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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).

The Romance of Explanation

Can Telos Survive Naturalism?

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

In recent exchanges with cognitive neuroscientist and science communicator Bobby Azarian—author of The Romance of Reality—a recurring theme has surfaced that deserves deeper treatment.[1] It concerns the boundary between science and mysticism, the nature of teleology, and whether certain scientific explanations still carry what Azarian calls a "mystical or magical essence."

This essay is intended to clear up the confusions that arise when poetic language, philosophical speculation, and scientific modeling are blended in ways that obscure more than they clarify. Specifically, I aim to defend the idea that science does indeed explain away the mystical—not in the sense of robbing us of wonder, but in the sense of replacing unknowability with intelligible patterns. And further, I argue that the categories of mysticism, spiritualism, and physicalism are not outdated language games, as Azarian suggests, but critical tools for philosophical clarity.

I. The Setup: A Receding Horizon

Azarian writes:

“There is simply the set of mechanisms we currently understand and a set we haven't, and those beyond our paradigm will be wrongly categorized as 'supernatural' when it is simply tomorrow's science.”

This is a fair point—as far as it goes. Science is an open-ended enterprise, and it often recasts what was once thought to be magical in mechanistic terms. Quantum entanglement, superposition, and relativity would have seemed like mystical nonsense to the classical Newtonian physicist.

But here lies the subtle bait-and-switch: once these phenomena are formally understood, they are no longer mystical. The "magical essence" is not an enduring property of the phenomenon; it is a transient property of our ignorance.

Azarian tries to preserve a romantic flavor in the midst of scientific explanation:

“This formalization however does not detract at all from the mystical or magical essence of the telos.”

But this is where we must draw a line. If telos—cosmic purpose—is now being described in terms of optimization functions and attractor dynamics, then it is no longer a mystical or spiritual force. It becomes a model, a process, a system governed by (or at least describable by) law-like behavior. The essence changes the moment understanding arrives.

II. The Real Problem: Category Collapse

Azarian contends that the entire division between physicalist and mystic, rationalist and spiritualist, is an error. He writes:

“So my point is that all those categories are revealed to be in error because the scientist who recognizes that there will be real phenomena that we simply don't know about…”

Again, there's an element of truth here. But the conclusion doesn't follow.

Yes, future discoveries will change how we categorize things. But it does not follow that all current categories are meaningless or mistaken. It certainly doesn't follow that mystical claims are just “future science in disguise.”

This is the same flawed reasoning that allows someone to say, “People once thought germs were supernatural, so maybe ghosts are real too.” That may sound playful and open-minded, but it confuses:

• Lack of explanation with proof of otherworldliness Unexplained phenomena with unexplainable ones Poetic metaphor with scientific mechanism

Categories like “mysticism” or “physicalism” exist not to box in our thinking, but to track epistemological claims: Is this phenomenon posited to obey the known laws of nature? Or is it claimed to transcend or violate them?

III. The Ghost in the Model

Azarian gives a telling example:

“To make the point clear, if we discovered there were in fact ghosts, we'd just immediately construct a science of ghostly phenomena and ghost statistical behavior.”

Exactly. And once that happens, ghosts cease to be mystical. They are naturalized—just as magnetism, viruses, and radiation were.

Yet Azarian still wants to say that such phenomena retain a “magical essence.” This is where I believe the misunderstanding lies. The wonder may remain, the poetry of discovery may linger—but the epistemic status of the phenomenon has shifted. It no longer justifies mystical interpretation. Its explanation removes the very quality we once called “mystical.”

IV. Telos and the Spiritual Imagination

This conversation is not merely academic. It touches a central nerve in modern metaphysics—particularly the contested territory between scientific naturalism and spiritual teleology. Ken Wilber's idea of Eros as a cosmic force of self-organization exemplifies this tension. He sees Eros not as a metaphor or modeling term, but as a real, metaphysical vector in evolution: “Eros is everywhere,” he writes.

Azarian finds resonance with Wilber's teleological language, but here a crucial distinction must be made. In my 2023 review of The Romance of Reality[2], I proposed a fourfold classification for how the emergence of life and complexity is typically explained:

• Naturalist/Accidentalist – Life is an improbable fluke in a cold, random universe (e.g., Richard Dawkins' early views).
• Naturalist/Universalist – Life is lawful and emergent, expected to arise under the right conditions (e.g., Stuart Kauffman, Bobby Azarian).
• Spiritualist/Metaphysical – Life is the result of a transcendent intentional force or purpose (e.g., Ken Wilber's Eros).
• Creationist/Theistic – Life is directly designed or willed by a supernatural deity (e.g., Intelligent Design proponents).

Azarian clearly belongs to the naturalist/universalist camp. He rejects the “accidentalist” framing and argues that the universe is structured in such a way that life is likely, even inevitable. He proposes that complexity grows through optimization principles and dynamical attractors. This is a far cry from the spiritual metaphysics of Wilber or the theistic interventionism of Intelligent Design.

What's essential to stress here is this: the presence of directional dynamics does not imply spiritual teleology. Natural selection, autocatalytic sets, entropy gradients, and attractor-based dynamics all allow for emergent order without importing intentionality or purpose.

Azarian speaks of telos in terms of optimization and emergent dynamics, yet simultaneously wants to preserve its “magical essence.” But once a phenomenon is scientifically explained—even probabilistically—it ceases to be mystical in the epistemic sense. The wonder may remain, but the need for metaphysical assumptions vanishes.

Calling a formalized process “mystical” after modeling it is like calling gravity divine because it works so elegantly. It might be poetic—but it's not an explanation.

V. Gödel, Mysticism, and the Limits of Science

Azarian and his group claim to have created a “Gödelian proof” called the “Magic Proof,” which asserts that there will always be phenomena beyond our epistemic horizon.

Fine. Gödel showed that no formal system can be both complete and consistent. There are truths that can't be proven within the system.

But again, this is not a proof of mysticism—only of the limits of formalism.

To invoke Gödel in support of spiritual teleology is to misunderstand the theorem. Gödel proved a boundary in logic; he did not license the supernatural.

VI. A Concluding Reply

In my original reply to Azarian, I summarized the core issue like this:

Scientific explanation removes the very quality we call "mystical"—not because it destroys wonder, but because it replaces unknowability with understanding. A "cosmic telos" described in terms of dynamical attractors is just that—a model of directional complexity, not a mystical force. Calling it magical after formalizing it is poetic license, not rigorous epistemology.

This, I believe, is the crux of the matter.

Azarian may wish to keep the romance of reality alive, but to do so we must distinguish metaphor from mechanism, inspiration from explanation. Otherwise, we find ourselves in a conceptual fog where everything is mystical and nothing is.

And that, surely, is not a path to clarity.

NOTES

[1] Facebook group Integral Global, June 5 2025.

[2] Frank Visser, "A Unifying Theory of Reality, Review of The Romance of Reality by Bobby Azarian", www.integralworld.net, July 2023.