Church of the Churchless

We can't grasp reality as it is, only as we know it

My new favorite book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, had such a provocative title, as soon as I saw it recommended in The New Yorker I knew that I'd have to buy it.

Wow. It's a work of literary genius, based on my reading of the first part of it. The author, William Egginton, is a humanities professor, but he clearly has an excellent grasp of modern science also. The front cover has a one-sentence summary of what the book is about.

A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe -- the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind -- and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world.

I immediately liked Egginton's approach when I read this in the introduction.

For all their profound differences, Jorge Luis Borges, Immanuel Kant, and Werner Heisenberg shared an uncommon immunity to the temptation to think they knew God's secret plan. Each in his own way resisted the urge to project essential aspects of how human beings experience reality onto reality itself, independent of how we know it.

Indeed, Heisenberg's disruption of classical physics had its roots in an iconoclastic countercurrent to a powerful human tendency to conjure the ultimate nature of reality in our imagination, and then go out and discover it. There is indeed rigor in the world, as Borges famously wrote, but "humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels."

Knowledge is man-made, our own way of making sense of a reality whose ultimate nature may not conform to our conceptions of it. 

Is the saturated red of a Vermeer part of that ultimate reality? The soft fuzz of a peach's skin? The exalted crescendo of a Beethoven symphony? If we can grasp that such powerful experiences require the active engagement of observers and listeners, is it not possible, likely even, that the other phenomena we encounter have a similar origin? 

When we do the opposite, we forget the role we have in creating our own reality.

The first section of the book, which I finished today, is called "Standing on a Sliver of Time." It's fascinating reading, though sometimes a bit difficult to fathom. This section starts out by talking about people who have the rare ability to remember everything they've experienced in remarkable detail. 

It turns out that while this seems like a cool ability to have, in some ways it isn't, because these people lose the ability to generalize from experience. They deal in a vast multitude of specifics, endless moments of time that remain crystal clear in their mind. 

Borges wrote about a fictional person, Funes, with total recall. Egginton says about him:

The scientist can't perceive the way Funes ostensibly can because the very nature of observing something as it changes over time requires that the observer generalize, ever so slightly, and connect the difference between two moments in space-time.

Without this slight blur, this ever so subtle distancing, this lifting up and holding steady of a standard so as to register some infinitesimal alteration, all there would be is an eternal present.

...Like Borges and Kant, what Heisenberg grasped -- what he calculated mathematically, yes, but also what he was able to capture in language -- was that to simultaneously observe an electron's position and momentum would require a perfect presence in a single moment in time, which is utterly incompatible with the minimum condition of observing anything at all.

Not because of some spooky quality of the world of fundamental materials, but because, by its very nature, an observation must relate at least two distinct moments in space-time.

In Kant's words, an observation absolutely requires distinguishing "the time in the succession of impressions on one another." An observation, any observation, undermines perfect being in the present, because the observation itself brings space and time to the picture.

A fundamental particle captured in a singular moment of space-time is thus, by definition, unperceivable and "absolute unity," an infinitely thin sliver of space-time, with no before or after.

Kant couldn't stand Swedenborg's belief in eternal truths beyond the reach of the human senses. Here's why.

It would take Kant many years to articulate what exactly about Swedenborg's pretensions so vexed him, but when he did, the reality came like a thunderclap. The problem was this: we are so accustomed to perceiving a world extended in space and successive in time that we naturally project those qualities onto all our intellectual endeavors.

Take the example of our very own personhood. Since we naturally tend to conceive of things as being extended in space and having duration in time, we implicitly apply the same structure to ourselves. 

We think of our self, be it our soul or our consciousness, as existing somewhere in our body. We imagine it to have come into being at a certain time, and perhaps openly believe or secretly hope it will live on past our physical demise.

However, we fool ourselves when we think that this way of talking about ourselves in space and time has any validity outside space and time.

...The soul or consciousness, in fact, is nothing but the unity of a sense of self over time, the bare fact that to perceive and then to articulate our perceptions something must connect from this very instant to another, and another after that.

This connecting of disparate slices of space-time is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowing anything at all, but it is not itself a thing in space and time, a thing that survives our existence on Earth. When we believe that it is, we end up conjuring the kinds of ghost stories with which Swedenborg beguiled his readership.

"I could be wrong" is what separates openness from dogmatism

Two wonderful sayings that every person should embrace are "I don't know" and "I could be wrong." Each points toward openness, humility, and a rejection of dogmatism.

My favorite, though, is I could be wrong. One reason is that there are so many things that each of us doesn't know. The number of things we know is far, far, far exceeded by the things we don't know. This makes I don't know a commonplace statement.

But I could be wrong is about a belief we hold that seems true to us, yet there's at least some chance we're incorrect about that. This is the way of science, where no truth is viewed as being true for evermore. 

Instead, every truth is provisional, since it might be overthrown by fresh facts. That isn't the way of religion, at least when it comes to fundamentalist religiosity. Rarely do we hear fundamentalists say, "I could be wrong" -- about God, life after death, the religion's founder, heaven, and such.

As an atheist, I'm perfectly willing to admit that I could be wrong about there being no God. However, my experience is that fervent religious believers, whether on this blog or elsewhere, are very reluctant to admit that they could be wrong about there being a God.

This goes a long way toward explaining why it is so difficult and frustrating to have a conversation about religious belief with a fundamentalist. Since they usually won't admit they could be wrong about their beliefs being true, that closed-mindedness shuts off open debate and discussion.

I wrote about this in a 2009 post, "Tips on talking to a fundamentalist." 

Fundamentalism is defined in various ways. I like this Wikipedia definition: "clinging to a stubborn, entrenched position that defies reasoned argument or contradictory evidence."

If someone is certain they're right, it's tough to have a productive conversation with them.

So it's good to learn early on whether you're dealing with a fundamentalist, since most of us have better things to do than try to open up a mind that is nailed shut. A simple question, if answered honestly, is a helpful aid:

Do you consider that you could be wrong?

When you hear a "yes," that's an indication of openness. It turns the conversation in the direction of offering reasons for a religious, spiritual, metaphysical, philosophical, or mystical belief.

Because if there's a possibility of being wrong, no one else should be expected to accept an assertion on blind faith. And if you are told, "no," I'd look elsewhere for conversational companionship (unless you're a glutton for dogmatism).

I've got wrongness on my mind today because yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog, "A kitchen faucet problem reminds me of the wisdom in 'I could be wrong.'" It starts with:

I don't like to be wrong. But I dislike problems that defy fixing even more, whether these be personal, political, or any other sort.

And what I've learned from painful experience is that when I believe I'm absolutely right, yet that rightness isn't resulting in progress at resolving a problem, the best thing I could do is tell myself, "I could be wrong."

When I'm able to do this, or better put, remember to do this, the possibility of fresh options opens up. This is how I was able to leave the religious organization I was an active member of for 35 years. When I was certain that the religion was true, despite a lack of evidence for this, I had no choice but to keep doing what I was doing.

But when I seriously entertained the idea that I could be wrong about the teachings of the religion being true, new avenues of growth appeared. That's the beauty of "I could be wrong." It's a path forward when we're stuck.

Belief in life after death precedes religious belief

Religious believers, of whom I used to be one, so I know what I'm talking about, like to view tenets of religiosity as being a higher form of knowledge than ordinary knowledge of this world. 

But from my current more enlightened atheist perspective, it's much more likely that the actual situation is reversed: religions make use of how people view things before religion comes along, which helps explain the appeal of religiosity. It feels natural.

Here's a good example. Death. Not the cheeriest topic, but a important one, since death arrives for everybody.

The October 14, 2023 issue of New Scientist has an article called "The legacy paradox: Why do people spend time, effort and money to be remembered after death? And can we use this quirk for good, wonders Conor Feehly [the author]."

The article notes that if you believe in an afterlife, "a desire for a positive legacy makes some sense because, in a way, your soul will be around to see how your legacy unfolds." But what about people who don't believe in life after death, who can be termed extinctivists?

