Nondualism For Naturalists

[DocWatts]

Howdy, I thought I might share a philosophy article I've been working on. The article presents a different take on nondualism than that of Leo and many other folks on this forum, for left-brained folks who might appreciate a different approach to the subject. It's a phenomenology-first approach to nondualism that I've arrived at after years of study and contemplation, which places its real-world applications for our fractured present at the forefront.

(If you'd prefer to read this on my actual Substack, here's a link)
https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/nondualism-for-naturalists-the-uncommon

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Nondualism For Naturalists | The Uncommon Sense Of World Disclosure

Nondualism usually comes wrapped in a dense layer of mysticism. This is the naturalist version: grounded in biology, evolution, and phenomenology - and urgently relevant to our fractured present.

A Slap In The Face To Common Sense

The exploration we’re embarking upon kicks off with a shot across the bow to common sense - and toward what we might call uncommon sense. At its core is a disorienting premise that’s at odds with how we typically understand our relationship to the world around us. What we’ll be challenging is a way of carving up Reality that’s picked up unconsciously through daily life - and mistaken, by virtue of its familiarity, for objective truth. So strap in, because the familiar is about to become strange.

This premise may well land like a slap in the face to what feels self-evident - and that’s by design, because the self-evident has a habit of papering over hidden assumptions. Here’s the slap: the world of people, places, and things we spend our lives immersed in - otherwise known as our lived reality - isn’t some pre-made set that we wander onto, its features in place before we arrive. It’s a home we actively assemble and inhabit - a disclosed world that’s built by our mind and mistaken for a discovery.

But assembled from what? Not from thin air, of course - but from social and material ingredients we didn’t choose - including the people we share the world with, who are constructing their own version right alongside us. This goes well beyond “you have your interpretation, and I have mine” - it’s about what shows up as ‘real’ for us in the first place, long before interpretation enters the picture. There’s an old story about how perception works, and it goes like this: the world is ‘out there’, we experience it ‘in here’, and the latter is judged by its fidelity to the former. Our aim is to collapse that distinction - show that minds are worldly and worlds are minded. Call it nondualism if you’d like. Or don’t. The label matters less than what it lets us see, and what’s at stake.

Far beyond philosophical navel gazing, world disclosure reaches to the beating heart of a social crisis we know all too well. One that extends from estranged families to fractured nations, from arguments over Thanksgiving dinner to the Big Lie that sparked an insurrection at the US Capitol. When realities become incompatible without adequate release valves to vent the pressure, violence fills the gap and democracies crumble. The stakes are viscerally real - so let’s ground this destabilizing premise before we turn it towards our societal divisions.

The Uncommon Sense Of World Disclosure

Enough preamble, then - what are minds actually doing when they ‘construct’ a lived reality? In a sense, they’re shaping our environment into a home that we can reside in. And just as a house is designed for a human lifestyle - homes aren’t built underwater, doors aren’t placed in ceilings - minds construct a version of Reality that’s tailored for our needs and capacities.

This process has a name: world disclosure.

A ‘world‘ here isn’t the planet - it’s a cumulative whole of meaningful boundaries, patterns, and relationships for a living being - raw materials, translated into something livable. To distinguish the two, we’ll use capital-R ‘Reality’ for the raw materials, and lowercase ‘reality’ for the livable version.

To disclose means to reveal - to uncover what’s unseen or unnoticed. World disclosure, then, is the process by which Reality gets reworked into a home we can actually reside in - not discovered ready-made, but built through a partnership between living beings and their environment.

And just like a physical house, a disclosed world is constituted by its boundaries - walls that separate inside from outside, here from there, mine from yours. Everyday perception is built on them: Mind and World. Self and Other. Subject and Object. Load-bearing divisions that arise so effortlessly we have difficulty imagining that they could be anything other than inherent features of Reality itself. As immutable as gravity, unquestionable as distance - or so the story goes. And therein lies the issue - what’s unquestioned hardens into dogma.

