So, I'm reading along this morning in David Robson's book, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change the World, enjoying the "Faster, Stronger, Fitter" chapter, which is about athletic performance, not anything spiritual, and I come to a passage about how a bicycle racer benefitted from an injection of sugar water, which got me to thinking about how religious belief also is a placebo.
(I've boldfaced the concluding sentence that struck me most strongly.)
This new theory of exhaustion, one that rightly places the brain as controller of what the body can do, helps us to understand the influences of placebo treatments in sport. If we consider Virenque's amazing time trial in the 1997 Tour de France, the injection of the "magic potion" increased his perception of what he could achieve.
His brain calculated that it could devote more of the body's resources to the race without risking injury, allowing his muscles to work harder on the track. The fact that it was only sugar water didn't matter: because of its effects on the prediction machine, the injection still increased the amount of energy that Virenque was able to expend.
We may describe the substance as "inert," but in terms of its effects on performance, it was anything but. Virenque's belief and the sense of ritual accompanying the injection imbued the substance with power.
I only have direct experience of two religious systems, Catholicism (which I left behind as a child after First Communion) and Radha Soami Satsang Beas (an India-based faith headed up by a guru that I embraced for 35 years).
In my brief exposure to Catholicism, I learned that after you confess your sins to a priest -- I was so young, the only sin I could come up with was not going to church very often -- you're told how many Our Father and Hail Mary prayers to recite, and bingo, your sin has been absolved. At least that's my understanding.
Since I deeply doubt that prayers do anything for the person praying, given that God almost certainly doesn't exist, those prayers are a religious placebo. They make someone feel better without having any active ingredient in them.
With Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a new disciple is given Five Holy Names to repeat in an initiation ceremony. Those names are to be kept secret, though they're the same for all initiates. They're believed to be imbued with the guru's power, a big deal, since the guru is considered to be God in Human Form.
In 1970, when I was going to RSSB meetings in preparation for applying for initiation, I recall a man in the Palo Alto group (his name might be Milton Monasch) telling a story about the power of the Five Holy Names.
He said that he was in a business meeting that wasn't going very well. Some sort of contract negotiation was being discussed, as I recall. The man said that he got up from the table, walked over to a window, and started to repeat the Five Holy Names, which serve as a mantra.
As soon as he sat down again, the negotiation turned the way he wanted it to. Monasch, or whatever his name was, ascribed this to the Five Holy Names.
Well, obviously there's no way to prove that. It could have been that his getting up caused a pause in the negotiation, and this allowed the side he was dealing with to reconsider the wisdom of their current position.
That's much more likely than the RSSB guru (God in Human Form) controlling the minds of the people Monasch was working out a contract with, making them decide to take a position more advantageous for Monasch because he repeated the Five Holy Names.
This would be as crazy as God determining the outcome of a football game, even though players on both sides prayed for victory. Just really hard for me to believe that God intervenes in sporting events. Or in contract negotiations.
But people who believe in religious rituals feel a power within them, just as the Tour de France rider felt power in the sugar water he was given that improved his performance. Such is the power of placebos. It's all in the mind, but the mind is a powerful force.
I felt a need to add the parentheses in the title of this post, because I realize that I'm more interested in how the quantum realm works than most people are.
So if you read on, be warned that while I find this theory tantalizing, because it deals with the "measurement problem" in quantum mechanics in a creative fashion, you might find this to be the most deadly boring blog post in the history of humankind.
(Hey, if so, at least I've accomplished something rare.)
In the February 3, 2024 issue of New Scientist, or as folks in Great Britain prefer to say, 3 February 2024, there's an article by physicist Tom Rivlin, "Where Quantum Weirdness Hides." The subtitle:
Our world emerges from clouds of quantum possibilities, but where do the other outcomes go? Maybe they are hiding in the cracks of reality.
Well, that encouraged me to read the article, much of which was difficult for me to understand. So I'm going to focus on the parts of the piece that were most interesting and comprehensible to me. And I hope, to you. Here's how Rivlin describes the measurement mystery.
At a fundamental level, the world lives by the rules of quantum mechanics. The theory was first developed in the early 1900s to explain why things like light and matter sometimes behave as waves and sometimes particles. Then, in 1926, Erwin Schrödinger devised a way to treat them as both, in a mathematical term called a wave function.
Quantum theory describes the microscopic world with unprecedented accuracy. But its laws are strange: they allow a particle to exist in multiple places at once, for instance. We never see these odd effects in the classical, everyday world. So, what is happening?
When physicists considered this question over the years, they often thought about measurements. No matter how many places an electron was in before being detected, once it is measured, we only ever see it in one place. Somehow, the act of measurement snaps the wave-like cloud of possibilities into a point-like reality with a defined position.
This has been shown time and again in experiments. The process seems to be random and instantaneous, but physicists like me aren’t completely satisfied with that, since nothing else acts this way.
One approach to resolving the measurement problem, or mystery, is that when a measurement is made, consciousness somehow collapses the many possibilities in the wave function into a single actuality. New Age types love this conception, since they construe it as "we humans create reality."
That doesn't make sense, though. Following the big bang, there's no way any form of consciousness as we know it could have existed for a long time. Yet stars and galaxies formed in accord with the laws of physics, which are founded on quantum mechanics at the most elemental level.
And if a machine measures a quantum phenomenon, is this really undetermined until a conscious being is aware of the measurement? That doesn't make sense either.
Another popular way of dealing with the measurement problem is that actually there isn't any collapse of the wave function when a quantum entity is measured. Instead, all possibilities exist in a rapidly expanding, near infinite collection of branching realities.
