Introduction
The dominant scientific and philosophical ideology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was (and remains in this young century) the paradigm of reductionism, the notion that reality can be best understood by breaking down all physical phenomena to their simplest parts and processes. In so doing, one can observe the behavior of each fundamental part of nature in isolation, thus shedding light on what nature is.
In the natural sciences and in analytic philosophy, reductionism has come to entail reducing all disciplines to the foundations of physics. This approach of observing the behavior of the components of material systems, so as to understand the systems at large, has proven effective for the invention of technology (Azarian 2022).
For instance, we can look at a bird and observe that, with the right angle of its wings, the right rate of speed (reached by sufficient generation of thrust), and the right proportion of those to the bird’s weight, the animal can achieve flight. We can then apply those findings to our designs for airplanes and their components: engines, wings, stabilizers, and all of their components as well. In proportion to the weight of the plane and its cargo, we’d need to have the wings at the right angle, sufficient thrust to reach the right speed to generate airflow on the wings, etc.
In other words, understanding the behavior of the components of the system tells us how to create a whole system that works.
However, the usefulness of reductionism comes into question when we begin asking about ontology. For example, reductionism applied to a given metaphysics, particularly physicalism, gives the impression that material things, while causally efficacious via their quantitative properties, are alienated from each other. Further, it entails that all life forms, including us, are collections of atoms following purely mechanistic, quantitative trajectories.
This paradigm is beginning to shift, as complexity science has leveraged empirical developments and information theories to offer us a less meaningless, mechanistic view of the universe, perhaps even giving us back a telos to reality. The universe is evolving toward greater ordered complexity. Living, adaptive, dynamical systems fill the role of the universe coming to know itself through self-realization (Azarian 2022).
Such a paradigm shift is tantalizing precisely because the current reductionist model has seemingly reached the limits of its explanatory power. Reductionism has failed to explain, for example, phenomenal consciousness, which is purely qualitative and not at all quantitative, defying the reductionist account of reality. Since phenomenal consciousness is the primary datum of existence, through which we know everything else, this hard problem of consciousness poses a major challenge to the physicalist worldview.
Indeed, the question of how purely qualitative phenomenal consciousness could emerge from or be identical to purely quantitative states of the material brain appears insoluble (Chalmers 2003).
Furthermore, data from quantum physics over the past (approximately) fifty years have refuted local realism, in favor of non-locality and contextuality. In other words, we have significant reason to doubt the idea that the properties of physical entities exist independently of observation (“observation” in the quantum mechanical sense, not the colloquial sense of just perceptual vision), an idea on which reductionist physicalism relies (Wheeler 1990; Hoffman 2019; Kastrup 2021; Müller 2023). While theories such as the many worlds interpretation, superdeterminism, reverse causality, and hidden variables have been proposed in an attempt to salvage aspects of local realism, all of them still entail non-locality, and none of them are as parsimonious as the interpretation that supports contextuality over non-contextuality (Musser 2015).
While energy and information are now considered “physical” under metaphysical reductionist physicalism, there was a time when they, like consciousness today, went unexplained by that worldview. It was only after the definition of “physical” was expanded, thus abandoning the name “materialism” for “physicalism,” that those two non-material “entities” fell under the reductionist physicalist paradigm.
Some physicalists today attempt to perform a similar definitional change with consciousness, arguing that phenomenal consciousness is illusory or the product of strong emergence. The former claim of illusionism lacks logical coherence (Harris 2019; Kastrup 2021), the latter lacks a true mechanistic explanation of how and why consciousness emerges at a magic threshold of complexity in a material system (Kastrup 2021). Both approaches are heavily criticized.
Meanwhile, empirical results in neuroscience, particularly in studies of psychedelics and other altered states of consciousness (cardiac arrest-induced NDEs, G-LOC, intentional strangulation, etc.), have called into question the traditionally popular identity theory of consciousness, which demands a 1:1 relationship between the level of metabolic brain activity and the richness of conscious experience. In fact, we find an inverse relationship between them in the cases mentioned above; brain activity sharply drops and the richness of experience sharply rises under the influence of psychedelics, placing the brain in a state of metastability that defies the identity theory hypothesis (Parnia & Fenwick 2002; Urgesi et al 2010; Carhart-Harris et al 2012; Cristofori et al 2016; Lewis et al 2017).
