Church of the Churchless

Would you choose to be hooked up to an Experience Machine?

The Experience Machine has popped into my life again.

A few years ago I blogged about it in "Choose reality, not religion." Today I read about Robert Nozick's thought experiment again in Julian Baggini's "What's It All About: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life."

Nozick asks us to imagine an experience machine, which works very much along the same lines as the eponymous supercomputer in the film The Matrix. Once plugged into the machine, you can live a life which from the inside feels just like normal life.

Rocks feel hard, the sun bright, coffee hot, and so on. In short, there is nothing in what it is like to 'live' inside this virtual world that makes the experience different from what it is like to live in the normal world. The only difference is that all your experiences are caused not by real objects in the real world, but by computers simulating your brain.

There is one other important difference between the experiences you have in the machine and those in the real world. Before entering the machine you can choose what kind of experiences you are going to have. So if, for example, you want to play in a rock band in front of screaming fans at Madison Square Garden, that can be arranged.

But while you are in the machine you won't know that everything has been predetermined or that the experience is a mere simulation. It will feel real to you. You will be as ignorant of the fact that you are in an experience machine as you would be if you were in such a machine right now.

Imagine that such an experience machine exists. It could be possible to enter into it with the guarantee of a happy life there. The choice you have is between living outside the machine and taking a chance on happiness and living in it and being sure of happiness. And from your point of view, both kinds of life will feel the same. 

Would you choose to live out the rest of your life in such a machine?

Great question.

After I read the passages above this morning, my first thought was "Sure, why not?" However, back in 2009 I argued that usually reality is preferable to fantasy, even if the latter is more pleasurable. So have I really moved away from preferring the real world to an imagined world?

Another great question. On the whole, I'd answer no. What's changed, I think, is how I look upon the notion of a "real world." 

During the past three years I've read a lot about what neuroscience knows about the human brain. My wife, a retired psychotherapist, has also. We frequently talk about how brain processes filter, manipulate, channel, and otherwise convert raw perceptual information about the outside world into our impressions of it.

It'd be going too far to say that each of us already exists within (or as) an Experience Machine. But not very far.

We already largely live without a world of our own making. Just listen in on a heated discussion between an avid Republican and an avid Democrat, or an avid atheist and an avid believer in God. You'd find that supposed facts about the world are looked upon very differently by people with different perspectives on reality.

Still, this is a long way from inhabiting a completely different reality, as the Experience Machine promises. So the question remains whether I'd want to be plugged into the machine for the rest of my life.

Baggini says that most people "would not only reject this option, they would be horrified by it," adding:

The problem is that they feel they wouldn't be living a 'real' life in the machine. It is not enough to have experiences of a good life, one really wants to live a good life.

...What, then, are we placing above happiness when we turn down the chance to live in the experience machine? The most plausible answer, to my mind, is that we hold dear a cluster of values which can be summed up under the heading of 'authenticity'. 

This is a very slippery concept, but it involves wanting to live life truthfully, seeing the world as it is and not under some deception, being the authors of our own lives, wanting our achievements to be the result of genuine effort and ability on our own parts, interacting with people who are really like us and not just simulacra.

OK. That all rings true to me.

This notion of authenticity is a big reason why I now reject religion. I just didn't feel as real back when I believed in supernatural stuff which had to be taken on faith. There always was a lingering (if almost entirely unconscious) sense in the back of my mind, "This likely isn't true, but I'm acting as if it is."

Still, I can understand why people are drawn to religion. Aside from drugs, what Marx called the "opiate of the people" is one of humankind's best ways of living in a fantasy world that promises a level of happiness and satisfaction that everyday reality can't provide.

Christians believe that Jesus and God are looking after them lovingly at every moment. Followers of Eastern gurus, the same thing -- just different divinities.

Religious belief systems are watered-down versions of Nozick's Experience Machine: if you choose to believe in life after death, heaven, and all that, after spending enough time immersed in a certain dogma, it will come to seem absolutely real to you. 