Maybe, Feehly writes, they cultivate their legacy to lessen their death anxiety by creating a sort of symbolic immortality through what they produce in the world that will live on after them. However, the article goes on to say:

But there could be a simpler explanation for why extinctivists are motivated to build a legacy: perhaps, deep down, we all entertain some sort of notion of life after death. After all, nobody can consciously experience the absence of consciousness, making it effectively impossible to imagine your own death without being a conscious spectator. 

Indeed, research by [Jesse] Bering and his colleagues suggests that belief in continued existence of the mind following death is a default state for all of us. 

In one study, for example, children watched a puppet show where an alligator ate an anthropomorphised mouse. Older children were unlikely to ascribe any psychological functions to the dead mouse.

However, the youngest children, who were 3 or 4 years old, took a different view. While they understood that the dead mouse no longer had biological needs, they stated that it still had emotions, contradicting the notion that afterlife belief is something we learn.

The findings, which have been replicated across both secular and religious schools, suggest that belief in the continuity of consciousness after death is an intuitive position, with religious belief systems taking advantage of this quirk in our thinking. "I think a lot of [legacy motivation] has to do with these cognitive [processes]," says Bering.

So instead of religious founders bringing back the good news that they've experienced the reality of life after death, there's good reason to believe the opposite: from a young age we humans intuitively view consciousness as surviving bodily death, then that view is used in religious teachings.

But this could be just one source of the widespread assumption among people that death isn't the end of our existence, but a transition to another form of life. Wishful thinking probably also plays a role in this.

The November 20, 2023 issue of The New Yorker has a story about deepfakes, videos, photos, or whatever that are skillfully manipulated to fool others into believing they are true. Here's excerpts from "Your lying eyes."

In the midst of writing his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle grew obsessed with photographs of two girls consorting with fairies. The fakes weren't sophisticated -- one of the girls had drawn the fairies, cut them out, an arranged them before the camera with hatpins.

But Conan Doyle, undeterred, leaped upon the express train to Neverland. He published a breathless book in 1922, titled "The Coming of the Fairies," and another edition, in 1928, that further pushed aside doubts.

...The most effective fakes have been the simplest. Vaccines cause autism, Obama isn't American, the election was stolen, climate change is a myth -- these fictions are almost entirely verbal. They're too large to rely on records, and they have proven nearly impervious to evidence.

When it comes to "deep stories," as the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls them, facts are almost irrelevant. We accept them because they affirm our fundamental beliefs, not because we've seen convincing evidence.

This is how Arthur Conan Doyle fell for fairies. He'd long been interested in the supernatural, but the First World War -- during which his son and brother-in-law died -- pushed him over the edge. Unwilling to believe that the dead were truly gone, he decided that an invisible world existed; he then found counterevidence easy to bat away.

Were the fairies in the photograph not catching the light in a plausible way? That's because fairies are made of ectoplasm, he offered, which has a "faint luminosity of its own." But why didn't the shots of them dancing show any motion blur? Because fairies dance slowly, of course.

If Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales describe a detective who, from a few stray facts, sees through baffling mysteries, his "Coming of the Fairies" tells the story of a man who, with all the facts in the world, cannot see what is right in front of his face.

Alan Watts on how we create an illusory problem, then want it solved

You Tube works in mysterious ways. After I started listening on my iPhone to a video of Robert Sapolsky talking with an interviewer about how the brain constructs emotions, I noticed that an Alan Watts talk had popped up in a list of supposedly related videos.

Okay, I thought, I like Alan Watts, and the title sounds intriguing, "Alan Watts: Live Without Worry or Fear." Wow, all I have to do is spend 53 minutes listening to an Alan Watts talk, and I'll be worry and fear free. 

Of course, that didn't happen, unless there's a delayed reaction after hearing what Watts said. But I really didn't expect anything different. I just hoped to enjoy the talk and get some fresh insights into the philosophy Watts espoused with such clarity and wisdom.

That did happen. 

Watts gives away the secret to living without worry and fear early on in the talk. Basically it is to not fight life but to flow with life. Hard to argue with that, for we make life more difficult when we strain and struggle to control the uncontrollable. 

Problems always will be with us. However, we make matters worse when we view life itself as a problem to be solved, as opposed to dealing with problems that arise within a nonproblematic life. 

Religion, mysticism, and many forms of spirituality are all about viewing life itself as a problem. When we go along with this, Watts says that we fall prey to a trap. We create an illusory problem, then we want that problem solved.

There are lots of religious leaders, gurus, masters, and such who are happy to help with this. Salvation, enlightenment, God realization -- these and other wares are offered in the religious/spiritual marketplace as solutions to the illusory problem of life not being what life actually is.

Actually, we die. Actually, our knowledge of the cosmos is limited. Actually, happiness doesn't exist without sadness. But not being content with the actual nature of life, many people seek out a "guru" who will fix them by making their life into something that isn't an actual life.

Zen, says Watts, attracts some of these people. Traditionally, it was difficult to be accepted as a student by a Zen master. They'd tell the would-be student, "I have nothing to offer you. Go away." 

Viewing that brushoff as an invitation to try harder, the person who wants to be fixed by Zen makes an even stronger effort to be accepted as a Zen student. Sure, the Zen master knows that there is nothing wrong with the person that needs to be fixed. However, the only way to lead the person to that realization is by playing along with their illusion.

Watts likens this to someone who believes the Earth is flat. They can't be reasoned out of this false belief. So a wiser person says to them, "Lets go together to the edge of the world and peer over it." 

Moving in a single direction along a certain latitude, eventually they will return to the place from which they started, demonstrating that the Earth is circular in two dimensions. If they repeated this exercise by traveling along a certain longitude, they'd experience Earth as the globe that it is.

Watts shares a William Blake quote: "The fool who persists in his folly will become wise."

Likewise, a teacher of Zen indulges a student by pressing them to find the nature of themselves that is having the problem they want fixed by Zen. Typically this is done rather indirectly through statements such as "Show me the face that you possessed before you were born." 

Of course, being steeped in the Zen form of Buddhism, the Zen teacher knows that the student doesn't have a self that is separate from the life they are living now. But just as a flat-earth believer needs to experience the roundness of our planet to break free of their illusion, so does a Zen student need to expend much time and energy searching for the illusory self, or ego, or soul, that doesn't exist.

Eventually they will recognize that the search is useless, because there is nothing to be found but the life they're already living. A Donovan song comes to mind: "First there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is." Wikipedia explains:

The lyrics refer to a Buddhist saying originally formulated by Qingyuan Weixin, later translated by D. T. Suzuki in his Essays in Zen Buddhism, one of the first books to popularize Buddhism in Europe and the US:

Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.

Now, this paraphrase of the talk by Watts doesn't do justice to what he said. It's simply my way of expressing some key points that I recall from the talk.

Near the end of the talk Watts says that a Zen student is brought to the realization that the ego is phoney, not genuine, so it is impossible for the student to either act or to not act, since who they think they are isn't the reality of who they are.

For another way of expressing what I've said here, check out my 2014 post, "Watts: Wanting to clean up the messiness of life IS the mess." It includes a quotation from one of Watts' books on the same theme as the talk I've trued to describe. The quotation ends with:

Sometimes life is telling you that the course you are on is not the way to go, and the message underlying all of this is that you cannot transform yourself. Life is giving you the message that the "you" that you imagine to be capable of transforming yourself does not exist.

In other words, as an ego, I am separate from my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences. So the one who is supposed to be in control of them cannot control them because it isn't there. 

And as soon as you understand that, things will be greatly improved.

More atheist wisdom from "We of Little Faith"

The more I read of Kate Cohen's book, We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (And Maybe You Should Too), the more I enjoy what this talented writer has to say about openly, honestly, and bravely proclaiming one's atheism.

Here's some additional excerpts from the book, which I wrote about in an initial post a few days ago. First, I recall that one of the comments on the post said that it isn't possible, or at least very difficult, to be a Jewish atheist, since Judaism is a religion that believes in God.