Given the challenges faced by the reductionist worldview, science and philosophy must question whether a non-reductionist approach, which sees reality as a whole, provides a better ontological framework.
In that case, the division of the oneness of reality into things would be purely nominal, an artifact of the way in which we perceive the world and a useful tool that increases our survival fitness. Our ability to divide our perceived reality into things does not necessarily give us a literal conception of reality. Further, since reductionist physicalism has failed to explain phenomenal consciousness and failed to resolve the paradoxes of quantum physics, could a non-reductionist approach to physicalism, or to a different metaphysics altogether, better account for our empirical data?
Reductionism (and reductionist physicalism) has been useful in predicting the behavior of nature, as we perceive nature. But when we ask more profound questions about what reductionists would call the “fundamental” level of reality, reductionism breaks down. Like spacetime itself, at a certain level of reduction, it ceases to make sense (Hoffman 2019).
In other words, reductionism doesn’t seem to be able to adequately explain, in a literal sense, what nature is, in and of itself. Could it be that reductionism is a useful conceptual tool, a metaphor that we can use to assess our theories of the “fundamental?” Something to take seriously, but not literally. Or are these concerns over reductionism a case of misguided skepticism about a paradigm that has helped us invent technology?
In this essay, we’ll examine the ontology of material “things,” of conceptual “things,” and of consciousness itself, to elucidate the benefits of a non-reductionist worldview, in contrast to reductionism.
The ontology of material “things”: reductionism vs. non-reductionism
Our epistemic starting point is phenomenal consciousness, the “field” of raw subjectivity whose excitations are experiences (Nagel 1974; Block 1995; Schooler 2002; Winkielman 2009, 2011). All of the “things” that we know, including our perceptions of the physical world, are excitations of that field of subjectivity. In other words, we know the physical world of material “things” only by, in, and through our starting point of consciousness.
Specifically, we perceive qualities, such as colors, textures, sounds, aromas, and flavors, etc. It is these qualities that most people identify as the objective physical world, a viewpoint called naive realism. Evidence from evolutionary biology, thermodynamics, perceptual sciences, and foundations of physics has refuted naive realism, but it remains intuitive to those unfamiliar with the literature.
Whatever reality is, in and of itself, our perception does not provide a literal presentation of it. Rather, the truth of reality is so combinatorially explosive that we need a representation (i.e., re-presentation) that encodes that vast information into a simplified relevance and salience landscape, which in turn provides insights into fitness payoffs, not literality. In other words, we should take our perceptual interface, the physical world, seriously, as an evolved way we conduct relevance realization, but not literally (Vervaeke et al 2009; Friston 2013; Hoffman 2019; Kastrup 2021).
We then apply mathematics, or quantities, to those perceived qualities, as a way to describe what we perceive. We establish the “thing-ness” of reality by using numbers to delineate between physical entities. But, if we are to be as skeptical as possible, matter is, itself, an abstraction. It is a label that we use to describe the qualities that we perceive.
Under reductionist physicalism, physical entities are all that fundamentally exist. Physical entities are defined as those that can be exhaustively defined by quantities, such as their mass, spin, charge, frequency, etc. In other words, they are purely quantitative, and it is those quantitative parameters that give them causal power on each other. Physicalism ascribes ontic fundamentality to the descriptions of our perceptions. Then, it suggests that these abstractions not only come before the experiencer perceiving them, but also generate the consciousness that is the experiencer.
This worldview encounters the hard problem of consciousness, in which it is impossible to reduce the qualities of experience to the quantities of physical entities, and we scratch our heads wondering why consciousness is so difficult to understand. Perhaps it is because the reductionist physicalist worldview tries to pull the “territory out of the map” (Kastrup 2021). It gives ontic priority to the description, not to the thing in itself, which leads us into logical incoherence and internal inconsistencies, such as the hard problem and the paradoxes of quantum physics.
