A basic tenet of modern science is that we are observers of an external world that is entirely independent of our observations of it. We can measure, predict, and manipulate parts of that world by breaking it down into its basic elements, but we are part of it only in the sense that our bodies are made of the same stuff we find everywhere else. It is widely taken for granted that the universe is an exclusively physical place, and that the subjective aspects entirely derivative from physical processes. But it has not always been so. The story of how we came to believe that we are fundamentally separate from the world around us is a relatively recent development, an idea that has taken root over the past few centuries.
To the premodern mind, both in the philosophical schools of ancient Greece and in the animistic worldview of many Indigenous cultures, the cosmos was not an inert backdrop for human action but was itself a living, intelligent, and relational whole. This was a world defined by participation, not detached observation. Spirit, in some form, permeated the cosmos; a river or a mountain was not merely an object to be analyzed but an agent or a presence to be related to, possessing its own interiority and purpose. The foundational experience was one of belonging to an animate reality, a stark contrast to the modern view of humanity as a lonely, conscious spectator in a dead, mechanical universe.
This ancient intuition of a living cosmos was not simply a matter of folk belief; it was formalized and given profound intellectual structure by the earliest and most influential philosophers in the West. Early Western philosophy, far from being materialist, posited a universe imbued with mind and purpose. For Plato, the physical world was a moving image of an eternal, intelligible reality, and the cosmos itself was a single, living creature endowed with a World Soul and a cosmic intellect (nous) that brought order and reason to the material realm. His student, Aristotle, while more grounded in empirical observation, likewise saw the world as saturated with purpose. He argued that all natural things possess a telos, an innate, indwelling end toward which they strive—the telos of an acorn is to become a mighty oak, and this striving is an intrinsic part of its nature.
For these foundational thinkers, qualities that are now considered merely subjective—warmth, purpose, color, even soul—were irreducible and real features of the world. Reality was not divided into “primary” and “secondary” qualities, but was understood as a seamless whole in which mathematical relationships coexisted with meaning, beauty, and intention. The cosmos was intelligible precisely because it was intelligent; it could be known because it was, in some fundamental sense, akin to mind itself.
This integrated vision of a meaningful cosmos was not discarded with the rise of Christianity, but was instead absorbed and transformed by the next great intellectual movement in the West. The medieval period was intellectually chaotic, with many competing views and influences, but one thread appears to have taken particularly strong root. A synthesis of classical philosophical heritage with Christian theology produced a powerful and remarkably coherent vision of an ordered, meaningful, and God-infused cosmos. The core tenet of this medieval synthesis held that the universe was fundamentally intelligible because it was the creation of a rational, divine mind. Nature was seen as a “second book,” a divine text that, like Scripture, revealed the mind of its author.
The worldview of an ordered and meaningful cosmos found its most famous expression in the concept of the Great Chain of Being, a model that organized all of existence—from God and the angelic hosts down to the most humble stone—in a single, unbroken, and value-laden hierarchy. Everything had its proper place and its purpose within this divine order. Within such a framework, the practice of what we would now call science was not seen as an alternative or a threat to theology, but as a form of it. To study the natural world was to engage in a fundamentally spiritual act: to read the mind of God as expressed in the rational structure of creation.
For the great minds of the early Scientific Revolution, like the astronomer Johannes Kepler and the physicist Isaac Newton, scientific inquiry was a deeply spiritual pursuit. It was an act of deciphering the rational mind of God as it was expressed in the sublime mathematical laws of nature. Kepler, upon discerning the elliptical orbits of the planets, famously exclaimed his desire was “only to taste the flavor of seeing, if I could, with my own eyes, what I had learned from the mouth of God.”1 Johannes Kepler, in a letter to Herwart von Hohenburg, 1599. He believed he was thinking God’s thoughts after Him. Similarly, Newton, a profoundly religious man who wrote more on theology than on physics, saw his discovery of universal gravitation not as evidence of a self-sufficient mechanism, but as proof of God’s ongoing, rational design and dominion over the cosmos.
For these pivotal figures, there was no conflict between physics and faith; they were integrated paths to understanding a single, divinely ordered reality. The mathematical elegance they discovered in planetary motion and terrestrial mechanics was not mere utility—it was a glimpse into the aesthetic and rational perfection of divine creativity. Yet, the very power and elegance of the system Newton created contained the seeds of a profound transformation that would ultimately remove its creator from the picture.
Between the 16th and 18th centuries, a major conceptual shift occurred: the primary language for describing reality moved from quality and purpose to quantity and mechanism. This transformation did not happen overnight, nor was it the conscious intention of its architects. Rather, it emerged through a series of methodological choices that proved so successful that they gradually hardened into metaphysical commitments.
