The Reality Crisis

Our starting point must be the recognition that as things currently stand, we face not just one but three crises in our understanding of the nature of reality, and that the primary reason we cannot find a way out is because we have failed to understand that these apparently different problems must be different parts of the same Great Big Problem. The three great crises are these: (1) Cosmology. The currently dominant cosmological theory is called Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM), and it is every bit as broken as Ptolemaic geocentrism was in the 16th century. It consists of an ever-expanding conglomeration of ad-hoc fixes, most of which create as many problems as they solve. Everybody working in cosmology knows it is broken. (2) Quantum mechanics. Not the science of quantum mechanics. The problem here is the metaphysical interpretation. As things stand there are at least 12 major “interpretations”, each of which has something different to say about what is known as the Measurement Problem: how we bridge the gap between the infinitely-branching parallel worlds described by the mathematics of quantum theory, and the singular world we actually experience (or “observe” or “measure”). These interpretations continue to proliferate, making consensus increasingly difficult. None are integrated with cosmology. (3) Consciousness. Materialistic science can't agree on a definition of consciousness, or even whether it actually exists. We've got no “official” idea what it is, what it does, or how or why it evolved. Four centuries after Galileo and Descartes separated reality into mind and matter, and declared matter to be measurable and mind to be not, we are no closer to being able to scientifically measure a mind. Meanwhile, any attempt to connect the problems in cognitive science to the problems in either QM or cosmology is met with fierce resistance: Thou shalt not mention consciousness and quantum mechanics in the same sentence! Burn the witch! The solution is not to add more epicycles to ΛCDM, devise even more unintuitive interpretations of QM, or to dream up new theories of consciousness which don't actually explain anything. There has to be a unified solution. There must be some way that reality makes sense. The Two Phase Model of Cosmological and Biological Evolution, described in detail in this document, is that way.