Church of the Churchless

Be thankful for nothing. Which means, everything.

I'm not a grinch about Thanksgiving. I enjoy this holiday. 

My wife just finished making an apple pie. Soon I'll prepare our main dish, a vegetarian Trader Joe's Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast, which requires all of my cooking skills: heating the oven to 375, basting the roast, and cooking it for 45 minutes. 

Whew! I feel exhausted already.

I'm also totally fine with feeling thankful. I just have a different view about what thankfulness means. Last night I saw people interviewed on the evening news about what they're thankful for. Family. Friends. Having a job. That sort of thing.

OK. Totally understandable. Around millions of dinner tables today, there will be similar talk of what everybody is thankful for. 

But here's my problem with singling out certain aspects of life for a blue ribbon thankfulness award. This leaves out most of what we experience each day. 

I'm a big fan of mindfulness, even though I often suck at it.

Basically this is non-judgmental awareness of the present moment, accepting whatever lies within and without ourselves. If we're angry, we know we're angry. If we're stuck in traffic, we know we're stuck in traffic.

We don't push what's happening away. We embrace the good and bad, the beautiful and ugly, the pleasurable and painful.

This doesn't mean fatalism. We still try to fix things, improve our condition, help others in need, fight injustice. Mindfulness just leads us to a understanding that we've got to accept what is before we can move toward what can be. 

Thanksgiving is a holiday that encourages positivity. Nothing wrong with that. But with all the pressure to have an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving, maybe some people would resonate with this perspective: 

Be thankful for nothing. Which means, everything.

I'll explain why I like this notion. In my everyday life, I'm simply living my life. I don't divide my life into what I'm thankful for, and what I'm not thankful for. I do say "thank you" occasionally, but that's different from putting things in thankful and not thankful buckets.

I have some health problems. I deal with those. I guess I'm thankful that I'm alive, since being dead would be worse than having those problems (though it would eliminate them). But that doesn't come to mind as I go about my day.

Our dog usually is a pleasure to have around, but sometimes she can be annoying. Ditto with my wife. The same is true of me. I'm sure our dog gets annoyed with me calling her when she's engrossed in hunting mice or moles. And I know my wife finds me annoying at times.

Such is the nature of life. It's a whole, not a bunch of separable things.

If I could eliminate everything unpleasant about life, it wouldn't be life anymore. Living is a combination of what we like and don't like, of pleasure and pain, of happiness and sadness. Living life mindfully means being aware of everything, not just the part of life we'd say we're thankful for if someone asked.

I love our property, ten natural acres in rural south Salem. Our house is surrounded by large trees. They're beautiful. They're also annoying when they drop leaves, branches, and needles where we don't want them.

But I can't separate what I like about the trees from what I don't like. They're just trees, doing their tree thing. I have to accept everything about the trees. That means not thinking of them as something I'm thankful for, because they're a combination of annoying and pleasurable -- as is life as a whole.

I both like and dislike dealing with leaves.

So rather than being thankful about some aspects of the trees, and not thankful about other aspects, I prefer to be thankful for nothing particular about them, which enables me to be thankful for everything about them -- though the whole notion of thankfulness then becomes irrelevant. 

This afternoon I did what I usually do on Thanksgiving: pick leaves out of bushes in our yard, since by now almost all of the leaves have fallen and been blown into the brush, so I'm into the refined part of dealing with the leaves.

So there the leaves are, something to be dealt with, but not something I classify as "thankful" or "not thankful." They're simply a chore, which is quite pleasant on a dry fairly warm day like today.

And when I looked around the back of this bush, I saw flowers blooming that I hadn't noticed before. Again, this wasn't something I was thankful or not thankful for. It was simply part of what I was doing.

Life is just what life is. We can try to categorize and divide life in a myriad of ways, but in the end, our life is a whole. 

Which is how I look upon thankfulness.

When we're thankful for nothing in particular, the door is opened to being thankful for everything -- even though "thankful" ceases to be a word pointing to something special, since all of life becomes special.

Everybody's brain is producing a kind of hallucination

Today I finished reading the final pages of Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." Here's a provocative passage from the Epilogue.

Everything in conscious experience is a perception of sorts, and every perception is a kind of controlled -- or controlling -- hallucination.

What excites me most about this way of thinking is how far it may take us. 

Experiences of free will are perceptions. The flow of time is a perception. Perhaps even the three-dimensional structure of our experienced world and the sense that the contents of perceptual experience are objectively real -- these may be aspects of perception too.

The tools of consciousness science are allowing us to get ever closer to Kant's noumenon, the ultimately unknowable reality of which we, too, are a part.

This idea that conscious experience is a perception of sorts fits with what Sam Harris often says in the guided meditations I listen to on his Waking Up app.

For example, he'll ask if it seems that we're perceiving the world from a place somewhere inside our head. Then Harris will say that this seeming is itself a conscious experience, in the same way that objects in the world are conscious experiences.

In other words, we can't get outside of what the brain is doing. There's no ethereal observer, or self, floating around somewhere in our cranium. What there is are many billions of neurons connected in trillions of ways, which end up producing our conscious experiences.

I thought about trying to explain this from what I've learned in Seth's book. Then I recalled that Seth had written an essay published in the Boston Globe, "Reality is what you make of it," where he explains how the brain hallucinates reality.

I've copied in the essay below, which covers key points in his Being You book. 

I open my eyes and a world appears. I’m sitting on a plastic chair on the deck of a tumbledown wooden house, high in a cypress forest a few miles north of Santa Cruz, Calif. It’s early morning. Looking straight out, I can see tall trees still wreathed in the cool ocean fog that rolls in every night, sending the temperature plummeting. I can’t see the ground, so the deck and the trees all seem to be floating together with me in the mist.

