Subjective Perspective Makes Objective Reality ‘Everywhere Whole’

Earlier this month, the Berggruen Institute gathered religious scholars, philosophers, quantum physicists, AI technologists, neuroscientists and science fiction novelists at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice to ponder the nature of consciousness. It is fascinating to see how their ideas correspond to the long-ago musings of Medieval mystics and even the “pagan masters” of antiquity.

These reflections across time mirror each other. The great question then, as now, and probably forever, is whether there is a metaphysical gap between the body and the soul, or if they are made of the same substance, symbiotic aspects of a singular reality that entail each other.

Religious Awareness: One Reality, Many Forms

Religious thinkers tend to see consciousness, or “the birth of God in the soul,” as a recognition of the eternal, encompassing fabric of the universe that infuses all Being, even as the physical forms and functions that manifest it are endlessly differentiated.

This is apparent already in the obscure classic, “Book of 24 Philosophers,” published in the 12th century, with some contributions said to have originated in the 3rd and 4th centuries. According to Peter Sloterdijk, in that tome of arresting aphorisms authored by unnamed pagan thinkers, “God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” As the German philosopher observes, this formless conception befuddles the human spatial imagination because “God is neither contained in anything that contains him, nor is there anything outside him … he has no beyond, no outside. If the center is everywhere, it is everywhere whole.”

In another passage cited by Sloterdijk, God is the singular presence that courses through existence as omnipresent in all phenomena: “God is the monad that begets a monad and bends back upon itself in a single glowing breath.”

In Venice, the religious scholars and a Chinese thinker echoed this cosmology.

Swami Medhananda, a monk of the Ramakrishna Order, concisely frames even older Indian spirituality in this context.

“Hinduism has no single creed. Yet I suggest that four broad ideas, deeply rooted in Hindu scriptures and cutting across sectarian boundaries, express its universal spiritual core:

1. The Divine is one infinite Reality, both personal and impersonal, known by many names and approached in many forms.
2. Our deepest identity is spiritual — the immortal ātman, intimately connected with the Divine — and we suffer because we mistake the changing body, mind and ego for our true self.
3. Life’s highest goal is mokṣa — freedom from ignorance, suffering and rebirth — through direct realization of the Divine and our relationship with it.
4. The infinite Divine can be realized through infinitely many paths.”

He elaborated: “A celebrated verse from the ‘Rig Veda’ says, ekam sad viprā bahudhā vadanti: ‘Truth is one; the wise call it by many names.’ To capture this non-sectarian vision, I have coined the term polymorphic monism: Hinduism affirms one infinite Divine Reality that can be known and worshipped in many forms.

“’Monism’ is important. Monotheism affirms one supreme personal God, whereas Hindu monism is broader, encompassing both personal and impersonal aspects of the Divine. It includes saguṇa Brahman — the Divine with qualities — worshipped in forms such as Shiva, Vishnu, Devi, Ganesha and Christ; the formless personal Divine affirmed in Islam, Sikhism and some Hindu traditions; and nirguṇa Brahman, the impersonal, attributeless, nondual Reality beyond every name and form.”

Presence & Existence

In his intervention, Muhammed U. Faruque draws on Sufism and Islamic philosophy to argue that subjective experience presupposes a deeper, non-objectifiable ground called “presence” (ḥuḍūr).

“In the absence of external stimuli,” he says, “consciousness itself becomes the only ‘light,’ revealing your presence. Consciousness is self-illuminating and self-cognizing, i.e., it knows itself directly, without any intermediary or subject-object division. Just as light makes other things visible, consciousness discloses both the self and the world, but unlike light, it is also aware of itself. Consequently, the essence of consciousness lies not primarily in qualia, but in its intrinsic presence and capacity for self-knowledge, which constitute the fundamental reality of the self and provide the basis for all other forms of cognition.

“Within human experience, the consciousness of the ‘I’ is unique, simple, and indivisible. Although we may experience a variety of thoughts and emotions, even seemingly conflicting emotions such as happiness and sadness at the same time, the subject who experiences them remains one and the same. Also, it is impossible to add another consciousness of ‘I’ to one’s own awareness or to divide the ‘I’ into multiple conscious entities. This unity points to the simplicity of self-awareness, that is, the self is not a composite of separate centers of consciousness but a single, irreducible subject of experience.

“Human subjectivity is both empty and total. It is ‘empty’ because the contents of consciousness such as thoughts, feelings, memories, and perceptions are not identical with the conscious subject and can therefore change without altering the underlying ‘I.’ Yet it is also ‘total’ because every object of experience appears only within consciousness. In this sense, the entire universe is disclosed through the knowing subject.

“There is no reason to think that consciousness comes into existence only when there is an I-consciousness in relation to an external object, since our logical sense demands that consciousness must exist first, in order that it may become self-conscious by the knowledge of objects with which it contrasts itself. Consciousness can only be the underlying subject in all of our experiences; hence, it must be more fundamental than both our reflective and intersubjective (involving multiple) experiences. In my theory, consciousness is a multimodal phenomenon having nonreflective, reflective, and intersubjective modes.”

Song Bing, the Berggruen Institute’s president who formerly led the Institute’s China Center at Peking University, makes a similar case, substituting Faruque’s “presence” with the notion of “Existence.”

“All scientific observations and analyses are shaped by perception, and are subjective in nature.

“Perception keeps changing; however, the functioning of perceiving appears constant in each occurrence. Therefore, the capacity giving rise to such functioning must remain unchanged. It follows that the perceiver or “I”, which possesses such capacity, must also be unchanged. It is ever-present and remains unchanged. It is what Liu Fenghe — the contemporary wisdom teacher — has termed Existence.