This is called the Many Worlds hypothesis, in which we are only aware of a single outcome, while each of the other possibilities exist in other realms of reality. Such is clean and simple, but it seems highly unlikely (unless you're a professional physicist who likes the elegance of the hypothesis).
Then there's the approach put forward by Rivlin and his colleagues. He observes:
To make things more complicated, it has been clear since experiments in the 1970s that measurements don’t just happen on lab benches. Even stray air molecules hitting electrons can “measure” them and destroy their quantumness.
We call this process decoherence, and it explains why we don’t see quantum effects at everyday scales: once something gets big enough, there are too many other objects flying around that can “measure” it and upset its delicate quantum properties. But the same question still applies: how precisely does this process happen?
Naturally Rivlin is going to answer his own question. I like his approach. It doesn't elevate consciousness into some sort of quantum measurement Must Have, nor does it posit near-infinities of Many Worlds that come into being every time a measurement occurs.
His theory is called MEH: the measurement equilibration hypothesis. As Rivlin says elsewhere in the article, "the mathematics behind this process is complicated." Thankfully, when described in words, MEH is quite understandable.
MEH describes measurement as a process where a quantum system interacts with a measuring device. A “device” could be anything that interacts with the quantum object, not just what we would typically think of as a measuring device.
This spreads information into the device, until an equilibrium of information is reached between the system and the device. The bigger the device, the more places there are for the quantum information to hide, making it harder to get that information back – but never impossible.
How would this work in practice? Let’s take the simple example of a particle in a cloud of many different locations at once. Before a detector measures that particle’s position, there is information about all of the potential places it could have been detected.
When the detector comes into contact with the particle, these pieces of information mix into the particles of the detector. We think this spreading process somehow “broadcasts” information from the system, making the information about its classical position available to read but its “two-places-at-once” information harder to spot.
Rivlin discusses some philosophical implications of the theory.
So far, we have remained agnostic about what this idea means for any of the philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics. But our ideas do brush up against these concepts. For instance, MEH explains what happens to all the measurement outcomes you don’t see – the other “worlds” of the many-worlds idea.
They are all still here in our world; we just can’t control the quantum system finely enough to observe them. “If we could grab hold of every single electron and control them in whatever manner we wanted, we wouldn’t be asking ourselves why the particle went left or right,” says Lock. “The idea of measurement becomes moot.”
This would remove much of the supposed mystique from wave function collapse, since measurement only seems mysterious when we overlook just how difficult it is in practice. As Lock puts it, it is about asking: “How do I, an inaccurate, ape-sized lump-thing, try to access something as finely detailed as the spin of an electron?”
It would also rule out the idea that collapse is a physical process that deletes information, and that there is some harsh transition between classical and quantum realities. “Nobody forces you to make the classical world different from the quantum one,” says Schmiedmayer. “All you can say is that, in the classical world, the complexity is too big. I just can’t see the quantum part.”
Well, if you've read this blog post this far, to the end, at the least you've got some ideas to share next time you're at a party and someone you really don't want to talk to tries to engage you in conversation. Tell them, "I'm so glad you're here; I've been wanting to discuss a new theory of how quantum measurements occur."
(This should get rid of them almost right away. Unless they turn out to be a physicist. Then you have a problem.)
Back in 2020 was when my sciatica pain started. I don't know why. Often health problems appear mysteriously. Which would be fine if they disappeared just as mysteriously.
But in my case, the extreme pain I had early on, where I'd shed tears uncontrollably while walking the dog or mowing the lawn if I was having an especially bad day, eventually abated. Maybe from time. Maybe from the physical therapy exercises I was given. Who knows?
For the next three years, 2021-23, my right leg always had some discomfort. It was manageable, though. I didn't need pain relievers. I was able to do whatever I wanted, albeit with some pain if it involved standing or moving for more than a few minutes.
Then things changed last December. The locus of the pain shifted from my leg to my leg plus my hip area and part of my butt. It also got more intense. So my primary care provider referred me for more physical therapy.
That helped for a while. Until it didn't. Last Saturday I finally got a lumbar MRI after I met the criteria for my MedAdvantage insurance: got an X-ray, tried physical therapy, pain won't go away with medication or other means.
Now I'm in an awkward waiting period. The MRI result, which had a lot of "extreme" words in the report (age-related spinal degeneration, basically), opened the door to me getting referrals to two Pain and Spine clinics here in Salem, Oregon.
They likely will be able to help me. Cortisone injections, maybe. Surgery as a last resort. I'm sure they have other options that are better than what I'd doing now. That's mainly alternating Tylenol and Advil every four hours throughout the day, exercising, and simply dealing with the pain as best I can.
This morning it was excruciating, because sleeping causes my nerves and muscles to tighten up, making it extremely difficult to get out of bed when I have to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, or upon waking up in the morning.
That gets me to the philosophical part of this blog post.
I've tried thinking positively, visualizing myself as I'm getting ready for bed with manageable pain in the morning. That's better than thinking gloomingly, which creates more tension in me, something I don't need.
I've tried repeating a mantra, the Buddhist Namu Amida Butsu being a favorite. This also helps, yet it seems artificial to me, being a distraction or barrier from what my mind would be doing absent the mantra.
Then there's simply being in the present moment. That's my go-to approach when the pain is so great, my attention narrows to doing Just One Thing. That's how I picture the situation: Just One Thing, followed by Just One Thing, followed by Just One Thing.
