Riddle: What does an illusory being call an illusory world?

Answer: Reality. 

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Govinda: What you call a thing, is it something real, something intrinsic: Is it not only the illusion of Maya, only image and appearance?  Your stone, your tree, are they real?

Siddhartha: This does not trouble me much.  If they are illusion, then I also am illusion, and so they are always of the same nature as myself.

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

A recent article in New Scientist, entitled, “In the eyes of the beholders,” (March 21, 2026), reports on developments in scientific theory that may open a path to a “new world view for science that avoids the trap of dividing the world into mechanistic particles on one side versus pointless bubbles of consciousness on the other.”  This new world view is a step toward the “real dream worldview” advanced in my book, The Collapse of Materialism: Visions of Science, Dreams of God.  

The paradigm of scientific materialism is based on there being a “real world out there,” independent of the observer. This was a foundational principle for Albert Einstein, who said that “[t]he belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.”  (from A. Einstein, “Maxwell’s Influence on the Evolution of the Idea of Physical Reality.”) Einstein’s perspective has influenced many of today’s leading scientists.  For example, in The Trouble with Physics, Professor Lee Smolin writes that, “[p]hysicists have traditionally expected that science should give an account of reality as it would be in our absence.”  This realism, he writes, “provides the motivation driving most scientists.  For most of us, belief in a [real world out there] and the possibility of truly knowing it motivates us to do the hard work needed to become a scientist and contribute to the understanding of nature.”

The problem, of course, is what happens if experience and reasoning show there is no such ‘real world out there?”  This is a possibility. If it proves true, will the practice of science come to a screeching halt, or will future scientists gradually learn to carry out the scientific method upon a different foundation?

One of the chief findings of quantum theory is that the outside physical world does not consist of self-sustaining “uncuttable” things as Democritus (460 BCE – 370 BCE) – the founder of atomism – envisioned; instead, reality is best described by a wave equation or “wavicles,” things hovering somewhere between a particle and a wave.  (see Matt Strassler, Waves in an Impossible Sea). The leading interpretation of quantum theory holds that the wave equation gives probabilities of where an observer is likely to find a particle when they look.  Under this view, without an observation, the physical world is a cloud of uncertainties, a blurry mess

Our experience in the world shows that it is real; that it is the same for everyone, that it is hard and solid, and stays in place when no one is looking.  Quantum theory says it is unreal, a place where “most of the walls and towers in the vision are of paper mâché, plastered in between by an immense labor of imagination and theory.” (J. Wheeler, quoted in A. Ney, Does observing reality make it happen? 642 Nature 294 (6/12/25).

So today we live in a contradiction: our experience says the world is real; quantum theory says the world only becomes “real” when we observe it.

In the article, In the eyes of the beholder, Jo Marchant writes about the “radical idea” that “there is no objective view of reality.”  Marchant discusses the views of Christopher Fuchs, the pioneer of an interpretation of quantum theory called QBism.  QBism stands in opposition to the orthodox interpretation of quantum theory, which views external reality as consisting of a cloud of probabilities defined by a wave equation.

In QBism, however, “probabilities are not things out in the world, but rather measures of what somebody knows.” According to QBism, “Quantum mechanics does not describe reality as it is by itself. Instead, it is a tool that helps guide agents immersed in the world when they contemplate taking actions on parts of it external to themselves.”  R. Schack, QBism : quantum mechanics is not a description of objective reality – it reveals a world of genuine free will. 

Marchant then turns to recent findings from neuroscience that refute the common-sense notion that a real object – such as a red apple – exists outside the perceiving mind. The common viewpoint is that light rays bounce off the apple, sending signals to the eyes and then to the brain, which forms an exact replica of the apple in the mind. But some neuroscientists have called this view into question.  Anil Seth, for example, says, “We will never see things as they really, really are.  It’s hard to know what that world would even be.”  This standpoint, as Seth acknowledges in Being You, echoes the views of German philosopher, Immanual Kant (1724-1804), who believed that we can never experience the “thing-in-itself,” the unknowable backdrop behind appearances.  “We are still essentially living in an illusion,” Seth says, “unable to reach the real world.”

To QBism, the external world “hits back” but we can never know what is out there, if anything.  There is no one objective world, no one movie screen in the sky upon which the image of the world is projected.  Instead, information coming from the outside gives us multiple ways to interpret the world and our combined decisions (or “bets”) weave together to create the world we call real. This is the pluriverse.

Instead of the real, objective world of modern science, the pluriverse presents a multi-participant world, woven together by multiple agents making individual choices but somehow sharing the same world.

The fundamental flaw of QBism, and in fact all interpretations of quantum theory, however, is that they assume a “real world” independent of “us” — without defining “us.”

