broadly defined as understanding one thing in terms of another,
then we can follow a whole chain of metaphorical conceptualisation starting with the
most ordinary objects of our environment. If we see a tree, we relate to it in terms of
our mental representation of it, which is undoubtedly very different to, say, a termite's;
no two trees are alike, yet we apply our mental construct to all of them through
unconscious abstraction of hard-to-strictly-define salient features. After our primary
sign tree (already a metaphor) is in place, we can then push it to a level more
traditionally associated with the term as in the tree of life, or to still more abstracted
metaphorical types of usage as in cannot see the forest for the trees.
As semioticians have pointed out, even our physical surroundings are metaphors that
can be 'read'. A door is a sign whose connotations obviously include constructs such as
'walking through', 'knocking', 'opening', etc. Regardless of the actual shape, age,
material, location and so on, 'door' is an abstract concept that encompasses all doors
and lives in our mind. What matters is that each sign is unique, more or less, so that the
whole discrete system of signs can be efficiently manipulated and navigated.
Thus, metaphors are all around and within us, in a much deeper sense than just
realising that when using, say, the word 'manipulate' as we did in the previous sentence,
the idea suggested has little to do with our actual hands, or that by 'navigating' we do
not really mean sailing. We rely on metaphors at all expressional and conceptual levels
of meaning, we create internal representations of the outside world through our senses,
and our natural languages consist of linguistic signs which 'unite not a thing and a name,
but a concept and a sound-image' (Saussure 1966, p.66). On higher levels of the
linguistic system, linguistic habits, speech patterns and narratives shape our experience
of the world and much of what we know or think we know is a rumour, fiction and a

story. The common denominator at all levels of cognition, thought and communication
is that we use certain kinds of things (patterns of neural signals, language etc.) to stand
for other things in order to understand them. Indeed, the evolution of language and
thought can be seen as a progression and overlapping of metaphors, often embedded
in stories. As soon as we comprehend some novel concept or perceive a new aspect of
reality and represent it by referring and adding to prior concepts, objects, experiences,
or systems thereof, the newly understood entities themselves become cognitive objects
that can later be used in order to think and talk about even more things. Thus the
metaphor, although always a provisional entity, is a natural vehicle and medium of
thought, and as such it is no surprise that metaphors are built upon metaphors in
advancing the human experience of the world, just as has been observed about all media
in general: 'The content of any medium is always another medium' (McLuhan 1964,
p.8).
The most paradigmatic metaphors of science in constructing an operational model of
reality for any particular age usually come out of mankind's dominant technologies
during that time period. These days, one of the overarching cognitive analogies is
undoubtedly the computer (and computing in general)a technology whose basic
principles are fully understood by only a small minority of the population, but about
which most people possess an intuitive understanding as everyday users, interacting
with all its surface metaphors: windows, desktops, icons, scrolling, saving, sleep mode and
all the rest of what we call the human interface. 'The Computer' as a tool for shaping
thought has added itself onto metaphors arising out of older technologies like
handicraft and industrial machinery.
Scholars of language and the mind, too, have certainly not been immune to thinking
about their subject in computing terms. In his theorizing on language, the prominent
linguist Noam Chomsky assumes that the generation of language involves two
components: 'a computational system and a lexicon' (Chomsky 1995, p. 20). By
'computational system' he means the system, or set of formal rules, generating
linguistic expressions (each of which consists of a phonetic and a logical component)

for a specific language out of the presumed invariant principles and pre-built options
of the general human language faculty. Chomsky has himself remarked on the power of
the computer metaphor for the current age by comparing modern conceptual models
with the times of Galileo, when mechanical philosophy (mechanical science) provided
a 'criterion of intelligibility' and when mechanical devices provided the major stimulus
to the imagination, which is 'not unlike the stimulus today from what's done by
computers', while warning that 'it can lead you astray in both cases' (Chomsky 2012).
The psychologist-anthropologist duo of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put
computational systems at the very heart of their conception of intelligence, while
defining computational systems within organisms as those parts which are designed to
'monitor the environment for specific changes and regulate the operation of other parts
of the system functionally on the basis of the changes detected' (Cosmides & Tooby
2001, p. 153). This conception of a 'computational system' is obviously very different
to Chomsky's, although not altogether unrelated inasmuch as a process referred to as
'computation' receives input and produces output according to some predetermined
(genetic) rule, similar to a computer program. Cognitive scientist and linguist Steven
Pinker, for whom language is an 'improbable feat requiring intricate mental software',
although not something people naturally think in (Pinker 1994, p. 425), expounds the
view that 'the mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection'
(Pinker 1997, p. x), while observing that 'the computational theory of mind has quietly
entrenched itself in neuroscience, the study of physiology of the brain and nervous
system' (ibid., p. 83).
Philosopher Richard Boyd identifies the 'theory-constructive' role of the computer
metaphor in cognitive psychology, with thought seen as information processing and
certain motoric and cognitive processes seen as pre-programmed; in the paradigm he
outlines, the brain carries out computations, information is encoded and indexed in
memory store, and consciousness is often seen as a feedback phenomenon (Boyd 1979,
p. 360). It is worth noting how a concept such as 'memory', originally referring to the

human faculty of recollection, has made its way back into our models of the mind with
strong computing overtones.
So, what has computing taught us about the nature of language or more technically
code? As programmer and technical author on Microsoft Windows applications Charles
Petzold (1999, p.5) writes, 'Code usually means a system for transferring information
among people and machines', adding that 'There seems to be no reason why cats aren't
called "dogs" and dogs aren't called "cats". One could say English vocabulary is a type
of code.' (ibid.), thus echoing the long-standing insight of linguistics about the
essentially arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign. More importantly, he goes on to state
the basic and (to our present knowledge) irreducible building block of a code, be it
binary, Morse or something else: 'The key word here is two. Two types of blinks, two
vowel sounds, two different anything, really, can with suitable combinations convey all
types of information' (Petzold 1999, p.8). In computing and information science, this
smallest information-encoding logical entity is of course known as a bit.
It is not hard to see therefore that languageand logicmust break down below the
level of binary opposition. We might try to devise a kind of language composed of only
dots or only zeros (that is, just one building element), but then without intervals
between them (the interval effectively becoming our second encoding element) we
wouldn't be able to encode anything at all. This fundamental nature of the binary code
highlights the observation that (an arbitrary) difference is the root of all possible
meaning; as the father of modern linguistics Saussure himself remarks in his Course in
General Linguistics: 'in language there are only differences' (Saussure 1966, p. 120).
Thanks to computing, the fact that any kind of information can ultimately be encoded
in a system consisting of two symbols does not stretch the imagination these days when
we talk about language or codes, but does it hold true for what we call 'physical reality'?
Can we relate the originally 'tongue-tied' but now highly abstract concept of language
and take it to even higher levels of abstraction while paradoxically attempting to
explain matter and the universe, perhaps echoing St. Augustine's search for a 'perfect

language, common to all people', one not of words but 'rather, a language made out of
things themselves' (Eco 1995, p.15)? After all, although modern scientific man would
much prefer not to use quite the same religious metaphor, St. Augustine's view that the
world is 'as a vast book written with God's finger' (ibid.) surely still has not lost its
intellectual appeal.
Exploring this kind of connection may seem a little far-fetched, but the remarkable thing
is that it has been done before, and by some influential thinkers too. One of the great
linguists of the 20th century, Benjamin Whorf, expressed 'the idea, entirely unfamiliar
to the modern world, that nature and language are inwardly akin', while seeing that this
'was for ages well known to various high cultures', like the ancient mantric and yogic
traditions of India (Whorf 1941, pp.248-249). Whorf sees a 'premonition in language of
the unknown, vaster worldthat world of which the physical is but a surface or skin',
including insights from mathematics, which he regards as 'one special case of this
relation to language'.
For him, physical reality, like language, is a series of planes or levels, each with its own
set of patterned relations integrating themselves into patterns of a higher order. In
language, that would be the physical acoustics-phonetics-phonemics-morphologysyntax-discourse progression of levels, corresponding in science to the progression of
processes respectively studied by quantum physics, physics, chemistry, biology and
then moving on to the human and social scienceseach level of study working with its
own set of laws, patterns and causal relationships. In Whorf's own words, 'just as
language consists of discrete lexation-segmentation [i.e. words] and ordered
patternment [i.e. subconsciously internalised rules for combining phonemes,
morphemes, words, sentences etc.] of which the latter has the more background
character, less obvious but more infrangible and universal, so the physical world may
be an aggregate of quasi-discrete entities (atoms, crystals, living organisms, planets,
stars, etc.) not fully understandable as such, but rather emergent from a field of causes
that is itself a manifold of pattern and order' (Whorf 1941, p. 269).