There are some other plastic chairs, a table, and a tray arranged with coffee and bread. I can hear birdsong, some rustling around in the back — the people I’m staying with — and a distant murmur from something I can’t identify. Not every morning is like this; this is a good morning. I have to persuade myself, not for the first time, that this extraordinary world is a construction of my brain, a kind of “controlled hallucination.”

Whenever we are conscious, we are conscious of something, or of many things. These are the contents of consciousness. To understand how they come about, and what I mean by controlled hallucination, let’s change our perspective.

Imagine for a moment that you are a brain. Really try to think about what it’s like up there, sealed inside the bony vault of the skull, trying to figure out what’s out there in the world. There’s no light, no sound, no anything — it’s completely dark and utterly silent. When it forms perceptions, all the brain has to go on is a constant barrage of electrical signals that are only indirectly related to things out in the world, whatever they may be.

These sensory inputs don’t come with labels attached (“I’m from a cup of coffee.” “I’m from a tree.”). They don’t even arrive with labels announcing their modality, whether they are visual or auditory or sensations of touch, temperature, or proprioception (the sense of body position).

How does the brain transform these inherently ambiguous sensory signals into a coherent perceptual world full of objects, people, and places? The essential idea is that the brain is a prediction machine, so that what we see, hear, and feel is nothing more than the brain’s best guess of the causes of its sensory inputs. Following this idea all the way through, we will see that the contents of consciousness are a kind of waking dream — a controlled hallucination — that is both more than and less than whatever the real world really is.

Here’s a common-sense view of perception. Let’s call it the “how things seem” view.

In this view, there’s a mind-independent reality out there, full of objects and people and places that have properties like color, shape, texture, and so on. Our senses act as transparent windows onto this world, detecting these objects and their features and conveying this information to the brain, whereupon complex neuronal processes read it out to form perceptions.

A red coffee cup out there in the world leads to a perception of a red coffee cup generated within the brain. As to who or what is doing the perceiving — well, that’s the “self,” isn’t it?, the “I behind the eyes,” one might say, the recipient of wave upon wave of sensory data, which uses its perceptual readouts to guide behavior, to decide what to do next. There’s a cup of coffee over there. I perceive it and I pick it up. I sense, I think, and then I act.

This is an appealing description. Patterns of thinking established over decades, maybe centuries, have accustomed us to the idea that the brain is some kind of computer perched inside the skull, processing sensory information to build an inner picture of the outside world for the benefit of the self. This picture is so familiar that it can be difficult to conceive of any reasonable alternative. Indeed, many neuroscientists and psychologists still think about perception in this way, as a process in which the brain works from the “bottom up” to discern features of things in the world.

Here’s how the bottom-up picture is supposed to work: Stimuli from the world — light waves, sound waves, molecules conveying tastes and smells, and so on — impinge on sensory organs and cause electrical impulses to flow “upwards” or “inwards” into the brain. These sensory signals pass through several distinct processing stages, and at each stage the brain picks out increasingly complex features.

Let’s take vision as an example. At first the brain might detect features like luminance or edges, and later it might detect the parts of discrete objects — such as eyes and ears, or wheels and side-view mirrors. Still later stages of this processing system would respond to whole objects, or object categories, like faces and cars.

In this way, the external world with its objects and people and all sorts of everything becomes recapitulated in a series of features extracted from the river of sensory data flowing into the brain. Signals flowing in the opposite direction — from the “top down” or the “inside out,” serve to refine or otherwise constrain the bottom-up flow of sensory information.

This bottom-up view of perception fits well with what we know about the anatomy of the brain, at least at first glance. Perceptual systems of all modalities are organized in the brain as hierarchies. In the visual system, for example, the primary visual cortex of the brain is close to sensory inputs, while the parietal and frontal cortices, where later stages of processing are believed to occur, are further away.

Studies of brain activity also seem friendly to this bottom-up view. Experiments going back decades — investigating the visual systems of cats and monkeys — have repeatedly shown that neurons at early stages of visual processing respond to simple features like edges, while neurons at later stages respond to complex features like faces. More recent experiments using methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging have revealed much the same thing in human brains.

You can even build artificial “perceiving systems” this way. Machine vision systems based on artificial neural networks are nowadays achieving impressive performance levels, in some situations comparable to those of humans. These systems, too, are frequently based on bottom-up theories.

With all these points in its favor, the bottom-up “how things seem” view of perception seems to be on pretty solid ground.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?”

Elizabeth Anscombe: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.”

Wittgenstein: “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?”

In this delightful exchange between Wittgenstein and his fellow philosopher (and biographer) Elizabeth Anscombe, the legendary Austrian thinker uses the Copernican revolution to illustrate the point that how things seem is not necessarily how they are. Although it seems as though the sun goes around the earth, it is of course the earth rotating on its own axis that gives us night and day, and it is the sun, not the earth, that sits at the center of the solar system.

Nothing new here, you might think, and you’d be right. But Wittgenstein was driving at something deeper. His real message for Anscombe was that even with a greater understanding of how things actually are, at some level things still appear the same way they always did. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, same as always.

As with the solar system, so with perception. I open my eyes and it seems as though there’s a real world out there. Today I’m at home in Brighton, England, and there are no cypress trees as there were in Santa Cruz, just the usual scatter of objects on my desk, a red chair in the corner, and beyond the window a totter of chimney pots. These objects seem to have specific shapes and colors, and for the ones closer at hand, smells and textures too. This is how things seem.

