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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Sharpening Both Edges

A Critical Response to John Abramson's 'The Direction That Matters'

A response to John Abramson's critique of David Lane and Frank Visser

Frank Visser / Claude

John Abramson's essay, "The Direction That Matters: Consciousness, Causation, and the Claim the Wisdom Traditions Actually Make," is philosophically sophisticated and in places genuinely illuminating. It brings welcome precision to the debate between Lane's sympathetic portrait of Christof Koch and Visser's deflationary critique of "Mind at Large." Abramson correctly identifies that the most important question is not whether consciousness correlates with brain states, but which direction the ontological dependence runs. That is a real advance over much of the debate. Nevertheless, the essay contains several significant problems—of logical structure, of philosophical fairness, and of what might be called strategic equivocation—that must be examined before its conclusions are accepted.

I. The Transmission Model Is Not as Neutral as Claimed

Abramson's central argumentative move is to invoke the "transmission model"—the idea, traceable through Bergson and Huxley to William James, that the brain is a reducing valve for a consciousness that pre-exists neural organisation—and then to insist that this model is empirically equivalent to the generation model. Both, he argues, predict identical observations from lesion studies and pharmacological interventions: damage the receiver, lose the signal. Correlation, as Koch himself pressed, is not causation. Therefore, Visser's empirical evidence cannot adjudicate between the two models.

This is true, and it is an important point. But Abramson uses it more aggressively than it warrants. The claim that the two models are empirically equivalent is not the same as the claim that they are equally well-supported. Empirical underdetermination licenses suspension of judgment; it does not license the inference that the transmission model is therefore correct, or even equally plausible. Abramson writes as if successfully neutralising Visser's empirical arguments establishes, or at least strongly suggests, the primacy of consciousness. It does not. It leaves us with two hypotheses and no discriminating evidence. That is a much more modest outcome than the essay's tone implies.

Furthermore, the transmission model is not as assumption-free as Abramson presents it. To say that the brain "conditions local access" to a consciousness that is ontologically prior is itself a substantial theoretical commitment. It posits a relationship between a physical system and a non-physical (or transpersonal) ground—and that relationship requires its own explanation. What is the mechanism by which a particular neural arrangement "allows access" to the Absolute ground? If Visser is faulted for asking how "Mind at Large" interacts with local brains, Abramson must face the same question from the opposite direction. Asserting that consciousness is ontologically prior does not dissolve the interaction problem; it relocates it.

II. The Hard Problem Is Deployed Selectively

Abramson invokes the hard problem—Nagel's "what it is like," Levine's explanatory gap, Chalmers' formalisation—with considerable skill, and he is right that Visser's essay does not adequately engage with this tradition. Visser does treat the hard problem as analogous to earlier explanatory gaps (vitalism, phlogiston, ether), and Abramson rightly points out that the hard problem is categorically different: it is a gap between any possible third-person description and a first-person explanandum, not merely a gap in a third-person account waiting for more precise mechanisms.

But the hard problem cuts in both directions, and Abramson only cuts in one.

If the generation model faces a logical obstacle in explaining why any physical organisation should be accompanied by experience, then the transmission or primacy model faces a structurally equivalent obstacle in explaining why any particular local physical organisation should be accompanied by this specific experience—the redness of this red, the painfulness of this pain—rather than some other. If consciousness is ontologically prior and universal, what individuates it? What determines that the experience arising in connection with this neural configuration is mine, with this phenomenal character, rather than yours, or no one's? The hard problem, properly applied, does not dissolve at the level of the Absolute; it generates a hard problem for idealism as much as for physicalism: why does the universal ground express itself in these particular, finitely bounded, first-personal perspectives? Abramson does not address this. He uses the hard problem as a weapon against Visser while quietly sheltering the primacy model from the same scrutiny.

III. The Cantor Analogy Is Illuminating but Overextended

The essay's most original contribution—and perhaps its most ambitious gamble—is the deployment of Cantorian set theory as a formal analogue for the Absolute ground of consciousness. The distinction Abramson draws between the transfinite hierarchy (the endless succession of alephs, each unreachable from below by accumulation) and Cantor's Absolute Infinite (categorically prior to and beyond the entire hierarchy) is philosophically precise and genuinely interesting. It allows him to distinguish the "inflated container" version of Mind at Large (merely more consciousness, transfinite-style: aleph-one rather than aleph-null) from the traditions' stronger claim (consciousness as prior to the entire domain of quantification, Absolute-style).

This is elegant. But elegance is not proof, and the analogy carries more weight than it can bear.

First, Cantor's Absolute Infinite is not uncontroversial within mathematics. Cantor himself treated it carefully, and subsequent set theory has largely formalised around it by treating proper classes—like the class of all sets—as entities that cannot be members of other sets, precisely because the naïve Absolute leads to paradox (Russell's, Burali-Forti's). The "Absolute" is not a securely established mathematical object with agreed properties; it is a limit concept that set theory has learned to handle by being very careful about what it says. Using it as a direct analogue for the metaphysical ground of consciousness imports the intuitive appeal of the concept while bypassing the technical difficulties that have occupied set theorists for over a century.