Around the time Whorf wrote the article in question, the word 'computer' still usually
meant 'a real person with a pencil and paper, engaged in arithmetical calculations' (AlKhalili 2011), but there is an important computing analogue here too. In computing,
there is a progression of planes of organisation starting from machine language,
through higher-level programming languages and all the way up to the windows and
graphic design we are all familiar with. As cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter writes,
'When a computer program is running, it can be viewed on a number of levels. On each
level, the description is given in the language of computer science, yet there are
extremely important differences between the views one gets on the different levels. At
the lowest level, the description can be so complicated that it is like the dot-description
of a television picture... At the highest level, the description is greatly chunked, and
takes on a completely different feel' (Hofstadter 1999, p. 306). At some border-crossing
level, obviously, software turns into hardware, and most people would seek the
beginnings of language there. But Whorf's insight, shared with a number of physicists
nowadays (as we shall see) is that physical organisation may itself be a kind of
'software' product from 'a manifold of pattern and order' on another level: 'As physics
explores into the intra-atomic phenomena, the discrete physical forms and forces are
more and more dissolved into relations of pure patternment. The place of an apparent
entity, an electron for example, becomes indefinite, interrupted; the entity appears and
disappears from one structural position to another structural position, like a phoneme
or any other patterned linguistic entity, and may be said to be nowhere in between the
positions. Its locus, first thought of and analyzed as a continuous variable, becomes on
closer scrutiny a mere alternation; situations "actualize" it, structure beyond the probe
of the measuring rod governs it; three-dimensional shape there is none' (Whorf 1941,
p. 269).
On a less cosmic level, for communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, the impetus for
mankind's Euclidian imprint on physical reality and the catalyst for the advent of
mechanical machines with their interchangeable parts can themselves be traced back
to particular linguistic technologiesthe alphabet and print. He may be accused of
over-generalising but is, in our view, justified in highlighting this important connection:

'The full-blown city coincides with the development of writingespecially of phonetic

writing, the specialist form of writing that makes a division between sight and sound. It
was with this instrument that Rome was able to reduce the tribal areas to some visual
order... Roman roads and Roman streets were uniform and repeatable wherever they
occurred. There was no adaptation to the contours of local hill or custom' (McLuhan
1964, p.99-100). And later on: 'Repeatability is the core of the mechanical principle that
has dominated our world, especially since the Gutenberg technology. The message of
the print and of typography is primarily that of repeatability. With typography, the
principle of movable type introduced the means of mechanizing any handicraft by the
process of segmenting and fragmenting an integral action' (ibid. p.160). Today, we
speak of a digital age and computing is supposed to be intimately tied to numbers, but
McLuhan was well aware that, ultimately, 'the digital computer substitutes "yes" and
"no" for numbers' (McLuhan 1964, p.110).
This linguistic-at-its-heart yes/no technology and the light-speed networks we have
built around it are similarly having a profound impact on us and our environment. In
arguing that we are living in a world designed forand increasingly controlled
byalgorithms, MIT Media Lab professor Kevin Slavin points out the fact that 'we're
running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm
can close the deal three microseconds faster... we're actually terraforming the Earth
itself with this kind of algorithmic efficiency' (Slavin 2011).
In times like these, it is no surprise that notions such as code and information are
increasingly being turned to by physicists as possibly representing a more fundamental
realm from which things that we call 'physical' may arise. This is the subject of the
following section.

3. From Hard Facts to Soft Wares

After several centuries of rationalist science, we have learned that the universe is
largely 'empty' space. Atoms and their ingredients are much like outer space with its

planets and starsconsisting mostly of 'nothing'. A big branch of experimental physics

is determined to find ever smaller elementary particles and we hear of occasional
successes such as the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2013. One wonders, however, if
building bigger and bigger accelerators to find smaller and smaller particles is
ultimately the right approach, and whether we can really ever observe the smallest
possible building block of the universe. Hence the intellectual appeal of fractals which
were better defined and understood in the twentieth century, thanks to computers.
These are intricate geometric patterns built out of simple complex-number equations
that are bounded in space and yet offer an infinite number and variety of repeating
patterns across different scales. Understanding the principle of change of form across
scales certainly seems like a far more efficient and far-reaching method of discovery in
the physical world.
The intellectual foundations behind much of the modern experimental endeavours in
fundamental physics can be traced to what quantum physicist Amit Goswami has called
'the upward causation model' of the (scientific) materialist. He sums up this paradigm
in the following way: 'All things consist of elementary particles of matter and their
interactions. Everything in the world can be understood from this one hypothesis.
Elementary particles form conglomerates called atoms. Atoms form bigger
conglomerates called molecules. Molecules form cells; some of these cells form the
conglomerate we call the brain. And the brain comes up with our ideas... In this
philosophy called scientific materialism or material monism or simply materialism,
cause rises upward from the elementary particles' (Goswami 2008, pp. 16-17).
However, in a post-quantum mechanics world many are beginning to re-evaluate and
challenge this hard-headed model so dominant in the previous century. This is evident
even from the popular download of the findings of theoretical and quantum physics, or
anything physicists say without resorting to complex mathematical equations.
In a BBC documentary entitled 'Everything and Nothing', theoretical physicist Jim AlKhalili explains about the riddle of empty space: 'Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle
had suggested that matter could pop into existence for incredibly short periods of time.

[Paul] Dirac had provided the mechanism by which matter could be created out of the
vacuum and, just as quickly, disappear again... Whenever a particle pops out of empty
space, so simultaneously does its anti-particle. Although this sounds completely
ridiculous, let me assure you that it is true. So, whenever you try to remove everything
you can from empty space, it's still always awash with all these fluctuations. Within
nothingness, there's a kind of fizzing, a dynamic dance as pairs of particles and antiparticles borrow energy from the vacuum for brief moments before annihilating and
paying it back again... Dirac's ideas about empty space were defined and developed into
what is known today as "quantum field theory". And these strange fleeting things within
"nothing" became known as "virtual particles"' (Al-Khalili 2011).
So, strange as it sounds, matter and anti-matter are inherently potentially present even
in 'empty' space. Of course, the space inside the experimental container that scientists
use to observe these effects is already part of the fabric of our world's space-time, and
so might be different from the 'void' that the universe may or may not have sprung out
of, while the fact the 'vacuum' is full of these pairs of virtual particles stretches the
meaning of that word quite a bit. We can nonetheless see in principle that seeming
'nothing' is in fact quite 'something', but also that this 'something' has already and
necessarily appeared in the form of a binary opposition, particle and anti-particle in our
case. Is it just a coincidence that perhaps the most basic observable spontaneous
appearance of 'matter' and the simplest form of a code are fundamentally of the same
binary nature? Is the fluctuating vacuum something like a primary encoding medium
for all matter?
Another example that challenges standard scientific materialism and brings an
informational touch to physics are the discoveries of a group of leading physicists
whose work centres around something called the Holographic Principle (explained
below). In fact, the person that first proposed the principle, Dutch theoretical physicist
and Nobel laureate Gerard t Hooft, does not leave much doubt about the fact that the
computer metaphor heavily informs his vision of the world: 'It's a vision that the
universe is very much like an information processing machine. I like to view nature as

a gigantically big computer, that has information going into it and information comes
out, processed. The processors are the laws of nature' (Hockenberry, Hooft et al. 2011).
In the introduction to the 2011 World Science Festival Panel Discussion on the
Holographic Principle (featuring Hooft along with Edward Susskind, mentioned below)
theoretical physicists Peter Galison and Brian Greene state that, according to the said
principle, all the things that are falling inside a black hole are 'somehow captured as a
preserved image at the horizon itself. All the information about those objectswhat
they were like in their three dimensional existence was preserved or encoded on the
surface of the black hole. That's a little bit like a hologram... That suggests that maybe
that idea may apply more broadly to the universe as a whole. Maybe the threedimensional objectsus, everything, the world around usmaybe all the information
in these objects is carried, is smeared around a distant two dimensional surface that
surrounds us and we are, in some sense, a holographic projection of that distant data.
The holographic principle tells us something quite astonishing. It says that our ideas of
"volume", of the "real world", in a sense, might be a kind of illusion' (Hockenberry, Hooft
et al. 2011).
Mathematical physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf has echoed this idea in a recent public
lecture: 'Inside the black hole, space and time come to an end, but it does not really end.
Basically this theory says just cut it off, create a screen, which is the thing that surrounds
the black hole, forget anything inside, and project all of physics in terms of the
information on that black hole horizon, the zeros and ones that are sitting there. It is a
rather radical idea because it tells you that there is information in the underlying layer
of understanding all of quantum geometrical physics' (Dijkgraaf 2012).
Holography is a technology for producing three dimensional images (holograms), by
letting two beams of light, coming from a single source, interfere on a photosensitive
recording medium (photographic film etc.), where one beam is shined directly onto the
film and the other comes in contact with the recording medium having illuminated a
scene or object that we wish to record. The resulting image produced by this

interference looks random, scrambled and nothing like the original object, but upon
shining a light, identical to the one used to record the hologram, a virtual 3-D copy of
that original object can be reproduced. Even more, as eminent theoretical physicist and
proponent of the Holographic Principle Leonard Susskind says, 'If you made the
hologram from an MRI scan, you could actually code the full three-dimensionality'
(Susskind 2011). One of the fundamental insights of the principle is that the maximum
number of 'hidden bits of information' (or its entropy, to use the formal term used in
both physics and information science) in a black hole is equal to, counter-intuitively,
the area of the horizon measured in Planck units of area 1, as discovered by Jacob
Bekenstein circa 1972 (ibid.). This, combined with the insight that 'you can describe
any region of space by data on the surface, as if it were a hologram' (ibid.) means that
the whole three dimensional universe may be encoded in the form of two dimensional
data on its surface, scrambled and seemingly random. It is not too much of a leap of the
imagination then to wonder if such a lower-dimensional and discrete (i.e. digital) data
organisation, when 'projected' in the right way may give us the world we experience. In
the words of Bekenstein himself, 'our universe, which we perceive to have three spatial
dimensions, might instead be "written" on a two-dimensional surface, like a hologram.
Our everyday perceptions of the world as three-dimensional would then be either a
profound illusion or merely one of two alternative ways of viewing reality' (Bekenstein
2003, p.60).
Thus, dimensionality itself can be seen as an emergent 'illusion', arising from a more
primitive organisation of data. But two dimensions cannot really be the beginning of
the story, one begins to suspect at this point. Indeed, on the day after the abovementioned World Science Festival event, in a panel discussion on Digital Physics at the
same venue, computer scientist Jrgen Schmidhuber stated: 'What we are doing today
is essentially go one step further and even ignore the 2-D structure of information, and
take into account the possibility that it's actually a one-dimensional program, a simple
bit-string that is running, that is explaining in a compact form everything that you find
1