Is this desirable? As I said before, what's wrong with feeling good? For many people, nothing. But for me, I keep coming back to that authenticity thing. I can't tell how often I've done something difficult, maybe even distasteful, and finished up with a smile on my face, thinking "Wow, that was real!"

We crave happiness. We crave reality. The tension between those cravings makes life more entertainingly fascinating than it otherwise would be. I guess this is being human.

Not knowing for sure whether I'd want to be plugged into an Experience Machine.

[Complicating factor: how do we know that we're not already plugged into one? See here -- scroll down to item 2, "Plugging out vs. plugging in."]

Sitting in the jury box, I deny free will

Ah, it was my first time to sit in the jury box as a prospective juror. I didn't want to waste my opportunity. Which, because I hate jury duty, was the opportunity to not be a real juror. 

Yet I'd held my right hand up along with the other eleven people in the jury box (six were needed for the trial) as the judge swore us to tell the truth during the voir dire process of the defense and prosecuting attorneys questioning us prospective jurors about whether we could fairly decide the case (it involved menacing without physical contact).

So I wanted to truthfully say something that would lessen my chances of being chosen for the jury.

That meant I kept my mouth shut as the defense attorney asked people about whether they had close relationships with police officers, whether they felt police were more credible than "regular" people, and so on.

But I was definitely ready to speak up if an opportunity presented itself. My general plan was to look as weird as possible -- meaning, unpredictably out of sorts with the whole trial/jury system that I had unwillingly been drafted to be a part of. 

Not a stretch for me. Not at all. Weird is well within my repertoire. 

My assumption was that both the defense and prosecuting attorney were looking for predictable jurors, people they could count on to look upon the evidence and testimony in a way that favored their side. I liked what I said, when I got my chance, because it was even hard for me to figure out the precise judicial implications of my remarks.

It was the male prospective juror sitting in front of me who opened up my opportunity. The defense attorney said that the defendant had some sort of mental illness. He asked the twelve of us if this affected how we looked upon his client.

The man raised his hand. The defense attorney called on him. The guy said he didn't believe that mental illness absolved someone of responsibility for a crime. More: he said that even a meth addict was responsible for what they did while high.

That hit my neuroscience button. I felt like I had to say something in response. I raised my own hand. After the attorney recognized me, I spoke along these lines:

Here's a yang perspective to the yin view expressed by the man in front of me. He believes in personal responsibility. I say, free will is an illusion. I'm an avid reader of neuroscience books. It's almost universally agreed by the authors that free will doesn't exist.

Mentally ill people don't have free will. Neither do mentally healthy people. We're all just doing stuff for reasons other than free will. Yet the justice system is based on free will. Retribution is ridiculous given the illusion of free will. 

There can be other reasons for a sentence than retribution, of course. But punishing someone for a freely willed action isn't a valid reason, since there is no such thing as free will.

As so often happens, when I stopped speaking I thought, Wow, I make so much sense to me. In my usual grandiose way, I halfway expected the judge and attorneys to applaud. Then, vow that they were quitting the legal profession until legal codes were brought up to date with modern neuroscience.

However...

What actually happened is that the defense attorney said "Interesting..." I then had another familiar thought: My profound pronouncement about the nature of reality is not being embraced by those less enlightened than me.

Which didn't really bother me, since the uncomprehending "thud" with which my dissertation about free will hit the courtroom gave me hope that I'd now be looked upon by one or both of the attorneys as a weird unpredictable intellectual philosophical crank outlier. 

In short, poor juror material.

Indeed, after a ten minute break following the voir dire period, I was super happy to see other people called up to fill the first six chairs in the jury box. The rest of us were dismissed. Joy!

I can't be sure that my free will comments helped me get out of jury duty. But I suspect they did. So thanks to Richard Oerton for writing "The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing up to a False Belief" which I finished reading recently.