It is even a mystery why our mathematics, a conceptual framework of an evolved primate on a statistically unremarkable planet, in an unremarkable solar system, in an unremarkable galaxy, in a vast universe, should so precisely map onto objective reality. Eugene Wigner once consistently used the word “miracle” in an article on that question of why mathematics would be so effective (Wigner 1960). In other words, we can’t even explain the very quantitative descriptions that reductionist physicalism places ontically prior to the experiencer doing the describing.
But what if we treat our perceptual interface of the physical world not as an objective reality of literally ontic, separate “things,” but rather as a complete whole? What if we see the “thing-ness” as part of our description of that whole, whatever reality might be in and of itself? If we take the physical world of our perception to be a useful tool, which lets us utilize reality from our perspective within reality, might our view of the material/physical change, and could that change assist us in resolving the hard problem of consciousness?
In other words, what if we try non-reductionism?
First, the key claim of reductionism is that our position in reality is at a higher and more illusory level than that of the reduction base, that which is fundamental. In mainstream analytic philosophical discourse, “fundamental” roughly means “the most real.” But if we are at an illusory level of reality, high above the reduction base, then how can we trust anything that we think we know about the deeper levels that are more fundamental, and thus less illusory, than our own? If we start by placing ourselves in an illusion, then we sabotage the entire project of reductionism by creating an epistemic crisis from the original claim.
By taking the non-reductionist position, we avoid this epistemic problem.
Second, instead of seeing reality as having separate levels with differing degrees of realness, we should view reality as that which exists. It is one whole. By definition, there is nothing (observe the language, “no-thing”) that exists external to reality. Further, anything (note: “any-thing”) that exists must be reality. Therefore, while our perspective within reality (and as reality ourselves, since we exist), may enable us to describe that perspective in different ways, we should not see reality as a collection of levels, each more or less real than another. There are no truly different levels to reality, only different descriptions (aspects), each one co-realized in a dialectical, reciprocal, agent-arena relationship.
Reality and the information therein appear to the interface of our perception as the physical world, itself a whole “image” (referring to the entire sensorium, not just to vision) prior to our division of the interface into icons, physical entities. That does not mean that the information is more fundamental than the perceiver, as a reductionist might suggest. Rather, it exists at the same level of reality as a given perceiving conscious agent, who is at the same level as reality, because it is, by definition, something (again, note the language) that exists. It is the perceptual appearance of the information that changes, not its ontic level within reality.
As has already become clear, our language, another of our conceptual frameworks, makes it difficult to escape the “thing-ness” we ascribe to the world. Our linguistic approach is based around subjects and objects – “things.” As such, I’ll do my best to transcend those limitations, but our language, and indeed all our descriptive capacities as evolved primates, will certainly prove too restrictive to accurately handle the concept of reality, in and of itself. We’ll do the best with the symbology that we have.
As a thought exercise to demonstrate the above point, how would we describe what a car ontically is, as a physical entity? If we start with its function, we would naturally include all of the parts that make the car work. The steering wheel, the engine, the pedals, the shifter, the spark plugs, etc., would all be elements of the car, in and of itself. Our conclusion is to describe the car as a grouping of atomistic (as opposed to relational) “things,” each “thing” playing a causally efficacious role on another “thing,” in a long chain of cause and effect that causes the car’s function to emerge from those components (note also the similarity to the reductionist physicalist conception of consciousness as a function emerging from the components of the brain).
That would be the standard reductionist approach, and we could take it all the way down to the quantum fields. All the while, we’d use the mathematical descriptions of these physical entities, like their mass, spin, charge, etc., to exhaustively define them and to explain their causal power over each other.
However, where does that cause and effect chain stop? Where is the true boundary separating the car from the rest of the physical universe? We will never find it. After all, oxygen is a necessary component for combustion to occur, and combustion is required for the car to function. So now we need to include Earth’s atmosphere as a component of the car. Of course, the car needs the road in order for the tires to grip, so now we need the ground to be a component of the car, in addition to gravity itself. Now, the “thing-ness” of the car encompasses the entire planet. But the planet is only in this state due to the full causal history of the universe, so really the “thing-ness” of the car must also include the entire universe as a component. To suggest otherwise would be to violate the definitional parameters that we set at the beginning.