Last night I was sleeping soundly until I awoke around 5 am. I groggily realized that I didn't feel any pain. My semi-awake brain thought, "Great, your sciatica is better; you won't have much of a problem getting up to go to the bathroom."
Until I moved. A little. Which hurt a lot. So much so, I cried out in pain. Not enough to wake my wife, thankfully, who sleeps in another part of our house. That cry was repeated several more times as I struggled to move my right leg, which was locked in an excruciating sciatica death grip.
All I could do was Just One Thing. Eventually I was able to swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand up. Just One Thing. Then I got a crutch that I keep next to the bed for nights when it's extremely painful to walk into the bathroom. Just One Thing. I shuffled along, one crutch-assisted step at a time. Just One Thing.
I couldn't handle the entire situation, which seemed like a nightmare if I let my mind drift in that direction. However, I could do Just One Thing, followed by the next Just One Thing. It took quite a while, but eventually I was able to get back into bed and fall asleep again. Just One Thing.
There's a lesson here. Maybe just for me. Maybe for others also.
When things are going well, or at least not too badly, it's easy to believe that we've got life figured out. Our coping mechanisms work for us. Existence is pleasant enough, and we can handle the rough spots that pop up.
But when we're pushed to a limit, beyond what we're used to handling, that's when we might realize the limitation of our usual manner of going about things. Such was the case for me, for sure.
When excruciating sciatica pain comes over me, it washes away my customary positivity, my mantras, my meditation, my life lessons, my knowledge -- just about everything. What's left isn't really me. At least, not the me I ordinarily consider myself to be.
What's there is what my body is doing and feeling. What's there is my consciousness, my awareness engaged in Just One Thing. Taking a step. Swallowing a pill. Going to the bathroom. Washing my hands. Always, Just One Thing.
And that, actually, is what's happening every moment of every day whether I'm feeling such pain. I'm always doing Just One Thing. I just don't realize it, because my attention can flow in many different directions. Intense pain narrows that focus. Pain screams, "Only me, only me!"
I can't help but obey. Yet in the midst of that pain, I can still do Just One Thing in addition to feeling the pain. That's my reality at that moment. As I said, maybe at every moment, if I could just realize it.
A passage in the Preface of Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp, says what I feel in painful moments.
Liberation is finding freedom in limitation and perfection in imperfection. It is the freedom to be exactly as we are. But what are we? What is real Here/Now? What is life all about? Who is reading these words?
Is reading these words an individual choice, or is it the only possible activity of the whole universe at this moment, and is there a difference?
Having devoted myself to watching the lengthy Oscars show this evening, which sucked up much of my time, I'm going to take a shortcut by revisiting a theme introduced in a previous blog post about Brian Klaas' book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.
As I recall saying before, what Klaas says is very much in line with Buddhist notions of emptiness and interdependence. In that worldview, entities, including us, are empty of inherent existence because nothing stands alone, a part unaffected by other parts of the cosmos.
Yet this isn't how most people view themselves. I recall the uproar in this country when Hillary Clinton said "It takes a village to raise a child." Many, especially conservatives, were outraged. Hey, they said, parents are totally capable of raising a child; that's their responsibility.
Not true. Children are affected by all kinds of other influences: teachers, other children, neighbors, shopkeepers, relatives, television programs, books, pets, toys -- the list goes on and on. And each of us is an influence on people we both know, and don't know.
Such is the way of the world: a web of relationships. There are various ways to look upon this fact.
On the positive side, none of us leads a solitary existence, as we're an integral aspect of something much greater than us. On the negative side, none of us can fully control what happens to us, as we're an integral aspect of something much greater than us.
Klaas writes:
However, no single locust can direct the swarm. An insect can't decide to move the swarm east or west because the outcome of any individual movement is unpredictable. As Scott Page rightly points out, each individual controls almost nothing, but influences almost everything. The same is true of us.
Swarms and sandpits are useful analogies that help us understand why we're so often lulled into a false sense of security. We delude ourselves into believing we're in control, until we are, yet again, thwacked by a devastating crisis, such as a financial crash, a disruptive new technology, a terrorist attack, or a pandemic.
But rather than understanding those inevitable avalanches as the normal functioning of the system -- a sandpile existence working exactly as it's designed -- we mistakenly think of them as "shocks."
...Modern society is a complex system, seemingly stable, teetering on the edge of chaos -- until everything falls apart due to a small change, from the accidental to the infinitesimal.
...Over the past several chapters, we've seen how an intertwined world means that everything matters, as little ripples reshape lives and upend societies. These ripples give rise to a world that is far more random and accidental than we tend to believe, undercutting the mantra that "everything happens for a reason."
...It all leads to a single, seemingly unsettling conclusion: we live in a world that is far more unstable and uncertain than we'd like to imagine.
Since I'm only about a third of the through Fluke, I'm interested in seeing what lessons Klaas draws about how we can best handle this inherent instability and uncertainty. We all need someone or something to lean on when times are difficult.
For some people, this is religion. For others, this is family and friends. For others, a cause deserving of devotion. There are many ways of seeking firm ground on which to stand. But at some point, it is virtually inevitable that personal or societal earthquakes will shake our foundations.
Knowing that this is coming seemingly helps us prepare for the inevitable ripples that Klaas speaks of in the quotation above. Flowing with them sometimes is the best we can do.
During the 35 years that I was a member of an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), one of the things that I liked most about that experience was how I felt like I was part of a giant family.