The square of the Planck length. The Planck length, or about 10 -33 cm is the fundamental length scale related to gravity
and quantum mechanics. (cf., e.g., Bekenstein 2003).

on these 2-D "bubbles". All the information that is created, as the universe is evolving,
is actually contained (and this is a hypothesis but it's not totally implausible) in a very
short program that is running the entire evolution of this universe' (Hockenberry,
Fredkin et al. 2011). Anyone who has seen an animated video of a 'fractal zoom' can
certainly imagine such a state of affairs.
If we wish to be even more ambitious, we might add here that the fundamental
structure of information, i.e. bits, is 'essentially dimensionless' (cf. Bekenstein 2003, p.
60), but the idea that systems seemingly as complex as living organisms can be derived
from a short set of rules or computer code has already been vividly demonstrated by
mathematician John Conway's 'Game of Life' in a two-dimensional grid of square cells,
each with two possible states (dead or alive, i.e. on or off). Given just four basic rules
governing how cells are born or die and an initial state comprised of a few live cells, the
system spontaneously evolves with 'surprising results', where 'shapes appear and
disappear spontaneously', and 'there are whole kinds of objects'species'that
interact', and 'some can even reproduce just as life does' (cf. Hawking 2012).
Another participant in the latter of the above panel discussions was physicist and
computer scientist Edward Fredkin, widely considered one of the fathers of Digital
Physics, who has more recently developed his thinking and work in terms of 'Digital
Philosophy' (DP), defining it as a 'new way of thinking about how things work.... it is
based on the general concept of replacing normal mathematical models, such as partial
differential equations, with Digital Mechanics. DP is based on two concepts: bits, like
the binary digits in a computer, correspond to the most microscopic representation of
state information; and the temporal evolution of state is a digital informational process
similar to what goes on in the circuitry of a computer processor' (Fredkin 2003, p.189).
Later on, he adds that 'Computers and their software are the most complex things ever
made by man. However, computation is based on the simplest principles ever
discovered. Our world is complex and we are looking for simple models that might be
at the bottom' (ibid. p.191).

Digital Physics is certainly one the most striking contemporary examples of how the
computing paradigm is reshaping and refining scientific thinking, and quite possibly
advancing scientific knowledge. More fundamentally, it tries to explain the world in
simpler terms than its predecessors. In the words of quantum-mechanical engineer
Seth Lloyd, 'every time something happens, you can actually do a calculation to find out
how many bit-flips are necessary to simulate the universe' (Hockenberry, Fredkin et al.
2011). The study of matter and motion under the guise of Digital Physics has reached a
state where it can begin to explore its subject matter in informational terms and the
simplest form of languagebinary code. The above-mentioned Conway's Game of Life
clearly shows, in principle, that something like motion in space can be seen as a
phenomenon emerging out of a grid of discrete on/off cells and a simple program.
The idea that physical categories are at bottom of the nature of code is something that
McKenna himself understood and was undoubtedly one reason for his statement
quoted in the introduction. In his words, 'This realization that everything is code, and
code moving on many levels is, I think, more primary than the perception, for example,
that things are made of space, time, matter and energy. Thats one level below code. The
code codes for space, time, matter and energy' [emphasis added] (McKenna 1999). A
closely-related observation was made by holographic physicist Jacob Bekenstein: 'a
century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in
physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of
Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with
energy and matter as incidentals' (Bekenstein 2003, p. 59).
Incidentally, the contingent nature of physical 'reality' upon language (in respect to
both the fundamental terms in which we conceive of it and, in a wider sense, the
metaphors that provide food for scientific paradigms) is not lost on at least some
scientists working within the field of Digital Physics. For example, theoretical physicist
Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara says: 'So, how could you do physics without space-time?
There, information gives you a rather convenient language. You could talk about
information, which in a way is a way to cheat, a way not to make any statements about

the ontology, because often ontology can confuse you, rather than help you. So, it's
easier to talk about information and try to see if that information has the right
properties that you want, and hold off the interpretation in terms of [whether] spacetime is really fundamental until later' (Hockenberry, Fredkin et al. 2011). Earlier in the
same discussion, she has already remarked: 'It's a Zeitgeist question. We live in a time
when we understand the world in terms of computers, and I think and describe the
world in terms of computers. If I lived at a different time, the universe might be a big
clock. So now it's a big computer. Which is a good thing, because I can use all those tools
that the computer scientists have' (ibid.).
If the computer has been one of the prime intellectual tools and useful metaphors
advancing and adumbrating our notions of both the fundamental nature of language
and possibly reality itself, let us next take a look at a new paradigm which has been
gaining ground of late as a fundamentum for explaining the world, although at the same
time it is also very ancient. And it might be fitting at this point to allow a physicist to
lead us into it. Thomas Campbell, large-system simulation expert and yet another
proponent of the idea that reality is fundamentally digital and akin to a computer
simulation, has this to say in the last book of his trilogy, called 'My Big TOE' (TOE
standing for 'Theory of Everything'): 'Contemporary physicist Edward Fredkin and his
Digital Physics movement make the digital connection (quantized space and time) and
are heading in the right direction, as were Einstein, Bohr, and Bohm, but they are
missing a solid connection to consciousness. Digital physics has not yet discovered that
consciousness is the computer' [emphasis added] (Campbell 2003, p. 34).

4. A 21-century Ancient Paradigm: Consciousness

'At the beginning of the 21st century humanity is poised for a revolution in our
understanding of consciousness, as the first-person modes of inquiry of the contemplative
traditions of the world are integrated with the third-person methods of modern science.'
From the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies website

In recent years, the word 'consciousness' has frequently been used by people who try
to peer deeper into the nature of reality, or those who strive for insights into the
mysteries of the cosmos and the self. Among contemporary seekers for meaningful
answers to these questions, there seems to be a growing perception that consciousness
is the primary stuff of the world and is thus more fundamental than matter. The reasons
for the apparent ongoing shift from science's well-established materialist models of
existence to a new set of more 'spiritual' ideas may be looked for in many places, such
as the increasing permeation of Eastern thought in the West facilitated by modern
media, the popularisation of disciplines like Yoga and Zen Buddhism around the world,
the ontological shifts necessitated by quantum physics, the ever-growing research in
areas such as near-death and out-of-body experiences, New Age narratives of the power
of the mind and the eternity of the spirit, or the dissatisfaction of some people in rich
countries with happiness being defined as the mere accumulation of material goods.
These days, it is not unusual to see meditation sessions offered at Google's headquarters
(see, for example, Young 2010 and Freeman 2012) or mind-centred techniques for
prosperity peddled to ambitious businessmen, such as the so-called 'Law of Attraction'.
There is even what has sometimes been dubbed an 'archaic revival' the rising interest
in ancient practices such as shamanism, with well-to-do people from around the world
travelling to places like the Peruvian, Bolivian or Brazilian rainforest to take part in
shamanic ceremonies and experience visions and alternative perceptions of reality.
What all these developments of the 'post-modern' world have in common is that, in one
way or another, they place the self or consciousness at the centre of the human cosmos
and the universenow a place in which observer and observed are inseparable, just
like time became inseparable from space after Einstein's theories. At the same time, the
development of modern technology and artificial intelligence is likely to make
questions regarding consciousness even more pertinent to our lives. 'Her', a 2013
American movie exploring the implications of 'dating' an operating system, is just one