In truth, there is no boundary between the car and the rest of reality. There is only reality. Any “thing-ness” we ascribe to reality, such as the label of “car,” is nominal. It allows us to talk about and to work with the combinatorially explosive true nature of reality. In other words, we evolved this perceptual and conceptual framework for its survival advantages, not for its ability to convey literal truth about the ontic status of reality, in and of itself. Our ability to invent technology (use tools) is one such advantage.
Next, we can look at the concept of affordances, which are transjective (as opposed to objective or subjective) in nature. They are not a property of the agent, they are not a property of the arena. Rather, they are a relationship between the agent and the arena, and that co-shapes the environment to the agent and the agent to the environment.
In other words, a water bottle is graspable only when a conscious agent is able to grasp it. The graspability is not a property inherent to the bottle. Rather, the bottle’s list of properties changes in nearly infinite ways depending on the agent-arena relationship in play. A person can’t be a tennis player in a classroom. They need to be on a tennis court. Similarly, a tennis court could be used for any number of other things besides tennis, until a tennis player enters it. Once again, the properties of the agent and of the arena are transjective. The agent and arena realize each other depending on their relationship (Vervaeke 2022).
Every “thing” has a never-ending number of aspects (i.e., the Greek eidos, in the Platonic sense, not in the Aristotelian sense referring to structural-functional organization), but they’re not separate from each other. The aspects belong together, flow together. We can’t directly perceive the whole of reality, because if we precisely mirrored its high levels of entropy in our internal state, we would dissolve into an entropic soup (Friston 2013). However, because of the aspectualization that accompanies our representation of the whole of reality, we can intimate the whole.
There is a through-line of all the aspects, but the aspectuality of a “thing” is open-ended. When I say that reality is the only “thing” that exists, even then I am only imagining the whole as one aspect, and this is the best that we can do while locked inside the “thing-ness” of our perceptual and conceptual frameworks. Our language, intellect, and cognitive apparati can’t comprehend the whole, but the whole is still intelligible to us via the through-lines. This intelligibility of an incomprehensible whole of reality through aspectuality and representation is what makes science and philosophy possible.
In other words, science and philosophy presuppose it. To deny the above claim is to abandon the projects of scientific and philosophical investigation. Indeed, our representation of reality always involves aspectualization (“thing-ness”), in an infinite number of possibilities, until one is selected depending on the specific configuration of the agent, its state, and what it predicts the state of the world will be. This flows naturally into the previously mentioned interpretations of quantum physics and what the wave function mathematically describes.
Further, the above supports the paradigm of the physical universe (as we perceive it) as an evolved perceptual interface. After all, fitness payoffs depend not just on the true state of reality, but also on the organism (conscious agent), its state, its actions, and its competition (Hoffman 2019). The organism then reciprocally influences its arena, creating an evolutionary dialectical realization between agent and arena. If the physical universe is an artifact of this process at work on our perceptual abilities, then we would expect our perceived world to display transjectivity, and that it does.
As such, even our physical bodies, which we closely identify with our identities as separate ontic entities, are only “things” in a nominal sense. Their properties, like the properties of every other material “thing,” are constantly in flux, as reality self-realizes (realizes itself relative to itself). It must do this, since, by definition, there is “no-thing” external to reality. It is all that exists, and so to be realized, it must realize itself.
Our bodies, as physical entities, are also icons on the screen of perception. Like other material icons, they have no inherent ontic “thing-ness” separate from the one aspect of reality as a whole. The physical universe is one “thing,” because it is a single projection of our perceptual and conceptual frameworks.
In other words, the aspects therein are our way of realizing reality from within reality, as reality. We are reality engaging in self-realization.
Therefore, taking this non-reductionist position, even before entering into metaphysical theoretical commitments, we avoid the epistemic self-sabotage of reductionism.
