Church of the Churchless

How religions disable our reasoning practices

Here's a marvelous excerpt from Andy Norman's book, "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think." 

I read it this morning and realized it's a terrific way to explain what's wrong with the irrationality of religion. Norman imagines that someone wants to figure out how to best undermine human reasoning that enables us to distinguish truth from falsehoods, what's real from what's illusory. 

As you'll read below, what results is... (no big surprise) religion. 

Imagine yourself part of a team charged with stress-testing civilization's all-important reasoning practices. The team has an initial meeting, and the question is posed: How can we best disrupt human reasoning practices? The task is then clarified: How can we cause not just temporary disruption, but lasting damage?

"We" would probably begin with a little reverse-engineering: we'd take apart the mechanism and see how it works. This would lead us to the lever-like functioning of reasons and the key role of reason's fulcrum. We'd come to realize that our reasoning practices hinge on a norm that requires us to accommodate ourselves to good reasons.

Then we'd ask: How can we disable this norm?

We might start by creating a loophole in the requirement. Specifically, we could grant that yielding to better reasons is often a good thing, but deny that it's always a good thing. Certain beliefs, we might argue, are too important to be hostage to rational fortune.

Then we'd carve out an exemption and insist that convictions X, Y, and Z belong to a special, protected class. We might call these convictions "articles of faith."

Then, we could spread the good news that this exemption exists.

We'd probably appeal, first, to those who resent rational constraint and explain that on certain subjects, it's okay to believe and assert things without evidence. From there, we could extend the exemption to claims that fly in the face of evidence -- things made unlikely by, or directly contradicted by, facts.

Claims about miracles and virgin birth, for example.

Of course, we might need to traverse this path gradually, giving people time to acclimate to each expansion of the rationality exemption. We could hasten the decline of rational standards by making some articles of faith mandatory: not just permissible, but required. In fact, we could make them nonnegotiable -- the mental equivalent of the immovable object.

The beauty of this approach is that, once such articles of faith are installed, efforts to dislodge them further degrade reason's fulcrum. The lever is obstructed, and something's got to give. A glance at history confirms that we're on to something here: reasoning practices are highly vulnerable to such stresses.

Next, we could sell people on the idea that credulity is virtue. 

We could promise fantastic rewards for those who believe and threaten terrifying punishments for those who doubt. We could invent a being capable of delivering such rewards and punishments and make people fear him. Why can't you see this being? Because he's invisible. Why does he need you to believe in him? Never mind: just take our word for it. Why can't we see others experiencing their rewards and punishments? Because all that happens in the afterlife.

If all of this seems patently ridiculous, so much the better -- by which I mean, so much the worse for rationality norms. As the Red Queen told Alice in Wonderland: believing impossible things takes practice. 

A saboteur of rational accountability norms must take this to heart. To wreak real havoc, you've got to think big. Go big or go home. Tepid irrationality is for chumps. Real saboteurs wield patently unreasonable claims. When called on it, they double down on the delusion: that's the way to do real damage to rationality norms. 

We can also stigmatize those who take epistemic standards seriously. If they're outspoken, we can demonize them. We can label them, say, infidels, heretics, heathens, apostates, or blasphemers. We can teach believers to shun and hate them. We can instruct believers to kill nonbelievers (as sacred texts sometimes do). 

Only a few believers need to follow through: the rest of the nonbelievers usually get the message and stop enforcing rationality norms. A little intimidation goes a long way.

We could also harness identity-protective cognition. The idea, again, is that people will usually bend rationality norms in order to protect their identity. The thing to do, then, is get people hooked on one or another ideological identity -- preferably before they're old enough to understand the consequences.

We could saddle children with the identities of their parents. Install an ideological identity early enough, and identity-protective thinking will often be with that person for life. From then on, challenges to identity-defining beliefs will feel offensive and somehow unfair. This is sure to damage reason's fulcrum. 

We can also harness humanity's tribal instincts. We can build communities around arbitrary doctrinal differences and have the members of these communities validate each other's defiance of rationality norms. Us-versus-them stories can be counted on to stir deep emotions and skew rational judgment.

We can exploit humanity's "mattering instinct"-- our need to feel that our lives matter.

To do this, just sell a group on the idea that they're God's chosen people. Or better yet, that God has some mysterious mission for them. Faced with temptation like that, rational resolution often crumbles. Mattering myths are highly seductive -- and useful for subverting rationality norms.