A family not in the usual sense, but in the sense of a group of people who had much in common, who shared a similar view of reality, who trusted each other, who helped each other, who looked up to a father figure -- the RSSB guru, which made us sort of like brothers and sisters.
All that felt good at the time. In retrospect, though, there were some downsides.
If someone strayed from the RSSB tenets, such as drinking a glass of wine at a party, there would be gossipy talk about this "sin" behind the person's back. Likewise, questioning the validity of the RSSB teachings was frowned upon. That was supposed to happen before someone was initiated into the RSSB fold, not afterward, as initiation was viewed as an unbreakable bond between the guru and disciple.
(Since reincarnation was assumed, the guru supposedly took it upon himself to shepherd the disciple back to God in a maximum of four lifetimes, less if the disciple was cooperative.)
So the flip side of a communal sense of belonging was an intolerance of thinking and behavior that deviated from the RSSB norm. This is a familiar characteristic of groups, since there has to be some fairly firm boundaries between what the group is and isn't, or the "group" fails to live up to its name, being merely a collection of individuals.
I got to pondering this while reading a chapter in David Robson's book, The Expectation Effect, called "The Origins of Mass Hysteria."
The chapter starts off with a description of how in May 2006 "Portugal was beset by mysterious outbreaks of illness." Only in teenagers, who experienced dizziness, breathing difficulties, and skin rashes. Three hundred students across the country were affected within a few days. No cause could be found, until:
Inquiries eventually revealed that a popular teen soap, Morangos com Acucar (Strawberries with sugar), was to blame. In the days before the first reported cases, the main characters on the show had been infected by a life-threatening virus that had led to very similar symptoms.
Somehow the "virus" had jumped from the small screen to a handful of viewers, creating real physical symptoms -- despite the fact that the illness in the program was totally fictional. These children had then passed it on to their classmates, leading the cases to multiply. Portuguese adults were unlikely to have been dedicated viewers of the melodrama, so they were less likely to develop the disease.
Scientists call this kind of outbreak, with no physical vector, a "mass psychogenic illness." (Whereas "psychosomatic" can refer to our mental state exacerbating existing symptoms, "psychogenic" means that the origin is purely psychological.)
Robson goes on to explain that "mirror neurons" in the brain enable us humans to internalize the physical and mental states of other people. If we see someone smiling, we feel happier. If we see someone frowning, we feel sadder. This doesn't have to happen consciously.
Without our even noticing it, the presence of another person can therefore change our body as well as our mind. And these bodily effects apparently have a purpose -- they increase our understanding of what the other person is feeling.
Of course, most religious groups use rituals to foster a strong sense of commonality and shared purpose. When I went to India in 1977 to see my guru, Charan Singh, in person for the first (and only) time, it didn't take long into my two-week stay for me to feel like I was part of a community of kindred spirits.
When we ate in the dining hall, we all had much in common. When we performed volunteer work (seva), such as carrying sand on our heads in baskets to fill in ravines for an expansion of the spiritual community, we felt like members of a family, not strangers. When many thousands of people would gather for a discourse by the guru, all eyes were focused on him, leading to a shared experience.
All this felt magical. Those two weeks I spent in India were like none I'd experienced before, or since. The atmosphere of the Dera (how the spiritual community was called) seemed to be permeated by the guru's love and tenderness. So how could this be likened to a mass hysteria event?
Well, because as soon as I arrived at the Dera, I was influenced by everybody I came into contact with, just as each visitor was. What they were feeling, I soon felt. What they were thinking, I soon thought. Not completely, obviously, since we still had our unique minds and inclinations.
But since we'd all embraced the RSSB teachings, or we wouldn't have journeyed in India to spend time with the guru, there was a groupthink foundation that only became stronger under the influence of the ritualistic atmosphere of the Dera. It would have been very difficult to resist, not that I wanted to.
I'll end with a passage from Robson's book that illustrates the power of shared feelings. Fascinating stuff that's hard to believe, but it seems to be true.
As an illustration of how far someone's feelings can spread, imagine that you became friends with someone with an astonishingly positive attitude, who is incredibly satisfied with her life. You might feel a bit glad for her, but could her joy really bring lasting happiness to your life, too?
According to one detailed longitudinal survey -- the Framingham Heart Study -- the answer is yes. Because of your regular interactions with her, you would be 15 percent more likely to achieve a high score on the survey's measure of life satisfaction -- despite no direct change in your immediate circumstances.
How about your friend's friend? The same study found that their happiness will be passed on to your friend, who passes it on to you, increasing your chances of happiness by about 10 percent in the coming months. Your current satisfaction with life is even influenced by a friend of a friend of a friend, who can increase your chance of happiness by about 6 percent.
These are people you almost certainly have never even met, and you probably don't even know of their existence, but they are nevertheless influencing your well-being through a chain of interactions.
After writing the title of this post, I just had a doubt about my use of the word "amazing."
It made sense when I wrote Placebos point to the amazing link between body and mind. But as soon as I'd typed those words, my mind said, in effect, "Hey, dude, is it really so amazing that one part of the body affects another part of the body?"
To which I replied to myself, "No, it isn't."
So why are placebos looked upon as an indication of the surprising connection between what the human mind does and what the human body does? It must be because almost everybody views their mind as something ethereal, while the body is thoroughly physical.
This can't be true, of course, since the mind is the brain in action, and the brain is thoroughly physical.
It's just that thoughts and emotions appear to be like wispy clouds floating in a sky of immaterial consciousness, while the goings-on of the body are made of crude blood, bone, nerves, flesh, and such. That this disconnect between mind and body is illusory is the subject of a book I bought after reading an article by the author regarding placebos in New Scientist.