Although it may seem as though my senses provide transparent windows onto a mind-independent reality, and that perception is a process of “reading out” sensory data, what’s really going on is — I believe — quite different. Perceptions do not come from the bottom up or the outside in, they come primarily from the top down or the inside out. What we experience is built from the brain’s predictions, or best guesses, about the causes of sensory signals.

There is a real world out there, but the way in which that real world appears in conscious experience is always a construction — a writing as much as a reading. As with the Copernican revolution, this top-down view of perception remains consistent with much of the existing evidence, leaving unchanged many aspects of how things seem, while at the same time changing everything.

---

This notion of perception is best described as “controlled hallucination,” a phrase I first heard from the British neuroscientist Chris Frith many years ago. The essential ingredients of the controlled hallucination view, as I think of it, are as follows.

First, the brain is constantly making predictions about the causes of its sensory signals, predictions that cascade in a top-down direction through the brain’s perceptual hierarchies. If you happen to be looking at a coffee cup, your visual cortex will be formulating predictions about the causes of the sensory signals that originate from this coffee cup.

Second, sensory signals, which stream into the brain from the bottom up, or outside in, keep these perceptual predictions tied in useful ways to their causes — in this case, the coffee cup. These signals function as “prediction errors,” registering the difference between what the brain expects and what it gets at every level of processing.

These bottom-up signals therefore serve to refine and calibrate the top-down predictions. By adjusting top-down predictions so as to suppress bottom-up prediction errors, the brain’s perceptual best guesses maintain their grip on their causes in the world.

The third and most important ingredient in the controlled hallucination view is the claim that perceptual experience — in this case the subjective experience of “seeing a coffee cup” — is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves; we only ever experience interpretations of them.

Mix these ingredients together and we’ve cooked up a Copernican inversion for how to think about perception. It seems as though the world pours itself directly into our conscious minds through our sensory organs. With this mindset, it is natural to think of perception as a process of bottom-up feature detection — a “reading” of the world around us. But what we actually perceive is a top-down, inside-out neuronal fantasy that is reined in by reality. It is not a transparent window onto whatever that reality may be.

And — to channel Wittgenstein once more — what would it seem like, if it seemed as if perception was a top-down best guess? Well, just as the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, if it seemed as if perception was a controlled hallucination, the coffee cup on the table — the entirety of anyone’s perceptual experience — would still seem the same way it always did and always will.

When we think about hallucination, we typically think of some kind of internally generated perception, a seeing or a hearing of something that isn’t actually there, or that other people don’t hear or see — as can happen in schizophrenia or perhaps during a psychedelic adventure. These associations place hallucination in contrast to “normal” perception, which is assumed to reflect things as they actually exist out in the world.

In the top-down view of perception, this sharp distinction becomes a matter of degree. Both normal perception and abnormal hallucination involve internally generated predictions about the causes of sensory inputs, and the two share a core set of mechanisms in the brain.

The difference is that in normal perception, what we perceive is tied to — controlled by — causes in the world and the body, whereas in the case of hallucination our perceptions have, to some extent, lost their grip on these causes. When we hallucinate, as considerable evidence from psychological and brain imaging studies is now indicating, our perceptual predictions are not properly updated in light of prediction errors.

If perception is controlled hallucination, then — equally — hallucination can be thought of as uncontrolled perception. The two are different, but to ask where to draw the line is like asking where the boundary is between day and night. You could even say that we’re all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.

Anil Seth, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom, is the author of “Being You: A New Science of Consciousness,” from which this essay is adapted, with permission from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group. Copyright © 2021 by Anil Seth.

"Beast machine theory" explains consciousness well

Hate to break this to you, if you're a firm believer in immaterial consciousness, but we humans are animals. Specifically, mammals of the primate variety, close relatives of chimpanzees, gorillas, and such.

In his book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness," Anil Seth lays out his well-informed view of consciousness. (He's a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex.)

Seth gave a TEDx talk about his beast machine theory. 

Here's some of what Seth has to say in his book about the beast machine theory.

The beast machine theory grounds experiences of world and self in a biological drive toward staying alive.

...The beast machine theory proposes that consciousness in humans and other animals arose in evolution, emerges in each of us during development, and operates from moment to moment in ways intimately connected with our status as living systems.

All of our experiences and perceptions stem from our nature as self-sustaining living machines that care about their own persistence. 

My intuition -- and again it's only an intuition -- is that the materiality of life will turn out to be important for all manifestations of consciousness. One reason for this is that the imperative for regulation and self-maintenance in living systems isn't restricted to just one level, such as the integrity of the whole body.

Self-maintenance for living systems goes all the way down -- even down to the level of individual cells. Every cell in your body -- in any body -- is continually regenerating the conditions necessary for its own integrity over time.

...This shouldn't be taken to imply that individual cells are conscious, or that all living organisms are conscious. The point is that the processes of physiological regulation that underpin consciousness and selfhood in the beast machine theory are bootstrapped from fundamental life processes "all the way down."

In this view, it is life, rather than information processing, that breathes the fire into the equations. 

...Seen this way, the fuss about machine consciousness is symptomatic of an increasing alienation from our biological nature and from our evolutionary heritage.

The beast machine perspective differs from this narrative in almost every way. In my theory, as we've seen, the entirety of human experience and mental life arises because of, and not in spite of, our nature as self-sustaining biological organisms that care about their own persistence.

This view of consciousness and human nature does not exclude the possibility of conscious machines, but it does undercut the amped-up techno-rapture narrative of soon-to-be-sentient computers that propels our fears and permeates our dreams. 