recent example of how such issues are already trickling into our social reality. In
academia too, there has been 'a major resurgence of scientific and philosophical
research into the nature and basis of consciousness', dating back to the 1980s and 90s
(Van Gulick 2011). So, if consciousness is to be a re-emergent fundamental paradigm
for explaining and relating to the world in the 21st century, rivalling established
materialist views, we might well ask the question: What is it?
Memologist Susan Blackmore, who has written extensively on the subject and has
interviewed some of the 'great minds of our time, major philosophers, and renowned
scientists' (cf. Blackmore 2006), tells us that while at the start of the this century
'consciousness studies is thriving', the 'mystery is as deep as ever' (Blackmore 2005,
p.1). According to her, there is no generally agreed definition of 'consciousness', but we
can think of it as what it's like to be something, or in terms of phenomenality (the way
things seem to the self, subjectivity) and qualiathe ineffable subjective qualities of
experience, like the redness of red. Moreover, Blackmore is of the opinion that even
though many people have claimed to have solved the mystery of consciousness in terms
of grand unifying theories, quantum mechanical theories, or spiritual theories, most of
them 'simply ignore the yawning chasm between the physical and mental worlds' and
that 'as long as they ignore this problem they are not really dealing with consciousness
at all' (Blackmore 2005, p.2). There are some important assumptions made even just in
the last two statements and one can start an arbitrarily long debate about them, but
such is the ouroboric and tautological nature of the matter, the fact that consciousness
is forced to investigate itselfa 'strange loop' par excellence in the terminology of
Douglas Hofstadter (see discussion below). As philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel puts it,
'something apparently preposterous, it seems, must be true of consciousness'
(Schwitzgebel 2011, p.x), while physicist-turned-psychologist Daniel Wegner's spin on
it is that 'you need somehow to be objective about subjectivity, which is the deepest
conundrum we can think of' (Blackmore 2006, p. 246).
Given this intractable character of the central problem of consciousness, it is no wonder
that it has been called 'the hard problem' by philosopher David Chalmers, i.e. the

problem of the phenomenal world of subjective experience and qualia, as distinguished

by 'easy problems', such as 'the ability to discriminate, categorize and react to
environmental stimuli, the integration of information by a cognitive system, the focus
and attention and the deliberate control of behaviour', among others (see Chalmers
1995).
Meanwhile, even the tough problem of consciousness has not avoided the paradigmatic
mould of the computer, supplanting more mechanistic earlier models. John Lilly himself
thought of human beings as 'programmed biocomputers', stating that 'no one of us can
escape our own nature as programmed entities. Each of us may be our programs,
nothing more, nothing less' (Lilly 1967, p. 14). For him, 'in a well-organized
biocomputer, there is a critical control metaprogram labelled "I" for acting on other
metaprograms and labelled "me" when acted upon by other metaprograms' (ibid. p.
16).
Consciousness researcher and founder of the above-cited Santa Barbara Institute for
Consciousness Studies B. Alan Wallace observes (while lamenting, like Amit Goswami,
the pitfalls of the dominant intellectual paradigm of scientific materialism and calling it
the 'ideology of modernity') that in many of the disciplines comprising the modern field
of cognitive sciencethe neurosciences, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind,
psychology, linguistics, quantum theory, and evolutionary theory'The computer has
become the central mechanical model of the mind and cognition is identified with
symbolic computations. Thus, cognitive science becomes the study of such cognitive
symbolic systems, and the field of artificial intelligence takes this cognitivist hypothesis
literally. During the Scientific Revolution, some natural philosophers likened the mind
to a hydraulic system, and an early twentieth-century metaphor for the mind was a
telephone switchboard. Regardless of how fundamentally dissimilar the mind is to the
latest products of technology, including the modern computer, scientific materialists
have long been convinced that it must be similar to some kind of ingenious, material
gadget. The most salient omission in this regard is consciousness itself, but it is now
commonly presumed that consciousness really boils down to nothing more than

information processing' (Wallace 2000, p.125). And Wallace is most probably right that
scientific materialism has usually, whether by conviction or ingrained habit, been the
basis of the majority of modern scientists' thinking, more recently combined with
concepts out of information processing and computing.
For instance, in their book, 'The Computational Brain', neurophilosopher Patricia
Churchland and computer scientist Terry Sejnowski state that 'at this stage in the
evolution of science, it appears highly probable that psychological processes are in fact
processes of the physical brain' and that 'once we understand more about what sort of
computers nervous systems are, and how they do whatever it is they do, we shall have
an enlarged and deeper understanding of what it is to compute and represent'
(Churchland & Sejnowski 1994, p.1 & p. 61), which even presupposes that nervous
systems are 'computers' of some sort, even as Churchland herself confesses that 'The
fact is that we've very little by way of a fundamental understanding of the brain. We
don't know how neurons code information. That's a lot not to know' (Blackmore 2006,
pp.50-51). If pressed on this issue, scientists working in computational neurobiology
and related fields might say that they are using the word 'computer' metaphorically,
but that is the whole point!
Consider also the following type of reasoning by David Chalmers, which sounds slightly
more dualistic than outright materialism but is revealing as to the firm intellectual grip
of the latter: 'The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When
we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a
subjective aspect... It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but
we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical
processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it
should, and yet it does' [emphasis added] (Chalmers 1995, p.226). To be fair, the
entrenchment of materialism can be overstatedsometimes it depends on which
scientists we are talking about and can also be due to the inertia of the habitual language
used to express one's views. This may slightly be the case in our last quotation because,
according to Susan Blackmore, 'The confusion starts with the question itself and how

best to word it. Dave [Chalmers] himself originally worded it with the phrase "give rise
to". He also talks about physical activity being "accompanied by" subjective experience;
in fact he defends a version of property dualism. But this might be completely the wrong
way of thinking about the relationship between brain and consciousness. Perhaps, as
the Churchlands [i.e. philosophers Patricia and Paul Churchland] argue, brain activity
just is experience, or perhaps, as [philosopher] John Searle argues, brains cause
experiences' (Blackmore 2006, p. 4). Blackmore herself curiously makes no secret of
the fact that she doesn't think dualism (i.e. the notion that consciousness and the
physical world represent different realms, or substances) is a good idea, despite having
told us about the 'yawning chasm' between mind and matter that we must not ignore.
At any rate, if presented with an orthodox scientist, one's bet would be that he or she
would be (consciously or not) under the sway of scientific materialism to no small
degree and that they would most probably treat consciousness as an epiphenomenon,
i.e. a phenomenon emerging from certain complex structures such as the brain.
All good and well so far, except that we still cannot quite put our finger on what
consciousness is supposed to be. Talking about subjectivity, phenomenology, qualia or
awareness is, after all, just using vaguely synonymous words, which themselves need
explaining. (Not that we can ultimately do it otherwise).
Help isn't exactly forthcoming. In his article 'Consciousness' in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Robert Van Gulick writes that the words conscious and
consciousness are 'umbrella terms that cover a wide variety of mental phenomena' (Van
Gulick 2011), which he then proceeds to systematically explain. Unfortunately, a
reading of this and likely many other reputable encyclopedia entries on the subject may
well leave the reader with the feeling that they understand less about the concept for
having read them, even though we are dealing with a concept that is otherwise
somehow intuitively grasped by the lay person. Van Gulick diligently launches into
summaries of diverse explanatory projects and tells us that what we may have thought
of as one question of consciousness is actually three: the descriptive (what?), the

explanatory (how?) and the functional (why?, or what for?) questions; we are invited to
consider various kinds of consciousness, such as sentience, wakefulness, selfconsciousness, transitive consciousness, narrative consciousness and access
consciousness among others. One almost gets the feeling that the hope here is that, (just
like many scientists think that consciousness itself arises), the answer will somehow
come out of complexitythe complexity of our knowledge about it, quote:
'consciousness is a complex feature of the world, and understanding it will require a
diversity of conceptual tools for dealing with its many differing aspects' (Van Gulick
2011).
At the same time, even though the article in question states that 'as phenomenologists
have known for more than a century, discovering the structure of conscious experience
demands a rigorous inner-directed stance that is quite unlike our everyday form of selfawareness' and that 'skilled observation of the needed sort requires training, effort and
the ability to adopt alternative perspectives on one's experience', the author fails to
make a single mention of Hindu philosophy or Yogaancient disciplines devoted to the
study and evolution of consciousness by 'rigorous and inner-directed practices',
generally referred to as meditation. The reason for that may be a fundamental rift: for
Western philosophers and scientists, consciousness is first and foremost an aspect of
the mind, which is basically thought of by most as a computing brain with a nervous
system, whereas in Hindu thought and Zen Buddhism, mind is the first thing to be got
rid of in order to get to 'pure consciousness', which is seen as the 'ground of all being'.
Also, and relevant to our main subject matter here, the rift between Western
philosophical notions on one hand, and Eastern yogic and Vedantic (i.e. based on the
teachings of the Upanishads) conceptions of consciousness on the other, is also
probably in no small part due to the different languages that formal modern science and
traditional Indian thought use. One would be very surprised to be able to rise to a
prominent role or perhaps even just get a degree in mainstream psychology or physics
if he or she reasons using terms like brhman'the unchanging reality amidst and
beyond the world' (in one translation, see Puligandla 1997, p. 222), which is also said