That ridiculous, as anyone familiar with the actual beliefs of people in a religion would know. For example, there are Christian pastors who don't believe in God, though they don't proclaim this from the pulpit.

More obviously, it is common to be an atheist Jew. Cohen says this about atheism and being Jewish:

Whether someone is "still Jewish" is not a question you hear in an area with a sizable Jewish population. Anyone familiar with Jews is also familiar with the concept that being Jewish is as much about belonging as belief. It isn't something you change easily. Or at all. You can be more or less observant, you can downgrade to "culturally" Jewish, but it's hard to give it up entirely. I'm pretty sure you can even convert to Hinduism and still be Jewish. 

In a chapter with the engaging title, "Sorry, Honey, God's Just Pretend," Cohen speaks about why she taught her children that we know there's no God, rather than leaving the question of God open. I heartily agree with her logic.

One day, in the middle of doing her math homework at age nine, after having heard a casual remark I made to her father, she [her daughter] paused, pencil poised, to ask me the obvious but as yet never asked question: "How do we know there's no God?"

It's a question atheists get asked all the time, often by people who think we should use that gentler term "agnostic," people who are comfortable with doubt and suspicious of certainty. In answer I would say that all evidence points to the fact that God is a popular and useful fiction, and that no evidence points to the fact that he actually exists.

...So chances were good that teaching my kids there was no God would likely result in... their not believing in God. I can't prove that God does not exist. So how can I teach my children as fact something that cannot actually be proven? Isn't that intellectually irresponsible?

Well, I can't prove that monsters don't exist, either but I have no trouble saying to my kids, "Monsters are pretend." What, after all, is the alternative?

"Mommy, are monsters real?"

"Well, honey, I don't believe monsters are real and neither does your father. Certainly, we've never seen one. But a lot of people do believe they are real. What do you think?"

Of course not. Monsters are pretend. No one would accuse me of indoctrinating my children with a nonbelief in monsters or of brainwashing them with my skepticism about the paranormal. And yet that's precisely what happens when the subject is God.

...Belief in God seems harmless enough. What's the harm in imagining that a kindly old man runs the world? There is none -- as long as they know it's not actually true. Being able to tell fact from fiction comes in quite handy in life, personally and politically, and at least one study has shown that kids who are raised with religion can't do that as well as kids who are raised without it.

So, sure, let's imagine Great-Grandma looking down on us from heaven, but let's be clear we are making that up. And because our surrounding culture tells us, over and over, that heaven might be true, we have to be extra clear that the heaven scenario is no more plausible than the idea that Great-Grandma's spirit has been distilled in a bottle of scotch.

When the kids are old enough, they can have a sip. Or that Great-Grandma now haunts the 793s of the public library; where, in the Dewey decimal system would they like to be filed?

It's okay -- not just okay; mind-expanding, pleasurable -- to think about those things. To picture an alternative universe and ponder its metaphorical significance. I'm happy to do that and happy for my kids too. But I would never say such speculative flights of fancy are or even might be factually true, and I would never say that of heaven or God, either.

Just as I would never say, "It could be that ladybug is in charge; one day you can decide for yourself," I would never say, "I don't think God is in charge, but who knows?" I taught my children there is no God. Or, to be more accurate, I taught them that there are lots and lots of gods, all of them fascinating and all of them invented by human beings.

...Each of these beliefs is something they could learn among the local religious offerings. Not just fiction posing as fact, but also, in some cases, wrong posing as right. Shall I refrain from imposing my moral values on my children as well?

Let's consider a few more imaginary conversations:

"Teddy says wives have to do whatever their husbands say. Is that true?"

"You know, people disagree about that. I think women and men are equal, but a lot of people don't. It sure is an interesting question."

or 

"My teacher says it's now legal for men to marry other men. That's gross, isn't it?"

"No, I don't think it's gross. I think two adults who love each other should be able to get married. But some people think marriage should only be between a man and a woman. They think men who want to marry other men are doomed to burn in hell for all eternity. When you get older, you can decide for yourself."

Not a chance.

...As a parent, I am not willing to say "that's just my opinion" about whether something is fact or fiction, right or wrong. All beliefs -- mine, theirs, Mike Pence's -- are not equal. Many are wrong. Some are harmlessly wrong (I'll go to heaven after I die) and some are harmfully wrong (gay people will go to hell after they die).

Excerpts from a great book: "We of Little Faith" by Kate Cohen

On one of my other blogs, recently someone shared a link to Kate Cohen's book, We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (And Maybe You Should Too).

I bought it, because while I've read and enjoyed books that praise atheism by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and others, Cohen takes a different approach from these men.

Cohen's book is rooted in her experience as a Jewish woman who found her atheist voice and was determined to bring up her children not as secular, spiritual but not religious, or any other euphemism, but as the proud outspoken atheist she herself came to be.

This gives her book a lightness and practicality that books by the hardcore atheists mentioned above mostly lack. Cohen describes conversations with other Jewish mothers in everyday settings, like school Halloween parties, where she had to decide how open to be about her atheism. I find that refreshing.

Here's excerpts from the "Prologue: Actually an Atheist." It will give you a feel for what the book is all about, and Cohen's engaging writing style.

Americans who don't believe in God call themselves agnostics, humanists, skeptics, free-thinkers. They call themselves "spiritual." Sometimes they are called "nones" -- from the box they checked on a survey identifying their religion. Sometimes they prefer not to label themselves at all. And sometimes they call themselves Jews. Or Catholics or Muslims or Buddhists.

Rarely do they choose the word "atheist."

That used to be me. I was one of the many people who identify with a religion while disbelieving in the Supreme Being that lends it authority. I was raised Jewish and married a Jew in a Jewish wedding. As a child, a teen, even a young adult, though I didn't actually believe in that jealous, capricious, and cruel Old Testament God, I would not have called myself atheist on a survey; I would have called myself a Jew.

...Having drifted from the church or the synagogue after high school, having neglected if not outright rejected their own religious upbringing, many young parents return to it once it's their turn to bring up kids. Even if the idea of heaven once made them roll their eyes, heaven is the consolation they offer their children when burying the family cat.

For me, becoming a parent did the opposite. When it hit me that I was responsible for teaching my children everything, I knew in that moment that I must do something about this. And for me, "this" was the mindless transmission of information that I actually believed to be false, and "something" was telling the truth -- to myself, to my kids, and, finally, to others.

I vowed to teach my children what I truly thought about everything, and that included what I thought about God: that like Zeus, Thor, Brahma, and Ra, he's a fictional character created to soothe the fears of ancient people. I would not -- I did not -- tell them that God might be real, just as I would not have told them the Mayan goddess Ixchel might be real.

And if there's no supernatural being, then there's no supernatural place, either: temping as it was, I did not offer my children the consolation of heaven when the cat died or when they themselves began to understand that their lives had a time limit.

All of this felt right in my head and in my home but radical in the context of the dominant culture. More radical still: I did not let them decide for themselves, as I would not with any other question of morality or the way the world worked. My insistence on telling my children what was true and what was fiction -- my refusal to leave the question open -- bothered even some of my nonbelieving friends.

Being an atheist was one thing, but raising atheists was quite another, and far more questionable -- at best, depriving children of the comforts of religion; at worst, brainwashing them.

I believe, to the contrary, thant passing on one's preference for reason, evidence, and honesty -- pointing out, with conviction and context, where fiction poses as fact -- is the only truly moral choice. It's one of the most powerful ways to stop the cycle of evasion and politeness that has given religious belief far more cultural, political, and legal power than it should have.

Most of us have grown up with this reflexive deference to religion, and many of us continue to act on it even if we don't ourselves believe in God. I still sometimes have to remind myself that it's okay not to tiptoe around religion as it it were a soufflé that could collapse and then the dinner party will be ruined. I'll never be totally free of that reflexive deference. But my children are.

...Raising children made it abundantly clear to me why people invented religion -- why so many strays return to the pews after they have kids, and why even nonbelievers pass along to their children those religious beliefs (or half-beliefs, or the assumption that believing is the benevolent norm). Religion offers ready-made answers to our most difficult questions.