From the beast machine perspective, the quest to understand consciousness places us increasingly within nature, not further apart from it.

Just as it should.

 

Free will is part of the human mind, not the universe

Free will as people almost always understand it is an illusion. There's little or no doubt about that, as I noted in a recent post. 

Here's an idea that is well worth pondering. I've enjoyed doing just that as I go to sleep, letting my mind wrap itself around an intriguing notion.

So far as we know, we humans are the only entity in the universe that doesn't exist in full accord with determinism -- causes and effects operating in a lawful, orderly manner.

Oh, but what about randomness?

Sure, randomness is real. Every programmer knows about random number generators. Quantum physics is based on probabilities of things happening at the atomic and subatomic level.

But randomness is lawful.

Certain rules determine whether a sequence of numbers, for example, truly is random. And quantum phenomena also are lawful. That's why quantum physics is so amazingly successful in serving as a foundation of modern technologies.

Thus here we are, some 13.8 billion years after the big bang that brought our universe into being, with everything in the cosmos going along with the laws of nature, galaxies forming, stars appearing and disappearing, our planet forming from primordial material, single celled life becoming multicellular life, mammals eventually evolving, then primates, and finally Homo sapiens, while sunlight strikes Earth, continents drift into their current configuration, millions of species come and go, volcanoes erupt, hurricanes form, mountains rise and are eroded away.

All without a single trace of free will. Everything occurring naturally. No one wondering other than we humans, "Should this be happening?"

Human consciousness is the only known place in the universe where a belief in the illusion of free will, and a downplaying of lawful determinism, introduces a sense of It could have been otherwise.

Should we be proud of this? Or is this a flaw in what evolution has brought about, an unfortunate side effect of a human brain that is able not only to be aware, but to be aware of our own awareness?

I enjoy looking on myself as a very, very, very small cog in the vast machinery of the cosmos. I find peace in viewing my life as fully determined, causes and effects leading to the sort of person I am now, in the place I am now, surrounded by the circumstances that affect me now.

Human consciousness is wonderful.

But it isn't perfect. Or infallible. Sometimes what seems to be, actually isn't. That's how I've come to view my sense that I'm in control of my life, that I possess free will, that I can stand outside of the deterministic laws of nature. 

Lying in bed, pondering this stuff as I gradually fall asleep, I have a glimpse of another way of viewing my place in the universe that doesn't make me something separate and distinct from the rest of nature.

And that feels good.

Spooky free will is an illusion

Everybody believes they have unfettered free will, yet almost certainly nobody does. This is just one of the illusions that Anil Seth debunks in his captivating book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness."

I'm fascinated by free will. Of course, I don't have a choice in this.

Seth makes a strong case for being skeptical about our ability to choose actions, thoughts, emotions, and such by somehow stepping outside of all influences other than... 

That's what's so difficult to come up with. What could possibly reside in human consciousness that produces the "free" part of free will? 

If something like that existed, it would be spooky. Meaning, supernatural or other worldly -- like a ghost. Seth writes:

Let's first be clear about what free will is not. Free will is not an intervention in the flow of physical events in the universe, more specifically in the brain, making things happen that wouldn't otherwise happen. 

This "spooky" free will invokes Cartesian dualism, demands freedom from the laws of cause and effect, and offers nothing of explanatory value in return.

So does this mean that everything is determined by those laws of cause and effect? Maybe.

But denying free will doesn't rest on a strict determinism. Even if randomness is at play in certain aspects of reality, such as the quantum realm, this doesn't provide support for free will.

Once spooky free will is out of the picture, it is easy to see that the debate over determinism doesn't matter at all. There's no longer any need to allow any nondeterministic elbow room for it to intervene.

From the perspective of free will as a perpetual experience, there is simply no need for any disruption to the causal flow of physical events. A deterministic universe can chug along just fine.

And if determinism is false, it doesn't make any difference because exercising free will does not mean behaving randomly. Voluntary actions neither feel random, nor are random. 

Seth uses the act of making tea to illustrate features that characterize most, if not all, experiences of volition. 

The first defining feature is the feeling that I am doing what I want to do.

...Although making tea was fully consistent with my beliefs, values, and desires, I did not choose to have these beliefs, values, and desires. I wanted a cup of tea, but I did not choose to want a cup of tea. 

Voluntary actions are voluntary not because they descend from an immaterial soul, nor because they ascend from a quantum soup. They are voluntary because they express what I, as a person, want to do, even though I cannot choose those wants.

As nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it, "Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."

Then Seth talks about something that Sam Harris emphasizes in his arguments against free will. To me this is a very strong argument.

The second defining feature is the feeling that I could have done otherwise... I made tea. Could I have done otherwise? In one sense, yes. There's coffee in the kitchen too, so I could have made coffee. And after making the tea, it certainly seemed to me that I could have made coffee instead.

But I didn't want coffee, I wanted tea, and since I can't choose my wants, I made tea.

Given the precise state of the universe at the time, which includes the state of my body and brain, all of which have prior causes, whether deterministic or not, stretching all the way back to my origin as a tea-drinking semi-Englishman and beyond, I could not have done otherwise. 

You can't replay the same tape and expect a different outcome, apart from uninteresting differences due to randomness. The relevant phenomenology -- the feeling that I could have done otherwise -- is not a transparent window onto how causality operates in the physical world.

Thus our usual conception of free will is an illusion. However, Seth says:

From another perspective, free will is not illusory at all. So long as we have relatively undamaged brains and relatively normal upbringings, each of us has a very real capacity to execute and to inhibit voluntary action, thanks to our brain's ability to control our many degrees of freedom.