Reification: When Mental Boundaries Bleed Into The Real World

Understanding where these divisions come from should loosen their hold on our day-to-day thinking - not pry them away entirely, but render them more fluid and negotiable. Why is this advantageous? Because it breaks the spell of reification - the habit of chiseling divisions into stone, and then claiming they were always part of the landscape. Racial hierarchies are one example of how ugly this can get, but one need not reach for the most egregious cases to grasp the benefits of more flexible modes of thinking.

For one, it gives us more room to maneuver when these divisions aren’t serving a worthwhile purpose. For another, it helps us get a sense of how others might carve things up differently, thus opening the door to understanding perspectives that seem alien to us - including viewpoints that we’re committed to fighting (one need not tolerate Nazis to see the value in understanding their reality).

But to reap these benefits, we need to understand how such divisions arise in the first place. So if boundaries aren’t fixed features of Reality, where do they come from? The short answer: they emerge through co-authorship. Your every perception - the edge of a table, the sound of traffic, the warmth of the sun on your skin - is an act of construction, built by your mind and the world working in tandem.

Let that sink in - and consider what it means for our fractured public sphere. When two people can watch a video of the same event and see completely different realities, that’s world disclosure all the way down. And it’s also why facts don’t change minds - because what counts as a relevant fact depends on the world you’re living in.

So does this mean that any world is as good as any other? Not at all - remember that world disclosure is a partnership, not a solo-act - and Reality gets the final veto. You can try inhabiting a world where E=MC² is ‘Jewish science’, but good luck trying to crack nuclear fission. Which is to say, disclosed worlds can be pathological - their wreckage measured in lives, not just errors. There are many ways to build a home. Not all of them are fit to live in.

Minds Are Survival Machines, Not Metaphysical Engines

While world disclosure is ultimately constrained by Reality, the mere suggestion that we co-construct what shows up without the slightest effort on our part might still sound preposterous. After all, the world is irrefutably independent of our whims and desires. And nothing here requires abandoning that intuition: minds are biological systems - not metaphysical engines that dream Reality into being. As anyone who’s ever tried to ignore gravity, hunger, or a deadline knows, the world knocks us on our ass when our constructions fall out of sync with how things actually behave.

Yet the fact that this habitual carving up of Reality feels natural doesn’t put it beyond question. Quite the opposite, in fact, when we remember that our perception is scaffolded by biological processes that are opaque to our moment-to-moment awareness. Just as an eye doesn’t see how it sees, we don’t directly experience this perceptual scaffolding. Moreover, evolution is under no obligation to ensure that what feels viscerally real is what’s actually true - minds are survival engines, not a transparent window into Reality. What’s disclosed to us just needs to be compatible with survival - and if that means living in a useful simplification, so be it. If we accept that minds are biological systems shaped by evolution, the boundaries we take for granted might say more about us than about the world.

So let’s stress-test these demarcations. Our goal isn’t to discard, but to contextualize - to show that they’re convenient sticky notes slapped over a seamless Reality. So this won’t be a ‘debunking’, in the usual sense of the word. What we’re chiefly interested in is why these divisions are so intuitive for us in the first place, and what their limitations are.

A Biological Simulation

This means revisiting some familiar starting points - beginning with one of the most celebrated statements in Western thought. “I think therefore I am,” Descartes declared - and in doing so, cleaved the thinking self off from the world of people, places, and things which makes thought meaningful for us in the first place. But is that separation as clean as it sounds?

Consider: who precisely is the I that’s doing the thinking here? And is it a foregone conclusion that this I is separable from the world it inhabits? Descartes severed mind from world so completely that he accidentally invented the premise of ‘The Matrix’ three centuries early. And while Simulation Theory adherents might be chasing the wrong metaphor for human cognition, they’re inadvertently correct that we are living in a simulation - not of silicon and circuits, but of biology and neurons. One that’s generated by our own nervous system, and continuously updated by feedback from our physical and social environment - no computers required.

Unlike ‘The Matrix’, a disclosed world isn’t an illusion - it’s a curated slice of Reality that’s attuned to your needs and capacities. The lived reality of people, places, and things that you experience during every waking moment of your life isn’t an objective account of what is - but neither is it a hallucination. It’s your mind’s best guess about what’s going on in the world around you. Remember: your mind isn’t some malevolent architect that’s trying to deceive you, it’s a survival engine that’s trying to keep you alive. And that means most of Reality never makes it through the doors of perception. This is by design - or adaptation, to put it more precisely. A survival engine doesn’t show you everything - this would be overwhelming and largely useless to us. It shows you what’s relevant. Some of what’s relevant is programmed in from birth - like our attunement to faces and voices - but much of it depends on the particular life you’ve lived.