It gives people ways to mark time, celebrate, and mourn. How should we think about death? How do we know right from wrong? How do we make sense of a world of wonders and horrors with no one in charge?

Those are questions I wrestled with as an atheist -- and still do. My answers are not the only answers. They are probably not even my final answers. But they demonstrate that you can conduct a full life, a wonderful, even profound life, without relying on either the familiar religious structures or the supernatural beings that supposedly animate them.

You don't need any special tools or training; you just need the determination not to pass on -- by silent acquiescence or outright misrepresentation -- what you don't believe to be true.

Six months after she declared herself an atheist on national television, Rebecca Vitsmun was interviewed about her heroic display of honesty. "I had this moment where I just stopped for a second  and I realized, you either lie or tell the truth," she said. "And I, just, I'm not a liar."

That's what this book is asking you to do: stop for a second, think about what you believe, and consider telling the truth.

Why do we exist? (I attempt an answer)

Yesterday I got this message from someone.

Just curious, perhaps it would be an idea to make a topic with the title: Why do we exist? I am convinced that we have no free will at all and life seems so useless...(to me).

Since I enjoy challenges, I said that I'd attempt a blog post on this subject, though I don't have any firm answer to the question. 

So here goes. I'll be sort of rambling in my response, given that quite a few different ideas have been meandering through my brain as I thought about the message at various times today.

Since I no longer believe in any religion, the straightforward answer to why we exist is nature.

Our universe came into being via the big bang some 14 billion years ago. After Earth formed much later, life appeared on our planet, which began a lengthy process of evolution that resulted in our species, Homo sapiens.

That's one way to look upon why do we exist? Natural causes led to people being alive today. But why can also point to a reason for being that goes beyond mere physical existence. 

This reason wouldn't come from a supernatural creator, since as noted above I don't believe in one.

However, it's possible that there's some law of nature which favors ever-increasing degrees of consciousness in living creatures, with we humans being the pinnacle of consciousness at the moment. I also reject this view, given that evolution doesn't work through "favors."

I don't like why's. At least, not when it comes to Big Important Questions.

I've written about how "Why is there something rather than nothing?" leads nowhere, while "There is something rather than nothing"  is a productive statement that reflects reality. Likewise, "Why do we exist?" is an intriguing question, but "We exist" strikes me as even more interesting.

I'm fascinated by existence. I adore existence. I can't get enough of existence.

At my age of 75, I'm well aware that existence isn't something I can count on for a whole lot longer, given that it strikes me as a virtual certainty that once I die, I'm dead and gone forever. Well, actually I've felt this way for quite a while. 

I'll be going along in my daily routine, doing this and that, going here and there, when I'll suddenly have the sensation, One day I won't exist, so everything I'm aware of now is infinitely precious.

At least, those are words that came to mind when I try to describe the sensation.

The sensation itself is wordless, being a knowing, a wake-up call, a premonition from my brain/mind to pay rapt attention now to everything that exists around me and in me and as me, because there's no way to know when a last breath, a last heartbeat, a last flickering of consciousness, marks the end of my existence.

Or your existence. Or anybody's existence. 

This is why Why do we exist? means so little to me when I envision myself not existing. Yes, I adore important philosophical questions. However, death has a way of making every sort of question fade into insignificance.

Living as fully as possible now -- that's an action-filled statement that makes sense to me. I want to believe that if I was totally engaged in brushing my teeth, or writing a blog post, or patting our dog, or doing any other everyday activity, if death made an appearance at that moment and said, Nonexistence has arrived, my friend, I'd be able to reply, So be it.

As the person who sent me the message observed, we have no free will. I heartily agree. This is especially obvious when it comes to our birth and death. No free will there, for sure. (Suicide is thrust upon us, not freely chosen, as is everything else.)

So this is the way I see things. The big bang happened. The formation of Earth happened. Life happened. Evolution happened. Home sapiens happened. The birth of each of us happened. The death of each of us is bound to happen.

None of these happenings was within our control. None of what's happened to us during our lifetime was within our control either, though most of us embrace the illusion of personal control and free will. So in this sense life is indeed useless, as the person who sent me the message said.

But it is useless only because there is no User -- no Self, no Soul, no Commander, no CEO inside our head in charge of what we do, feel, and believe. We're an integral part of the cosmos. Nature is us; we are nature. Whatever happens arises out of that unity.

Every living being comes into existence, then departs from existence. Heck, maybe everything does, our universe included, except existence itself. For that reason I feel grateful that the being who goes by my name and is writing this blog post has been able to experience life and existence even though I had nothing to do with this.

And that's my roundabout reply to Why do we exist? In no way did I genuinely answer the question, but I had an enjoyable time dancing around a question I'm incapable of answering.

New Yorker review of Sapolsky's "Determined" is a subtle look at free will

Because I liked Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, so much, when I saw that the November 13, 2023 issue of The New Yorker had a review of it, I was nervous that the reviewer, Nikhil Krishnan, would have a devastating criticism of the book that I couldn't ignore. I say this because The New Yorker has wonderfully erudite book reviews by highly talented writers.

So I was pleased when it turned out that Krishnan had a subtle take on free will that managed to combine agreement with Sapolsky's thesis that determinism is how the world works on every level, with a contention that virtually everybody looks upon free will not from the objective view of scientific determinism, but from a subjective human view of moral responsibility.

The review's title in the online edition is "How Can Determinists Believe in Free Will?" The description below the title says: Some people think that we can’t be held responsible for what we do, given that our actions are the inevitable consequence of the laws of nature. They’re only half right.

Thus Krishnan argues that (1) yes, our actions are determined, yet (2) yes, we can be held responsible for what we do. I generally agree, for as a practical matter, it is indeed difficult to imagine a society in which responsibility is trashed in favor of hard core determinism, even though determinism is true.

That said, I did have this thought as I was reading Krishnan's review. Since he agrees that determinism is how the world works, this means that people like him who favor a nuanced conception of free will that includes moral responsibility, came to this conclusion through deterministic causes. So in that sense Sapolsky's view of free will -- it's a complete illusion -- wins out even when critics of Sapolsky's book argue for a different perception of free will.

UPDATE: Just came across a letter to the editor in New Scientist that made my point above. Hey, great minds think alike. Of course, Richard and I can't take credit for that, since it was determined that we have a similar view. Here's the letter:

From Richard Taylor,
Guildford, Surrey, UK
Your article claims that some people worry about judging criminals unfairly if there is no free will, meaning their crimes were predetermined. But if the crime was predetermined, then so is the judgment. Worry not, determinism isn't something that just happens to other people!

That's a minor quibble, though. I thoroughly enjoyed Krishnan's thoughtful, well-written review. Since it's quite long, I intended to only share portions that I'd highlighted while I was reading it. But in the end what I've shared below is most of the review. (Guess that was meant to be.) You can read the whole thing either on The New Yorker web site or via a PDF file I made of the review.
Download How Can Determinists Believe in Free Will? | The New Yorker

“Causal determinism,” the philosopher’s unlovely term for that unsettling hypothesis, is the default assumption of most modern science. It matters a good deal if the idea implies that none of our actions are what we call “free.” If science tells us to be determinists, and determinism is incompatible with freedom, shouldn’t we give up on judging people for doing what they were destined to do?

That’s what the Stanford neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky urges. He thinks the time has come to accept the truth about determinism and acknowledge that “we have no free will at all.” What follows? Early in his book “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” (Penguin Press), Sapolsky lists, with the morbid relish of a man daring to think the unthinkable, the implications of his heresy: no one is ever blameworthy—or, equally, praiseworthy—for doing anything. No one, Sapolsky writes, “has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else.”

Ordinary human sentiments—resentment and gratitude, love and hate—are pretty much irrational in their normal forms: “It makes as little sense to hate someone as to hate a tornado because it supposedly decided to level your house.” One practical implication is that, since nobody’s to blame for anything, criminal justice shouldn’t be about retribution. Accordingly, he tries to view human beings without judgment. Free-will skeptics are, he suggests, “less punitive and more forgiving.”