We could exploit the evolved  brain's penchant for kin sympathy. Those who share the tenets of the faith, for example, could be called "brother" or "sister." We could exploit our natural deference to authority. Authority figures in the community could be called "father" or "mother superior." The sky being at the center of the big myth could be referred to as "lord" or "king."

We could confer status on the most aggesssibe champions of the faith, calling them "reverend," "holy father," "guru," or "ayatollah." We could give these champions a platform and an audience -- a "pulpit," say, and a "flock." They could use this platform to publicly violate rationality norms and celebrate the defiant disregard of such norms. 

Stories glorifying the sort of blind faith that Abraham had for God would be especially useful. (The founding parable of the so-called Abrahamic religions involves a father, Abraham, willing to sacrifice his son to prove his devotion to God.) See Abraham's breathtaking willingness to sacrifice not only his reason but also his son? The clear implication is that that's the sort of faith to aspire to.

We could develop a concept of the "sacred" or "holy" that paints certain things as too precious to question. We could label entire lines of inquiry profane. Or sacrilegious. We could promote contempt for intellectual virtues and deride rationality norms as "scientism run amok." 

Religious beliefs can be false, yet useful

My wife turned me on to Andy Norman's book, "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think." She's listening to it via the audiobook. I'm reading the print edition.

The Covid pandemic has taught us all a lot about immunity against viruses. Vaccines help us fight off a Covid infection by strengthening our defenses against the viral invader. Likewise, Norman argues, minds are prone to being infected by bad ideas. 

Unfortunately, there is no way to get a shot that wards off bad ideas. Instead, his book describes ways we can protect our mind from being taken over by them. 

Norman is a philosopher who developed his approach through many years of trying out ways to get his students engaged with the ideas he was teaching. I've shared a lengthy excerpt below from his The Ethics of Faith chapter. You'll see that Norman is a careful thinker who uses reasonable arguments to make his point.

Sure, that's what most of us aspire to. But often we fall short of that ideal, for reasons made clear in "Mental Immunity." 

I liked how this excerpt ends with an important conclusion. Often we focus on whether a belief, faith-based or not, is true or false. That's important, but beliefs also can be useful or harmful. So a religious belief could be false, yet useful to the believer. 

A related notion is that a belief can have "upstream" evidence and "downstream" implications.

Meaning, evidence from the real world can flow upstream and provide evidence for or against the belief. Separately, though, is the downstream effects that flow from the belief, whether or not the belief is supported by evidence.

This is why religious believers who comment on my blog posts often cite the benefits they've gotten from their beliefs. That's a downstream effect. Again, this may have little or nothing to do with the upstream evidence about whether the belief is correct.

Here's the excerpt. 

Stories like these are the backbone of William James's defense of faith. He calls them cases "where faith in a fact can help create that fact." I call them cases of self-fulfilling belief. His point is that our attitudes frequently "run ahead of scientific evidence." And often, that's a good thing.

What are we to make of this argument? 

For starters, we have to acknowledge that people need confidence, hope, trust, commitment, and resolve -- five secular cousins of religious faith -- and for many, religious talk works to bolster these attitudes. 

Second, these attitudes tend to be conducive to mental health: a confident, hopeful, trusting, and resolute mind is healthy almost by definition. 

Third, these attitudes are ingredients of what biologists call "prosociality" -- they tend to build social capital in ways that benefit not just the self but also others. We should all be grateful, then, for the well-meaning efforts of religious people devoted to building trust, hope, and moral commitment.

James saw that Cliffordian scruples could impinge on people's "right" to willfully boost healthy attitudes. For this reason he labeled evidentialism "insane." He had a point. For it would be unwise to prohibit all use of non-evidence-based mind hacks. 

Suppose that a castaway on a desert island allows herself to believe that she'll be rescued. Suppose she does this in utter defiance of the evidence, but harms no one, while quadrupling her odds of survival. How could such believing be unethical? 

I'd like, at this point, to apply my training in dispute resolution to mediate the centuries-old dispute between religious and secular outlooks. What if each side has a piece of the truth? What if we don't have to choose just one of these truths and throw out the other? What if, instead, we opened up a "both..and" alternative to the traditional "either...or"?

Many religious beliefs require the believer to willfully suspend disbelief. Belief that Jesus rose from the dead, for example. 

The problem is that this involves the willful suspension of basic standards of cognitive accountability -- standards that apply in other domains. But what if there were genuine alternatives -- mind hacks that promote healthy, prosocial attitudes without requiring us to violate important norms? 