I'm enjoying The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World, by David Robson. It's a well-written, detailed examination of the placebo effect and methods that we can use to harness it to improve our life.
In the initial chapters, Robson focuses on the evidence for the placebo effect, emphasizing that the more we know about it -- which is why he wrote the book -- the more likely it is that we can use placebos in a positive fashion to help cure what ails us either mentally or physically.
So he repeatedly stresses how clear the evidence is for a strong mind-body connection. For example:
As a result of this continued skepticism, scientific understanding of the placebo effect has taken a long time to blossom, but we now know that positive expectations can bring much more than emotional comfort, producing real relief for many physical conditions, including asthma, Parkinson's, heart disease, and chronic pain.
Even more astoundingly, the cure often produces the same biological changes as the actual drugs prescribed to treat these ailments. The mind-body connection is real and potentially powerful.
...In an amazingly comprehensive way, the brain, working as a prediction machine, updates its simulations and coordinates the body's responses using any cue that might hone its expectations of recovery. There is now no doubt that expectations can -- and do -- shape our physical reality.
Here's some good news. Even if someone knows that a placebo has been given to them, it can still be effective.
The idea that the word "placebo" can itself evoke a placebo response may sound absurd. Since the eighteenth century, the whole concept of the placebo effect has centered on the premise that people must believe they are receiving a "real" treatment for there to be any foreseeable benefit.
[Thomas] Jefferson wrote that the deception was a "pious fraud" because it was completely unavoidable. Beecher himself said that "it does not matter in the least what the placebo is made of or how much is used so long as it is not detected as a placebo by the subject."
Yet various groundbreaking studies have shown that a large number of people do respond to a placebo even when they are fully aware that they are receiving an inert pill.
According to Bennett's hypothesis, this may be most common in regions where the placebo effect is already well known, but there is now plenty of evidence that "open-label placebos" can be equally potent elsewhere, provided scientists give participants a clear explanation of the brain as a prediction machine with the power to influence the body's responses.
This provides a fresh perspective on the whole idea of faith as an essential aspect of religion, and spiritual practice in general, including meditation.
Usually it's assumed that unless someone has a strong degree of faith that the tenets of a religion are true, or that the guru to whom they've sworn allegiance genuinely does have mystical powers, or that their meditation system is a proven means of achieving an altered state of consciousness, then embracing that religion, guru, or type of meditation isn't going to be productive.
But since placebo-related research shows that it is the expectation of benefit that leads to positive changes, it doesn't matter so much whether someone believes that their spiritual prescription is a sugar pill or an active substance.
If you think it can help you, it probably will.
For several years I've been a fan of the Buddhist mantra/phrase, Namu Amida Butsu. ("I take refuge in Amida Buddha.) I repeat it frequently, even though I don't believe in the supernatural aspects of Buddhism, which includes the Pure Land version of Buddhism that interprets Namu Amida Butsu in a much more flowery and esoteric way than I do.
I like how the words sound. I like how I'm saying something that other people also say. I like how it reminds me of central tenets of Buddhism: impermanence, emptiness, no-self. If I'm worried or distressed, repeating Namu Amida Butsu calms my mind.
It's my personal placebo. No active ingredients. Just an expectation that if I say those words, I'll get some benefit from the repetition. Usually I do. My mind is producing the benefit, not the Buddha or the words.
Most of us claim to want to know the truth. I sure do. But there's reason to wonder the extent to which this is -- I have to say the word -- true.
A memory comes to mind.
As a child, most summers my mother would take me from our home in California to see relatives back in Massachusetts, where I was born and my mother grew up. Once I remember my uncle (mother's brother) greeting her with, "My god, Carolyn, you've gained so much weight!"
That shocked me. Not because it wasn't true, because it was. Because that wasn't the sort of thing people would say to someone they hadn't seen for a long time.
We all shade the truth for one reason or another. The truth can be harsh. It can be painful. It can be unwelcome. Every husband learns that the best answer to your wife asking "Do you think this dress makes me look fat?" is an emphatic "No, absolutely not."
In general, though, I've figured that truth is a positive thing. I still feel that way, but the more I read about modern neuroscience, the more I understand why one of my first posts on this blog, "Just have faith," was a bit off-base.
Back in 2004, I wrote:
Here's how to tell the difference between true faith and false faith: Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a bare windowless room. Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, but can be opened with a turn of the doorknob. The doors are marked with signs that describe what awaits on the other side: (A) Reality, (B) Belief
After you open a door, you have to walk through it. The door then will shut and you never will be able to leave the place you have entered. Choose Reality and you will know things as they really are, from top to bottom of the cosmos. You will know whether or not God exists and, if so, the nature of this ultimate divinity. You will know whether death is the final end of your existence or if it is the beginning of another form of life. You will know whether there is a meaning to the universe beyond what human beings ascribe to it.
Or, choose Belief and you will know only what lies within the confines of your current suppositions about the nature of the cosmos. For the rest of your life you will be confident that what you believe to be true, really is. Any evidence to the contrary will not make an impact on your mind. You will remain doubt-free, faithful to the beliefs you now hold about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.
Which door would you choose to walk through?
Before answering, consider carefully the potential ramifications of your choice. Reality is an unknown, a mystery. It could be frightening or fabulous, painful or pleasurable, warmly loving or coldly uncaring. Do you want to embrace absolutely real reality? Or would you rather hold on to your beliefs about what is real?