The steps of his reasoning are familiar: if everything is determined, there is no freedom; if there is no freedom, there is no moral responsibility. Science tells us that everything is indeed determined. Ergo, no freedom; ergo, no responsibility. Are we bound to agree?

Much of “Determined,” appropriately for a book by a neurobiologist, is an attempt to defend the part of the argument which sits safely in the scientist’s wheelhouse: that our best contemporary science has established the truth of determinism. Sapolsky draws on explanations at every level—from atoms to culture—to make the case that everything we think and do is caused by something other than free will.

We can’t control, say, the conditions of the crucial first nine months of our existence. “Lots of glucocorticoids from Mom marinating your fetal brain, thanks to maternal stress, and there’s increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety in your adulthood,” he writes. You thought your failing marriage was to blame for your depression. But it turns out it was all bound to happen long ago. It isn’t so much that our blame was aimed in the wrong direction as it is that blame, in the strict sense, never truly made sense.

...Why do we resist the truth? In part because we’re skilled at concocting stories in which we’re in charge. One experiment Sapolsky mentions suggests that people had cooler attitudes about gay marriage when considering it in a room with a disgusting smell. The effect was connected to the way certain odors activate the brain’s insular cortex, which is what makes rancid food nauseating to us.

But did the subjects know what was going on in their heads? “Ask a subject, Hey, in last week’s questionnaire you were fine with behavior A, but now (in this smelly room) you’re not,” Sapolsky writes. “They’ll claim some recent insight caused them, bogus free will and conscious intent ablaze, to decide that behavior A isn’t okay after all.” They were being played, but were desperate to regard themselves as the players.

Sapolsky’s summaries are pithy and pacy, his spoiling-for-a-fight tone enjoyably provocative. Still, he doesn’t assert that any one piece of research demonstrates that there is no free will. Rather, he says, “All these disciplines collectively negate free will because they are all interlinked, constituting the same ultimate body of knowledge.” In the end, “there’s not a single crack of daylight to shoehorn in free will.”

To his exasperation, though, many sophisticates are skeptical about free-will skepticism. In a 2020 survey of academic philosophers, some sixty per cent of them—a strikingly large majority in a profession allergic to consensus—didn’t agree that determinism ruled out freedom. Where Sapolsky, who says that he has been a free-will skeptic since adolescence, sees an excitingly counterintuitive conclusion, philosophers often see a reductio ad absurdum. Determinism, they tend to hold, is compatible with freedom, and therefore with moral responsibility, and therefore with blame, gratitude, and so on.

The technical term for that happy reconciliation is “compatibilism.” A compatibilist, that is, agrees that our actions are determined but denies that this truth casts doubt on anything of significance about human practices. Sapolsky will have none of it. He devotes some of his most trenchant writing to these quislings, whose arguments, he claims, “boil down to three sentences”:

a. Wow, there’ve been all these cool advances in neuroscience, all reinforcing the conclusion that ours is a deterministic world.

b. Some of those neuroscience findings challenge our notions of agency, moral responsibility, and deservedness so deeply that one must conclude that there is no free will.

c. Nah, it still exists.

How fair is that précis? Sapolsky clearly thinks that philosophers should start with the results of the sciences (objective, external, impartial) and ask what they imply for our naïve prescientific self-conceptions. If science, coming from outside, tells us that our self-conceptions are confused, so much the worse for them. Yet there’s another way of approaching the question: from the inside out.

Of those who take such an approach, the most influential is Peter Strawson, a compatibilist philosopher whose arguments make no appearance in “Determined.” (Sapolsky mentions him once in a list of his allies, evidently thinking of his son Galen.) What we label “free will,” as Strawson saw it, was something that we could grasp solely in relation to the role it plays in our lives, in our daily practices of judging others and ourselves.

Start from the fact that, in our dealings with other people, we are sometimes angry or resentful, or, in happier moments, grateful. Does the fact that we’re material beings situated within vast chains of causation make these responses—Strawson calls them “reactive attitudes”—irrational? In any case, could we live an intelligible human life while giving up such reactions entirely?

The really troubling forms of philosophical skepticism—say, about the authority of moral demands, the possibility of altruism, the legitimacy of governments—are troubling in part because it’s possible to live without a belief in such things. Can we live without a belief in the possibility of holding one another and ourselves responsible for the things we do? Try it. We are always a “sorry,” a “thank you,” or a “how dare you” away from slipping back into the bad old ways.

Sapolsky’s long-standing convictions on the subject notwithstanding, he admits to being a normal guy with a normal guy’s feelings. “It’s been a moral imperative for me to view humans without judgment or the belief that anyone deserves anything special, to live without a capacity for hatred or entitlement,” he writes. “And I just can’t do it.” He’s in permanent misalignment with his theory of the world: “Sure, sometimes I can sort of get there, but it is rare that my immediate response to events aligns with what I think is the only acceptable way to understand human behavior; instead, I usually fail dismally.” If even the archest of skeptics cannot live out his skepticism, how serious an alternative is it?

For that matter, if Sapolsky has no choice in how he thinks, what would it even be to try to think any particular way? It’s unclear how he could subscribe to “hard incompatibilism,” as he avows, and believe in such ancien-régime vestiges as “moral imperatives.” The very idea that someone “ought” to do something makes sense only if that person is capable of making choices.

For Strawson (like Kant before him), the difference between a story of causation and a story of choice-making is one of viewpoint. We’ll never purge ourselves of those “reactive attitudes,” nor should we try to. But that’s not a rejection of determinism; as Strawson says, we can sometimes “achieve a kind of detachment from the whole range of natural attitudes and reactions . . . and view another person (and even, perhaps, though this must surely be more difficult, oneself) in a purely objective light—to see another or others simply as natural creatures whose behavior, whose actions and reactions, we may seek to understand, predict and perhaps control.”

The parents of teen-age boys are always oscillating between regarding their impossible offspring as creatures moved by hormones to do stupid things and regarding them as rational human beings who should know better. In time, those boys will learn to give Mom a pass for her possibly perimenopausal outbursts and understand that Dad, with his atherosclerosis, occasionally forgets things. On a night out in college, they’ll learn to spot when it might still be possible to persuade an increasingly drunk friend to order an Uber home and the point at which all that remains to do is to pick him up off the ground and bundle him into one as if he were an unwieldy mattress.

What Sapolsky considers “the only acceptable way to understand human behavior,” then, is one that we adopt some of the time. Is it really one we should adopt all of the time? Physics tells us a story about ourselves in which we are as much matter and energy as that mattress. Biochemistry tells us another story. So does neuroscience. So do history, psychology, and anthropology.

All these modes of explanation tell us, in various ways, that people are causal systems, enmeshed in larger ones. But, from a first-person perspective, we’re seldom inclined to wait around to see what the system does when we’re faced with a decision. Instead, we do what even Sapolsky finds himself compelled to do—we get on with things and open the kitchen cupboard to decide (or, anyway, “decide”) what kind of tea we’re going to have.

A few minutes later, a kettle boils. Why? Consider these answers: because I want a cup of Earl Grey; because it’s teatime in England and that’s what we do around here; because the water molecules have reached a certain energy state. Must we choose among these statements? Can’t they all be true?

Sapolsky, to his credit, resists the fallacy of moving from ontological reductionism (the correct view that we’re all physical stuff, governed by the laws of physics) to methodological reductionism (the error of concluding that physics is the only discipline that explains anything). Wisely, he doesn’t think that history, psychology, or anthropology are just window dressing on the hard truth of our material, molecular existence.

Mental states and neurobiological physical states, Sapolsky thinks, “can’t be separated—they’re just two different conceptual entry points to considering the same processes.” Different, but apparently equal, neither privileged over the other. Why, then, does he resist the first-person register of explanation, in which we believe, want, intend, and decide?