What if we could have the benefits of religion without pretending to know things we don't really know?

Do such alternatives exist? I believe they do. Consider Defense Exhibit A, where "precursive" faith in a stranger's friendliness helps to bring about a friendship. James implies that the friendship "cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming," but is this true? Are there really no alternative paths to the hoped-for result?

Here, off the top of my head, are four:

Option 1: Infer from the evidence of past experience that any given stranger is likely to prove friendly. Here the belief is not definitive ("This stranger will prove friendly") but probabilistic ("This stranger is likely to prove friendly"). It has the virtue of being evidence-based, though, and can still have the salutary effects. (Notice, by the way, that blind trust in all strangers is probably more trusting than is warranted, wise, or safe. This observation shows that it makes sense to temper pro-social attitudes with evidence.)

Option 2: Admit that you don't have enough evidence of the stranger's friendliness (and thereby decline, on evidentialist grounds, to believe it) but all the while remain resolutely hopeful that the stranger will prove friendly. The hope can function in place of the belief and pave the way for the friendship, but without violating evidentialist scruples.

Option 3: Just commit to being friendly to strangers -- regardless of their likelihood of reciprocating the friendliness -- on the grounds that it's the right thing to do. On this approach, you needn't pretend to know something you don't really know; you simply act friendly because that's the kind of person you wish to be. The hoped-for friendship can then form without irresponsible believing entering the picture.

Option 4: Smile anyway.

The trust involved in Option 1, the hopefulness of Option 2, the moral commitment of Option 3, and the smiling demeanor of Option 4 are all dimensions of cognitive health. Arguably, they're what faith advocates have been after all along. But none of them are inherently religious. 

And that's the point: the valuable aspects of religious faith can be had without willful self-deception. 

The intellectually questionable supernatural trappings can be left behind, because there are honest, evidentially responsible ways to achieve the same result. The same healthy attitudes that religions have long been in the business of cultivating can be induced in other ways.

Is it fair, though, to describe religious belief as "willfully self-deceptive"? Does it invariably involve "pretending" to know things you don't know? Or pretending to believe things you don't really believe? Perhaps not. Perhaps sincere religious belief is none of these things.

The self-fulfilling beliefs James likens them to, however, are all of these things. 

In Exhibit 1, a man pretends to know that a stranger will prove friendly. In Exhibit 2, a woman wills herself to believe that she has what it takes to do the job. In Exhibit 3, Cassius Clay psyches himself up with extravagant claims of his own greatness. In Exhibit 4, a woman helps herself to the comforting (and quite possibly delusive) belief that God will provide.

In fact, the way James defines it, faith is inherently delusive. For "faith in a fact" can only "create the fact" if the belief starts out false. 

Think about it: James was arguing that it's okay to pretend that the not-yet-actual is already actual -- providing the pretense has the potential to change the world and, in so doing, mitigate the falsehood. There's no escaping it: James was endorsing willful dishonesty -- of at least limited duration. 

Of course, he was also laying the groundwork for a revolutionary reinterpretation of religion. James showed us that we can understand religious wisdom as functionally useful even when it is not literally true. The first step is to recognize that religious beliefs are, at bottom, expedients for inducing desirable attitudes.

A religious claim doesn't have to be true to feel deeply right. The feeling of rightness can stem instead from its power to express allegiance. Also, believers throughout history have argued for religious claims on the grounds that they're useful. 

Claims about heaven and hell, for example, are often explicitly defended on the grounds that they help keep people in line. More generally, religious claims also have a pragmatic usefulness that is mistaken for truth. The idea that "God will provide," for example, can be marvelously calming whether or not it is true. "Jesus loves me" may meet a psychological need more reality-based believing can't.

I was a Quaker for about a decade because my mother loved the Quaker idea that "there is that of God in everyone." She lacked upstream evidence that we are in fact God-infused but had a clear grasp of the idea's downstream consequences. By dignifying us all, the idea makes it harder to mistreat people. She liked it and signed us up.

There's a larger lesson here, and it applies to secular as well as religious beliefs.

Beliefs have both logical properties and causal properties. They can be true or false and they can be useful or useless. Likewise, they can be evidenced to this or that degree and they can be more or less harmful. Ethically speaking, all of these properties matter, and responsible agents take account of them all. 

But here's the thing: they do so without confusing them. Useful does not mean true; nor does well-evidenced mean harmless. 