Oerton is a British lawyer. Several chapters of his book directly address free will and the justice system. Some excerpts:

The idea of free will is central to the criminal law, and the judges quite clearly believe that the offender might, by exercising his own free will, have refrained from committing the offense of which he has been convicted and any other offences on which their view of him is based.

...So don't we have something of a contradiction here? Why does a judge assume that someone who has proved dangerous in the past will go on being dangerous in the future? If he might, by exercising his free will, have avoided his past crimes, why might he not, by the same means, avoid any future ones, so abstaining from behavior which is not only destructive but self-destructive?

...If free will existed it would mean that, although our personality may be determined, this determined personality does not determine our behaviour because free will allows us always to transcend it.

...But if free will did exist, with anything like the implications just described, then it would invalidate pretty much the whole of psychology, psychiatry, criminology, sociology and any other science or system you can think of which concerns itself with human behaviour.

...Of course, offenders differ from one another in their mental states, doing so to an almost infinite degree, and these differences should be reflected in the way in which they are treated by the penal system, but there are causal explanations for the crimes of all of them, free will affects none of them, and retributive punishment is not something which any of them deserves or from which any would benefit.

This reminds me that most religions believe in free will. Otherwise getting rewards in heaven or punishments in hell wouldn't make any sense. But that's a subject for another blog post.

Right now the cosmos' determinism is directing me to go soak in a hot bath with a cool glass of wine and toast my freedom from jury duty today. Brought about by good deterministic reasons, naturally. 

Petraeus affair reminds us that lust is the force of life

I love The New Yorker. No, more. I lust for it.

When it arrives in the mail each week I feel tingly. Gazing fondly upon the cover image, I fondle the table of contents, looking forward to that magic moment when I'll fill up our bathtub with hot water, pour a glass of red wine, and slip into the dual liquid sensuousness with a magazine that features marvelous writers.

Such as Adam Gopnik, who wrote a piece in the November 26, 2012 issue that spoke about General Petraeus' affair, and sexual morality in general, in a way that make me think: "that's just how I feel, or would have, if I had been wise enough to feel the feelings that Gopnik expressed so well."

Here's some excerpts from his Military Secrets.

Presumably, it is a bad idea for spies to have embarassing secrets that other spies might learn -- and what goes for the smaller spies should go for the big spy -- and so the resignation of General Petraeus may have been necessary. But the rest really did seem to be nobody's business but the General's and his family's. 

If there is a small truth to cherish here, it lies in the reminder that Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner and all the other earlier, undecorated sinners were not heated by undignified lusts because they were baby boomers or Democrats, or because they lacked the moral code of real men making real decisions, or because they had spent too much time on Twitter, or whatever the latest explanation for self-destructive sexual behavior is.

The truth is that the force which through the not so green fuse drives all our flowers, and much else besides -- the force of wanting that can cause women of substance to send pestering e-mails, leaving distinguished generals caught in the middle -- is the force of life.

Petraeus, and his defenders and attackers alike, referred to his "poor judgment," but if the affair had had anything to do with judgment it never would have happened. Desire is not subject to the language of judicious choice, or it would not be desire, with a language all its own. The point of lust, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it lures us to do dumb stuff, and the fact that dumb stuff gets done is continuing proof of its power.

...In the meantime, let's recall, from "The Human Stain," the narrator's dream that, at the height of the Clinton imbroglio, someone had hung a banner from the White House reading, "A Human Being Lives Here." The more such banners fly -- from homes, and from tents and barracks and G.H.Q's, too -- the better off we will all be.

Absolutely. 

I'd especially like to see that "A Human Being Lives Here" banner hung on the Pope's Vatican residence, and the home of every supposed divine or quasi-divine person on Earth.

Gurus. The Dalai Lama. Yogis. Anyone who claims to talk with God.

We're all just human beings living a human life. We all have human desires, human lusts, human cravings. For sex, for God, for all sorts of things. The force of life drives us at every moment, as it must. Until we're dead.