to be indefinable, and tman'the soul', or 'brhman in a pot [i.e. the body]' (cf. White
1996, p. 18). The McKenna-Lilly disparity we started with was probably mostly due to
mismatched definitions, but in the case of traditional Eastern versus modern Western
science we simultaneously have a clash of both worldviews and disparate language, even
in translation. Which is unfortunate because, for example, if we do not readily dismiss
it for its religious overtones, brhman and its conception as 'non-dual' and
'transcendental' reality (cf. Indich 2000, pp. 2-3) is not really unscientific at all. If the
smallest possible basis for language and thought is a binary system of difference, then a
supposed non-duality must be undefinable and therefore transcend our logical and
conceptual systems.
Sure, the Advaita (i.e. 'non-dual') Vedanta vision of brhman as the ultimate reality is
itself an unprovable conjecture 2, but conjectures are hardly unscientific either. For
instance, one of the great physicists of the 20th century, John Wheeler, conjectured that
'black holes have no hair', which is the physicist's colloquial way of saying that 'the
collapsed state of any nonrotating massive star could be described by Schwartzschild's
solution' (Hawking 2001, p. 112). Colourful though this example may be, it does suggest
that the language divide between Vedantic thought and Western positivist and
materialist science is not simply due to foreign-sounding Sanskrit words, which are
most probably less alien to the non-expert than the term 'Schwartzschild's solution',
but is also a consequence of their perceived religiosity and the frequent use within
Vedanta (in its English rendering) of words we do know and have feelings about, like
spirit and bliss, or 'equations' such as existence is consciousness (cf. Indich 2000, p. 4).
This despite the fact that nowadays 'Consciousness causes collapse of the wave
function' is one of the well-known, if controversial, interpretations of the quantum
measurement problemthat a conscious observer is necessary to determine what
reality is in the first place, thus in effect saying that, in a certain sense, consciousness is
existence. At the same time, fundamental physics derives many of its modern truths
from the very different linguistic medium of higher mathematics, truths that few can

Strictly speaking it is little more than giving a name to such an imagined ultimate reality.

'understand' or relate to conceptually, including physicistshence the various

competing interpretations of quantum theory.
So let us take a closer look at the traditional Hindu view of reality and consciousness,
and how it has influenced some modern thinkers and scientists. Michael Talbot (who
was, incidentally, one of the early popularisers of the holographic model of the
universe) gives us a succinct summary: 'The Hindus call the implicate [i.e. fundamental]
level of reality Brahman. Brahman is formless but it is the birthplace of all forms in
visible reality, which appear out of it and then enfold back into it in endless flux. Like
[physicist David] Bohm, who says that the implicate order can just as easily be called
spirit, the Hindus sometimes personify this level of reality and say that it is composed
of pure consciousness. Thus, consciousness is not only a subtler form of matter, but it
is more fundamental than matter, and in the Hindu cosmogony it is matter that has
emerged from consciousness, and not the other way around. Or as the Vedas put it, the
physical world is brought into being through both the "veiling" and "projecting" powers
of consciousness' (Talbot 1996, p. 288).
Physician and holistic health-guru Deepak Chopra, deeply influenced by traditional
Vedanta teachings and always eager to re-express them in modern terms, presents a
similar sweeping view of consciousness: 'Consciousness is not a by-product of
evolution as has been suggested... consciousness is the common ground of existence
that ultimately differentiates into space, time, energy, information and matter. And the
same consciousness is responsible for our thoughts, for our emotions and feelings, for
our behaviours, for our personal relationships, for our social interactions, for the
environments that we find ourselves in, and for our biology. In other words,
consciousness is the common ground that differentiates into everything that we call
reality, including the observer and the objects of our observation' (Chopra 2007). He
also states, in opposition to a large body of materialistic scientific thought:
'Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon. Consciousness is the phenomenon and
everything else is the epiphenomenon' (Chopra 2005). This is allegedly because 'Before
infinite consciousness observes itself, there is neither space, nor time, nor matter. Nor

is there causality... Interacting with itself, infinite consciousness first creates the mind,
then it creates the body, then it creates the physical world. Everything we call physical
is a translation of different vibratory frequencies of consciousness in the mind. And the
mind, in turn, is an interpretation of consciousness unto itself' (Chopra 2011, Ch. 8).
Chopra is convinced that Chalmers' hard problem 'becomes much easier when we give
consciousness a primary role instead of making it secondary to the brain' (Chopra 2013,
p.270).
This may sound ambitious, but Chopra is certainly not alone. The primacy of 'pure'
consciousness has had many high-profile advocates, from musician George Harrison to
actor Jim Carrey to comedian Russell Brand. Filmmaker and long-time practitioner of
Transcendental Meditation David Lynch offers the following view: 'Consciousness is
such an abstraction. We all have it. We don't think that much about it, but it's the "I am"ness, being, our ability to understand, our awareness, our wakefulness, our inner
happiness. And there's a great, giant ocean of pure consciousness within every human
being' (Lynch 2005). The official website for the Transcendental Meditation
movement, of which David Lynch is part, states that 'the technique allows your mind to
settle inward beyond thought to experience the source of thoughtpure awareness,
also known as transcendental consciousness. This is the most silent and peaceful level
of consciousnessyour innermost Self' (cf. URL under References).
A number of quantum physicists, too, have weighed in with their sophisticated
metaphors and elaborate the 'consciousness-as-primary' and related ideas, which are,
in the colourful phrase of one of them, 'not yet a bandwagon by any means, but neither
a lonely cart' (Goswami 1995, p. 169). One of the greatest physicists of the 20th century,
Erwin Schrdinger, wrote in the 1940s: 'Consciousness is never experienced in the
plural, only in the singular... there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality
is merely a series of different personality aspects of this one thing, produced by a
deception (the Indian MAJA) ... What is this "I"? If you analyse it closely you will, I think,
find that it is... little more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories),
namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection,

find that what you really mean by "I" is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected'
(Schrdinger 1944, pp. 88-89). In the last decade of the previous century, Fred Alan
Wolfaka Dr. Quantumunequivocally stated that 'there's just one basic being, one
basic consciousness, of which we're all parts in some mysterious way ... I mean,
everything is basically consciousness' (Wolf #S450). And, more recently: 'Unity
consciousness, because it's so unthinkable is nevertheless the fundamental ground of
being out of which everything arises. And this is evident to me not only from spirituality
but it's also evident to me from the quantum physical understanding of how the
universe comes into being. It can't just come into being through mechanical means.
We've tried, believe me, physicists are looking for all the mechanical ways they could
possibly seek, to find a mechanical means by which "God" could be left out of the
equation. And we haven't been able to do it. Somewhere along the line, a miracle has to
happen. And it's disturbing, because science doesn't want miraclesscience wants to
have everything explained in terms of objective fact. There is something un-objective,
or subjective, about the nature of reality' (Wolf 2010). Perhaps it was statements like
these that prompted American psychiatrist Brian Weiss to remark that 'physicists have
become the mystics of our own age, bridging miracles and science' (Weiss 2012, p.215).
Quantum physicist Amit Goswami is adamant that 'when we introduce consciousness
as the ground of being, as transcendent, as one, as self-referent in uswhich is what the
spiritual teachers of the world have taughtthen the quantum debate can be settled
and the paradoxes resolved' (Goswami 2006, p.16), with one of the major paradoxes in
question being the so called observer effect, or 'how do the quantum possibilities
become an actuality of experience simply through the interaction of our consciousness,
by simply us observing them?' (Goswami 2008, p.21). Goswami espouses monistic
idealism as the solution and, naturally, supports the view that it is consciousness that
collapses the wave function and 'by the process of observation chooses one of the many
facets of the superposition. ... According to monistic idealism objects are already in
consciousness as primordial, transcendent, archetypal possibility forms. The collapse
consists not of doing something to objects via observing but of choosing and of
recognizing the result of that choice' (Goswami 1995, p.84). However, if consciousness

is already primary and omnipresent, then what does 'observing' and 'recognizing' have
to do with choosing quantum states? Goswami's answer is not really satisfactory: 'The
measurement is not complete without the inclusion of the immanent awareness... We
have to make a distinction between consciousness with awareness and without
awareness. The collapse of the wave function takes place in the former case but not in
the latter' (Goswami 1995, pp.97-98).
Solipsism, or the idea that only the self is certain to exist, is obviously related to the
philosophy of the Upanishads and has been entertained in the West. At the age of 26,
Wittgenstein wrote in his notebook: 'The limits of my language stand for the limits of
my world. There really is only one world soul, which I for preference call my soul and
as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others. The above remark gives the key
for deciding the way in which solipsism is a truth' (Wittgenstein 1961, p.49e). John
Lennon, also at 26, wrote the lyrics to the Beatles song I Am The Walrus, beginning with
the following cryptic sentence: I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all
together. Of the two, Lennon's quote is perhaps closer in style to traditional Vedantic
thought than Wittgenstein's and also to the truth according to Goswami, who, in
resolving the paradox of Wigner's friend (a version of the fabled Schrdinger's cat
thought experiment; cf. Goswami 1995, pp. 84-86) from his idealist monist standpoint,
says that the paradox arises only when one makes 'the unwarranted dualist assumption
that his consciousness is separate from his friend's' and 'disappears if there is only one
subject, not separate subjects as we normally understand them', later clarifying that,
'When I observe, what I see is the whole world of manifestation, but this is not solipsism,
because there is no individual I that sees as opposed to other I's' (ibid. p.86). In our
mind, however, both Wittgenstein's note and Lennon's line are more or less different
takes on a fundamentally equivalent theoretical situation. The realisation that there is
no individual 'I' but only universal consciousness is still something that has arisen in
Goswami's mind, whose supposed existence is a figment in ours, as all this is currently
in yours, our esteemed reader. It could be a matter of taste, epistemological affinity,
preferred narrative, or degree of egocentrism.