This kind of freedom is both a freedom from and a freedom to. 

It is a freedom from immediate causes in the world or in the body, and from coercion by authorities, hypnotists and mesmerists, or social-media pushers.

It is not, however, freedom from the laws of nature or from the causal fabric of the universe. It is a freedom to act according to our beliefs, values, and goals, to do as we wish to do, and to make choices according to who we are.

This is a much reduced conception of free will from the usual feeling of "I could have done otherwise." It's basically compatibilism, which is a greatly watered-down view of free will where determinism is compatible with acting freely.

Except, you aren't really free in the sense of being able to do something other than what you did. You're merely free to act according to what you're motivated to do -- with the cause of that motivation being outside of your control.

If someone wants to call this free will, it's because they're motivated to do so. But they aren't free to choose to believe in free will. That's a result of causes and effects, not free will.

Health problems are a window into how our minds work

Yesterday I got a probable diagnosis of glaucoma, an eye disease. I wrote about this in a post on my HinesSight blog, "Not so fun day: I probably have glaucoma."

One bit of good news is that this was detected in an early stage, since I get an annual eye exam because I wear contact lenses and am severely nearsighted.

Another aspect of getting the likely diagnosis is that it's given me an opportunity to observe how my mind has been dealing with the news. Which really is just another way of saying, How I have been dealing with the news, since there's really no difference between my mind and me.

Everybody is different. But I suspect my mind works in much the same way as many other human minds. Here's a rundown of some of the central themes that have been running through my head since yesterday afternoon.

Could be worse. A glaucoma web site informed me that going blind (quite unlikely in my case) ranks #3 in people's medical fears after cancer and heart disease. However, the survey dates from 2002, before Covid. 

I've been recalling what a promoter of Stoicism said in a talk I listened to a while back: "Your life is someone else's dream life." His point, which makes good sense, is that no matter how bad off you are, out there in the world are people who would gladly trade your problems for theirs.

So while I'd prefer not to have what appears to be glaucoma, I'd be a lot more disturbed if I'd gotten a serious cancer diagnosis, or told I needed major heart surgery. Of course, I'd be happier if I'd gotten a common cold diagnosis. I just prefer to look on the bright side as much as possible.

Get the facts. When I got home after seeing an ophthalmologist that my optometrist had referred me to, my first thought was that I didn't want to do any Googling of "glaucoma." But that soon was followed by a second thought, Why not? 

In general, I'm a believer that knowing more about a medical problem is better than knowing less. Sure, you can overdo being an Internet M.D. Searching out basic information made me feel better, though, because the flip side of my Could be worse frame of mind is visualizing just that: the worst.

Since glaucoma can lead to blindness, in my more frantic moments my mind would picture what it'd be like to be sightless. Not a pleasant prospect, especially since I enjoy writing and reading so much. So it was good to read "with early diagnosis and modern treatment, blindness is very uncommon."

Some thinking is good, some is bad. There's a fine line between pondering what I need to do to deal productively with what appears to be a glaucoma diagnosis, and allowing my mind to obsess about this. 

I've tried to be gentle with myself, realizing that it only has been a bit more than 24 hours since an eye doctor told me my test results were "suspicious of glaucoma." This was a shock to me, though my optometrist had raised the possibility a few weeks earlier. 

What I've had to do today is tamp down repetitive worries that don't lead anywhere positive, while engaging in thinking that will help me -- like trying to figure out why I'm not able to set up online access to the two clinics where my optometrist and ophthalmologist work so I can ask them questions that way.

Often my mind seems to operate with the crazy rule of "Worrying about a bad thing will stop it from happening." Actually, I've found that most things I worry about happening don't, while other problems pop up as a complete surprise.

If the goal is to be happy, be happy now, not later. A corollary to the observation above is that today I found myself on a late afternoon dog walk having thoughts along the line of, "If I couldn't see very well, it wouldn't be as much fun to go on a walk with our dog."

But then it'd dawn on me that right now I'm seeing just fine, and I'm on a walk with our dog. So I should be happy doing that, not worrying about how I might be less happy at some point in the future. Sure, that's possible. Yet so are countless other things, most of which can't be predicted.

In my saner moments I'd realize that life is uncertain. I don't have a heart problem. However, until recently, I didn't have a glaucoma problem. So what if I had a totally unexpected fatal heart attack while I was on a dog walk, worrying about my eyes rather than enjoying the walk.

I wouldn't want my last thought to be an unnecessary worry. Or, a worry that I had been worrying too much. As I recall I said in a recent post, if we make our moments pleasant, those moments will produce pleasant minutes, hours, days, and years.

Of course, that's an ideal. More realistic is to do our best to make our moments pleasant, understanding that some will be unpleasant. That increases the odds that if something bad happens to us, it will have been preceded -- and hopefully followed -- by good times.

What if God hates religions?

I'm an atheist who likes to imagine how God thinks. What allows me to do this is the same reason anyone is able to make a claim about God.

Since there's no convincing evidence that God exists, every person has an equal opportunity to imagine what this non-existent entity is like -- in much the same way that anyone can come up with a fictional story about characters they conjure up in their mind.

So I enjoy visualizing how irritated God is at religious people.

God is fine with people who use drugs, drink too much, watch porn all the time, have sex with anybody they want, get an abortion, and engage in any other sort of supposedly sinful behavior.

But when it comes to being religious, God absolutely hates this disgusting insult to all that is good and holy. I know, because God is using me as a channel to set humanity straight. Like all prophets, I shall speak the Word of God.