Probably because his notion of “free will” isn’t the one we actually make use of. Every now and then, it occurs to Sapolsky that the parties to the debate may be talking past each other, and he makes an effort, a little grudgingly, to clarify his terms. “What is free will?” he asks early in the book. “Groan, we have to start with that.”

What follows is not a definition but a challenge. A man, Sapolsky invites us to imagine, “pulls the trigger of a gun.” That’s one description. Another is that “the muscles in his index finger contracted.” Why? “Because they were stimulated by a neuron,” which was in turn “stimulated by the neuron just upstream. . . . And so on.” Then he throws down the gauntlet: “Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will.”

Sapolsky’s qualifying phrase—“for the purposes of this book”—suggests he recognizes that there are other things “free will” might mean to other people. The real question is whether the thing he thinks has been disproved will be much missed—whether Sapolsky’s concept of free will is “our” concept, what we take it to be when, uncorrupted by the specialists, we go about our days blaming and thanking, loving and hating.

...In the positivist spirit, a philosopher or a scientist may replace “We have free will” with some determinate claim that might be supported or undermined by experimental evidence. But if we’re going to allow the experimental results, and the ambitious thesis that they support, to overthrow our everyday practices of praising, blaming, and punishing, the scientific explication had better be close enough to the everyday concept that underlies these practices. Otherwise, as Strawson—a leading critic of Carnap, and of logical positivism—objected at the time, we’re not solving a problem; we’re just changing the subject.

Sapolsky may want us to replace our everyday concept, complex and muddled as it must be, with a new, improved concept. But he needs to offer us a good argument for doing so. In other words, if this isn’t how we already use “free will,” is it how we should use it? We don’t ask this question often enough. Maybe that’s because “free will” has become, for better or for worse, a term of ordinary language. As with other such large, abstract questions, our professed views on the free-will problem rarely do justice to the complexity of our real thoughts on the subject.

There are sane and humane reasons for reminding ourselves that, as Sapolsky puts it, “some people have much less self-control and capacity to freely choose their actions than average, and that at times, we all have much less than we imagine.” But Sapolsky and skeptical fellow-travellers such as Sam Harris want to blow up our everyday practices; they’re convinced that the innumerable subtle distinctions we mark in our ordinary talk and practices don’t matter. Whatever it is we think we’ve got, we haven’t got it.

Once we give up on free will, after all, we have to be willing to say that nobody has ever done anything intentionally (or voluntarily or deliberately or on purpose). That no line can truly be drawn between the malicious and the accidental, the voluntary and the forced. That no event has really been an action, except in the undemanding sense in which the puppet Punch killing Judy was an action. We are not, except in this minimal sense, “agents.” Bits of our bodies move; things happen. That’s it.

Yet we can wonder whether this ideal of the “causeless cause” is what we really mean in our careless everyday talk of free will. If it isn’t, then insisting on that as the appropriate standard is, as Strawson once remarked, “like offering a text-book on physiology to someone who says (with a sigh) that he wished he understood the workings of the human heart.”

As it happens, Carnap’s own definition, or explication, of “free choice” was devised to be compatible with the truth of determinism. Free choice, he wrote, “is a decision made by someone capable of foreseeing the consequences of alternate courses of action and choosing that which he prefers.” He saw no contradiction between free choice thus understood and even the strongest form of determinism.

More than that, he thought that without determinism—that is to say, without reliable relations of cause and effect—there is no free will. The point of making a choice, he noted, is that it has consequences. Indeterminacy—should the kind that exists at the quantum level encroach upon the meso-level scale of human lives—would replace our agency with sheer randomness, which is not anyone’s idea of freedom.

Still, if Sapolsky’s radical revisionism threatens to eliminate our moral vocabulary altogether, the traditional compatibilist approaches can err in the other direction: they can deny us grounds for reforming our practices of moral judgment. So we might want to ask—in the philosophical tradition not of positivism but of pragmatism—about the “cash value,” the practical uses, of invoking free will. Ignore the many things we say about free will and focus on what we do. By attending to our practices, we can conduct a more profitable line of inquiry: What do we need free will to be?

Consider these questions. How does my response to a student who has failed to meet a deadline change when I discover that she sprained her wrist the day before? How do I respond to a piece of fruit chucked at me when I discover that the chucker is two years old? How vehemently do I press for a tough prison sentence when I learn that the defendant was abused as a child? Is there a difference between someone jumping into a pool and being pushed in? Between falling in after he stepped on a banana peel and falling in because he was drunk?

In each of these situations, we can ask whether the person in question had or lacked something called “free will.” But look back at the factors that seemed to undermine the exercise of free will: rotten luck, immaturity, circumstance, coercion, accident, and incapacity. When the terms on the obverse side of the contrast are so disparate, it’s hard to be confident that there really is a single thing called “free will” whose presence or absence we can meaningfully debate.

The philosopher J. L. Austin, in a paper titled “A Plea for Excuses,” observed that, though it’s tempting to view “freedom” as a positive term requiring elucidation, we tend to use it just to rule out one of these miscellaneous antitheses. Freedom’s just another word for no excuses. In Austin’s spirit, you can wonder how much would be lost if we ceased talking about free will altogether and spoke more specifically of what we meant. “He was not acting of his own free will,” you tell me. “What do you mean?” I ask. “Was he being held at gunpoint? Sleepwalking? High on narcotics?” “Oh, no,” you say, “I just mean he’s a toddler.” Maybe you should have just said that. Maybe, in other words, there is no one thing that we need “free will” to be.

Sapolsky’s most persuasive passages remind us of the many modest changes that we have made to our practices in light of advances in our understanding of certain facts about ourselves. Things got better for people with epilepsy once we learned that the condition was not a form of demonic possession that was “brought on by someone’s own freely chosen evil.” Things got better for people with schizophrenia (and for their families) once it was recognized that the condition was at base a biochemical disorder, not a product of faulty mothering. Some of our current moral conceptions and presumptions may come to seem just as confused. We may currently be blaming people whom it would be better to treat, tolerate, or simply avoid.

Or, perhaps, better to forgive. That was, after all, part of Sapolsky’s case for his new morality: free-will skeptics are “less punitive and more forgiving.” To understand all, he might have said, is to forgive all. But he can’t have really meant that. Forgiveness is, as much as vengeance, a concept that can be applied only from within the first-person point of view. If free-will skepticism means never having to say you’re sorry, then it also means never being forgiven. Sapolsky’s ethic of forgiveness demands that we retain something of our old-fashioned belief in holding one another responsible.

The traditional project of compatibilist philosophers has been to treat determinism, free will, and moral responsibility as fixed parts of a triad and to search for ways to reconcile them. The skeptics, seeing an irresolvable contradiction, have concluded that the whole idea of moral responsibility has to go. But there are other ways of reconciling scientific and moral inquiry.

It may be that we need a suppler and more humane approach to holding one another responsible, an approach that takes more seriously what our best scientific accounts tell us about ourselves. We needn’t follow the skeptics to the conclusion that the best morality would be no morality at all to recognize that our current morality remains a work in progress.

Nikhil Krishnan is a fellow in philosophy at Robinson College, University of Cambridge.

Happy Thanksgiving. I'm thankful for this great atheist message from John.

It's the Thanksgiving holiday today in the United States. We're going to have dinner with some friends in a few hours. My contribution is a Trader Joes vegan Breaded Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast With Gravy. Took me a whole five minutes to prepare before I put it in the oven.

Luckily I'd bought extra last year and put some in the freezer, because I was shocked to learn that Trader Joes isn't offering it this year because it didn't sell well. Damn capitalism! My wife and I have tried every vegetarian alternative to turkey and the Trader Joes offering was the best. Oh, well, life is full of disappointments. Maybe it will return next year.

On a positive note, wanted to say how thankful I am for everybody who visits this Church of the Churchless blog, including those who leave comments on the posts. In some ways we're a family of sorts -- understanding that family gatherings are typically a mixture of pleasant interactions and irritating conversation.

