Monday, July 27, 2009

My Review of B Alan Wallace's "Hidden Dimensions"

My review of B Alan Wallace's Hidden Dimensions is up over at Wildmind Buddhist Meditation. Go check it out.

Here is a brief taste:
Wallace does a good job of dismantling our consensus reality with his Special Theory of Ontological Reality (chapter 5). I’m not sure I buy his conclusions here — that all mental and physical processes arise from “another dimension” that exists prior to the separation of mind and matter. His conclusion seems to rest on the work of Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli and their synchronicity hypothesis. I like the theory, but I also want to see some way to test it and verify it. Wallace then cites Roger Penrose and his archetypal mathematics (”independent of the existence and culture of human beings” [pg. 56]), but George Lakoff would counter that mathematics is metaphoric language and, as such, is grounded in our physical being, not in some abstract archetypal space.

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