As a slight side note, and going back to Lennon's enigmatic quote, although its author
deliberately set out, by his own admission, to write the most confusing lyrics he could
in that particular song, 'the first line was written on one acid trip one weekend' (Sheff
2000, p.184). This was, after all, the sixties, but throughout the 20th century
mainstream science did not, or could not, come to a mature view regarding the
relationship between perturbation of consciousness and reality. Honest and open
accounts from serious researchers of consciousness are rare (although both John Lilly
and Terence McKenna certainly contributed a lot in that department), but here is one
from mathematician and psycho-physiologist Stephen LaBerge from his interview with
Susan Blackmore: 'I learned one important lesson from LSD: under its influence I saw
living, breathing hieroglyphics superimposed on a blank wall, and thought, "Ah, so this
is what the world is really like, overflowing with meaning, beauty and complexity. How
could I not have seen it before!" But then the next day, "Ah, wait a minute, this is what
it's like, that was just an illusion." And finally to realize, no, it's neither like this nor like
that, those are just my mind's understanding of what the world is, and the world
remains a mystery' (Blackmore 2006, p.138). Perturbing one's normal state of mind,
along with focusing attention on attention (meditation), presumably must have an
important role to play in working out what consciousness and reality are (especially
given possible and long-overdue changes in the political and cultural climate
surrounding some of these things, say, during this century). As LaBerge argues: 'We
need scientists who understand the brain but also have their own experiences'
(Blackmore 2006, p.147). McKenna, incidentally, frequently referred to psychedelic
substances as 'boundary-dissolving'. Could it be that they potentially provide cognitive
access to a higher level of organisation, a self that is in the normally 'inviolate' level (in
Hofstadter's sensesee below) of an individual ego and thus allow the subject to
identify with fellow human beings and the rest of nature as parts of a whole, as seems
to have happened in Lennon's case? It is certainly ironic that insights gained through
altered states of consciousness are so often dismissed as confused ramblings and
hallucinations by respectable 20th-century scientists, even as some of the best in their
midst have called the self a 'hallucination' (Hofstadter 2008, p. 315), which is produced
by a 'deception' (see Schrdinger's quote above).

Consciousness conceived as the ground of all being is a worldview away from that of
most

modern

scientists

who

assume we

live

in

world

featuring

conscious/unconscious dichotomy which is difficult to resolve, or as mathematician

and cosmologist Roger Penrose puts it, 'there's nothing in our physical theory of what
the universe is like which says anything about why some things should be conscious
and other things not' (Blackmore 2006, p.173). The working assumption usually seems
to be that consciousness somehow arises out of complexity. Renowned cognitive
scientist Douglas Hofstadter expresses the point thus: 'The key point here is that there
is some level of complexity at which a creature starts applying some of its categories to
itself, starts building mental structures that represent itself, starts placing itself in some
kind of "intellectual perspective" in relationship to the rest of the world' (Hofstadter
2008, p.82). This view is certainly very reasonable because we can all intuitively feel a
continuum of increasing intelligence from, say, a rock to an ant to a dog to a human.
However, in the process, we have made an 'unconscious' jump: we have started to use
apparent intelligence as a yardstick for consciousness. Some like neuroscientist
Vilayanur Ramachandran hold a strong view on the subject: 'I think animals don't have
consciousness or qualia... animals in general, even higher primates, excluding humans,
have only a raw background awareness. But they're lacking extra stuff which I have
called meta-awareness' (Blackmore 2006, p.188).
Ramachandran shares with Hofstadter the view that self-reflexivity is central to
consciousness. In the words of the latter, people are 'self-perceiving, self-inventing,
locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference' (Hofstadter 2008, p.363).
Ramachandran expresses the point thus: 'In a sense you have to know that you know,
otherwise you don't know. That's the crux of the matter, and that's why you need the
sense of self, which knows that it knows' (Blackmore 2006, p.190).
Hofstadter likens 'selves (or "I's" or "souls", if you preferwhatever it is that
distinguishes animate from inanimate matter) to certain special swirly, twisty, vortexlike, and meaningful patterns that arise only in particular types of systems of

meaningless symbols' (Hofstadter 1999, p. xx). He treats inanimate molecules and

meaningless symbols as analogous (given the right configuration out of the former arise
animate beings and out the lattermeaning) and holds the notion of these vortex-like
patterns that he calls 'strange loops', or 'tangled hierarchies', as the 'key to unravelling
the mystery that we conscious beings call "being" or "consciousness"' (ibid. p. xx). His
formal definition of a Tangled Hierarchy is as follows: 'What I mean by "strange loop"
is not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that
constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or
structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet
somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is,
despite ones sense of departing ever further from ones origin, one winds up, to ones
shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical levelcrossing feedback loop' (Hofstadter 2008, p. 101). A classic example of such a tangled
hierarchy is the famous M. C. Escher lithograph 'Drawing Hands', where two hands are
seen paradoxically drawing each other. The paradox is only resolved if one steps 'out of
the picture' and realises that the artist draws it all and the whole thing is thus revealed
to be an illusion from this 'inviolate' (invisible) level. Hofstadter hopefully holds,
however, that 'fortunately, there do exist strange loops that are not illusions'
(Hofstadter 2008, p. 103), saying 'fortunately' because his central thesis is that we
ourselves are strange loops.
Thus for Hofstadter, contrary to Chopra and Goswami, consciousness is an
epiphenomenon: 'Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or, to
make it even more pithy, consciousness is thinking. As Descartes said, Cogito ergo sum'
(Hofstadter 2008, pp. 275-276). This is obviously far from consciousness seen as the
ground of being; on the contrary, it emerges out of complexity: 'Like Gdels strange
loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number
theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently
sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once youve got self, youve got
consciousness' (ibid. p. 325).

Still, remarkably, Goswami sees a place for Hofstadter's strange loops: 'I suspect that
the situation in the brain-mind, with consciousness collapsing the wave function but
only when awareness is present, is a tangled hierarchy and that our immanent selfreference is of tangled hierarchical origin. An observation by a self-referential system
is where the [quantum superposition] chain stops' (Goswami 1995, pp.99). To make his
model work, however, Goswami has to use a linguistic, one might say, sleight of
handhe distinguishes between the 'consciousness' that is the ground of all being and
the 'awareness' that an individual mind possesses in order to bring the probability field
of quantum indeterminacy to a 'real' outcome. This is all very fine, provided that he is
consistent with his terms (and it's also true that sometimes we perceive things
subconsciously, i.e. outside the focus of our awareness, and with special techniques it
may be possible to retrieve such information), but nevertheless, referring to one's notyet-aware ground of being as 'consciousness' seems quite wishfully arbitrary. Similarly,
Hofstadter cannot do without linguistic sleights of hand either, as evidenced by phrases
like 'meaningless symbols'. Of course, both of them are all too aware that 'what
mathematician Kurt Gdel proved is that any attempt to produce a paradox-free...
system of reasonable richness is doomed to be incomplete. The system can be either
complete but inconsistent or consistent but incomplete' (Goswami 1995, p. 183).
This might be a good time to remind ourselves that language itself, being a system of
'reasonable richness' is one big Strange Loop; in the words of Hofstadter: 'language
does create strange loops when it talks about itself, whether directly or indirectly. Here,
something in the system jumps out and acts on the system, as if it were outside the
system.' (Hofstadter 1999, p. 691). Or, in the words of theologian Stephen Faller: 'Does
it ever seem strange that the entire dictionary is self-referential? We look up a word we
don't know the meaning of, and what do we find? More words. The dictionary is nothing
more than circular logic' (Faller 2004, p.72) 3.

We might only add that while the statement "language talks about itself" does seem paradoxical and even 'strangely
loopy', it is just like the hands drawing each otheran illusion. It is we who are doing the talking. Which is an out-ofplace remark in a paper arguing that, in a way, 'the world (including ourselves) is made of language', but... we still
haven't got to the conclusion.