We also avoid the hard problem of consciousness, since the brain, as part of the body, is another icon of the perceptual interface. It is not an ontic “thing,” but a description conjured up by and in consciousness to serve a survival purpose. It is trivial to expect a correlative relationship, but not a causal one, between the image of a thing and the thing in itself (ex: fire is the image of combustion, and so they correlate but are not causally linked).
Therefore, we’d expect to find many neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCCs), but no causal link between the brain and conscious experience (Koch 2004). Indeed, that is exactly what we’ve found. The hard problem only arises if we attempt to reduce consciousness to the brain, treating the latter as a “thing” with a separate ontic identity. But under this non-reductionist approach, that’s not what we’re doing, so the problem dissolves.
Furthermore, we explain why our mathematics miraculously maps onto the physical world. The answer: both of them are conceptual frameworks that describe reality, but are not literally reality, in and of itself. They help us survive, but they are not the truth. This realization flows naturally into dissolving the paradoxes of quantum physics. The measurement problem, entanglement, the quantum Cheshire Cat, and other paradoxes all dissolve if we stop trying to make physical entities “fundamental,” in the reductionist sense, but rather treat the physical as one whole appearance of reality. Not a presentation of reality, but a representation (“re-presentation”).
Quantum physics is then best interpreted along the lines of Carlo Rovelli’s relational model (Rovelli 1996), and Markus Müller’s physics of the first-person perspective (Müller 2023), both of which are consistent with the previously referenced interpretations that support non-locality and contextuality.
Finally, we can make sense of the holographic principle, the five constants (like the speed of light), and the Planck scale. Spacetime ceases to make sense at a certain miniscule level, and the natural constants are what they are, because spacetime itself is not “fundamental” in the reductionist sense. Rather, it is the one, whole appearance of reality, projected by our perceptual and conceptual frameworks, which has been developed by evolution by natural selection to encode fitness payoff information coming from our combinatorially explosive external state.
In other words, the physical universe is what it is, and behaves as it behaves, because that is how we need to perceive reality in order for us to survive. Put another way, that is how evolution by natural selection shaped out perceptual and conceptual models, which in turn give us the physical universe and its “things” as tools.
To call the physical and spacetime illusory is a mistake, although some publishers’ marketing departments will leverage that phrasing to sell books. The physical is real, because it is realized. More than that, the physical world is how we make the incomprehensible whole of reality intelligible. For that purpose, on which science, technology, and philosophy rely, the physical world need not be a literal presentation of reality. Indeed, it can’t be.
Realization and aspectualization are the key factors in the non-reductionist framework, as opposed to the language of fundamentality and illusion that is central to reductionism.
Our relationship to reality is transjective, and our sense of objectivity and subjectivity are both artifacts of our evolved perceptual framework. That framework makes us feel ontically separate from reality, thus establishing subjectivity and objectivity, as a way to help us survive within reality, as reality.
By abandoning reductionism for non-reductionism, we can dissolve many of the problems with our current paradigm, although we’ll later also consider metaphysical alternatives to physicalism at large.
The ontology of conceptual “things”: reductionism vs. non-reductionism
If our perceptions (and our descriptions of our perceptions) are not actually ontic things, what about the entities that we consider purely conceptual, purely qualitative (as opposed to the purely quantitative nature of physical entities), such as good and evil, or the experiences of hot and cold? Our language also describes these conceptual entities along subject-object dynamics, ascribing a “thing-ness” to them, even though they are not “physical.”
As with material things, we see transjective, reciprocal, dialectical realization at work. The conception of opposites supports human thinking in a number of ways, including our “everyday counterfactual thinking, classic deductive and inductive reasoning tasks and the representational changes required in certain reasoning tasks … it follows that opposites can be regarded as a general organizing principle for the human mind rather than simply a specific relationship (however respectable) merely related to logics” (Branchini et al 2021).
In other words, we make sense of the world by creating dualities, such as good and evil, hot and cold, tall and short, etc. We mentally position these pairs as opposites, allowing us to reason and grok important information about our arena.
