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Christopher Jonathan Ott was born in Woodstock, NY in 1959 to well-educated artist parents. When Chris was 6 his family moved to the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, SC. There he grew up meeting literally thousands of young seekers and aspirants who were guests at the Ott home and he sat in on constant conversations on cosmology and metaphysics.
When Ott was 20 he moved to California to study film and work in the film industry. After working for two years as a camera assistant at an animation studio in Marin County, he moved to Los Angeles and completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in cinema-television production at the University of Southern California. In 1987 Ott established Caravan Films, Inc. in Wilmington, NC, where he wrote and produced films.
In 1997, at the age of 37, Ott moved to Fayetteville, AR, where he went back to school and received a Master of Arts in philosophy in 2001. During this time he developed his theory of perception. In June 2004 he wrote and published "The Evolution of Perception and The Cosmology Of Substance". In February 2021 he published "Evolution of Perception Re-Explained" and in November 2024 he published "Further Reflections", which discusses causation, explains the epistemological basis for his theory of an evolution of perception and explains his unique theology. "EOP Trilogy", released in 2025, is a compilation of all three books.
The concept of the evolution of perception is inspired by the teachings of Meher Baba as well as the entire gamut of Western philosophy. Instead of positing unseen theoretical entities to explain perceived phenomena, as done in the past, Ott proposes an evolution of perception itself to account for our phenomenal universe. Undergirding this is the concept of perceptual schemas that Ott likens to lenses. One can see the influence of Ott's formal study of film and experience as an animation camera assistant and projectionist in a system that builds on the analogy of optical lenses.
As the back panel of his first book says,
"Chris Ott considers our current philosophical problems to be the tragic result of psychological fallacies as old as Plato. He offers a new explanation for the universe that relies simply on an evolution of perception. His theory succeeds at accounting for the physical as well as the psychological--including mathematics, natural law, concrete objects, language, thought, and culture. A spellbinding journey to the roots of our assumptions."
And this quote from inside the same gives a peak into Ott's unique way of looking at the world.
"Long ago, before he had the complicated metaphysical theories that he has today, man had his experience to explain. Over time, he invented theoretical entities to explain his experience. He invented gods, the logos, forms, matter, monads, noumenon, minds, spirit, the ether, spacetime, superstrings, dimensions, etc. Gradually these invented things became the things which required explaining. Great arguments were generated to explain them, to prove the existence of the entities he had invented to explain experience. Gradually man began to question experience itself, since it no longer seemed compatible with his theories. Experience, that event which had once been beyond dispute and the starting point of man's inquiry, was now the theoretical entity, and his invented entities, such as matter and energy, for which he had no direct evidence, were reality. The world was finally totally upside down."
Chris Ott is critical of reductive materialism, but is equally critical of New Age and the so-called New Science, both of which he considers woo-woo. He believes his three books on the evolution of perception concept ought to be prerequisite of any serious study of Sufism, Christian mysticism, Vedanta, and especially the works of Meher Baba, as it gives a scientifically minded way to approach ideas found in those sources that might otherwise feel impenetrable or too esoteric to the Western mind.
Today Chris Ott lives and writes in Myrtle Beach, SC, just across the street from the Meher Center where he grew up. He has one daughter.
Chris Ott in Myrtle Beach, SC
Fifteen contributions to contemporary philosophy:
A solution to the Mind-Body problem by isolating its underlying cause and remedying it with a process
A solution to the Socratic Paradox
Proof that God exists by showing there are a priori principles by which the evolution of perception had to have occurred, and hence why a single witness must necessarily exist, and how its denial is irrational
A solution to the skeptic's dilemma by proposing a form of positive skepticism that avoids the intrinsic self-contradition of negative skepticisim
An a priori method of citing necessary preconditions as a way to determine coherent process order
The first coherent explanation of why some cultures did not discover the wheel while others did
The evolution of perception theory - the most original serious theory since Plato
The problem of possibility - showing that mere probability is trivial
The intuitions that underlies logic - a solution to the question of how we know modus ponens
A clarification of what induction is - along with a solution to the traditional problem of induction pointed out by David Hume
An explanation of language and money - what they are and how they form
The first coherent reinterpretation of Meher Baba's Om Point as a vantage point - the psych-emergent Universe
The Process Order Fallacy - A renaming of John Dewey's 'Historical Fallacy' along with a fleshed out explanation of it and its implications
A new explanation for the rise of gender in evolution, inclusing its underlying cause and purpose
A new explanation for the rise of life - defined as movement and autonomy
A new explanation of primary and secondary qualities that accounts for the spectrum from subjectivity to objectivity in observation.
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