Galileo Galilei was a key architect of this change, redefining science as the study of what is measurable and declaring mathematics to be its proper language. His famous declaration that “the book of nature is written in mathematical characters” represented more than a methodological preference—it implied that what could not be mathematized was somehow less real, less worthy of serious attention. Shortly thereafter, René Descartes provided the philosophical architecture for this new science with his ontological dualism. By splitting reality into two distinct and incompatible substances—inert, extended, mechanical matter (res extensa) and un-extended, private, thinking mind (res cogitans)—Descartes effectively exiled mind and all its qualities from the physical world.
This conceptual divorce of mind from matter set the stage for a gradual but profound reinterpretation of Newton’s work. Here we encounter one of the most consequential intellectual drifts in Western history: a slow but decisive shift that would reshape human consciousness over the course of generations.
Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, another major conceptual shift took place in European thought: the mathematical tools that were so successful at modeling the behavior of the world gradually came to be seen as a complete description of the world itself. This transformation represents what we might call the confusion of the map with the territory—but it was a confusion that developed slowly, almost imperceptibly, across multiple generations.
The shift began with the undeniable predictive power of mathematical modeling. Newton’s equations could predict eclipses, calculate trajectories, and explain the tides with unprecedented precision. This was genuinely revolutionary—for the first time in human history, natural phenomena could be predicted with mathematical exactitude. The success was so spectacular that it seemed to validate not just the method, but the entire worldview that accompanied it.
What happened next was more subtle but psychologically understandable: the very power of mathematical description began to cast doubt on everything it couldn’t capture. If mathematics could reveal the “true” behavior of planets and pendulums with such precision, what did that say about aspects of experience that resisted mathematical treatment? The stunning success of the quantitative approach created an implicit hierarchy of reality—what could be measured and predicted was “objective” and reliable, while what couldn’t be mathematized appeared increasingly suspect, subjective, and ultimately less real.
What began as a methodological limitation—the practical decision to study only what could be measured—gradually hardened into an ontological claim about what was real. Qualities like color, beauty, meaning, and purpose, which could not be captured by the new mechanical equations, were deemed “secondary qualities”—not real features of the world, but subjective projections of the isolated human mind. The elegant, predictive power of Newton’s mechanics allowed subsequent thinkers, most famously the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, to envision a “clockwork universe” in which God no longer had a place.
When asked by Napoleon where God fit into his cosmic system, Laplace is said to have replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”2 This quote is famously attributed to Laplace, though its exact wording is a matter of historical debate. It captures the essence of his deterministic worldview. He had articulated the vision of a perfect, deterministic machine that, once set in motion, required no ongoing divine agency or purpose. This marks the moment of what Alfred North Whitehead would later call the “bifurcation of nature,” where the seamless, meaningful whole of the premodern world was decisively cleaved in two.
What makes this transformation so historically significant is not merely that it changed how we understood the world, but that it changed what we considered worth understanding. The mathematical model, originally designed as a tool for prediction and control, gradually became the standard for what counted as real knowledge. Anything that could not be quantified, measured, or reduced to mechanical terms was slowly relegated to the realm of the subjective—deeply private, and ultimately illusory.
This drift into a mathematical narrative of the world was so gradual that each generation of thinkers could reasonably see themselves as simply building on their predecessors’ work, not fundamentally altering humanity’s relationship to reality. Yet by the end of the process, the seamless, meaningful cosmos of the ancients had been replaced by something entirely different: a collection of mindless particles moving according to mathematical laws, with consciousness relegated to the status of an emergent accident.
The materialist framework that emerged from this conceptual drift worked brilliantly—as long as it confined itself to the external world. For centuries, the mechanical approach could focus on planetary motions, falling bodies, chemical reactions, and other “objective” phenomena without confronting its most glaring omission. But as science matured and began turning its attention inward, toward the phenomena of awareness, experience, and subjective life, the full magnitude of what had been excluded became undeniable.
The irony was profound: the very minds that had constructed this elegant mathematical description of a mindless universe were themselves the most obvious feature of reality that the theory couldn’t explain. Here we use ‘mind’ not in the narrow sense of computational processing, but as a placeholder for the qualitative aspect that may be intrinsic to reality itself—a qualitative dimension that may be as basic as any physical property. Consciousness, in this broader view, refers to the awareness of experience—what it is like to be something, as philosopher Thomas Nagel framed it. If the cosmos truly consisted of nothing but particles moving according to deterministic laws, how could it give rise to the felt experience of being a conscious observer?