For instance, we use the hot-cold dichotomy in order to know if the temperature of an entity or of the environment at large is dangerous or suitable to our survival. A hot stove delivers negative fitness payoffs. So does a frozen lake.
The dangerous properties of a hot stove and a frozen lake are not properties of the “things” in themselves, but rather are only realized as such once we, conscious agents, enter into a reciprocal, dialectical, agent-arena relationship with the things in themselves. For instance, many other organisms are able to survive intense heat or cold, but both the hot stove and frozen lake are outside the temperature range that humans need. Thus, the agents and the arenas co-realize each other, and that relationship is “re-presented” in our perceptual and cognitive frameworks as icons (physicality) and as the conceptual notions of “things” and opposites.
Duality implies the separate ontic existence of the two entities making up the dichotomy. In order for them to be opposed, surely they must exist independently of one another as two distinct “things.”
However, we instead find a more complex, self-realization of the conceptual, in which “thing-ness” is merely nominal, just as it was for the material. The “things” once again reciprocally realize each other in a kind of dialectical relationship, not so much opposing each other as depending on each other’s co-existence, and ultimately on a shared unity (McGill & Parry 1948; Lincoln 2021; Vervaeke & Mastropietro 2021), in order to be realized, and thus made real.
In all cases, we get back to the logical necessity that reality, as the only “thing” that exists, must realize itself in order to be real.
For instance, good and evil do not really have separate existence as delineated “things,” for at what deficiency of good does evil begin? And at what deficiency of evil does good begin?
When we say something is “evil,” are we not really referencing degrees of good? And, reciprocally, when we say something is “good,” are we not really referencing degrees of evil? When we say something is “hot,” are we not really referencing degrees of cold? And, reciprocally, when we say something is “cold,” are we not really referencing degrees of heat?
There is, indeed, no separation, no ontic delineation, between these concepts that we consider opposite “things.” They are relative to each other, not atomistic. Evil is the negative aspect of good, good the positive aspect of evil. Hot is the higher aspect of cold, cold the lower aspect of heat. We never encounter absolute goodness or absolute evilness of any finite nature. Instead, we are always co-realizing reality in a reciprocal, dialectical manner.
These aspects are part of the evolved perceptual and cognitive framework that conveys fitness payoff information to the conscious agent. In other words, it tells us about positive or negative effects on our survival, not about ontically independent properties of ontically fundamental (to use the reductionist language) “things.”
Indeed, the properties change depending on the agent-arena relationship in play, just as we saw with the material realm under Rovelli’s interpretation and Müller’s interpretation of quantum physics. In other words, the structure to which our consciousness gives our conceptual entities parallels the structure to which our consciousness gives physical entities on the screen of perception, providing further substantiation for the claim that the physical is, in fact, a evolutionarily useful representation, and not a literal presentation, of reality, in and of itself.
The ontology of consciousness: the false dichotomy of mind and matter
At this point, one might raise the following objection. My argument has leveraged and centered around the role of conscious agents in realizing reality, including the physical world as a perceptual and conceptual interface. Doesn’t that necessitate, and indeed presuppose, a “thing-ness” to conscious agents? And isn’t that “thing-ness” precisely what I have denied by saying that reality itself, as a whole entity, is the only “thing” that exists? Doesn’t that reliance on conscious agents, seemingly each a separate “thing” from the reality that is their environment, refute my claim that reality, as the only “thing” that exists, must realize itself in order to be real?
To address this, we must finally get into the metaphysical differences between physicalism and idealism. The two theories are often seen as opposite positions founded on the dichotomy between our conceptions of matter/physicality and mind/consciousness. Reductionist physicalism takes the former to be fundamental, while reductionist idealism takes the latter to be fundamental. Therefore, many assume that they are opposite alternatives existing at the same level of abstraction, thus forming a dichotomy (which requires that both opposing points inhabit the same level of abstraction).
In a way, this duality between qualitative mind and quantitative matter ensures a hidden dualism within physicalism, which claims to be a monist theory that rejects such a fundamental pairing. It seems that physicalism is unable to escape that duality, however, so long as the hard problem of consciousness remains in place.