Meaning, while everyone enjoys getting together, there's Uncle Joe who won't stop talking about his current conspiracy theory; Cousin Elaine who is determined to get her relatives to try her new cure-all for whatever ails you; Grandma Mabel who's telling the same stories from her childhood that she relates every year; and indeed, just about everyone has some strange quirks that some family members find appealing and others can't stand.

Just like us on the Church of the Churchless! We're all uniquely strange, and that's a good thing. Life would be boring if we were all the same, if we all believed the same things, if we all had the same reactions to topics that arise on this blog.

As the host, so to speak, I do my best to strike a balance between allowing free expression of views, and making the blog a pleasant place for people to share their views in comments. I don't always succeed in this balancing act. Just wanted to let you know that I try to follow the adage of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Marshall: Do your best, angels can do no better.

Here's a comment that John left a few days ago which I liked so much, I'm sharing in a blog post so it gets more attention. I fixed a few typos and added paragraph breaks. Nicely said, John.

Hi all, I'm a long time follower of Brian's blog, but I've never posted on an open thread. But I thought I would do so on this one.

I grew up as a Christian (originally Presbyterian) with the last 20 plus years of that belief being in the evangelical/charismatic flavor. I've been an agnostic atheist for about 6 years now. My wife is still a very devout Christian and doesn't know the full extent of my deconversion. Maybe someday.

But because of her still being a believer, I hear plenty of sermons per weak and lots of really shitty Christian music. Speaking of, is all religious music as bad as Christian music? Just curious. Anyway, the further I get from my religious roots, the more I think how weird religion seems to me now. I can only imagine how weird religion in general seems to someone who was never part of any of it.

People have an imaginary friend who they talk to and hope to somehow hear back from. This imaginary friend is super powerful and created everything and has things that they want you to do, and things they don't want you to do.

Often there is a book that their imaginary friend wrote, or at least had a hand in writing. And the people who believe in this imaginary friend live their lives (or profess to do so) according to the book he wrote. Oh yes, the imaginary friend is always a he. Isn't that interesting? More often than not, this imaginary male friend is a loving being.

Unless, of course, you don't believe in him. Then he will almost always condemn you to some kind of suffering or torture after you die. Forever. As though living life here isn't suffering enough! And isn't is interesting that where you are born and raised has almost 100% to do with which imaginary friend you believe in?

Many wars have been fought over, my imaginary friend is real and yours isn't. Or something similar to that. Maybe my imaginary friend is offended by something you did or didn't do and I have to fight you on his behalf.

And then there is the whole money thing. At least in the flavor of Christianity I came out of. This imaginary friend always needs more money! At least 10% of your gross, not net, income. And if you give more than that, he will do some special favors for you. Yep. He's just cool like that. But I do think it's interesting that since I quit giving 10% plus to my imaginary friend, I've been able to get out of, and stay out of debt. Something I never could do when I was giving all that money to him.

And then there is the whole prayer thing. Prayers are basically asking your imaginary friend for favors. Things like, please heal my cat. Please help me get a promotion at work. Please make my kids believe in you so they don't get tortured forever. Please let my football team win this weekend. Please keep it from raining the weekend of our church picnic. While the farmer is asking for rain on that same weekend so he doesn't lose his farm.

How does that work? But I do get it to some degree. Just like when kids have an imaginary friend. This friend is someone they trust and can talk to without fear of judgment. And as "adults", we are only a few years away from being children. 50 years seems like a long time, but wouldn't we all feel a little better if we still had our stuffed animals? Or is it just me?

So if we want to still have our imaginary friend, that's cool. But I shouldn't be trying to convince you that my imaginary friend is real, and is the only imaginary friend you should believe is real. And promise you rewards if you believe it, and punishment if you don't. Yep. The further I get from religion, the more weird it seems.

Consciousness arises in the brain (no matter what you may read on this blog)

NOTE (to consciousness geeks): if you've already read this post, I've updated it with an admittedly geeky further description and critique of the "naturalistic dualism" espoused by philosopher David Chalmers. I did this after Googling that term and finding a blog post that I'd written in 2010 on this subject. If you're into zombies, you might find a mention of them interesting.

It's kind of weird that I have to distance myself from content on this blog in the title of this post.

That's due to me writing blog posts that I do my best to be scientifically and otherwise accurate, while the comments on those posts mostly come from other people -- some of whom either aren't as scientifically literate as I am, or purposely skew scientific truths to suit their religious ends.

One of the commenters in the purposely skew category would go nameless if I didn't name him, which I am: Spence Tepper. I respect Tepper in many regards. He is intelligent, a good writer, a regular visitor to this blog, and has contributed to lots of interesting comment conversations.

However, Tepper also has an annoying habit.

He is a master at avoiding direct questions that would prove him wrong, so he dissembles by trying to shift a comment conversation from the original topic where his position was on shaky ground to a different topic, apparently in hopes that no one will notice that when he was about to lose an argument, he starts anew with a fresh discussion.

I guess I respect this also about Tepper, but only in the sense of how I respect Donald Trump for his ability to entertain an audience and keep his approval rating up even in the fact of his constant lying, efforts to overthrow our democracy, two impeachments, and four indictments.

Tepper is a much better person than Trump, I want to be clear about that. It's just that I respect both men for using the qualities that I wish they didn't have in such a skillful fashion.

On the plus side, Tepper is a good example of someone who uses the God of the Gaps argument. Since I don't believe in God any longer, I've stopped being a God of the Gaps person, though I readily admit that in my true-believing days I acted much as Tepper does: using a limit of current scientific knowledge as an opportunity to fill that gap in understanding with.... God! 

Instead of the more intellectually honest, We just don't know yet.

One of those current limits that Tepper and I agree on is that science doesn't yet know how consciousness arises in the brain.

There are various theories about how the 100 billion or so neurons in the human brain result in consciousness, which enables me to write this post and you to read it. Searches continue for the neural correlate of consciousness, meaning the part(s) of the brain that, when activated, enable consciousness to arise.

In a comment today, Tepper noted that this year philosopher David Chalmers won a 25 year old bet with neuroscientist Christof Koch in which Koch wagered a case of wine that by now the neural correlate of consciousness would have been discovered. A Scientific American story tells the tale, ending with:

Back to the bet between Koch and Chalmers: They agreed that, for Koch to win, the evidence for a neural signature of consciousness must be “clear.” That word “clear” doomed Koch. “It’s clear that things are not clear,” Chalmers said, and Koch, grimacing, concurred. He stalked off the stage and reappeared with a case of wine as the audience laughed and applauded.

Koch then doubled down on his bet. Twenty-five years from now, he predicted, when he will be age 91 and Chalmers will be age 82, consciousness researchers will achieve the “clarity” that now eludes them. Chalmers, shaking Koch’s hand, took the bet.

“I hope I lose,” Chalmers said, “but I suspect I’ll win.” I suspect so, too. I bet consciousness will be even more baffling in 2048 than it is today. I hope to live long enough to see Koch give Chalmers another case of wine.

Here's the thing, though, in regard to me and Spence Tepper. I never said that science had learned how consciousness arises in the brain. My contention, which Tepper disagreed with (which amazed me, since I'm clearly correct about this), was that the consensus of neuroscience is that goings-on in the brain result in consciousness, with nothing supernatural involved.

"Goings-on" is shorthand for something to do with the activity of those 100 billion neurons, but it is unknown what that is. 

Again, this seems so obvious to me, given the many books about neuroscience and the current state of consciousness research I've read, along with articles in Scientific American and New Scientist that I subscribe to, I figured it would be easy for Tepper to agree that science considers the brain to be the source of consciousness.

I figured wrong, which led me to write a post decrying science denialism here on the Church of the Churchless: "Denying scientific truth isn't welcome on this blog." I didn't like how Tepper did the God of the Gaps thing, jumping to the completely erroneous conclusion that because science doesn't currently understand how consciousness arises, this opens the door to a supernatural explanation.