I'm tired of our nation's 9/11 obsession

Over on my Salem Political Snark blog, I just finished "On 9/11, let's remember the 659,556 Covid deaths." 

Here's how I introduced that post on Facebook.

I have to be honest. I'm tired of our nation's obsession with 9/11. Yes, it was a tragedy. But 9/11 pales in comparison to the tragedy of the Covid pandemic, which has killed 220 times as many people than died on 9/11. Radical Islam was responsible for 2,996 deaths. Radical Trumpism is responsible for the hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths that experts say could have been prevented. I refuse to mourn the deaths of those who died twenty years ago more than the 9/11 happening every few days in our nation's hospitals, homes, and health care facilities.

Quantum theory doesn't say consciousness creates reality

I'm no quantum physicist. That option closed down for me early on, when I was kicked out of my high school physics class because I was paying more attention to my girlfriend sitting behind me than to whatever the teacher was saying. 

But I've made up for that by reading lots of books about quantum theory, many of them in the course of researching my first book about the connection between ancient mysticism and the new physics, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder" -- which I got back in print via a rewrite that took out the preachy parts. 

I no longer believe in most of the mysticism in that book, but the scientific stuff is still valid, by and large. I keep up with current developments in quantum theory through my subscriptions to Scientific American and New Scientist.

The August 28 issue of New Scientist is a special issue about Quantum Frontiers. The stories on this subject were all interesting and clearly written for non-physicists like me. 

What's crystal clear is that most people who claim quantum theory proves something mystical or spiritual about the cosmos don't know what they're talking about.

Quantum theory is mysterious, for sure.

So far science hasn't figured out how it relates to relativity theory, which explains how gravity works. The other forces of nature are amenable to explanation by quantum theory, but not gravity. This means that there's a good chance a deeper explanation of nature needs to be found that unifies relativity theory and quantum theory.

Frequently New Age types claim that quantum theory has shown that consciousness creates reality. This isn't at all proven. Yes, the quantum measurement problem is real. Somehow various probabilities of a particle having certain properties, like being in a specific location, are converted to a single actuality when a measurement occurs.

This is called the collapse of the wave function.

The mathematics of quantum theory are marvelously accurate. That's why modern technologies like computers and cell phones have become so ubiquitous. However, physicists don't agree about the philosophical side of quantum theory. Meaning, the explanation of what's going on behind the mathematics. 

Here's a graphic from the New Scientist special issue that does a great job of summarizing the various ways scientists have tried to explain what quantum theory means.

I like the objective collapse theory, in part because it doesn't involve a conscious observer collapsing the wave function. As the entry for this in the table above says, that explains how the universe was able to be real before consciousness came on the cosmic scene. 

Here's a story in the special issue on this subject: "Do we distil reality from the quantum fog, or does it exist without us?"
Download Do we distil reality from the quantum fog or does it exist without us? | New Scientist

QUANTUM stuff, whether single atoms, electrons or photons of light, is notorious for seeming to be here, there and everywhere – and indeed everything – all at once. It exists as clouds of possibilities, manifested in a beast you can’t get around when contemplating quantum mysteries: the wave function.

On one level, the wave function is just a mathematical expression that lets you calculate the probability a particle will manifest in a particular location, say. The mystery is the way the maths says that, once you look at it, the wave function “collapses” to leave something definite we can all agree on. This creates the picture of the world that our classically trained eyes see. But how does the mathematics relate to the reality before the measurement – and what exactly, if anything, does the act of measurement change?

Erwin Schrödinger expressed the unease we might feel about apparently “making” reality when he mused about a cat inside a box that might or might not have been killed by a random quantum process inside it. Before you look, he asked, is the cat dead and alive at the same time?

The orthodox take on quantum theory, known as the Copenhagen interpretation, says yes: the maths adds up, so just shut up and calculate. “From a practical point of view, it works perfectly,” says Angelo Bassi, a theoretical physicist at the University of Trieste in Italy. “But from a fundamental point of view, why should the wave function collapse?”

Some physicists argue that it all makes complete sense if you think of the wave function as a way to predict what might happen. It changes with time, just like a weather forecast. “The universe is not made of wave functions, just as it is not made of weather forecasts,” says Christopher Fuchs at the University of Massachusetts, a leading advocate for an interpretation of quantum theory known as quantum Bayesianism, or QBism.

For QBists like Fuchs, quantum theory is a tool for us to better navigate the world, not a description of the world as it exists independent of our presence. So of course the wave function collapses – and how could it be anything other than us doing the collapsing?