This explanatory gap became particularly acute when viewed through the lens of evolutionary history. The development of complex brains represents one of evolution’s most costly investments. Large-brained species like humans and odontocetes appear to have evolved neural architectures that support what may be extraordinarily rich consciousness—not merely information processing, but a deep subjective awareness of experience that accompanies complex consciousness. Given millions of years of neural stability in oceanic environments optimized for acoustic complexity and social depth, odontocete consciousness may well exceed anything humans can readily imagine.3 This speculation becomes less far-fetched when we consider the vast range of interiority among humans themselves. While we tend to associate human consciousness with the depths achieved by contemplatives, philosophers, or artists, much of contemporary human awareness appears focused on what might charitably be called surface phenomena—social media, consumer culture, and immediate gratification. If we can acknowledge such variation within our own species, the possibility that millions of years of stable neural development in acoustically rich, socially complex environments might have produced forms of consciousness that dwarf typical human awareness becomes not just plausible, but almost inevitable.”
But the puzzle deepens when we consider the broader pattern of neural evolution. This extraordinary investment in brain complexity hasn’t occurred just once, but repeatedly across dramatically different lineages and vast timescales. Long before the first humans appeared, multiple species of odontocetes had already evolved highly encephalized brains. Modern research reveals that pilot whales, for instance, possess over 37 billion neurons—more than twice the human count—while dolphins and other cetaceans share with humans the specialized von Economo neurons associated with social cognition and self-awareness. Behavioral studies have confirmed mirror self-recognition in dolphins, cultural transmission of hunting techniques across generations, and sophisticated social alliances that persist for decades.4 Mortensen, H.S., et al. (2014). Quantitative relationships in delphinid neocortex. Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, 8, 132; Butti, C., et al. (2009). Total number and volume of von Economo neurons in the cerebral cortex of cetaceans. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 515(2), 243-259; Reiss, D., & Marino, L. (2001). Mirror self-recognition in the bottlenose dolphin: A case of cognitive convergence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(10), 5937-5942. Von Economo neurons are three times more abundant in cetaceans than in humans. The neural architectures of odontocetes, which achieved their current complexity millions of years ago, appear to serve entirely different forms of intelligence. These parallel experiments in consciousness pose a fundamental challenge to any view that treats mind as a recent accident of terrestrial evolution.
The materialist story, which had seemed so complete when focused on the external world, suddenly found itself confronting evidence that consciousness might be far more fundamental than its framework could accommodate. The universe appeared to have an intrinsic tendency toward greater neural complexity and, presumably, richer forms of awareness—a pattern that suggests mind might be woven into the very fabric of reality rather than being a late-arriving anomaly.
This newly disenchanted, mechanical cosmos set the stage for the final step in the evolution of the modern worldview: the construction of meaning by humanity alone. Enlightenment thinkers extended the idea of a mechanical universe to society, politics, and ethics, proposing that meaning was no longer to be discovered in a divinely ordered world but was to be constructed by human reason alone.
God, for many of the period’s intellectuals, became unnecessary—not disproved, but functionally replaced by the power of the human intellect. This was not necessarily atheism in the militant sense, but rather a practical agnosticism: whether or not God existed became irrelevant to the business of understanding and organizing the world. Human reason, armed with the scientific method, could do the work that had once required divine revelation.
The historian David Noble has argued that the concept of “progress” emerged as a central cultural myth: humanity would perfect itself and the world through knowledge and control, not through alignment with a cosmic or divine order. This represented a fundamental reorientation of human purpose. Where traditional cultures had seen the goal of life as harmony with a meaningful cosmos, the Enlightenment redefined it as the rational transformation of the world according to human designs. This powerful shift paved the way for a new, secular form of transcendence. Technology gradually became the new locus of salvation, with the scientific and engineering enterprise inheriting the redemptive arc that had once belonged to religion. Noble holds that the modern technological project is, in many ways, a secularized religious mission, driven by “a religious striving for transcendence and salvation.”5 David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 3-29.
Human salvation was subtly redefined from alignment with spirit to mastery over nature. The future was not something to be received with grace or humility, but something to be engineered and controlled through human ingenuity. This shift is so fundamental to the modern worldview that we rarely recognize its radical departure from earlier worldviews that saw humans as participants in, rather than masters of, natural order.
Yet this vision of human exceptionalism becomes deeply problematic when we consider the broader temporal perspective of intelligence on Earth. Homo sapiens has existed for perhaps 300,000 years—a mere blink of an eye in geological terms. Humans have only been organized in what we think of as civilizations for a few tens of thousands of years–and modern civilization, with all its technological achievements, spans only a few hundred years. In contrast, many odontocete species have maintained sophisticated neural complexity for tens of millions of years, successfully adapting to every marine environment on the planet without destroying the ecosystems that sustain them.
The result of this long historical process was a universe radically different from the one our ancestors inhabited. And the price of this newfound predictive power was a profound existential dislocation, leaving humanity in an inert, mindless, and indifferent cosmos. In the story we inherited from this period, consciousness is cast as an emergent illusion, a ghost in the machine—real only in the sense that a rainbow is “real,” a surface effect of underlying physical processes that are themselves devoid of interiority or purpose. Value and meaning become purely subjective whims, separated from the “real” world of objective facts.