No, it doesn't. In fact, today I picked up a book I have by David Chalmers, the guy who won the bet with Koch, called The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. It was published in 1996, a few years before the bet occurred. In his Introduction, Chalmers speaks of three constraints that guided his development of an account of consciousness. Here's the third:

The third constraint is that I take consciousness to be a natural phenomenon, falling under the sway of natural laws. If so, then there should be some correct scientific theory of consciousness, whether or not we can arrive at such a theory. That consciousness is a natural phenomenon seems hard to dispute: it is an extraordinarily salient part of nature, arising throughout the human species and very likely in many others.

And we have every reason to believe that natural phenomena are subject to fundamental natural laws; it would be very strange if consciousness were not. This is not to say that the natural laws concerning consciousness will be just like laws in other domains, or even that they will be physical laws. They may be quite different in kind.

So what does Chalmers mean by "may be quite different in kind." Well, in chapter 4 of his book he speaks of naturalistic dualism. This is a complicated philosophical concept.

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NEXT DAY UPDATE: For sure it's complicated. This morning I started to reread that chapter, which is lengthy, but decided that would take too much time and effort. So I Googled "criticism of Chalmers naturalistic dualism." Among other results, a blog post that I wrote in 2010 popped up, "David Chalmers view of consciousness: naturalistic dualism." I was quite positive about the book, since it seemed in accord with science. Then I noted a comment on that post from David Lane who shared a link to a message from Chalmers about a New York Times review of his book by John Searle, along with a response from Searle. Interesting reading, if that link opens for you.

What struck me is that Chalmers bases his naturalistic dualism in part on a "zombie" argument. He imagines that zombies could exist that in a world that is just like ours, and where people act just like they do in our world, but don't have consciousness. This supposedly shows that consciousness is an add-on to the world, not an integral aspect of it. However, Searle makes some excellent arguments against this. Here's quotes from Searle:

In his argument for property dualism, he says, correctly, that you can imagine a world that has the same physical features that our world has—but minus consciousness. Quite so, but in order to imagine such a world, you have to imagine a change in the laws of nature, a change in those laws by which physics and biology cause and realize consciousness.

But then, I argued, if you are allowed to mess around with the laws of nature, you can make the same point about flying pigs. If I am allowed to imagine a change in the laws of nature, then I can imagine the laws of nature changed so pigs can fly. He points out, again correctly, that that would involve a change in the distribution of physical features, because now pigs would be up in the air. But my answer to that, which I apparently failed to make clear, is that if consciousness is a physical feature of brains, then the absence of consciousness is also a change in the physical features of the world.

That is, his argument works to establish property dualism only if it assumes that consciousness is not a physical feature, but that is what the argument was supposed to prove. From the facts of nature, including the laws, you can derive logically that this brain must be conscious. From the facts of nature, including the laws, you can derive that this pig can’t fly. The two cases are parallel. The real difference is that consciousness is irreducible. But irreducibility by itself is not a proof of property dualism.

...Chalmers resents the fact that I frequently try to remind him that brains cause consciousness, a claim he calls a “mantra.” But I don’t think he has fully appreciated its significance. Consciousness is above all a biological phenomenon, like digestion or photosynthesis. This is just a fact of nature that has to be respected by any philosophical account.

Of course, in principle we might build a conscious machine out of nonbiological materials. If we can build an artificial heart that pumps blood, why not an artificial brain that causes consciousness? But the essential step in the project of understanding consciousness and creating it artificially is to figure out in detail how the brain does it as a specific biological process in real life.

Initially, at least, the answer will have to be given in terms like “synapse,” “peptides,” “ion channels,” “40 Hertz,” “neuronal maps,” etc., because those are real features of the real mechanism we are studying. Later on we might discover more general principles that permit us to abstract away from the biology.

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This passage makes it fairly clear, though not crystal clear.

It remains plausible, however, that consciousness arises from a physical basis, even though it is not entailed by that basis. The position we are left with is that consciousness arises from a physical substrate in virtue of certain contingent laws of nature, which are not themselves implied by physical laws. This position is implicitly held by many people who think of themselves as materialists. It is common to hear, "Of course, I'm a materialist, the mind certainly arises from the brain."

OK, so maybe if I reread the book, I'd realize that I'm open to naturalistic dualism. The key thing here, though, is that the guy who took the side of the bet against Koch considers that consciousness is a natural phenomenon arising in the brain, not a supernatural phenomenon.

This is the prevailing view of virtually every neuroscientist, which makes Tepper's refusal to admit this so perplexing and, yes, irritating. I think, Dude, I'm right about science viewing consciousness as arising from goings-on in the brain; what's so tough about simply saying, I agree?

I find it easy to admit when I'm wrong, in part because I've been married for 51 years (albeit in two chunks, 18 years in my first marriage, 33 years and counting in my second marriage), so I'm all too aware of how often my wife is right and I'm wrong.

I feel that it wouldn't hurt Tepper to do the same thing -- one reason why I persist in my possibly quixotic quest to have Tepper admit that the current conclusion of neuroscience is that consciousness arises in the brain.

Pleasingly, another commenter, Sant64, who thought he was refuting my position, actually helped strengthen it in his own comment today. Here's how I used that gift in my comment reply.

Sant64, thanks SO MUCH for sharing the link that EXACTLY supports what I've been arguing with Spence Tepper about. (I like capital letters also at times, just like you.)

Contrary to what you falsely claimed, my assertion in regard to Tepper is that there's a consensus among neuroscientists that consciousness arises from goings-on in the brain, not from some supernatural source. I've never said that neuroscience understands HOW this happens, just that brain stuff causes it to happen.

The quote you included in your comment says exactly what I've been claiming.
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https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.767612/full#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20consensus%20about,the%20action%20of%20the%20brain.

The following is from the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Journal:

"Studies of how consciousness is generated, and why it has the characteristics it does, is nevertheless a focus of considerable interest and effort. There is no consensus about how it is generated, or how best to approach the question, but all investigations start with the incontrovertible premise that consciousness comes about from the action of the brain."
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I love that clear statement. I'll repeat it because I love it so much: "All investigations start with the incontrovertible premise that consciousness comes about from the action of the brain."

That's just what I've been asking Tepper to admit is true. And now you've provided clear documentation that I'm correct in saying that it indeed is true that consciousness arises from goings-on in the brain. It's still a few days from Thanksgiving, but I'm really thankful to you for finding this quote. Hopefully Tepper will take it to heart.

Spence Tepper, thanks for your comment also. Naturally I was aware of the bet between Koch and Chalmers. It gets talked about quite a bit in stories and books about the nature of consciousness. My reaction to what you said is pretty much the same as what I just said to Sant64 above: I agree, and always have, that neuroscience hasn't learned how consciousness arises in the brain.

Where you and I disagree, and where I view myself as being right and you being wrong, is about whether the consensus of neuroscientists is that goings-on in the brain, so far unspecified, lead to the creation of conscious experience. (There's debate about whether consciousness is a thing or a process; I tend to prefer process, but it could be a thing.)

Do you agree with the quote Sant64 shared above? "All investigations start with the incontrovertible premise that consciousness comes about from the action of the brain." A simple YES or NO would be appreciated, no dissembling.

If you say yes, great, we're in agreement. If no, please supply evidence that serious peer-reviewed investigations of consciousness are taking place that DON'T have the premise that consciousness comes about from the action of the brain.

The situation is similar, in my opinion, to how physics is examining the unsolved question of how gravity works. Einstein's general theory of relativity says that gravity is the result of curved spacetime in the presence of mass. Quantum mechanics hasn't arrived at a theory of gravity yet, though several leading theories exist, in the same way neuroscientists are exploring theories of how consciousness arises.

But here's the thing: I've never heard of a physics theory that says gravity is the result of some supernatural force. Sure, maybe there is some unknown material/natural force involved, but not supernatural. Likewise, I've never heard of a respected (as opposed to crackpot) neuroscience theory that says consciousness is the result of some supernatural force.

Again, if you agree that consciousness, like gravity, is the result of natural/physical/material goings-on, then we see this area of science similarly. There's a lot to learn, but what will be learned will, with virtual near certainty, involve material laws of nature, not supernatural.