“Existence is without arising or ceasing. It inherently possesses all capacity and gives rise to all functioning. All arising, changing, and ceasing are the functioning of Existence and are dependent upon Existence. While all perceptions change constantly, Existence remains unchanged.”

Consciousness As An ‘Internal Film,’ ‘Controlled Hallucination’ Or ‘Confabulation’

Philosopher Jenann Ismael attempts to square the circle of the big question with the metaphor of a mirror.

“Is consciousness the ground of everything,” she asks, “with the material world just a pattern woven out of regularities in experience? Or is matter the ground of everything, with consciousness a kind of internal film produced by the machinery of the brain? I suspect the answer is both — that consciousness and matter are not rival foundations but the subjective and objective faces of a single existence.

“Picture a mirror on the far wall of a room. There is the room itself, ordinary and three-dimensional, and there is the mirror, a flat surface mounted on the wall, in which the room appears. The mirror’s surface belongs to both realities at once. It is a kind of membrane between them, separating the room reflected in the mirror from the room that does the reflecting. That, I want to suggest, is the peculiar status of our experience: it is the membrane between an inner and an outer world, at once containing the whole of reality within it and occupying, by its own account, only a thin sliver of that reality.”

With Ismael’s notion of self-awareness as an “internal film” produced by our sensory apparatus in mind, neuroscientist Anil Seth offers where he has landed on the big question after a quarter of a century studying consciousness.

“My own work on consciousness, which goes back about 25 years, follows one single and powerful idea,” Seth argues. “This is the idea that the brain is a prediction machine, and every conscious experience we have — whether of the world, or of the self — is a kind of controlled hallucination: a brain-based best-guess that is tied to reality by signals coming into the brain from the senses. In this view, what we experience comes as much from the ‘inside out’ and from the ‘outside in’, and we don’t experience the world as it really is, but in ways that help us to survive and thrive. As the novelist Anaïs Nin once said: ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.’

“With a deeper understanding of consciousness comes the chance to reconcile with the impermanence of the ever-changing bundle of perceptual experiences that we call ourselves and that define our worlds. The line ‘I open my eyes and a world appears’ comes from my book ‘Being You.’ The poet Sylvia Plath closes the circle: ‘I shut my eyes and all of the world drops dead.’”

The idea of consciousness as an “internal film” or “controlled hallucination” fits snugly with science fiction novelist Ken Liu’s view of consciousness as the ability to confabulate.

“Since consciousness is a subjectively experienced state, no one can judge whether it is ‘real’ except the agent experiencing it,” Liu says.

“We may be able to bypass the quintessentially subjective nature of consciousness by some expedient and reduce it to functional tests, behavioral proxies, neural signatures, etc. — in a word, define the subjectivity away. But I don’t think what we would then be defining is consciousness, only a shadow. The ‘I’ that drives everything remains behind the gaze, impossible to pin down.”

Here, Liu muses, the attempt to construct thinking machines is useful. “Constructing thinking machines will help us better understand our own neural circuitry. For instance, one feature of conscious experience involves storytelling, or confabulation. This goes all the way down to the way our brain creates a sense of integrated sensory simultaneity despite differences in the time it takes neural signals from different parts of the body to reach the brain, and all the way up to the way we construct our sense of self with a purpose, a history, a yearning for meaning. Our memory requires active reconstruction with each recall. Is this compression-confabulation required for a finite being to experience or articulate infinity? As we try to build thinking machines, we may gain insight into whether the ability to confabulate is essential to a conscious being.”

We Are Fundamental To The Reality We Observe

The quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that the much-discussed metaphysical gap between body and soul, subjective and objective, doesn’t exist.

As he has written in Noema, “We, subjects of knowledge and understanding, are not outside the world. We are part of it. Our theories and knowledge are embodied tools to help us navigate the real world, not disembodied views on reality from the outside. They are themselves aspects of the very world they describe. Our understanding, like our feelings, perceptions and experience, is a natural phenomenon.”

For Rovelli, the notion of a metaphysical gap “contradicts everything we have learned about nature in the last centuries. The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary: They are two distinct perspectives on the same events. We do not need to assume that the circle between epistemology (how we get knowledge) and ontology (what exists) requires a starting point. There is nothing wrong with its circularity: The world I access is the information I have about it, and I am part of that world.

“Nor do we need to require that there is any ultimate or fundamental account of reality. Any account is approximate, has blind spots and is realized within reality, so it is embodied in a part of that same reality.

“If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is also a collection of atoms. It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics.

“Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature.”

Rovelli’s scientific case that we humans are not outside the world of reality, but constitutive participants in it and constructors of it, tracks with the intuition of Medieval thinkers like the 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart.

For Eckhart, consciousness was being aware we are not apart from, but both inhabit and are inhabited by, the mind of God — that is, “objective reality.”

As stated in the New Testament’s Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” In biblical terms, the Word, or Logos, is divine reason. Eckhart interpreted this passage as meaning that the incarnation of the divine in man was not a one-time event of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, but takes place through continuous human participation in the unfolding Logos of the Word, making us part of and conjoining with the mind of God; co-essences, so to speak.” If God is the pure thought of divine reason, then, as Sloterdijk has put it, ‘To think is to give birth to God.’”

That Medieval insight is another way of saying, in Rovelli’s words, that “objectivity without a subject is an abstract construct, of little relevance — it is the illusion of a science now belonging to the past.”

Consciousness, then, can be said to be the perspective of the aware self in a world where there is no outside. The “I” is not detached from some order of objective reality, but in all the diversity of personal experience, part of what makes it “everywhere whole.” Not only is “the universe disclosed by a knowing subject;” the knowing subject is its co-creator from within.

Correction: On Aug. 28, 2026, this essay was changed to reference the Gospel of John rather than Genesis.

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