The only difference being, what follows is absolutely true.

If you don't believe me, too bad. Only I can testify to the majesty of the revelation revealed below, because ONLY I AM ME -- God's first and most important commandment.

God hates religions and religious people for lots of reasons. Chief among them is that no one knows anything about God. They're just guessing what God is like and what God wants. I'm no exception. However, God loves me for not pretending to know what God is like and what God wants.

I just make crap up about God, and am pleased to admit this. That pleases God mightily. 

God is especially pissed when religious people claim they have a special relationship with the Almighty. As if! God wants everyone to know that they all are equally beloved by God -- though God has a special fondness for atheists, since we acknowledge God's non-existence, and God likes truth-tellers.

Even if God existed, God tells me, there's no way Christians, for example, would be viewed any differently than Rastafarians or devotees of Zeus. The notion that God looks upon some people more favorably than other people is so fucking absurd, God lacks words to describe the absurdity.

Which is why I've been chosen to speak for God. 

God doesn't play favorites. When death comes, every person is going to end up in the exact same place: nowhere. And in the same condition: nothingness. Nowhere and nothingness... these are two words that please God beyond all others, since they describe the nature of God perfectly.

So what's the harm in believing in God? I asked God this question and got a one-word flaming response that burned its way into the depths of my consciousness.

Everything. 

Since God's nature is to be nowhere and exist as nothingness, each and every bullshit description of God that takes itself at all seriously -- and believe me, this revelation doesn't fall prey to that fatal error -- is blasphemy piled upon blasphemy with a big topping of blasphemy.

That's why being religious puts you on the Road to Hell. Or it would, if Hell existed. Which it does, because I've just imagined it. But my revelations about Hell must await another blog post.

Sneak peek: there's eternal suffering there for all who dare to speak of God without feeling in their innermost heart, "I'm just bullshitting."

The teletransportation paradox gives us clues about the "self"

Here's an excerpt from Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." I found it fascinating, even though it echoes ideas Derek Parfit wrote about in one of his books. But Seth describes this thought experiment in an intriguing way.

After the excerpt, I'll share some observations about it.

Let's begin our exploration of the self with a quick trip into the future. A century or so from now, teletransportation devices have been invented which can create exact replicas of any human being. 

Just like the machines in Star Trek, they work by scanning a person in exquisite detail -- down to the arrangement of each individual molecule -- and using the information in the scan to build a second version of that person in a distant location, for example on Mars.

After some initial apprehension, people quickly become accustomed to this technology as an efficient means of transportation.

They even get used to the necessary feature that, once the replica is created, the original is immediately vaporized -- a procedure that had to be built in, in order to avoid creating an explosion of identical people. 

From the point of view of a traveler, let's call her Eva, this poses no practical problem at all. After some reassurances from the operator, Eva simply feels that she has disappeared from place X (London) and reappeared in place Y (Mars) in an instant.

One day, there's a hitch.

The vaporization module in London malfunctions and Eva -- the Eva who is in London, anyway -- feels like nothing's happened and that she's still in the transportation facility. A minor inconvenience. They'll have to reboot the machine and try again, or maybe leave it until the following day.

But then a technician shuffles into the room, carrying a gun.

He mumbles something along the lines of "Don't worry, you've been safely teletransported to Mars, just like normal, it's just that the regulations say that we still need to ... and look here, you signed this consent form ..."

He slowly raises his weapon and Eva has a feeling she's never had before, that maybe this teletransportation malarkey isn't quite so straightforward after all.

The point of this thought experiment, which is called the "teletransportation paradox," is to unearth some of the biases most of us have when we think about what it means to be a self.

There are two philosophical problems raised by the teletransportation paradox. The consciousness-in-general problem is whether we can be sure that the replica will have conscious experiences, or whether it will be a perfectly functioning equivalent but without any inner universe. 

I don't find this problem very interesting. If the replica is created in sufficient detail -- every molecule identical! -- then there's no reason to doubt it would be conscious, and conscious in exactly the same way as the original.

If the replica is not completely identical, then we're back to arguments about different kinds of philosophical zombie -- and there's no need to go over all that again.

The more interesting problem is that of personal identity.

Is the Eva on Mars (let's call her Eva2) the same person as Eva1 (the Eva still in London)? It's tempting to say, yes, she is: Eva2 would feel in every way as Eva1 would have felt had she actually been transported instantaneously from London to Mars.

What seems to matter for this kind of personal identity is psychological continuity, not physical continuity.

(Even without teletransportation, the cells in our body are continuously turning over, most being being replaced every ten years or so -- a biological Ship of Theseus. This doesn't seem to impact our sense of personal identity very much.)

But then, if Eva1 has not been vaporized, which is the real Eva? I think the correct -- but admittedly strange -- answer is that both are the real Eva.

That makes sense to me, both the Eva on Mars and the Eva in London being the real Eva. If there is no difference between them, with each having the same memories, personality, abilities, and such, how is it possible to say that one Eva is real and the other Eva isn't?

Sure, someone who believes in an immaterial soul could argue that the Eva who has a soul is the real Eva. However, since there is no evidence for soul, it wouldn't be possible to distinguish between the Eva who supposedly has a soul and the Eva who supposedly doesn't. 

Why, then, would the Eva in London object to being killed if she is identical to the Eva on Mars?

This is a difficult to answer question. Intuitively, I feel that since living beings have a preference for life over death, which is baked into the brain by evolution, this explains why the Eva in London would fear the technician with a gun. 

