Welcome to my website about reality and the future

This website was set up by Armands Leimanis, whose review of my book The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation you can read below. The purpose is to make freely available, at least for the foreseeable future, the full text of that book, which was published in June of this year. This is a book about the intersection of two of things, neither of which is easy to write about, or much fun to read about. The first of these is the collapse of civilisation as we know it – a process which is already well underway. The second is the conflict between science and spirituality/mysticism/religion in the West – a conflict which has been rumbling since the 17th century, and which prevents us from moving forward ideologically, both as a society, and, in many cases, as individuals.

Western society has become systematically detached from reality, and that we have come to accept this as a normal state of affairs. The book is argument that this is neither normal nor necessary, and that we are potentially on the verge of the biggest paradigm shift since the Enlightenment itself. It follows that we can view collapse not as "The End" (and stop thinking), but as the beginning of a transformation.

I decided to make the text free due to the somewhat muted reaction to its physical publication. I never expected to make any money out of it, even though it took 17 years (and four attempts) to write it. I wrote it because I felt I had to, because there was something I needed to say to the world, and trying to explain it in chunks smaller than a whole book does not work. Armands is one of only a handful of people who have both read the entire text, and had something to say to me at the end of it. My hope is that by making it freely available, more people will read it.

For now I do not have much more to add – the book itself describes how I ended up writing it. I am not planning to add any more posts in the immediate future. I am currently working on the concept for a new book, which focuses on just one of the two intersecting issues described above – the science/mysticism conflict, which is in effect a conflict about our model of reality. I am proposing a new metaphysical system, which has major implications for three things: the metaphysical interpretation of quantum theory (i.e. the measurement problem), consciousness (i.e. the "hard problem"), and the wide-ranging crisis in cosmology. When The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation came out, there was an important part of the theory missing: what is the specific property of brains, which makes them both necessary for consciousness and capable of collapsing wave functions? If you accept brains are indeed necessary (though insufficient), then it follows that there must indeed be some sort of answer to that question. I have since made a breakthrough on this question – something which could only have happened after I went public with the basic theory, because the key idea was inspired by a theory of wavefunction collapse that somebody else had come up with (using AI), and I only encountered this person because I was explaining my own theory to people.

This unique property, I now understand, is not physical at all. Instead it operates at a deeper level of reality – that of pure information. The threshold is informational/logical, not physical. The wavefunction is collapsed by the logical impossibility of unitary evolution continuing. This happens at the exact moment that a conscious being commits to an irreversible decision about which of the physically possible futures it prefers, and it applies just as much to the bodily movements of the most primitive conscious animal to a human trying to yearn coherently for a better future for civilisation. In other words, the special property of brains is that brains model the world, and the future, with ourselves in the model as coherent entities persisting over time, and that we can assign value and meaning to the various options. It is not possible for us to will two contradictory things at the same time. This is exactly why it feels like we have free will, and why the Many Worlds Interpretation of QM feels so wrong. The future feels open because it actually is. Consciousness, free will and wavefunction collapse are three different descriptions of the exact same process.

I now have the last major missing piece of the puzzle, but I am left with the task of figuring out how to write a book explaining the whole thing. Hopefully this time it won't take 17 years.