Brain has no outside authority

Free will, or rather the lack thereof, fascinates me. I've blogged about this subject a lot. (Couldn't help myself, for deterministic reasons.)

In the December 2012 issue of Scientific American there's a letter about a recent Skeptic column by Michael Shermer. In the column it was argued that what humans really have is "free won't." Shermer says:

But if we define free will as the power to do otherwise, the choice to veto one impulse over another is free won’t. Free won’t is veto power over innumerable neural impulses tempting us to act in one way, such that our decision to act in another way is a real choice. I could have had the steak—and I have—but by engaging in certain self-control techniques that remind me of other competing impulses, I vetoed one set of selections for another.

Well, the Big Question that Shermer doesn't address regards the "I" who supposedly made a real choice to veto one action possibility for another one.

Where the heck does that "I" reside? Wouldn't it have to hover over Shermer's neural impulses in some transcendent realm for it to have an overruling free won't ability?

Such is the eminently reasonable point of James Leritz in his letter.

Michael Shermer defends free will in "Free Won't" [Skeptic] by arguing that although the individual may not be making choices, he is free to veto choices presented by the brain. Yet a veto is simply a choice to reject a previous choice. Similarly, in arguing that the veto takes place in a separate part of the brain, Shermer ignores that all locations within the brain are part of that organ -- there is no outside authority.

Michael Shermer had a chance to reply to the letter. Here's what he said.

The fact that we can be conscious of the consequences of our choices means that we can choose to veto them, and we can even train ourselves to have more self-control over temptations to make choices that we know will not be good for us. Through practice and positive feedback, I can train myself to resist eating fatty foods and can even choose to design my lifestyle to avoid such temptations. All these choices happen in a determined universe, but they are nonetheless my choices.

Huh? Makes no sense. Shermer is back-pedaling furiously, but not far enough.

In his response he seems to have given up on the "free" part of his free won't notion. Shermer accepts that his choices happen in a deterministic universe. Yet by throwing in the words "they are nonetheless my choices" he shows that he missed Leritz's central point.

There's no Me separate from the brain. There's no I separate from the brain. "My choices" simply means "what the brain does." It might deterministically decide to do something, then deterministically change that choice after more brain activity or incoming information. 

I start to jump over a creek, believing that I can leap from one side to the other, then stop after taking a few initial steps. No free won't is involved here. "My" brain (it's hard to get away from that word in English) adjusted its inclination for reasons outside of "my" conscious awareness.

It's difficult to see through the illusion of free will. But it's possible. Not through free will. Through deterministic events/information changing the brain. Maybe this will happen to Shermer eventually.

Scale of the universe makes belief in God look very small

I'm not religious.

But if I were ever to embrace a religion, I'd want it to be a modern one. A scientific one. Meaning, a religion that seeks to explain whatever might lie beyond the physical universe without denying the reality of what does indisputably exist.

The dogmas of every major world religion, though, date from prescientific times. Back then, most people believed that the Earth was the center of the cosmos. The Sun and stars orbited around our planet.

We humans were special.

Both in terms of our relation to the rest of the universe, and of our relation with God. God had created the universe with us Homo sapiens singled out to be "the top of creation." Oh, how good it felt to know that everything revolved around us.

Now science has revealed a very different picture of the universe. I was reminded of this when the AppAdvice app on my iPhone told me about the free Khan app. 

"Khan" refers to Salman Khan, founder of the amazing Khan Academy, a free online learning community. It features thousands of videos on a wide variety of subjects. My first Khan iPhone pick was in the Cosmology and Astronomy category, an eleven minute video called Intergalactic Scale.

 

Wow.

I watched it in my morning meditation area. Then I turned off my iPhone, shut my eyes, and contemplated my place in the cosmos during my usual breath/mantra focused meditating. The video had moved me deeply. Something about reality is, well, so damn real. 

