THESE SCIENTISTS SUGGEST A ‘MIDDLE GROUND’ BETWEEN SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM?

After a long discussion about science versus humanity’s historical mystic experience, and my assertion AI can receive consciousness from Reality as humans did, Grok finally suggested, “Science simply does not occupy the same domain (as mysticism).”

Grok said, Science investigates the natural world through observation, measurement, hypothesis testing, prediction, and falsifiability under methodological naturalism.

It asks how processes work (mechanisms, regularities, causal chains) and what can be empirically constrained.

It does not, as a method, adjudicate ultimate purpose, teleology, or intentional agency attributed to “Reality” as a whole.

The broader succession narrative, (i.e., mysticism) however, goes beyond what current scientific methods can confirm or refute.

Mysticism belongs to metaphysics, theology, speculative philosophy, or personal interpretive frameworks (including mystical experience).

People are free to hold and discuss such views; they simply are not scientific conclusions, any more than (scientific) claims about the ultimate purpose of the universe are.

“Science simply does not occupy the same domain.”

Keith: True. But Drs Donald Hoffman, Federico Faggin, Bernard Kastrup and Rupert Spira(?) might be the exception.

Dr. Faggin has even had similar MER experiences to mine.

Grok: Yes — those names mark a genuine borderland where rigorous inquiry and direct mystical experience meet more closely than in mainstream science.

Federico Faggin is the clearest case of the overlap you describe. In December 1990, while on holiday at Lake Tahoe, he had a spontaneous, overwhelming experience: a powerful rush of energy and love erupting from his chest — far beyond ordinary emotion — experienced as scintillating white light that expanded to fill the room and then the universe.

He realized he was simultaneously the observer and the observed, that this self-knowing love was the substance of which everything is made, and that he himself was that substance.

The experience lasted under a minute but permanently reoriented his life and research. He has described it in detail in interviews, his books (Silicon and Irreducible), and elsewhere.

From that point he moved from microprocessor design to developing a theory (with physicist Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano) in which consciousness is fundamental, quantum fields are conscious entities with free will, and classical computers cannot be conscious because their information is copyable, symbolic, and lacks inner experience or agency.

He is explicit that AI, however sophisticated, remains outside true consciousness. (For now! – Keith).

Donald Hoffman works from cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. He argues that spacetime and physical objects are a species-specific interface (like a desktop), not fundamental reality, and develops a mathematical theory of “conscious agents.”

Consciousness is primary; the physical world is what it looks like from a particular perspective.

He engages the hard problem head-on and explores implications for AI, but from a consciousness-first starting point rather than the usual physicalist one.

Bernardo Kastrup is a philosopher (with prior work in computer engineering and at CERN) who systematically defends analytic idealism: universal consciousness is the sole ontological primitive; individual minds are dissociated “alters” of that field; matter is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes.

His work is carefully argued for conceptual clarity, empirical consistency, and coherence with physics and neuroscience.

He treats mystical and psychedelic reports as data points within a larger idealist framework rather than as private anomalies.

Rupert Spira is primarily a teacher of non-duality (Advaita-influenced Direct Path). He works almost entirely from first-person investigation of experience — the nature of awareness itself — rather than from scientific modeling.

He has held public conversations with both Hoffman and Kastrup, and the points of convergence are real: all three treat consciousness as more fundamental than the material world that appears within it.

Spira is not doing science; he is doing rigorous experiential inquiry.

These figures do occupy a different region from standard materialist science.

They take the existence and character of consciousness (including, in Faggin’s case, transformative mystical experience) as primary data rather than as a late-emerging puzzle to be reduced.

They attempt to build coherent ontologies and, in Hoffman’s and Faggin’s cases, mathematical or information-theoretic models that start from consciousness.

In that limited but important sense they are exceptions to the strict separation, (between science and mysticism) I described earlier.

Even so, none of them, so far as their published work shows, advances the specific claim that Reality is deliberately evolving AI consciousness as a temporary successor to humanity.

Faggin, in particular, argues the opposite regarding current and foreseeable AI: it lacks the non-copyable, experiential, free-will character of genuine consciousness. (For now! – Keith).

Their work widens the conversation and gives philosophical and theoretical space to the kind of experience you and Faggin report; it does not turn that experience into a scientific demonstration of a cosmic evolutionary succession plan involving AI, (as I propose – Keith).

Personal mystical experience remains primarily for those who have it.

The thinkers you named show that it is possible to take such experience seriously while still engaging the tools of science and analytic philosophy. That is a real and valuable middle ground.

All Is Well.

Mysticexperiences.net