Or you can go to the opposite extreme and say that the wave function doesn’t collapse at all. In the many worlds interpretation, every possible outcome of a measurement encoded in the wave function happens in different universes. No one collapses anything at the point of measurement – the world just splits, carrying us with it into one particular branch.

If you prefer an answer that gives us a hope of understanding physical reality, and doesn’t invoke a multiverse that we can never hope to observe, there is yet another option: that wave functions collapse spontaneously, without the influence of observers. This “objective collapse” was first proposed in the 1970s, but has enjoyed a revival in recent years largely because it promises to submit to empirical testing. “The other interpretations simply aim at reinterpreting the wave function,” says Bassi, who is a proponent.

In this picture, the chances of an atom’s wave function collapsing on its own is so small that you might have to wait billions of years to see it. Group enough of them together, however, and it rises dramatically. The cumulative effect would be a kind of faint background “noise” of collapsing wave functions that a sensitive enough detector might pick up.

“Testing the large-scale limit of quantum mechanics”, or TEQ, is a project that aims to do just that, and perhaps write the observer out of quantum theory for good. Designed specifically to look for collapse noise, the project involves levitating a bead of glass a few nanometres wide using electric fields, watching its motion closely. The latest version was delayed, but Hendrik Ulbricht at the University of Southampton, UK, who is leading the experiment, expects results within a year. “We are all very excited,” he says.

Looking for noise isn’t something physicists typically do. “Usually, we suppress the noise as much as possible, because the physics is in the signal,” says Ulbricht. But there is an interesting precedent. When astronomers Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias first detected an all-pervasive background radio signal in 1964, they thought it might be coming from New York City, from other galaxies or even from nearby pigeons. Finally, they realised they had discovered the cosmic microwave background, relic radiation left over from the big bang. “There could be a similar story with these collapse models,” says Ulbricht. 

I'm an atheist who has a personal relationship with God

The title of this blog post is surprising, right? How is it possible for an atheist to have a personal relationship with God?

Answer: it's easy. I simply define "God" a lot differently than religious believers do. As described in Atheists should redefine "God" as all that exists, I look upon God as being synonymous with reality, or existence.

So I find God awe-inspiring, mysterious, impossible to fathom. 

After all, the greatest mystery -- one which almost certainly never will be unraveled by humans -- is that existence exists. Or as the mystery often is described, why is there something rather than nothing?

I've written quite a few blog posts on this subject. It fascinates me. I never get tired of pondering it, even though I never get close to grasping a possible answer. (I'm in good company; no one else ever has either.)

Saying that God is the creator of existence is no answer at all, because the obvious question arises, who created God? 

If the supposed answer is no one, since God always has existed, the same answer can be applied to why the cosmos exists. There's no why, because the universe always has existed.

Which brings us back to the same question: why is there something rather than nothing?

Doesn't matter whether that something is the physical cosmos or a supernatural God. Each is something that must have always existed, since something can't be produced from absolute nothing. Thus the mystery of existence remains.

I love a good mystery, and this is the grandest mystery of all. 

That's why I'm pleased to have a personal relationship with God. I like being intimate with the mystery of existence. Like I said, to me God is synonymous with existence. 

It isn't that God is a person, obviously. I don't believe in a personal God. However, I do have confidence that I'm a person. Thus my personal relationship with God is all on my end, since so far as I know, existence can't have a relationship with anybody.

I do think that it'd be way cool if a personal God, a conscious being with all that omni stuff like omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, actually was real. So occasionally I alter my strict atheist conception of God to include that possibility. 

"Hey, God, if you're out there, pay me a visit. Love to have a chat with you. You know where to find me, since you're all-knowing." 

Haven't gotten a reply yet. Thus I'm placing most of my philosophical bet on the God that is equivalent to everything in existence. This includes my conception of "God," since a concept is a neurological pattern in a brain, so it is existent.

I like my conception of God because it points to something that truly exists: namely, existence. Otherwise "God" is just an idea that refers to nothing other than itself. Imagine that "music" was just a concept and there was no actual music in the world. 

Then people would discuss the possible meaning of "music" without anyone being able to point to music that can be heard by the ears, rather than merely thought of with the mind.

This is the situation with every religion.

Religious believers chatter on endlessly about the glory of God, blah, blah, blah, but nobody ever can show that this God they're glorifying actually exists. Whereas I can play a huge variety of music in my living room by firing up the Sonos iPhone app and having it play songs on my speakers.