Stripped down to its bones-and-yolk, the modern chicken-or-egg question and the
'ages-new' paradigm clash that will most probably yet again fail to resolve itself in this
century is the Hofstadter versus the Goswami type of worldview, that is the materialistat-its-core idea that (material) form gives rise to mind through particular types of selfreflexive organisation, against the idea that an out-of-bounds transcendent mind gives
rise to all things on our dualistic observer level. It is a 'modern incarnation of the famous
mind-body problem' (Blackmore 2005, p. 2) and it is like the seemingly never-ending
Evolution vs. Intelligent Design debates of late, while trying to keep things presumably
scientific (although not less zealous in all cases). We shouldn't expect either side to
ultimately win. We human beings may be like computational machines that have
reached a critical threshold of representational universality (cf. Hofstadter 2008,
Chapter 17), but Hofstadter cannot gloss over the fact that computers had an already
conscious designer. Likewise, Goswami will forever have to live with the fact that on our
own observer level we have no clue whether a transcendent unitive reality can be
meaningfully described as consciousness, because 'conscious' is still a word/concept
and derives its meaning from the circular system of differences that is language and
also presupposes an 'unconscious' state in order to work.
Whichever view we feel like subscribing to on any particular day, in 'all' likelihood there
will be plenty of subscribers both ways and thus the nature of the problem of
consciousness will remain dualistic even as we keep hearing that 'Dualism does not
work. Almost all contemporary scientists and philosophers agree on this' (Blackmore
2011, p. 14). In fact, given the fundamentally binary nature of language, information
and logic, dualism seems inevitable; dualisms at higher levels of discourse may even be
seen as fractal re-expressions of the basic dichotomy in the makeup of Nature or Mya
(whichever way you wish to see the world), possibly arising out of some kind of basic
binary bit function, but at larger scales. The pendulum of epistemology will most likely
continue to go back and forth between mind and matter and this undecidedness will be
the only thing that holds real sway, no pun pending.

Again and inevitably, certain kinds of metaphors and technological artefacts will serve
as thinking tools in our trying to reflect on consciousness. For technologically and
mathematically savvy cognitive scientists like Hofstadter, such a thinking tool are
feedback systems of various kinds (although for him, simple feedback is not a tangled
hierarchy, which has to possess a 'level-crossing' property to qualify). These include a
wide array of things from flush toilets to video feedback to Mandelbrot's fractal
equation. Just like Conway's Game of Life, feedback systems involve iterations of simple
rules which can produce infinite complexity. A video of a fractal zoom is fascinating but
even more fascinating perhaps is the fact that Nature seems to produce a variety of
fractal structures such as seashells, for example. (see, e.g., Arthur Clarke's documentary
on fractals: Clarke 1994). The term 'fractal' was only coined by mathematician Benot
Mandelbrot in 1975 but, as yet another computational metaphor, is shaping the way
many think about consciousness and physical reality. For example, Stephen LaBerge
remarks that 'Consciousness makes consciousness interesting. It's exactly that selfsimilar quality, the fractal nature of it, which makes it so endlessly fascinating'
(Blackmore 2006, p.137). Mandelbrot's equation produces form on an infinite number
of scales, but Ramachandran cautions against infinite regress in human beings: 'I can
say "You know that I know that I had an affair with your wife"; but if I say, "I know that
you know that I know that you know that I know", you start losing the thread, like an
echo. There are only so many steps that the brain can handle, and that's adequate for
the sense of self. So it's not an endless regress' (Blackmore 2006, p.190). Again, this
seems to conflate processing power with 'consciousness', but it is true that you cannot
zoom into the fractal structure of a head of broccoli past a few iterationsor so it seems.
Just like in astro- and quantum physics, the holographic metaphor also has promising
explanatory potential in studying consciousness and the brain. This line of research was
begun by neurophysiologist Karl Pribram in the 1960s and curiously does have a
'mystic' connection. In Talbot's account: 'Which is the true reality, the seemingly
objective world experienced by the observer/photographer or the blur of interference
patterns recorded by the camera/brain? Pribram realized that if the holographic brain
model was taken to its logical conclusions, it opened the door on the possibility that

objective reality might not even exist, or at least not in the way we believe it exists. Was
it possible, he wondered, that what the mystics had been saying for centuries was true,
reality was maya, an illusion, and what was out there was really a vast, resonating
symphony of wave forms, a "frequency domain" that was transformed into the world
as we know it only after it entered our senses?' (Talbot 1996, p.31). Terence and
brother Dennis McKenna also pick up on the holographic model and have 'introduced
evidence which suggests that the mind itself is holographic in quality and to that extent
reflects its neural substrate... speculated that this holographic structure of the mind
may proceed from the fact that holographic principles operate on many structural
levels... found that holographic principles might also be applied to the structure of
reality itself by virtue of the quantum nature of matter, whose wave-particle qualities
suggest a holographic monad', and '[seen] that such a holographic model of reality did
not violate the laws of relativity' (McKenna & McKenna 1994, p. 55). However, they
make the very important point that they 'are not prepared to assert the "truth" of [their]
speculations over other models of reality, recognizing that all such models are
ultimately constructs of the human mind, each no "truer" than any other. Nevertheless,
a holographic picture of mind and of external reality has enhanced our understanding
of both' (ibid.).

5. Conclusion: Back to Basics

In his 'Book', subtitled 'On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are', philosopher and
populariser of Eastern philosophy in the West Alan Watts devotes a whole chapter to
the fundamentally binary nature of inner and outer reality, reminding us that: 'To the
central brain the individual neuron signals either yes or nothat's all. But, as we know
from computers which employ binary arithmetic in which the only figures are 0 and 1,
these simple elements can be formed into the most complex and marvellous patterns.
In this respect our nervous system and 0/1 computers are much like everything else,
for the physical world is basically vibration. Whether we think of this vibration in terms
of waves or of particles, or perhaps wavicles, we never find the crest of a wave without

a trough or a particle without an interval, or space, between itself and others. In other
words, there is no such thing as a half wave, or a particle all by itself without any space
around it. There is no on without off, no up without down' (Watts 1966, pp. 25-26).
Because of this, he calls life 'The Game of Black-and-White', which people have turned
into 'The Game of White-versus-Black', where White must always win'a fight haunted
by a sense of chronic frustration, because we are doing something as crazy as trying to
keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys' (ibid. p. 35). His view of reality is Advaita
Vedantic, with the whole universe being but one Self, in which all the 'so-called
opposites, such as light and darkness, sound and silence, solid and space, on and off,
inside and outside, appearing and disappearing, cause and effect, are poles or aspects
of the same thing' (ibid. p. 34). When it comes to naming that thing, however, Watts is
cautious and prefers to call it just 'IT', because 'language can no more transcend duality
than paintings or photographs upon a flat surface can go beyond two dimensions' (ibid.
p. 149), and because 'to define is to limit, to set boundaries, to compare and to contrast,
and for this reason the universe, the all, seems to defy definition' (ibid. p. 141), and
'what lies beyond opposites must be discussed, if at all, in terms of opposites, and this
means using the language of analogy, metaphor, and myth' (ibid. p. 151).
This is the double-bind that language has in its relationship to 'reality'. The simplest
form underlying any kind of logical organisation, including languages or codes and, as
some physicists currently suspectphysical reality, is one derived from an arbitrary
binary opposition, whose elements we can call by different names for convenience, such
as zeros and ones in the parlance of the contemporary computer metaphor, or perhaps
the old yin and yang. At the same time, it is and will likely remain mysterious as everat
least one bitas to what it is that gives rise to the basic on/off of the universe. In the
current apparent revival of the ancient wisdom of the Vedas from multiple viewpoints,
it seems tempting to call IT something like 'consciousness' and this paradigm may
indeed be convenient in resolving some quantum physics paradoxes, as Amit Goswami
claims. However, 'consciousness' is unfortunately still a wordthat is, part of our
human code which cannot reach beyond itself. So, in a way, bona fide mystics and yogis
are not really evading the question when they say that the ultimate truth cannot be

statedthey are not being mysterious, but rather strictly scientific. In the words of one
contemporary yoga master from India, 'It is impossible to pen such an ineffable and
lofty state of Truth... Brahma Nirvana, the Be-ness About Whom Naught May Be Said'
(Siddhanath 2006, p. 205). To the extent that one does say something about the
Ultimate Reality, he or she is already necessarily in the realm of myth, just like the
author of the last quote calls the ultimate reality a 'Truth' and a state of 'Be-ness', where
'the yogi, having crossed the light barrier of relativity... goes beyond the naked
singularity' (ibid.), whereas the domain in question thus defined must be well beyond
truth/non-truth, being/non-being and so on. This is how language/code is both the end
and the beginning of reality. 'Ultimate' reality, whatever that is, begins where language
stops, while 'our' reality starts where language does.
Thus, it may be a meaningful coincidence that 'information' comes from the Latin word
informare, meaning to 'give form', thus revealing itself as a lovely metaphor uniting
code and dimensionality. At the same time, it surely must be more than a coincidence
that the formulas for information entropy and thermodynamic entropy, the former
mathematician Claude Shannon's measure of the quantity of information content and
the latterphysicist Ludwig Boltzmann's measure of 'the probability of finding a
[physical] system in a particular state' (Kumar 2011, p.24), are very similar and
'conceptually equivalent', with the difference 'a matter of convention' (cf. Bekenstein
2003, p. 60).
On a less fundamental level, our descriptions of 'life, the universe and everything' are
always clothed in the metaphors of our times and the narratives that we choose to lend
credence to. Religions are a good example of narratives people invest a lot in, but even
just within quantum physics, there is no agreement as to what interpretations should
be given to certain equations which seem to otherwise produce correct experimental
results. This is why many physicists prefer to stick to the mathematics without asking
too many questions, but this situation is not exactly satisfying and, as we have seen,
there have been attempts to pursue an informatics-meets-physics type of science that
studies a realm possibly underlying that of quantum physics. In the current