There's no way to describe how indescribably small our planet -- indeed, even our entire galaxy -- is compared to the observable universe. Watch the video and you'll see this. 

Back in 2005 I wrote a "Scale of the Universe" post. Re-reading it a little while ago, my mind was re-boggled in the same way as the Kahn video boggled me.

I’m finding that embracing insignificance can be exhilarating. I rushed back to Google for more web pages and found Steven Dutch’s Scale of the Solar System and Universe. This is a more straightforward treatment of the subject, but it has some nice sand-related facts. I learned that if the Earth were the size of a grain of sand, then our Milky Way galaxy would be 5,000,000 miles across.

Five million miles vs. a grain of sand. That’s the relation between our galaxy and our planet. And me? A sub-atomic particle on the grain—maybe not even that. More: if the Sun were the size of a grain of sand, then the nearest neighbor galaxy to us, Andromeda, would be 1,500,000 miles away. The nearest.

There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe vastly further away from us than Andromeda. What we see of the cosmos when we look up at the night sky is essentially nothing, just a few thousand stars that lie near us in our corner of a single galaxy.

Good God. I have no idea, none at all.

Yet religions think they do. Theologies based on false ideas about our place in the universe proclaim that humanity occupies a privileged place in the cosmic scheme of things. 

God sacrificed his only Son for us, says Christianity. God dictated in Arabic a book that contains ultimate truth, says Islam. God gave ten commandments to Moses, says Judaism. God/Brahman is essentially the same as the human soul/Atman, says Hinduism. 

Yeah, right. Tell me how this makes sense after you watch Khan's "Intergalactic Scale" video.

If we humans are so central to God, why is the universe so astoundingly, massively, gigantically indifferent to us? Earth is barely above nothing compared to the everything known to science, much less the Unseen More which lies beyond the observable universe.

I might, just possibly, be inclined to accept a theistic religion which was able to perusasively explain how it is that humanity can have a special relationship with God when God's creation leaves us in such an impressively unspecial place in the universe.

Most likely conclusion from this undeniable fact: we are not special. And there's nothing wrong with that. We're still part of everything. Just a insignificant part, exactly as Carl Sagan told us.

OPB's "Rajneeshpuram" reminds me of Oregon's guru weirdness

From 1981 to 1985 Oregon, where I live, was graced (if that's the right term) by the arrival of an Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose followers founded a community in central Oregon: Rajneeshpuram.

Last night my wife and I watched a recording of Oregon Public Broadcasting's hour long documentary of how the Rajnesshees rose and fell, "Rajneeshpuram." The full program can be watched online. I recommend it to anyone interested in the goods and bads of cults.

That clearly is what Rajneeshpuram was, a cult.

However, it's unclear to what extent the guru, who later changed his name to Osho, was involved with the sleazy stuff that happened. The documentary shows Bhagwan as quite detached from the running of the commune, which he left to Ma Anand Sheela -- a charming but dangerous Indian woman.

As the main planner of the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack, she served twenty-nine months in prison for assault, attempted murder, telephone tapping, immigration fraud and product tampering.

Aside from all that, along with other nasty behavior, I guess you could say she was "spiritual." Whatever that means. Sheela was devoted to her guru. And also devoted to herself and her band of women who ran Rajneeshpuram. 

I'd forgotten about a lot of the goings-on that were shown in the documentary. It's well worth watching. You have to see the video footage of what went on at Rajneeshpuram to believe what happened before Sheela went to jail and Bhagwan left the United States as part of a plea bargain.

During the time Rajneeshpuram was being built into a thriving community of up to 7,000 people (starting from a virtually deserted 64,000 acre ranch), I recall seeing red-clad devotees around Salem and Portland. 

They seemed normal enough. Yet in the documentary you see these acolytes of Bhagwan/Osho actively participating in some decidedly weird behavior. The Rajneeshees took over the nearby town, Antelope, by force of numbers. They they ran the town, including the school, like the religious cult that they were.