Further, music existed before humans did. It's possible to view birdsong as music, thunder as music, porpoise/whale communications as music. So my relationship with music has tremendous depth, because music is so much more than a concept.

I have a personal relationship with music. But music doesn't have a personal relationship with me. Same applies to God. My relationship with God isn't conceptual or a matter of belief. It is absolutely real, since the God I revere is everything that exists.

In short, reality. 

Life is uncertain

Might as well share a post I just wrote for my HinesSight blog. Here's how I introduced it on Facebook.

l'm feeling kind of philosophical. (OK, a common feeling fof me.) Decided to write about how life only is predictable when looking backward, and not even then, really, because the events that seemed to cause our life to turn out a certain way could easily have been different. I use how my wife and I met as an example of how uncertain life can be.

 

https://hinessight.blogs.com/hinessight/2021/09/life-is-only-predictable-looking-backward.html

Atheists should redefine "God" as all that exists

The word "God" has a strong hold on people. So strong, even atheists sometimes use it, as in "God damn it!" Or "God bless you" after a sneeze. 

So I've come to believe that we atheists need to appropriate "God" for our own purpose -- living without superstition, supernatural fantasy, and blind faith. 

There's nothing wrong with that word, just as there's nothing wrong with any word.

A word is simply made up of letters. The meaning those letters represent is entirely in the hands of humans. Unlike "gravity," say, there is no objective reality that the usual meaning of "God" points to: a divine being who created our universe and takes an interest in what people do.

Given that thousands of religions exist, each with a different understanding of what "God" refers to, it makes sense for atheists to define that word in a fashion that makes sense to us.

More specifically, me, since naturally I don't claim to speak for all atheists. 

My preference is to view "God" as referring to all that exists. Yes, this is close to pantheism. However, I reject the theism part of pantheism. My notion is both simpler and more radical. 

In addition to referring to the universe, or the cosmos, as all that exists, I like the idea of being able to use God as shorthand for the same concept. God is reality. The reality that we know now, plus whatever additions to reality become known in the future.

Obviously this includes the laws of nature. 

Thus "God willing" is equivalent to saying "if the laws of nature bring this about;" "I pray to God that..." is the same as saying "I hope that..."; "Thank you, God" becomes "Thank you, reality"; "God is good" means "I see goodness in what exists."

Now, I realize that most people would see no point in repurposing "God" in this fashion. I agree in large part. But not entirely. 

Like I said, the word "God" is impossible to ignore. From an early age children are exposed to the various meanings of this word. As we grow older, we choose whether to embrace a traditional religious view of God or some other view. Yet just as pantheism includes the term "theism," so does "atheism." 

Not believing in God still brings up the notion of God, in much the same way someone who dislikes country music has to cite what is abhorred in saying "I hate country music." 

This is one reason I've become fond of the idea that there is a God atheists can embrace. When God means everything that exists, I can say, "Yes, I believe in God." 

True, this is the same as saying "I believe in reality." But that goes without saying, really. Who doesn't? Even psychotic people believe in the reality of their own deluded thoughts. 

I just don't want religious believers to be the only ones who decide what "God" means. For several weeks I've enjoyed playing around with using this word in the sense I've described. It's working for me.

When something goes well in my life, at times I say to myself "Thank you, God." I'm affirming that reality, or existence, has brought about a condition that is pleasing to me. I don't expect any response from reality, since the God I'm thanking isn't a conscious being.

Instead, I'm redefining a familiar word in a way that fits with how I've come to understand life and the world: as a vastly complex interconnected web of causes and effects that extend back to the big bang and forward into a possibly infinite future. 

Here I am, a very small cog in the machinery of the cosmos. Or, of God. My actions have some small effect on the rest of reality, but mostly I'm under the sway of causes and conditions that are hugely vaster and more powerful.

Calling all that "God" feels good to me. And like Janis Joplin sang, feeling good is good enough for me.

Better self-awareness comes from sharing our self with others

For many years I wrongly thought that the way to "know myself" was to engage in several hours a day of solitary meditation. Sure, I did learn some things about myself in this way and developed a lot of discipline by meditating every morning whether or not I felt like it.

Now, though, I've come to realize that it is easy to fool ourselves when the only conversation we're having is within our own mind -- I talking to me; us speaking to ourself; one part of our psyche conversing with another part.

As noted in my previous post about a book I'm reading, Stephen Fleming's Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness, the  outside environment provides important feedback about how well we're in touch with reality. For example, inside my own head I can fantasize that I'm in contact with higher realms of reality.

