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ABSTRACT: The bad news is that Hooley's inverted view of reality is escapist. The good news is that it need not be, because his contrast between a common sense View I (the material world is prior to our world of inner experience) and an inverted View II (our world of inner experience is prior to the material world) is so deftly done as to be eminently useful within View I. The strength of Hooley's account is his succinct and clear phenomenology. The weakness is his inability to build a coherent ontology. Among the many proponents of his perspective, he is the first I have read who acknowledges the need to do so.

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Hooley's aim is to communicate to us a view of reality (View II) that is the inverted image of the ordinary one (View I). In View I, the reality in which we have most confidence is the outside physical world, then our sense of self, then the culture in which we find ourselves, then the content of our personal experience, and finally consciousness itself, what he calls the wholeness of experience [6-14]. In View II, the order of confidence is reversed: we are most sure of wholeness, then the content of our personal experience, then the culture in which we find ourselves, then our sense of self, and finally the outside physical world [15]. Hooley explains the key concepts used to contrast these views in [16-32].

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Confidence derives from "how the objects you care about are 'weighted' within your experience as though your invested valuation had mass" [22]. The confidence we have in our beliefs derives from this sense of relative mass. Thus, "I recognize, as an educated twentieth century person, that I am easily fooled and that I may be misrepresenting reality to myself. As a prosaic example, I may buy more deodorant or more life insurance through a general lack of confidence in my own assessment of the matter" [4]. This is an example of having more confidence in one's culture than in the content of personal experience. Presumably Hooley is saying that in View I our culture has more mass – is more tangible -- for us than is our own inner experience. Consequently, when cultural opinion conflicts with personal belief, the latter yields. Thus, in View I authority is input from the outside, whereas in View II authority is an inner counsel that flows from within [26-27].

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Hooley's account of the two views in terms of a hierarchy of confidence levels allows him to contrast them as succinctly and clearly as I have ever seen it done, and by itself makes this article worth the read. Furthermore, he is the first proponent of View II that I have read who acknowledges the need to explain how our multi-faceted experience emerges from the simple wholeness of consciousness -- "[W]here did the first distinction come from?" [23] Unfortunately, the weakness of his analysis is reflected in his immediate response: "I really don't know."

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Hooley never says why he is offering View II for our consideration. He is presumably offering View II as somehow preferable to View I, though he never makes this claim, either explicitly or implicitly. I suspect that he is following the tradition that rejects View I for two reasons: (1) a factual issue -- since View I inevitably involves the notorious Cartesian dualism that almost every article to the Forum assumes must be overcome, Hooley offers us View II as an alternative that tries to absorb everything within consciousness; (2) a valuative issue -- since View I places greatest confidence in the physical world yet cannot justify that confidence, View II offers an experience of wholeness in which we can rest with complete assurance.

1. The Factual Issue

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Begin with the factual issue. Hooley's account of the self within View I clearly demonstrates Cartesian dualism in its contrast between the self inside the skin and the other outside the skin. View II, on the other hand, has everything contained within wholeness itself, where the constructs of the self and the world become unimportant [30-31]. View II dissolves the self and the world like dispersing two clouds, leaving us with simple wholeness that is "ontologically undivided", and thus with no Cartesian dualism. What then has become of the multi-faceted content of experience? Hooley does not say. Yet mutil-faceted content is everywhere in his account, where value is assigned contextually within the experiencing systems [22], authority flows from within [27], being is impressed on experiential contents [29], and constructs of self [30] and the world [31] exist even if inevitably evaporating.

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The Karl Jaspers Forum seems to have become an orphanage for philosophical waifs who see Cartesian dualism as *the* philosophical evil and some variant of idealism as the only solution. Yes, Cartesian dualism has its problems, but none of the idealists has provided a cure that is not worse than the disease. View I by beginning with content has developed a physics and psychology that explains most of our experience. Most dramatically, however, it seems unable in principle to explain the relationship between consciousness itself and its contents. In contrast, View II therefore begins not with contents but with consciousness. From this starting point, it offers no explanation for anything. It merely rests content with a simple consciousness that cannot be doubted because doubt itself requires multiplicity. In short, we have a choice between a useful View I that enables us to live our lives but leaves our consciousness an impenetrable mystery, and a View II which provides security at the price of an intellectual lobotomy that disperses all mystery like a gas. There is no intellectually principled way of choosing between these two non-overlapping views. To decide which we commit to, we can appeal only to pragmatism.

2. The Valuational Issue

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In referencing security and doubt, I have already touched on the valuational issue. The aim of intellectually addressing Cartesian dualism is to provide a conceptually coherent view of our experience. This no one has done; indeed, it seems impossible in principle. The aim of valuationally addressing Cartesian dualism is to find a secure and stable place on which to rest our lives. Here Hooley's wholeness seems promising. As simple consciousness, it has no parts that can raise insecurity. However, without an ontological explanation of the relationship between that wholeness and the world of View I, wholeness is purely escapist. That is, without that ontological explanation, we are left with the bald choice between a useful but inevitably insecure View I and a peaceful View II for which the self and the world inevitably evapore.

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Can we combine View I and View II? Very briefly, we cn do so by combining the accepted ontology of View I with Hooley's phenomenology of View II. The experience of wholeness in View II can be explained by View I as suppression of those cognitive functions and neural processes that sport content, leaving those functions and neural processes that support only consciousness itself. As far as I know, we do not yet have the data to confirm this hypothesis, but the data that we are acquiring seem to be developing in that direction. Supposing this hypothesis to be true, how is wholeness related to ordinary experience? A host of self-help relaxation techniques suggest wholeness is restorative. I think it is also transformative, as I argue in an article I have just submitted for publication to Journal of Consciousness Studies, "The Hard Problem As Koan". Very briefly, wholeness has psychosomatic consequences that provide a basis for our valuations and that are experienced as an inner fullness which is preferred over all else. As such, it frees us from clinging to the content of our ordinary experience. It thus liberates us from, but does not denigrate or remove us from, that content. It is not escapist. In fact, it facilitates our interaction with the world by helping us focus on the latter's endemic requirements rather than compulsively be led around by the nose of our own clinging.

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Commentator

Gary Schouborg, Ph.D., Philosophical Psychology, is a partner of Performance Consulting, which facilitates planning, meetings, and teamwork efforts of both profit and not-for-profit organizations. He has published in philosophy, religious studies, poetry, and business. Walnut Creek, CA.

<Email: garyscho@worldnet.att.net>