Someone with the type of faith extolled by the Church of the Churchless would unhesitatingly choose Door A and boldly stride into Reality. For their faith is not in anything particular, but is a faith that truth can be known, should be known, and, indeed, must be known.
Nice sentiment. However, in his book, Fluke, Brian Klaas says this in a chapter called "Why our brains distort reality."
Imagine two creatures: we might call them the Truth Creature and the Shortcut Creature. The Truth Creature sees everything exactly as it is...Nothing goes unnoticed.
...By contrast, the Shortcut Creature can't see any of that detail, but instead only perceives and processes that which is most useful to it. All else is either ignored or is invisible to that creature's perceptions. As a result, the Shortcut Creature cannot sense most of reality.
Which creature would you rather be?
We are tempted to side with the truth. But that would be a fatal mistake. Shortcut Creatures always win. Thankfully, that's exactly what we are -- a species that has evolved to perceive reality in a stripped-down, simplified form, so we can make sense of it to survive.
That conjecture has been validated by something called the Fitness Beats Truth theorem, an idea proposed and tested by mathematicians and cognitive scientists -- and popularized by Donald D. Hoffman at the University of California, Irvine.
What they've discovered inverts our commonplace ideas about how the world works.
Most of us assume that truth is, by definition, useful. But consider it a bit more carefully, and it becomes clear that's not the case. We do not see reality, but rather a "manifest image" of it, a useful illusion that helps us navigate the world.
...The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker put it like this: "We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness."
...Walking through the world is an information explosion. We couldn't possibly pay attention to everything. If we did, it would overload us, blinding us to what's important. To cope, our brain has a laser-like focus on detecting helpful patterns and potentially threatening abnormalities, while discarding that which is less useful.
This makes sense. But since I've only read a bit less than a third of Fluke, I'm pretty sure that Klaas will be talking about how what was useful for most of the time us Homo sapiens have been around may be quite different from what is useful now, in the 21st century.
This is how Klass ends the "Why Our Brains Distort Reality" chapter. It comes after a discussion of how male jewel beetles search for the distinctive coloring, larger size, and dimpled shell pattern of the female. That worked well until an Australian beer company, "by complete chance, created a virtual replica of a female jewel beetle's traits in its bottle design."
As you might be able to guess, the male beetles began trying to mate with discarded bottles, not exactly an evolutionary plus. Klass goes on to say:
These mismatches from broken shortcuts are known as evolutionary traps. They arise when the old ways of survival become incompatible with a newer reality. Unfortunately, as we'll see, humans trying to navigate the unimaginable complexity of modern society are now facing an evolutionary trap of our own because our minds didn't evolve to cope with a hyperconnected world that relentlessly converges toward a knife's edge, in which one tiny fluke can change everything in an instant. The Shortcut Creature doesn't do quite so well when navigating a new, more complex world.
Us members of Homo sapiens like to consider that we're the peak of the evolutionary mountain. We're proud of our big brains, our unique ability to use language and abstract thought, our technological accomplishments, and, yes, our supposed evolved morality.
Humanity has indeed made a lot of progress on the moral front. Slavery is condemned. So is racism. Women have equal rights in many, if not most countries. In democracies, everyone has an equal vote. Religious heresy doesn't lead to being burned at the stake.
And yet, life still is not valued as much as it should be. There are many examples of this, but what has captured my mind recently, and not in a positive way, is the horrific war between Israel and Hamas.
I readily agree with anyone who argues that war is always hellish, and this conflict is just more of the same. Still, there's something about the Israel-Hamas war that is especially disturbing to me. One reason is that the combatants are divided neatly by religion: Jews versus Muslims.
Supposedly religiosity makes us better people. I don't believe that. It's just a common assumption. Tonight I watched an episode of Bill Maher's HBO show. He interviewed Dr. Phil, who, as Maher said, is so well known as a television psychologist (I think that's what he is) he only has one name.
Dr. Phil argued that faith and family are key to a well-functioning society. Maher, being a confirmed childless bachelor and an atheist, disagreed with that assumption. So do I. Israel and Hamas are overflowing with faith and family. Yet they're engaged in a nasty war with each other.
Neither side is covering itself with moral glory. Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 of last year in a brutal terrorist fashion, killing 1,200 people. In response, Israel has invaded Gaza, the home base of Hamas, killing about 30,000 people there, about 70% of whom are estimated to be women and children.
I wrote about this yesterday in a post on my Salem Political Snark blog: "Israel is killing lots of innocent people in Gaza. Biden is letting this happen." Here's how it started.
I'm fed up. I'm angry. I'm outraged.
More than 30,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel. The real number is almost certainly higher, since thousands are buried under rubble.
Note that I said "people."
That's who they are, people just like you and me. Yes, they're mostly Palestinians. Yes, many are Hamas fighters. But 70% of the dead people in Gaza are estimated to be women and children.
How could this be? Because Israel has been bombing Gaza relentlessly with little concern for deaths of innocent people.
It's Old Testament warfare. Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel. So Israel feels justified in killing thirty times as many people in Gaza, because, you know. the life of an Israeli is so much more valuable than the life of a Palestinian. At least, that's how Israel has been behaving.
On cable news, if I have to hear one more spokesperson for the Israeli military or government blab on about how, yes, a two thousand pound bomb was dropped in Gaza that killed dozens of innocent people along with a few Hamas fighters, and that's okay because Hamas started the war and hides among civilians, my brain is going to explode with more pent up rage at Israel than it already is filled with.
