The Joys and Pains of Being a 'Freelance Academic'

Freedom has its cost

With my PhD in physics, I could have pursued an academic career. In fact, to some extent, I was already doing so. Yet, my decision to leave academia was one of the best decisions of my life. I described this shortly here, and in more detail, in my booklet “Free Progress Education.”

To make a long story short... I believe that modern science, research, and academic institutions have lost their original aim and purpose: the search for truth. When science still retained its inherent natural philosophical trait, it was thought of as a systematic study of the natural world not only through observation, experimentation, and analysis but also as the study of fundamental questions about existence and the nature of reality. This romantic conception is now long gone and, at the latest around the middle of the 20th century, the pragmatic approach prevailed.¹ While this separation between science and philosophy has its practical advantages and has led to many improvements in our material daily life it also distanced the human mind further from its human soul.

Raphael’s fresco of “The School of Athens” represents an environment where philosophers and scientists gather together, discussing and learning from each other. An ideal that is time to recover in contemporary academic reality.

Thus, a conventional academic career would not have allowed me to express my unique research interests and ideas, which revolve around a post-material worldview, a new science, and an integral vision of reality. Or, to put it in other words, I could have pursued some of these ideas but only by maintaining a naturalistic approach, or at least a not-too-metaphysical worldview, self-restraining myself to a mostly Western perspective on theories of consciousness and life that are in fashion nowadays and that insist on being mostly rooted in a materialistic belief system. This insistence has only seemingly rational grounds but is subconsciously driven primarily by sociological reasons. This intellectual attitude has failed several times to naturalize life, mind, and consciousness in the past, and there is mounting evidence that it is going to run itself into a dead end, yet again.²

This led me to leave my previous professional life to pursue research and explore topics that are nearly impossible to address within an academic environment. This gives me the freedom to dedicate my time to the real questions that interest me—questions about the nature of life, consciousness, and our place in the universe—which I believe are not only far more interesting but also far more important than building the next generation of AI, creating photonic computers, or sending humans to Mars. Leaving academia grants a kind of freedom and certain privileges that most people who continued their careers (and likely didn’t wish to leave anyway) can only dream of.

On the other hand, leaving academia comes with obvious financial drawbacks. To make a living, you must find another source of income. In my case, creating online content helps me stay afloat. This gives me enough time to continue working on the project I mentioned in a previous post (please take a look at it to understand better the overall context.) If you're curious about how this is progressing and what I'm working on now, here’s the update.

Currently, I’m seeking a journal to submit for peer-review an article on the 'Metaphysics of Language in Abhinavagupta and Sri Aurobindo.' Those who follow me may recall that I outlined their views on the nature of language in a two-part series of posts here and here. This topic is significant because it suggests a paradigm shift not only in linguistics but across all sciences. For example, it offers a completely different perspective on modern speculations about the coming age of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The core thesis is that language translates a cognitive process into symbols—a process that doesn’t occur in the brain but beyond it. If this is true, it naturally follows that an agent’s semantic understanding of a text, the environment, or the world cannot be achieved by an AI system unless it is also conscious, no matter how complex or powerful the system might be. No consciousness → no semantics → no AGI (this might be the topic of my next post, stay tuned if interested.) Several other implications for the natural sciences are also discussed.

But besides the spiritual and philosophical insights, I believe the main conclusion is that a lack of awareness about our true nature, how we think and perceive the world, and the unconscious allure of the almost irresistible fascination with naturalizing everything, drives scientists, philosophers, and ultimately corporations and nations, to spend enormous resources on projects that are doomed from the outset. When we don’t fully understand our own cognitive biases and cognitive limitations (here, the materialistic and mechanistic understanding of the world, and the ability to introspect) we inevitably embark on fundamentally flawed initiatives.

Another project I’m working on is an essay that aims to provide a bird’s-eye view of my overall vision. The manuscript, titled “An Integral Monism for Theories of Universal Consciousness,” is about 8,000 to 9,000 words long—a nearly impossible feat! I’m currently searching for a peer-reviewed journal to publish it in, but this has proven challenging. The essay’s broad scope doesn’t fit neatly into most academic periodicals, which are typically highly specialized. Additionally, finding a journal that doesn’t reject a spiritual first-person approach outright before the review process, is no easy task.

Once these last two papers are accepted and freely available, my next step will be to write a book that explains and reprints all the works mentioned above and in the previous post, compiling them into a single volume. This will make the material more accessible to a broader audience without a technical background. I hope this book will provide a comprehensive vision of what I believe can become part of a post-material scientific and spiritual perspective of reality, life, and consciousness in the future. Because we are entering an age where real progress will be impossible unless we begin to know ourselves.

This is the kind of work I’ve been focusing on recently. That’s what motivated me to become a freelance academic, or what is referred to in academic jargon as an 'independent scholar'—someone with professional training but without institutional affiliation and no research funding.

While leaving the cozy protections of institutional structures has given me the freedom to express myself fully, the major hurdle I’m now facing isn’t the enormous amount of time and energy required (this was expected and isn’t really an issue when you’re passionate about something). The real challenge is the financial burden. Publishing articles in academic journals as an independent scholar—without access to grants or the funding that universities typically provide—can be extremely expensive. Additionally, I don’t want my research to be behind a paywall. Unfortunately, most publishers don’t allow open access without charging exorbitant fees, which the author must pay. For instance, publishing the article on the mind-brain identity theory emptied my pockets of about $2,900!

Therefore, if you find value in my project and wish to support it, you can make a financial contribution by buying me one or more coffees.

1. I could provide a detailed description of how, unfortunately, this decline didn’t stop there. The foundations of academic research have been further undermined by internal power struggles, politicization, commercialization, fundraising policies, and the infamous ‘publish or perish’ dogma. This ‘businessification of academia’ has led to a science increasingly resembling a profit-oriented factory producing mostly useless and disposable goods or, worse, becoming a self-censoring political power structure. More recently, with the advent of social media, even several universities have jumped on the hype bandwagon. But that’s another story…

2. The so-called 'enactive theory,' or 'enactivism'—which, to put it bluntly, is a sort of "complexity theory 2.0 + autopoiesis 2.0"—is, at least at the time of this writing, the most cherished theory in cognitive science and the philosophy of biology. It is supposed to naturalize cognition and, ultimately, life and consciousness. But there are already signs of its demise. For those with a more technical/philosophical background, here is a recent historical overview of the failure of "experience-blind" naturalism and its concerns that enactivists & co. will meet the same destiny. I believe we will see further such assessments coming in the next few years, or at the latest in a few decades, declaring it no more successful in its intent than any previous attempt to explain life and consciousness from dead matter, abstract functionalism, and various complicated dynamical processes.