Every Perception Is An Invisible Curation

To appreciate how every moment of perception is a monumental act of curation, pause to consider what’s being filtered out at this very moment. Right now your nervous system is screening out the pressure of your clothes against your skin, the weight of your tongue in your mouth, the micro-adjustments keeping you balanced in your chair. You can test this principle right now by closing one eye, and noticing that your nose is in your visual field - yet your brain has been cropping it out your entire life without asking for your permission. What makes the cut isn’t arbitrary - it’s determined by what you need to navigate, manipulate, and respond to. Which means that what a world is can’t be separated from what an organism does.

For human beings, certain features of our physiology are especially important for what shows up. These include highly expressive faces, a bipedal posture oriented along a front-back axis, dexterous hands, and forward-facing eyes. Which is why we can see two apples and a banana on a table and read that as a face, why we use ‘ahead’ and ‘behind’ to refer not just to physical space but also to time, and why a doorknob invites grasping before you’ve decided to reach for it. These aren’t quirks or accidents - they’re invitations issued by the world to a creature built just like you.

Thus the boundaries of your world are determined - at least in part - by a body you didn’t choose. But bodies aren’t the whole story. Humans everywhere share the same basic equipment. No two brains are exactly the same, but they’re not so different that physiology alone can explain why we fragment into incompatible realities - no biological determinism here.

We Bring Our Environments With Us To Every Encounter

For the full picture, we’ll need to bring in the other half of this partnership - a mind’s environment - and what it contributes to a disclosed world: which is a hell of a lot. Social and material environments aren’t just spaces we travel through, they’re interwoven into the lived reality we bring with us to every encounter. This means that if you want to understand why your neighbor’s reality looks nothing like your own, you need to walk a mile in their shoes - and that phrase turns out to be more literal than it sounds. A shared body structure sets the stage for what types of worlds are permitted - no human knows what it’s like to be a bat and vice versa - but life experience decides what world you actually inhabit.

And precisely because disclosed worlds don’t emerge from some pristine inner sanctum but from a lifetime of bodily encounters with particular environments, your neighbor can’t just decide to ‘see’ what you see. Just like someone can’t ‘turn off’ a trauma response or decide to unhear their native language, you bring your environment with you to every encounter. But ‘environment’ here means more than just a physical space: it’s the people you interact with, the media you consume, the food you eat, the sources of stress in your life.

Same Room, Worlds Apart

None of this is controversial. Geneticists have known for decades that genes turn on and off depending on environmental signals. Books like ‘The Body Keeps The Score’ have shown how trauma from our environment gets stored in our body and nervous system. Attachment theory has demonstrated that our relationship with our caregivers from an early age shapes how we experience intimacy, trust, and danger for our entire lives.

What’s harder to accept is that our lived history with a set of environments doesn’t just colour our reality - it constitutes it. We’re not just interpreting the world differently - we’re often seeing and hearing different things entirely, even when we’re in the same room. A toddler isn’t just an adult with less knowledge - they’re living in a world without object permanence, where a blanket over a toy doesn’t conceal it but annihilates it. A traumatized war veteran isn’t experiencing fireworks, they’re living in a world where loud bangs are threats, not a cause for celebration. A reactionary isn’t submitting to a dictator, they’re embracing a stern father figure that’s promised to protect them from modernity.

This isn’t as simple as ‘you see a pig and I see a lion.’ We’re both registering the same pig. But an activist sees an animal, while an industrialist sees a commodity. These aren’t post-hoc ‘interpretations’; they shape how that shared Reality shows up for us in the first place, before we can form an opinion about it.

Thus, the body says what’s possible - the environment says what’s available. What does the environment offer? Invitations to act, tailored to your body and your history. Philosophers call these affordances - and they’re why we can live next door to one another while being worlds apart.

Edited 4 hours ago by DocWatts