That's exactly what I heard today on CNN. The CNN anchor kept asking the Israeli why they didn't work harder at minimizing civilian deaths, since so many women and children have been killed in Gaza. He never answered. Because Israel's extreme right-wing government feels entitled.
Entitled to destroy almost all of the buildings and homes in Gaza. Entitled to treat all Palestinians as if they are Hamas fighters, which obviously they're not. Entitled to control Gaza after the war in defiance of international law. Entitled to reject a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict, since Israel wants to permanently occupy the territory it has claimed since the 1967 war, also in defiance of international law.
People are starving in Gaza. People are being operated on with no anesthesia. People lack a safe place to shelter, given that Israel keeps on bombing locations that Gaza residents were told to relocate to.
There's plenty of food, medical supplies, water, generators, water purification equipment, and other things needed by people in Gaza just a few miles away in Egypt and elsewhere But Israel won't let most of those supplies in, claiming that they might be used by Hamas.
Well, so what? This is an imperfect world. To save lives of innocent people in Gaza, much more humanitarian aid needs to be entering the country. If a small amount goes to Hamas, so be it. That's the price of compassion toward the afflicted: sometimes unworthy people benefit from it.
What's baffling is that people in Israel and Gaza mourn the death of a loved one equally. I don't mean the customs they follow, but the pain in their heart when life is taken too soon, too cruelly, too unnecessarily.
Life is precious to them. Individually, at least. If a Palestinian and an Israeli were both in London, and one had a heart attack and collapsed on the sidewalk, I have no doubt that either would eagerly jump to help the other.
Yet on a collective level, many Palestinians and Israelis are uncaring about what befalls people on the other side of the war. I've seen reports that Palestinians were dancing with joy after the October 7 attack by Hamas, and that Israelis have been partying at the Gaza border, celebrating how little humanitarian aid is making its way into Gaza while people suffer there.
Sure, it could be argued that other species do much the same thing.
I've watched nature shows on television where a male lion is tenderhearted toward its own offspring. However, if the cubs are the offspring of a different father, because the lioness strayed and had sex with a male from a different group of lions, the male lion will kill them.
I just don't find this very reassuring. It's one thing to act from instinct, as other species do. But we humans supposedly have the capacity to rise above our baser impulses and pursue a higher course of action.
War brings out the worst in us. It certainly is justified at times. Yet only as a last resort, and then it should be conducted with the greatest possible respect for civilian lives. Hamas started this war. Israel, though, is showing that respect for the lives of innocent people is lacking on both sides.
Hopefully one day war will become a distant memory, and humanity will truly value life. All lives.
Having written a book about karma (specifically, the karmic rationale for vegetarianism) called "Life is Fair," I'm well acquainted with the idea that everything happens for a reason.
For karma, when stripped of its supernatural notions of reincarnation and such, basically is just a law of cause and effect. You do this, you get that. Pretty damn simple. What complicates things is that while the effects are clear, in our life or the world at large, the causes are generally hidden to a large extent.
In Eastern philosophy this may be due to actions in previous lives bearing fruit in a present life. You wronged someone in the sixteenth century. Now that person is reborn, as are you, and does something nasty to you.
I no longer believe in that religious view of karma. However, I'm still very much a believer in cause and effect, or determinism, since it seems clear that this is how the world works.
That's one reason why I'm enjoying Fluke by Brian Klaas, so much, a book I first wrote about here. Though the subtitle, "Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters," implies that life isn't deterministic, actually chance and chaos involve causes and effects as everything else does.
But when the cause of something is unknown, we call it "random." Actually, randomness is another word for our ignorance. Klaas explains this in a footnote:
When I mention "random" events, I always mean apparently random -- events that seem random to us due to our ignorance. A dice roll produces an unpredictable outcome that appears random to us, but it isn't random -- each roll of the dice is a deterministic event that follows the laws of physics.
Apparently random events still have definite causes, though they're not part of some larger hidden purpose. (As far as modern science can tell, the only phenomena in the universe that may be genuinely random are quantum effects at the atomic and subatomic levels.)
In this passage Klaas sounds a lot like Robert Sapolsky in his book, Determined, which argues persuasively that free will is an illusion. Both men say that praise and blame aren't really justified. Sapolsky looks at this from the perspective of determinism; Klaas, from the perspective of chance and randomness.
Yet, if luck plays such an important role in success, that should affect how we think about fortune and misfortune. If you believe you live in a meritocratic world, in which success is doled out to the most talented individuals rather than partly by accident or chance, then it makes sense to claim full credit for each success and blame yourself for every defeat.
But if you accept that apparent randomness and accidents drive significant swaths of change in our lives -- and they do -- then that will change your outlook on life.
When you lose at roulette, you don't kick yourself for being a useless failure. Instead, you accept the arbitrary outcome and move on. Recognizing that often meaningless, accidental outcomes emerge from an intertwined, complex world is empowering and liberating. We should all take a bit less credit for our triumphs and a bit less credit for our failures.
Here Klaas speaks our tendency to ascribe more meaning to events than is justified. Again, when he says that some things just happen, this doesn't mean that they pop out of nowhere. Rather, they happen without an apparent reason, because the cause(s) are hidden from us. Since this ignorance can be uncomfortable, we humans have a strong desire to make up spurious reasons for something happening.
We're particularly prone to inventing and clinging to false explanations in the face of seemingly random misfortune. We can't easily accept randomness as an explanation for why we get cancer or end up in a car accident. Bad news requires something behind it that makes sense. It's impossible to move on from misfortune without figuring out the real reason for your suffering.