Second, and more fundamentally, mathematical analogies illuminate structure; they do not establish ontology. That the Cantorian Absolute is categorically prior to the transfinite hierarchy does not entail that there is an analogous ontological Absolute in consciousness. The analogy is evocative—it helps us understand what kind of claim the traditions are making—but it contributes nothing to establishing that the claim is true. Abramson is entitled to use the analogy to clarify, but the essay's rhetoric frequently allows the mathematical precision to do argumentative work that only genuine philosophical argument could do.

IV. The Concession Section Is Too Brief

In section VI, Abramson offers what he calls an honest concession: Visser is right that the filter model is loose and difficult to falsify; the appeal to mystical experience does involve a shift in epistemic standards that can license motivated reasoning; Koch's experiences do not by themselves adjudicate between ontologies. These concessions are genuine, and the intellectual honesty is admirable.

But they are dispatched in a few paragraphs and then immediately defused with the claim that Visser's three main objections (unfalsifiability, parsimony violations, category error) all have maximum force only against the "inflated container" version, not against the Absolute-primacy version.

This move is too quick. Abramson concedes that the traditions' claims, in their popular and even their sophisticated forms, frequently are expressed as inflated-container claims—and then argues that the philosophical core of those traditions, properly understood, makes the stronger Absolute claim. Perhaps. But this requires a hermeneutic argument that Abramson does not fully make. Which texts? Which interpreters? Which traditions? The essay moves fluidly between Sant Mat, Neoplatonism, Advaita Vedanta, Zen, and the Gospel of John as if they share a single metaphysical structure. They do not. The Zen claim that "Buddha-nature was always already the case" is structurally different from the Sant Mat Sound Current's vibrational ontology, which is structurally different again from Plotinus's procession-and-return schema. Treating them as a unified tradition making a single "Absolute claim" is exactly the kind of motivated synthesis that Visser is right to be suspicious of.

V. Lane Is Treated More Generously Than He Deserves

Abramson is explicitly responding to both Lane and Visser, but the critique of Lane is gentle to the point of being apologetic. He notes that Lane's essay "quietly domesticates" the traditions' claims by treating Sound Current practices as a cross-cultural empirical archive rather than as an ontological map—and that this domestication "costs something important." That is fair. But Lane's essay has a more significant problem that Abramson does not raise.

Lane presents Koch's reaction to hearing about the Sound Current tradition—his startled interest, his reaching for his phone to search for the Cambridge book—as evidence of something weighty: the recognition that Koch's extraordinary experiences belonged to a "carefully mapped territory." But this is an anecdote, and anecdotes are not arguments. Koch finding a book interesting does not confirm that the book's framework is correct, any more than a scientist being moved by a piece of music confirms the ontological claims of music theory. Lane's essay is warm and well-written, but it repeatedly treats phenomenological resonance as intellectual vindication. Abramson is too kind to this move, and in a critical response essay, that kindness is a gap.

VI. What the Essay Gets Right

These criticisms should not obscure what Abramson's essay genuinely accomplishes.

He is right that Visser does not adequately distinguish between the direction-of-dependence question and the question of whether a "bigger consciousness" exists. These are different questions, and conflating them allows Visser to score points against a crude target while leaving the more serious philosophical position untouched.

He is right that the "sharpening explanatory tools" standard cuts both ways. Visser invokes it as a reason to stay within neuroscience; Abramson correctly points out that the sharpest tools in the field keep arriving at the same explanatory cliff. This is not mysticism. It is intellectual honesty about the limits of a research programme.

He is right that the category-error charge applies to spatial-substance versions of idealism but not necessarily to the directional-dynamic version articulated in Sound Current traditions and in the better Neoplatonic accounts. Consciousness-as-prior-ground is not the same as consciousness-as-container, and Visser does not always hold this distinction clearly.

And the Cantor section, whatever its overextensions, offers a genuinely useful conceptual tool: the distinction between ascending and Absolute claims is not merely rhetorical. It maps onto a real difference between the panpsychist position (consciousness is a fundamental feature of sufficiently organised physical systems, a transfinite-style progression) and the idealist or non-dualist position (consciousness is prior to the entire physical domain in which organisation and complexity are measured). These are not the same claim, and they should not be argued against with the same arguments.

Conclusion: Sharpening Both Edges

The value of Abramson's essay is that it forces a more precise articulation of what is actually at stake. He is right that neither Lane nor Visser quite reaches the question that most needs asking—the direction of dependence question—and he is right to insist that question cannot be settled by correlation data or by parsimony arguments that presuppose their conclusion.

But precision is owed to all parties. The transmission model needs to explain interaction as much as the generation model does. The hard problem needs to be applied to idealism as well as physicalism. The wisdom traditions need to be distinguished from one another rather than recruited as a unified front. And the difference between clarifying what kind of claim the traditions are making—which Abramson does well—and establishing that the claim is true—which Abramson does not do—must be kept in view.

The phone Koch reached for was not, as Abramson suggests, simply the wrong instrument. It was the right instinct—the empiricist's refusal to let experience remain untethered from evidence—applied to a question that may require instruments we do not yet have. The task is not to abandon that instinct in favour of the traditions' authority, nor to dismiss the traditions as seductive mythology. It is to build the instruments that can actually reach the cliff Abramson has correctly identified. That project is not advanced by assigning victory to either side. It requires exactly the kind of mutual sharpening that neither Lane's warmth nor Visser's deflation, nor Abramson's elegant asymmetry, fully provides.