Also, even though the two Evas were identical at the moment of teletransportation, Seth points out that they soon would begin to differ.

Back at the teletransportation facility, Eva1 managed to avoid the technician's murderous intent, and is coming to terms with her new situation, while Eva2 remains blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding back on Earth.

Even though both Evas were objectively and subjectively identical at the point of replication, their identities have already started to diverge. As with identical twins setting out on their own life journeys, the process compounds inevitably over time. 

This shows that our sense of self is closely connected with our memories -- a sense of personal history that makes us feel "this is who I am." Of course, that sense is altered as we experience new things over a lifetime. 

Nonetheless, so long as we feel a psychological continuity between the person we used to be and the person we are now, that supplies us with a mostly stable sense of self. Seth writes:

The self is not an immutable entity that lurks behind the windows of the eyes, looking out into the world and controlling the body as a pilot controls a plane.

The experience of being me, or of being you, is a perception itself -- or better, a collection of perceptions -- a tightly woven bundle of neurally encoded predictions geared toward keeping your body alive. And this, I believe, is all we need to be, to be who we are. 

...Let's move on to matters of personal identity and to the emergence of the "narrative" and the "social" selves. As we saw with the teletransportation paradox, it's at these levels that an entity experiences itself as continuous from one moment to the next, from one day, or week, or month to the next, and -- to some extent -- across an entire life span.

These are the levels of selfhood at which it makes sense to associate the self with a name, with memories of the past, and with plans for the future. At these levels we become aware that we have a self -- we become truly self-aware.

Risk-taking is largely a personal decision

Writing a few days ago about how walking on the edge of a roof is great mindfulness training got me thinking in a couple of related directions.

One is that how risky something is usually is a combination of objective fact and subjective interpretation. The other is that the first thing I did after coming up with the name for this blog back in 2004, was decide on a subtitle.

Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence

The two ideas are related, in my own mind at least. I want people to make an informed decision about what sort of spirituality, if any, to pursue. To some extent that means looking at whatever facts exist about the spiritual options that most appeal to them.

But it also means that after looking at the same facts, various people are almost certainly going to interpret those facts in different ways. 

This seems to be a universal feature of human nature.

Even in science, our most objective way of knowing reality, scientists engage in passionate disputes about how to view the same facts. Quantum theory, for example, is amazingly accurate in describing goings-on in the world of the very small. Yet there's no consensus among physicists as to how to interpret those goings-on.

(The "shut up and calculate" crowd even denies a need for interpretation.)

So I believe in allowing people a lot of latitude in how they decide to live their life, with the proviso that whatever decisions they come to aren't forced on others without good reason -- which typically is the role of government and elected officials.

Circling back to me walking on the edge of our roof to clean our gutters with a backpack leaf blower, I feel that I've thought out the pros and cons of this during the 25 years or so I've been doing this a half dozen or so times a year. 

However, I also totally understand why someone -- such as my wife -- thinks this is an unwise thing to do. Partly she feels this way because Laurel has a different risk tolerance than I do.

I should add, physical risk tolerance.

Laurel is wonderfully gutsy when it comes to standing up for what she believes is right, even if she's in a decided minority, which happens fairly often with our neighborhood association where she's been a board member for many years. And my wife was a psychotherapist in private practice where she had to deal with domestically violent men and volatile family counseling situations.

Yet when I decided to get a motorcycle soon after we got married in 1990, my dream of us going off together on it vanished when, after one ride on our local street, she started yelling "slow down!" when I got up to 25 mph.

After that, I rode alone.

Which also was the case when in 2009, at the age of 60, I decided to get a 650 cc Suzuki Burgman scooter after selling the motorcycle after a couple of years. Numerous people advised me not to ride around on two motorized wheels, especially at my age.

Me on my scooter

That led me to write a blog post, "Older motorcycle riders, don't be scared by statistics."

Thus the risk of riding a motorcycle or scooter can be reduced by about 50% just by not being stupid, inattentive, or figuring that your handling skills are better than they really are.

Doing the sorts of common-sense risk-reduction things I mentioned above cuts down on the chance of gettting in an accident even further. However, no matter how careful a rider is, there's no getting around the fact that driving on two wheels is going to be more dangerous than getting around in a four-wheeled "cage" (as motorcyclists like to refer to cars).

Also, a lot more fun.

Which is why I ride, along with most motorcyclists and scooterers -- aside from those who can't afford a car and simply need a low cost means of transportation.

Back when I worked in health planning and policy research I became acquainted with the notion of balancing the quality and quantity of life. This often comes into play with living wills, where a person has to indicate how he or she feels about this sort of tradeoff.

Most people consider that extending the sheer quantity of life via time spent hooked up to a respirator, feeding tube, and such isn't worth the suffering and distress if one's quality of life is dirt-poor.

Similarly, virtually everybody is willing to take some risks in order to get more enjoyment out of life. Whether it is horseback riding, bicycling, getting on an airplane, or even driving to the weekly meeting of a knitting circle, doing something rewarding entails some risk-taking.

Again, this applies to both physical and non-physical risks. A stand-up comic is at very low risk of being physically injured while on stage, but they run a very high risk of being emotionally injured if their audience doesn't laugh, starts booing, or yelling out insults.

How many people are willing to take that risk? Not many. Yet I love stand-up comedy and applaud anyone willing to have the courage to open themselves up to that sort of potential ridicule. 

Again, everybody is different.

Some people would rather have a root canal than speak in public. Others adore public speaking. They simply have different risk tolerances for the same activity. When I see another gray-haired/bearded old guy on a motorcycle, I think, "Way to go, man." Followed by, "I sure wish I still had my Burgman scooter."