The dichotomy is false, because the physical and consciousness are not, in fact, opposites, even in the conceptual manner in which we tend to frame them. Further, the hard problem arises from our misunderstanding of the relationship between consciousness and the physical world we perceive.
Recall that our epistemic starting point is phenomenal consciousness, the “field” of raw subjectivity whose excitations are experiences. Everything we know is an excitation of that field of subjectivity. In other words, we know the physical world of material “things” only by, in, and through our starting point of consciousness. We perceive qualities, then assign quantities to describe that qualitative world of our perception.
As such, our perception of the physical, by definition, presupposes the existence of consciousness first, because perceptions are contents of our experience, excitations of the field of subjectivity. The “physical” and all of the other labels we attach to that world of perception are abstractions that come after consciousness, because it is consciousness that creates (realizes) the abstractions. Therefore, consciousness and the physical cannot be opposites in a dichotomy, because they are not at the same level of abstraction (if we grant the “level” language of reductionism).
In fact, consciousness is the only “thing” that we can be sure has ontic existence, because we can never know anything else except by, in, and through it. It is the primary datum of our existence. It is the only “thing” to which we each have direct access.
Now recall that, out of logical necessity, we defined reality as the only “thing” that has ontic existence, because, by definition, nothing can exist external to reality, and all that exists within reality must be reality.
Therefore, it follows that consciousness is reality. It is not that all of reality exists in my mind alone or in your mind alone (I reject solipsism), but that consciousness is the substrate of reality.
This, of course, aligns with the metaphysical theory of idealism, and refutes the foundational metaphysical claims of physicalism. This idealism would then best be considered non-reductionist, as each conscious agent, or each instantiation of consciousness, would not be an ontically different “thing” separate from consciousness/reality as a whole entity. Rather, like a wave in the ocean, a conscious agent appears to be a separate entity from its medium, but is really just an excitation of that medium.
Therefore, the objection fails. Conscious agents are not ontically separate “things” from reality, because consciousness is reality. The objection does challenge non-reductionist physicalism, but not non-reductionist idealism.
As for solving idealism’s infamous decombination problem, which is the likely next objection, I refer to philosopher Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism, which leverages the empirically known natural mechanisms of dissociation and dissociative identity disorder (DID) to explain how one medium of consciousness appears to divide into multiple, separate subjectivities, when in fact there is only one consciousness (Kastrup 2019, 2021).
Conclusion
The division of the oneness of reality into “things” is purely nominal, an artifact of the way in which we perceive and conceptualize the world. It is a useful tool that supports the probability of our survival and reproduction, but it does not give us a literal presentation of reality.
Since reductionist physicalism and reductionism at large have failed to adequately explain reality, and since reductionism depends on the ontic existence of separate “things,” which we’ve shown to be nominal, we need new paradigms.
As such, non-reductionist idealism provides the greatest explanatory power, logical coherence, internal consistency, and theoretical parsimony/elegance, as it describes a reality that co-realizes itself in a reciprocal, dialectical manner. We avoid the logical contradictions encountered when we give “things” fundamentality and then attempt to reduce reality to those fundamental “things.”
Reductionism is, I would argue, a useful metaphor, not unlike the perceptual interface of the physical world, itself. It has helped us develop technology, as demonstrated in the earlier airplane example. Reductionism allows us to effectively discuss the behavior of nature in the natural sciences. Put another way, it helps us work with the interface. After all, the technology we invent, like the airplane or the car, is also part of that interface.
In metaphysical philosophy, reductionism allows us to quantify the assumptions of a theory by counting the number of things in the reduction base. In that way, we can use it to identify the most skeptical metaphysics on the table.
However, for all of the reasons above, reductionism is not a literal presentation of reality, the “thing” in itself. Rather, a non-reductionist approach is superior. Reality is a whole entity. It is “One.” It is constantly self-realizing, and we, as conscious agents, play a role in that process of reciprocal, dialectical, co-creational realization.
There are no levels of fundamentality and illusion. Instead, reality is real because it is real-ized.
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