Home > Articles > Consciousness > Reversing the Causal Arrow

Note: You are viewing an archived snapshot of a website that is more than 15 years old. For my more recent work see:

Extreme Optimization, my company website.
Path of Inner Light. Begin your journey to a happier, more fulfilling life.
Idealist Science, working unapologetically to replace the materialist foundations of science.

Reversing the Causal Arrow

by Jeffrey Sax
February 6, 2003

There used to be an intricate 'inner' world. Much of 'the world' as a whole could not be seen... be it heaven, mythical worlds, dream worlds, or wherever the gods lived. The physical ('objective') world was a medium for expression, for the god(s) or Creator(s) as well as for humans. The physical world was an instrument. God(s) and humans pulled the strings.

The objective world was a small part of subjective experience.

Now that has changed. The physical world is seen as the source of our existence. As science cuts up the world, humans end up being separate, isolated pieces. There is nothing that is 'us' outside our skin. There is no thought outside our brain. We are interacting particles. That is all. What happens inside those particles is called subjective. The inner structure of those particles is so complex that it is hard to understand and impossible to control. This makes the subjective unreliable and therefore not very useful.

Subjective experience has become a tiny piece of the objective world. The contradiction is pretty blatant: science takes pride in its many achievements, while at the same time doing everything to prove that science itself and its achievements are merely products of impersonal natural laws.