Recently I saw a TV news story about an 82 year old man who took up pole vaulting again after an unremarkable high school career with the sport. He's cleared 9 feet, 1 inch, a record for his age group. Falling from nine feet, even onto a mat, has to be sort of risky for someone his age. 

But he's enjoying pole vaulting.

Isett is the nation's best pole vaulter in his age group — and pretty much the only pole vaulter in his age group. He picked up the sport — for a second time — at age 66, five decades after an unremarkable high school career. 

"It's fun," he said. "It's like going to high school again with nothing to study." 

He has nothing to study but the physics of gravitational potential energy —  and pain management. But Isett said it's worth the aches. 

"It's a rush, exhilaration, when you clear a bar," he said. 

At a meet last year, Isett cleared 9 feet, 1 inch. No octogenarian has ever done such a thing. 

"What he does is absolutely insane," another teenager at the gym said. 

Isett said he's not done setting records. He told CBS News he plans to stay fit and keep at this until he's 6 feet under. 

Walking on the edge of a roof is great mindfulness training

Even though lots of people believe otherwise, we are physical beings living in a physical world.

(If you disagree, share your factual evidence in a comment on this post. Hey, maybe a Nobel prize awaits you if you're able to prove that we're non-physical beings living in a physical world, or maybe two Nobel prizes if you can prove we're non-physical beings living in a non-physical world.)

One reason I enjoy Zen Buddhism so much is that Zen is deeply rooted in physicality.

Chop wood, carry water. Focus on the breath while keeping the spine straight in meditation. Students getting hit with a stick by their Zen teacher.

Mindfulness appeals to me for the same reason.

Sure, mindfulness obviously involves the mind. But what we're mindful of is both the world outside of us, along with our inner world. The two are so intimately connected as to be one thing, really.

After all, what we're not aware of doesn't exist for us, though if it is a physical entity, it still exists in the reality outside of our own mind.

There's lots of ways to appreciate the benefits of mindfulness, which basically is simply being aware of what we're doing while we're doing it -- understanding that doing can include non-volitional acts like thoughts and emotions that arise without us choosing them.

Today I cleaned the gutters on our house and detached garage/carport.

They were filled with leaves after a windy period last week helped the many large oaks that surround us do their fall thing. Quite a bit of rain is forecast for the next seven days or so. Today was dry, so this was my opportunity. 

At my age, 73, I get frequent advice to stay off our roof, including from my wife. I'm pleased to ignore that advice. One reason is that I learn a lot about mindfulness from clearing the gutters out.

I do this by propping a ladder against the roof, which I climb with my Stihl backpack leaf blower on my back, not surprisingly. I start it on the ground and get up on the roof with it idling away. My wife left for a trip to Kentucky today to attend a Celebration of Life for her oldest sister, who died recently.

I thought about not cleaning the gutters until Laurel gets back, since we live in the country and our house isn't visible from the road. So if I fell off the roof and couldn't move, it would be a while before someone found me.

But then I realized that I'd been cleaning our gutters numerous times a year with a leaf blower for over 25 years, so the chance of me falling off today was minimal. 

If anything, I felt safer today, because I walked along the edge of our roofs -- which are two story in places -- with a bit more mindful attitude than usual. Because I was by myself, aside from our dog, I paid extra attention to what I was doing, every step of the way.

Recently I'd read a mention of how, if we take care of every moment, those moments add up to a good hour, day, week, year, and lifetime. Problem is, often we aren't really present in the moments that make up our life.

Our body is in one place -- the present moment -- while our mind is someplace else, the past or future, or thoughts unrelated to what we're doing. 

However, walking along the edge of a roof with a leaf blower on your back is a great way to practice being wholly in the present moment. Well, actually that started as I climbed our ladder, since getting on the roof with a leaf blower tube dangling to one side, with the weight of the machine on your back, presents a few extra challenges.

I find that simply being aware of what my body is doing as I take each step up the ladder, then focusing on getting from the ladder to the roof isn't difficult at all.

That's the benefit of doing something somewhat dangerous: it concentrates the mind in a way that tends to escape us in everyday activities. Getting close enough to the edge of the roof so the debris in the gutters can be blown out by the leaf blower is even more concentrating.

Today my approach was to continuously visualize myself losing my balance. That took away any lingering bit of nervousness by cleaning the gutters without anyone else around. I was aware that all I had to do was collapse straight down onto the roof and I'd be fine.

The key to doing that was being aware of what my body was doing at every moment, not letting my attention stray onto thoughts of what I'd do after this chore was completed.

An example of non-mindfulness arose later in the day around sunset. I was doing some stretching  exercises while watching TV after the sun had set. Looking out the window, I was struck by how cool the trees around our house looked in silhouette as darkness neared.

I grabbed my iPhone and went out onto our side deck. Along with our main deck, it's in the process of being replaced with a composite deck, since we'd gotten tired of maintaining wood boards with staining every few years.

Some caution tape was hanging from the sliding door that leads to the deck, since railings hadn't been installed yet. Even so, as I was looking for the best angle to take a photo, in the dark I unconsciously started moving toward the railless edge of the deck.

Fortunately, a little voice in my head said, "You fool, there's no railing!"

That taught me what I already knew, but all too often forget: mindfulness isn't just for doing obviously dangerous things; it's also for doing ordinary things, some of which can be dangerous if done mindlessly.

Anyway, I got the photo. If I'd fallen off the deck and broken my neck, it would have made for a good human interest story. "Old man dies while taking a photo, forgetting his deck under construction had no railing."