epistemological vacuum, and especially given the reaffirmed role of mind and the
observer in the constitution of 'reality', we may expect the recent trend of resurrecting
old Vedic notions such as the illusory nature of the dualistic world and consciousness
as the ground of being to persist, merging with modern notions and narratives (as in
the movie 'The Matrix'), and helping to shape scientific and philosophical discourse on
the nature of Nature in this century.
Much of all this must have been on McKenna's mind when he made the statement that
was quoted at the start, and that should hopefully sound much less arcane by now. In
making it, he was only reaffirming the realisation that Watts had come to in the middle
of the last century, but along slightly different linesby seeing that in a way 'everything
is code', and also by realising the important mediation of language in our
communication and abstract thinking: 'The world is made of language. In other words,
if you ask a scientist what is the world made of, he will tell you it's made of electrons
and force fields and this sort of thing, but notice that these are all words and that behind
these words stand the deeper languages of mathematics. Whatever the world really is,
what we experience and what we communicate to each other is entirely couched within
the medium of language. So, language is the primary determinant of the experience of
being and science has chosen to be very naive about this. It's only in the 20th century
that these issues have even been raised. Before that, before quantum physics, scientists
had blithely believed that they were observing an independent reality that their
observations had no effect on. Since quantum physics, we now know that there is a
much more complicated situation prevailingthat mind somehow is a necessary
ingredient in the becoming of the world, and that this "becoming of the world",
whatever it is for itself, for mind it is something which happens in the domain of
language. In going through language, it takes upon itself the character of language and
leaves behind much of the character of whatever it was before that. You know,
Wittgenstein talked about the "unspeakable"this is what he was referring to, this
dimension antecedent to language, and it is unspeakable' (McKenna 1994a). This
'unspeakable' realm is exactly what Lilly was referring to when we quoted him at the

beginning of this paper, speaking about 'higher realities beyond language' and 'union
with God' (i.e. yoga).
If language is the domain of all provisional reality, then we may be justified in asking:
which language? Languages come in many varieties and the confounding effect of this
has been known at least since the time of the mythological Tower of Babel. Dialects and
sociolects complicate the picture even further. Meanwhile, the much-criticised 'SapirWhorf' hypothesis has made a bit of a comeback, and the work of linguists such as Lera
Boroditsky is making it demonstrably clear that linguistic relativity must be true,
though not to the romanticised extent that Benjamin Whorf used to elevate it. The
picture in science is not very different. As Benjamin Whorf himself observed a long time
ago, 'what we call "scientific thought" has developed not only a set of different
dialectics, but actually a set of different dialects. These dialects are now becoming
mutually unintelligible' (Whorf 1941, p. 246). The problem of fuzzy definitions arises
even within more narrow fields of research. For example: 'The ambiguity of the term
"consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists writing on the
subject. It is common to see a paper begin with an invocation of the mystery of
consciousness [i.e. the "hard problem"]... In the second half, the tone becomes more
optimistic, and the author's own theory of consciousness is outlined. Upon examination,
this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more straightforward phenomena'
(Chalmers 1995, p. 226).
Physicists' arbiter of speakable truth is mathematics which, as Kurt Gdel showed,
cannot ultimately prove itself as a system and which is, after all, a 'linguistic apparatus',
as Whorf thought of it. Still, even physicists cannot escape having to deal with the firm
grip of what is more conventionally meant by the term 'human language'. For example,
in arguing for the physical validity of the concept of a beginning and an end of time,
Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose 'had sidestepped Kant's antimony of pure reason
by dropping his implicit assumption that time had a meaning independent of the
universe' (Hawking 2001, p. 41). That is, they had to convince their colleagues with the
force of 'the mathematical theorems that [they] had proved', as much as they had to

work to change the very accepted meaning of the word 'time' as 'most physicists still
instinctively disliked the idea of it having a beginning or end' (ibid. 43).
It is a well-known fact in sociolinguistics that 'languages are not created equal' and right
now, the specialised language known as mathematics reigns supreme among the
determinants of scientific truth when it comes to cosmology. Like all kings, however, it
depends on a board of sundry advisors and so nowadays it is not that unusual to hear
cosmologists speak the language of Vedanta. We as a species operate in the domain of
human language and even though someone might come up with a beautiful formula, it
still has to be interpreted. Like all kings, mathematics is not all-powerful and has
trouble with concepts such as 'infinity' and 'ultimate proofs' as much as any other
logical system. Nevertheless, it has been tremendously successful in zooming into the
nature of reality during modernitya period that has generally been ruled by the
materialist scientific viewwhile paradoxically basing itself on the concept of number,
which abstracts thought from matter in a most striking way (three times one apple
being equal to three apples basically meaning that all three apples have to be one and
the same, which is not something that we observe in the 'real' world).
Meanwhile, if one of the dominant metaphors for understanding the world and
ourselves was 'the computer' in the past half century or so, these days people are
gradually learning to think in terms of 'networks'. Increasingly, many will be tempted
or even irresistibly drawn to compare the wiring of the brain to the biggest and most
complex network ever created by manthe Internet. There are already some that
openly speculate whether the Internet might develop a mind of its own. To give just one
relatively recent example, according to brain scientist and entrepreneur Jeffrey Stibel,
'With computers, we have tried to find that analogy. We say that semiconductors switch
on and off like neurons and that fibres of glass can transmit messages as do synapses
and axons. Beyond that, however, we've come to a dead end... A computer itself is not
like a brain. But then there is the Internet... It is unbounded, self-perpetuating, and
capable of collective consciousness... It processes information, shapes it, transmits it...
For these reasons... I offer you this simple analogy: as the artificial pump is to the heart,

as the camera is to the eye, and as the hinge is to the joint, I believe that the Internet is
to the brain. In fact, I'll go one better than that. I believe that the Internet is a brain'
(Stibel 2009, pp. xvi-xvii).
In conclusion, it may be useful to reiterate this paper's basic theses as to how McKenna's
claim that 'reality is made of language' can be meaningfully and scientifically construed
as more than a funny idea. The chief propositions have been: (i) A dichotomy is the most
basic kind of difference and difference is the basis for all structure; an arbitrary binary
code has been identified as the simplest form of encoding information and the same
may well turn out to be true for physical reality. (ii) The moment we say something
about a supposed (pre-binary, and thus unspeakable) ultimate reality, we have started
a myth clothed in language (often deciding to stand on one side or the other of a classic
chicken-and-egg question), which we can then choose to go on and elaborate. (iii)
Ubiquitous metaphors shape our thinking and are integrated into our myths. (iv) Both
physical reality and language exhibit a structure composed of a series of planes with
principles of organisation at every level that are not easily relatable to operational laws
on other levels, which fact may lend additional suggestive power to the language/code
view of reality. (v) A mild form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis looks increasingly
plausible and different languages, as used by different cultures, create momentum for
thinking along slightly different lines, thus colouring our perceptions of reality
differently (this is true of both natural and scientific languages). Different media of
expression of meaning similarly have a non-trivial effect. (vi) The general phenomenon
of language, itself a medium, substitutes to a significant extent one reality for another;
we end up with a reduced/altered/augmented version of the 'original' reality of
primary perception. (vii) All fundamental theories of existence stand on the shoulders
of one pre-binary 'free miracle' (as McKenna used to put it), and people have called that
unexplained mystery God, the Big Bang, or Transcendental Consciousness, among
others. What comes beyond that are different incomplete narratives and myths. We
choose according to our personal biases, or as Lilly would have itour programs and
metaprograms.

And finally, when we say that 'reality is made of language' we have obviously used
language (a word whose archetype is the human tongue) itself as an expanded
metaphor encompassing various things like binary code, large symbolic systems,
human languages and story-telling, and placed it at rock-bottom stripped to its
essencean arbitrary binary difference. And because no one can explain what this rockbottom sits on, the metaphor is at least as good as any other chief pretender: elementary
particles, a computer program, zeros and ones in a matrix, a primordial self, and so (back
and) forth. In fact, one could stand the triangle of Language-Mind-Physical reality on any
of its sides and argue in favour of that as being fundamental with equal, if limited,
success. We don't know of anything that is not 'made of something'. Similarly, anything
we perceive or decide to claim has to be a product of our mind. And in our case, all
proposed bed-rock hypotheses about the nature of reality have to come in the form of
some language. Sticking with the language metaphor, and combining it with the old
parable of peeling an onion, we might say what is really happening is that, in our efforts
to understand and explain the world, we create a loop of words/concepts around a
vaguely grasped notion of some primary (and possibly non-dual) reality, and strive to
ensnare it tighter and tighter, while the thing we are after may probably best be
described as the very hole created by our linguistic lasso. Using the strange loop that is
language as a world-explaining metaphor might be taking McLuhan's famous and
enigmatic aphorism, 'The medium is the message', to a difficult-to-accept extreme
perhaps, but then again, explaining the world is extremely difficult, nay... aye.

Graduate School of Economics,

Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo

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Small Mouth Noises, Vol. 1, 2015, pp. 1-25.
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2015/11/15 - Revisado