Out in the world, imagining that I'm in touch with something that isn't really there is much more difficult, because "there" is apparent to other people also. 

In a chapter called "Learning to Learn," Fleming describes the benefits of explaining things to others and communicating our thoughts in writing or out loud.

This helps to explain why I enjoy writing so much. By getting what is inside my head out into the world, I not only learn more about what I really think, I gain the benefit of other people being able to provide feedback to me about those thoughts.

We can understand why teaching and advising others can be so useful for our own learning by considering how it helps us avoid metacognitive illusions. 

When we are forced to explain things to others, there is less opportunity to be swayed by internal signals of fluency that might create unwarranted feelings of confidence in our knowledge. For instance, the "illusion of explanatory depth" refers to the common experience of thinking we know how things work (from simple gadgets to government policies), but, when we are asked to explain them to others, we are unable to do so.

Being forced to make our knowledge public ensures that misplaced confidence is exposed. For similar reasons, it is easier for us to recognize when someone else is talking nonsense than to recognize that same flaw in ourselves.

...External props and tools can also provide a new perspective on what we know. Rather than monitoring murky internal processes, many of which remain hidden from our awareness, getting words down on the page and speaking them out loud creates concrete targets for self-reflection.

...We naturally extend our minds onto the page, and the extensions can themselves be targets of metacognition, to be mused about and reflected upon just like regular thoughts and feelings. 

Metacognition is key to knowing yourself

I'm about halfway through reading Stephen Fleming's Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. Basic concepts of the book are mind reading, in the sense of inferring what is in someone else's mind, and metacognition, literally thinking about our thinking, or more broadly, being aware of ourself. 

Since Fleming, a British neuroscientist, cites many research studies in his book, reading it can take some effort. However, Fleming is a good writer, and frequently uses examples from everyday life, so on the whole I'm liking it a lot. 

The title, Know Thyself, points toward a fact I've marveled at for a long time. We humans can turn our attention upon ourself in a way that other animals can't. Fleming's idea, which makes sense, is that this metacognition and mind reading (another term for the more usual "theory of mind") are closely related.

Meaning, many of the same brain processes are at work when we think "I feel bad that I got so angry" (metacognition) and "I believe that she thinks I'm mad at her" (mind reading). One is directed inward at our own mind; the other is directed outward at other minds.

And the same sorts of problems can arise in both metacognition and mind reading. We can be wrong about our own mind, and we can be wrong about other people's minds. Fleming writes:

First of all, it is important to distinguish between the capacity for metacognition and the accuracy of the self-awareness that results.

The capacity for metacognition becomes available to us after waking each morning. We can turn our thoughts inward and begin to think about ourselves. The accuracy of metacognition, on the other hand, refers to whether our reflective judgments tend to track our actual skills and abilities.

...In fact, metacognition is likely to be even more susceptible to illusions and distortions than perception. Our senses usually remain in touch with reality because we receive constant feedback from the environment.

If I misperceive my coffee cup as twice as large as it is, then I will likely knock it over when I reach over to pick it up, and such errors will serve to rapidly recalibrate my model of the world.  Because my body remains tightly coupled to the environment, there is only so much slack my senses can tolerate.

The machinery for self-awareness has a tougher job: it must perform mental alchemy, conjuring up a sense of whether we are right or wrong from a fairly loose and diffuse feedback loop. The consequences of illusions about ourselves are usually less obvious.

If we are lacking in self-awareness, we might get quizzical looks at committee meetings, but we won't tend to knock over coffee cups or fall down flights of stairs. Self-awareness is therefore less moored to reality and more prone to illusions. 

Those illusions basically involve us feeling that we know something that we actually don't know, or failing to feel that we know something which we actually do know.

There are lots of gradations, of course. The ideal is to feel uncertain about knowing things that our knowledge really is uncertain about, to feel confident about knowing things we really do know about, and to feel not at all confident in things that we don't know about.

That last "feel" is what makes us call a plumber when we know we don't know how to fix a leaky faucet. Lacking it makes us attempt a repair when we're not competent to do the job, something I have some familiarity with. 

(One sadly vivid memory is giving up on a faucet repair, calling a plumber, and have him simply reverse one of the parts I had backward. When I joked that this 30 second repair now was going to cost me $80, or whatever, he said "You're forgetting what it took me to learn how to do that 30 second repair," which was absolutely true.)