Is “us” the mind or the human body? Most scientists mean the human body.  But is not the human body also part of the “real world out there?” Isn’t it every much part of the outside world as the ground, the air, and the sky? What then is perceiving the body, including the five senses, and collapsing the wave equation for the body?

Suppose for the sake of discussion, that a mind sits behind both the body and the outside physical world, which is projecting three-dimensional reality. In that instance, we need no collapse of the wave function. Instead, body and Mother Nature exist on the same level and are real to each other.

When Einstein spoke of the external world he meant a world outside the control of the human body, a laboratory specimen ready for inspection. Once we prop up a part of this “real world,” such as a tree, and study it, however, we find that it does not consist of machine-like parts; instead, it consists of quantum waves, “dream-stuff,” revealing that we live in a world of the imagination not of a machine.

Quantum physicists, with the independent world assumption imbedded in their theories, bedazzle us with all the oddities of this quantum world — action at a distance, particles that can be two places at once, and things that change from particles to waves depending on the experiment being conducted.  All things they cannot explain because the independent world assumption has forced them to solve an unsolvable puzzle.

The oddest interpretation of quantum theory is the many worlds interpretation.  Here, the probable outcomes to the wave equation do not collapse when observed; instead, each solution leads to a different universe. As Paul Davies explains, “when the universe splits, our minds split with it, one copy going off to populate each world.” (God and the New Physics 116).

We can move beyond these inconsistent interpretations of quantum theory by simply ridding ourselves of the assumption that a real world exists independent of perception.  Instead, building from the findings of neuroscience and philosophical idealism, we hypothesize that the physical world, including the human body, are solidified ideas, hardened visions, or projections of the mind.  Calling the world a dream may seem odd until you realize that you are part of the dream and thus, it is your reality.

This is the viewpoint I develop in The Collapse of Materialism. Here is simple description of the real dream worldview:

Today we view the world as movie-goers sitting in a theater.  We imagine we are different beings viewing one picture shown on the screen we call the celestial sphere.  One outside world; individual minds.

If we reverse this perspective, we discover something interesting.  Instead of imagining that there is one objective world “out-there” experienced by different people, we instead take the view that we are one mind that is projecting a hardened image of the cosmos against the sky.  One mind, one sky, one world.

Anil Seth, and other neuroscientists, are thus correct when they describe the world as a “controlled hallucination,” in the sense that the mind creates the appearance of a real world.  But it is more than that.  The dreams and hallucinations of individual people are like the off gases of an infinite explosion: the one mind of God underlies the world and powers creation.

This approach gives us the objective world of science and individual perspectives.  The objective world of science is the hardened vision of the one mind of God.  We need not inject religious overtones into this discussion: we know as undisputed fact that at night, in times of duress, illness, or under the influence of drugs, the mind can conjure up a real-seeming world from nothing.  It is not a long step to concluding that this phenomenon is sign of the power of the mind.  I use the term “God” for the simple reason that doing so answers the question of why the idea of God is ever present in our minds; it also has the added benefit of uniting the fields of religion and science. (And for those wondering, this view does not lead to biblical literalism; instead, it provides a framework to re-interpret religious history, including the Bible.)

We view the Big Bang as a creation event that drove energy and matter from outside the mind, toward stars, planets, life, and the mind. But how these exploding particles decided to form together to create the harmonious, interlocking universe is a mystery for which materialism will never have an answer. If the universe, instead, comes from the mind, instead of toward the mind, we have a mechanism to account for the order and harmony in the world.

Like the pluriverse, individuals do join to create the universe; but these are not individual bets on quantum probabilities. Instead, they are part of an evolving mind coming to the realization that together we dream the world. The world we see is real, not a shadowy quantum world.  This quantum world is simply a derivation of the wrong-headed assumption that a “real world” exists independent of perception.

This notion that the world is a dream of God may be a “bridge too far” for many people, most particularly scientific materialists.  But it is the logical outcome of the same mysteries and enigmas now confronting quantum theorists, neuroscientists, cosmologists, evolutionists, and particle physicists. Instead of taking this simple step, they offer confusing and incomplete theories consisting of many worlds, collapsing waves, inflating universes, and dark matter, to name a few of materialism’s strange theories. With the real dream world, we have a logical alternative to scientific materialism that does not include any of these other-worldly ideas.

The pluriverse, QBism, neuroscience, and similar theories take a step toward the real dream worldview, but it may take some time for science to rid itself of the notion that there is a real mind-independent world out there.  Some theorists are taking one step, but why not take the next step, and then another? Why wait for others, in some future generation, to make the breakthrough to a more explanatory worldview, and one that unites science with religion? Why not make the breakthrough now?