It becomes a quest for an elusive meaning in what may have been a meaningless calamity. "Everything happens for a reason" is a coping mechanism most often heard when jobs are lost, when we're blindsided by breakups, or when people die.
While it can help to make sense out of the senseless, comforted by the myth of a neat, ordered plan for everything, the saying isn't true. It's a useful, reassuring fiction. Some things -- even important and maddening and horrific things -- just happen. That's the inevitable result of an interconnected chaotic world.
Accidents, mistakes, and above all, arbitrary neutral changes create species, shape societies, and divert our lives.
I'd vowed not to buy any more books from Amazon until I'd finished reading the ones I'd already started. But then a review in New Scientist changed my mind. Which I'm glad it did.
Because Fluke, by Brian Klaas, is a highly provocative book about how chance and chaos govern life to a much greater extent than we normally consider -- since most of us consider that we're able to steer our way through the twists and turns of life through reason, intuition, and our own good sense when it comes to decisions.
I've only read the Introduction and the first chapter, which has a great title: "Changing Anything Changes Everything."
However, I can already tell that I'm going to hugely enjoy the book. I say this because Klaas appears to be firmly in the same sort of worldview that most appeals to me.
Like Robert Sapolsky, who wrote Determined, a book about the illusion of free will that I've blogged about recently, Klaas (a professor of global politics at University College, London) views life as a tapestry made up of countless interrelated threads.
The tapestry of of life is woven with a magical sort of thread, one that grows longer the more you unspool it. Every present moment is created with seemingly unrelated strands that stretch far into the distant past. Whenever you tug on one thread, you'll always meet unexpected resistance because each is connected to every other part of the tapestry. The truth is, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his letter from a Birmingham jail, "We are caught in an escapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."
This is at odds with how life usually is simplistically viewed. We expect that big effects have big causes, often a single cause. What caused World War II? How did Covid-19 become a pandemic? Why did you marry your spouse? What made you choose your religion, or lack thereof?
Confronted with questions like these, typically we come up with an overconfident answer, because uncertainty is distressing while certainty gives us a pleasant feeling of knowingness. Or, we recognize that chance events have a large impact, but we view them as an exception to the rule, not the rule itself.
These passages provide an overview of Klass' central theme.
Few have had quite so dramatic an escape as Motoo Kimora narrowly avoiding death by atomic bomb. But everyone can pinpoint a moment that, in hindsight, was a fluke that changed his or her life. Perhaps it was a more traditional pivot, such as a chance encounter with your future spouse, or taking a class in high school that diverted your career plans to a new passion.
Or maybe it was a near miss, such as a swerve of the steering wheel that kept you alive, or having a generous offer rejected on a house or an apartment only to find something far better that you now call home. These moments stand out because they're obviously consequential. We contemplate what could have been.
It's clear there was an alternative path. But for one small change, spouses never meet, passions remain undiscovered, near misses become fatal hits.
But these seem to be the outliers, the moments we marvel at precisely because they are so rare and unusual. We feel as though we construct our lives not with chance, but with the building blocks of large, hopefully wise, choices -- choices that we feel we, alone control. We may seek advice for which path to choose, but we would not seek advice for that which we can't control.
...Watch just about any inspirational TED Talk or read just about any self-help book, and you will be told that you, alone, are the solution that you seek. These messages are popular because most of us view our lives through an individualistic prism. Our life stories are not crowdsourced. Our major decisions define our path, which means we control our path. To understand that path, worship at the Altar of Me.
Every so often, though, we see a fleeting, perplexing glimpse of our path colliding with someone else's in a way that seems out of our control. We call those moments luck, or coincidence, or fate. But we classify them as aberrations.
When the world functions "normally," life seems to have a predictable, well-ordered regularity, a regularity that we convince ourselves we can mostly direct, masters of our own destinies. Then, whenever we're confronted by strange coincidences or chance diversions that seem to challenge that confident certainty, we shrug at the brief respite from normality and move on, preparing ourselves to make the next big call that shapes our future.
It's a style of thinking so ubiquitous and commonplace that it's uncontested. That's just how the world works.
There's just one problem: it's a lie. It's the lie that defines our times. We might call it the delusion of individualism. We cling to this delusion, the way a man overboard clings to floating debris. But every so often, a story comes along that makes clear how absurd it is to think of ourselves as separate or separable from everyone and everything else.
The story is about a tourist in Greece who was swept out to sea. A search was conducted, but it came up empty. Eighteen hours later the tourist was found. Alive. Clinging to a soccer ball that he'd seen floating in the distance and managed to reach with his last reserves of strength. The ball had been lost ten days earlier by some boys playing on the beach. Without that accidental kick, the tourist would have died.
This emphasis on interrelationships and the illusion of individuality has a strong Buddhist flavor. Indeed, Klaas says that Western philosophies are much more self-centered than Eastern philosophies, which tend to be other-centered. He advises that the Eastern view of reality is to be embraced, not shunned.
At first, an intertwined world seems terrifying. Nobody wants to be told they're not in control, or that a stranger's decision half a world away, or a long-forgotten decision decades in the past, could kill us or cause our economy to collapse into a crippling recession.
...The reality, for better and for worse, isn't terrifying, but wondrous, giving every moment of life potentially hidden meaning. It flips the individualistic worldview on its head. Rather than being in control of our individual destinies when we make big decisions, even our smallest decisions matter, forever altering the world.
...It's time to adjust our lenses of how we see ourselves within the world. Our chaotic, intertwined existence reveals a potent, astonishing fact:
We control nothing, but influence everything.