The psychological toll of this separation is profound, though often unrecognized. Everything we actually care about—beauty, purpose, love, moral obligation, spiritual longing—is rendered epistemologically suspect, while the only “real” world is the one devoid of care, purpose, or meaning. Nature, stripped of its interiority and agency, becomes a mere resource to be managed and exploited. We are asked to believe that our most intimate experiences are the least reliable guides to reality, while mathematical equations and neurological correlates reveal the ultimate truth about our condition. Mind is reduced to software running on the biological hardware of the brain. The very sense of being a self is somehow less real than the colorless, purposeless particles supposedly underlying these experiences.
This creates a kind of existential vertigo. If consciousness is an illusion, who is experiencing the illusion? If meaning is just a trick of evolution, why does the absence of meaning feel so devastating? If we are nothing but complex machines, why do we suffer so acutely from being treated as such? The materialist worldview demands that we treat our most direct experiences as less real than absract mathematical descriptions-—a psychological contortion that may be impossible to sustain.
The symptoms of this impossible position appear to manifest throughout contemporary culture. The epidemic of depression and anxiety in materially prosperous societies, a desperate search for meaning through consumption or achievement, and the pervasive sense of alienation from nature and from each other–all of these may stem in significant part from a worldview that systematically invalidates the very experiences that make life worth living.
Despite this immense psychological cost, the materialist story persists for powerful reasons. It is a worldview that remains dominant today not because it is philosophically complete or spiritually satisfying, but because of its undeniable technological efficacy, its deep institutional entrenchment in our educational and economic systems, and the lack of a coherent, widely-known alternative.
The technological argument is the most obvious: this worldview works. It has given us antibiotics and space travel, computers and genetic engineering. When a perspective delivers such tangible benefits, questioning its foundational assumptions can seem like dangerous ingratitude, even irrationality. The institutional argument is equally powerful: mechanistic materialism is now so deeply embedded in our universities, research institutions, and funding agencies that alternative approaches struggle to gain a hearing, let alone resources.
But perhaps most importantly, its core assumptions have become so pervasive as to be invisible, mistaken for objective truth rather than what they are: one possible map of the territory. We no longer recognize that we are operating within a particular worldview; instead, we mistake this worldview for reality itself. The materialist perspective has achieved what all successful ideologies achieve: it has made itself seem like common sense.
Yet the very success of this framework may have blinded us to possibilities that require a different kind of vision. The convergent evolution of large, complex brains in multiple lineages suggests that consciousness may be a more fundamental feature of reality than the mechanistic model allows. The persistent failure to solve the Hard Problem of consciousness within a purely physicalist framework hints that we may need new conceptual tools, not just better data.
The current moment, however, defined by converging ecological, psychological, and spiritual crises born from this very worldview, presents us with a fork in the road. The same perspective that gave us unprecedented power over the natural world has also given us climate change, mass extinction, and a spiritual crisis that manifests as depression, anxiety, and a pervasive sense of meaninglessness among those who should, by material standards, be the most fortunate humans in history.
Most urgently, we face the prospect of losing the very evidence that might help us transcend our limited perspective. The odontocete lineages that represent millions of years of alternative experiments in consciousness are rapidly disappearing due to the industrial processes driven by mechanistic thinking. Ocean acidification, chemical pollution, underwater noise, and climate change are systematically destroying the marine ecosystems that have sustained these remarkable beings for geological ages. We may be approaching a moment when the only large-brained conscious beings left on Earth are humans—a tragic impoverishment that would eliminate our best hope for understanding consciousness as a cosmic rather than merely terrestrial phenomenon.
But what to do? The story we’ve inherited about the nature of the world and our place within it has evolved over centuries and is thoroughly embedded in just about every sector of modern society. The sense of disenchantment and meaninglessness that seems so pervasive appears to be at least in part a consequence of the widespread belief that the universe is mindless and meaningless, a belief that has been actively promoted by many prominent scientists and philosophers.
A new story of a cosmos that is fundamentally both material and non-material is beginning to emerge, a story that integrates our intuitive sense of being and connection with the indisputable truths revealed by science. But as we work to ground and expand a more inclusive story, it is critical to distinguish scientific facts from the interpretations and stories that have been built around those facts. Presenting an idea or narrative as scientific is a powerful means of establishing credibility, and for dismissing challenges, even if there is precious little factual basis for it. The most powerful of all such narratives is the belief that science is the only valid means of establishing truth about the nature of the world. Scientism, as this belief is known as, is the primary impediment to developing stories about the world that can readily accommodate mind and spirit along with physics and biology. And directly confronting scientism is the next part of our story.