01/05/2026
NB: non-foraging post, keep scrolling if you aren't interested in the nature of reality and the state of civilisation.
The reason I ended up teaching and writing about foraging was that at 33 I quit a software career to study philosophy academically. I did this after a shift in worldview from Dawkinsian science-geek to something closer to Taoism/Buddhism -- I wanted to find a way to fit both science and spirituality into a coherent worldview, and to learn why academic philosophy has been unable to do this. Having gone down this path, foraging was my only way forward post-degree.
I have spent the last 20 years trying to understand exactly how consciousness is related to quantum wavefunction collapse. Mainstream science has spent a century denying there is any connection, but the alternative view that (consciousness causes collapse) is not quite right either, because it imagines consciousness as something outside the physical system which is nevertheless able to "poke" it. This is problematic dualism.
Last year I made a breakthrough. Why now? Because of the rapidly-deepening crisis in cosmology. In this case there is no single humdinger problem like the hard problem of consciousness and the quantum measurement problem, but over 20 different anomalies, paradoxes, discrepancies and unanswerable questions. Academic cosmologists treat these as 20 different problems (Hubble Tension, the mysteries of "dark matter" and "dark energy", the unquantisability of gravity, our failure to find evidence of alien life, the impossible objects being found by James Webb Space Telescope, and many more). For me, they were 20 different clues as to what a complete solution to all these problems might look like.
The core problem is this: we have two kinds of physics, and they are fundamentally incompatible, but materialistic scientists are committed to finding a continuous (monist physicalist) model that contains both. They try to explain how a quantum-and-classical cosmos can appear from nothing, purely as a result of dynamic laws operating as time passes. But QM describes a realm of infinite and timeless possibility, not a singular classical reality. What if we start with infinite timeless possibility and ask instead how a singular classical reality might be selected from it? Suddenly a new way forwards appears, because rather than just one possible answer, there are three: consciousness, free will and wavefunction collapse are all names for a process whereby observed actuality is selected from unobserved possibility. Consciousness doesn't "cause collapse". It *IS* collapse -- they are different names for the same "phase transition". And this is the same transition described by the last person to attempt a coherent theory of the whole of reality, which was Alfred North Whitehead's "Process Philosophy" (100 years ago).
My new book explains how, if we apply this model to cosmology, all of the problems either vanish, or are fundamentally reframed and made tractable in new ways. The result is what I call the "Two-phase cosmology", and it is the first coherent model of the whole of reality since the scientific revolution. It is descended from the work of Whitehead, quantum physicist John Wheeler, and ultimately from the enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who called the two phases "noumena" and "phenomena", but wrongly claimed that noumena is completely unknowable. We cannot observe objects in superposition, but the whole of moden technology is based on our knowledge of them.
The new book is called "The Two-phase Cosmology", and it is now available from online booksellers. It would be most helpful for me if people buy it from Amazon and review it as confirmed buyers, but their main entry lists the wrong price. If you go to "other sellers" (which turn out to be Amazon themselves) it is available for £12.99 (ebook £4.99).
The Two-Phase Cosmology