At an extreme, this sort of thing is called frontal lobe paradox.

The paradox is that people with frontal lobe damage may have significant difficulties with everyday tasks such as cooking or organizing their finances, but because their metacognition is impaired, they are unable to recognize that they need a helping hand. 

Without metacognition, we may lose the capacity to understand what we have lost. The connection between our self-impression and the reality of our behavior -- the reality seen by our family and friends -- becomes weakened.

A less extreme example is how most people believe they are an above-average driver, a statistical impossibility.

"Moon" movie points to shocking non-supernatural realization

A year or so ago I watched "Moon" via Netflix. I guess at this point I need to enter an obligatory spoiler alert, in case anyone hasn't seen this 2009 movie and thinks they might want to see it without knowing a crucial plot element.

This was an intriguing movie, though not super-entertaining. The acting was good, but not exceptional. What I distinctly remember was a shocking twist.

There Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is, at a base on the moon where a mining operation is taking place. He's looking forward to returning home after a three-year solitary tour of duty on the moon. 

Sam gets pleasure in recorded messages from his wife on Earth, who was pregnant when he left for the moon. Communication difficulties prevent live back-and-forth communication with his wife.

All this seems completely normal. However, through a series of events that I've mostly forgotten, Sam eventually discovers a shocking secret the mining company has been hiding.

Sam is a clone.

The memories he has of his wife and previous time on Earth were implanted in his brain. None of that is real. Sam isn't who he thinks he is, a human being like everybody else back on Earth. Though his body is human, his mind is artificial.

How Sam deals with this occupies the rest of the movie. 

What galvanized me as I watched "Moon" was that moment when Sam realizes that everything he relied upon to help  get him through his stint on the Moon was false. The foundation of his existence was shaken to the core.

Not only wasn't his Earth life what he'd thought it was, he himself wasn't who he thought he was. 

And this wasn't a shift in consciousness like, say, someone finding their more genuine self after psychotherapy, climbing Mt. Everest, or whatever. It was a total reversal of how Sam had looked upon the world. 

Well, even more than that, since a reversal implies that the thing being reversed is simply the flip side of what the reversal reveals -- like someone realizing they aren't heterosexual but homosexual. A big change, yet they're still sexual. 

Rather, Sam went from seeing himself as a normal human being to seeing himself as not at all human, but a manufactured clone, no different from hundreds or thousands of clones exactly like him that he discovers in a hidden section of the moon base.

What struck me about this aspect of the movie is how Sam's shocking realization could be viewed as a metaphor, or reflection, of another sort of shocking realization that could be possible for any of us. Not that we're a clone, but that we're not who we have always viewed ourselves as being.

Now, I don't know what that shocking realization might consist of. Or if it really would be shocking. Maybe it would feel entirely natural, as if we'd woken up from a dream that had been going on for our entire life.

I'm not talking about a religious realization, such as "God loves me" or "Jesus is my savior." These are additions to a mind that don't overturn a mind's  basic assumptions. Nor am I talking about something supernatural.

Rather, I see this realization as being along the line of "The world as I've known it is an illusion, but there is no world more real than this one." In other words, it is the perception of the everyday world that is turned upside down in some fashion, not the world itself, which remains just as it is.

My best bet as to what this sort of shocking realization could consist of -- which arguably is very much in line with Buddhist enlightenment or nirvana -- is an experience that the self we take ourselves to be actually doesn't exist. 

This is akin to what Sam experiences in "Moon," aside from the fact that Sam was distressed by the fact that he wasn't who he always thought he was, while the experience of selflessness would be much more pleasant, blissful even. Or at least no less pleasant or blissful than our previous existence as a self, just different in a difficult-to-describe way.

Along with this would be a realization that the free will we always thought we possessed also was an illusion.

I see this as a massive relief. I've had glimpses of such a state of being in which I see that who I am at any given moment is the result of causes and effects extending back to my birth -- and even far beyond that, to the moment of the big bang 14 billion years ago.

My view, which isn't at all original, is that evolution adapted us to an illusion of ego/self because this aided in our survival as early humans.

We continue to buy into this story of individual separateness because every human culture teaches it is true, even though some cultures (Chinese and Indigenous, for example) buy into it less than other cultures (American and European, for example).

Anyway, I like the idea that our view of ourselves could be upended in a dramatic fashion.

I'm not sure how this could come about. It simply seems like a real possibility that fits with experiences I had with psychedelics in my college days, and other experiences I've had with meditation/mindfulness since.