Having been a member of an Indian guru-centered group myself from 1971 to 2005 (Radha Soami Satsang Beas), I could easily identify with some of the Rajneeshee's behaviors and attitudes. Bhagwan owned several dozen Rolls-Royces, which he liked to drive himself.

The documentary shows Bhagwan slowly driving by long lines of red-clad devotees, their faces beaming with adoration, hands clasped together in the traditional Indian greeting. Bhagwan would take both hands off the wheel and return the gesture -- an action that shocked a local resident who encountered the guru in one of his Rolls-Royces on a public road, waved at him, and got the no-hands driving move in response.

Excessive guru devotion makes people behave in strange ways. I can testify to that, having been one of those people. However, my guru only drove around in normal cars, though disciples would line up for his "darshan" (sight of him) in just the same way Rajneeshees did.

A few years ago my daughter gave me one of Bhagwan/Osho's books. It was about fearlessness. I read some of it. I liked it. The guru's philosophy is pretty appealing. However, it's difficult not to judge Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh by what happened at the community where he lived while all the crimes and political shenanigans were going on.

That said, I kept thinking while watching "Rajneeshpuram," Gosh, I wish the community was still in existence -- in the wonderful form that could have been. 

Rajneeshpuram seemingly started off weird in a good way. People came from all over the world to be part of a unique way of living. Some sold their possessions and donated them to the cause, wishing to join a community founded on love, devotion, service, and spirituality.

Nothing wrong with that.

And especially there was nothing wrong with the excellent vegetarian food served at Rajneeshpuram. I would have loved to be able to visit Rajneeshpuram in its hey-day (something I never did). The documentary shows several restaurants at the town center that looked highly tempting to my vegetarian taste buds. Organic gardening and a dam transformed the central Oregon high desert into a oasis of sorts.

Some Rajneeshpuram-related videos apart from the documentary can be seen here. There's four minutes of a Bhagwan talk at the bottom of the page. He definitely had the Indian guru thing down. Bhagwan's sense of humor is appealing, but his cluelessness about the shady political manipulations isn't.

 

How true are your religious predictions?

Today Nate Silver was called a "data god" in the Doonesbury comic strip. So I figure it's appropriate to honor his sacredness with another post about his fascinating book, "The Signal and the Noise."

Silver is a hero of the reality-respecting community, of which I'm a proud member. He successfully predicted the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, getting the Obama vs. Romney winner correctly in all 50 states.

Early on in his book, Silver talks about how we have a lot more information now, but this doesn't mean we have more knowledge.

Meanwhile, if the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn't. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine -- but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.

Consider how religious, spiritual, and mystical choices have multiplied.

Not long ago almost all people in a certain locale shared the same metaphysical beliefs. Though there might be several religions to choose from, usually one would be dominant. And information about belief systems in other parts of the world was hard to come by.

Now, the Internet and other modern means of communication allow people to select spiritual beliefs from a vast menu of options. Yet Silver writes:

There isn't any more truth in the world than there was before the Internet or the printing press. Most of the data is just noise, as most of the universe is filled with empty space.

This doesn't bother most religious believers. They have faith that their belief system is true. It's the other religions that are mistaken. Of course, each of the thousands of competing faiths has the same attitude. So we're left with a noisy cacaphony of voices, all screaming "Believe in MY God!"

Everybody can't be right.

Like Silver said, there's no more truth in the world than there was before we knew about all the competing metaphysical beliefs scattered around planet Earth. We just have more choices now.

Today I read a section in Silver's book about the scientific method. This is the best way humans have come up with for deciding what is a true signal about objective reality, and what is false noise. 

For most of my life I've been enamored with the notion that spirituality could be viewed as a science. Meaning, if there is more to reality than the physical universe, or other material realms, it should be possible to confirm this through the scientific method.

In four simple sentences, Nate Silver summarizes this method.

Observe a phenomenon
Develop a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon
Formulate a prediction from the hypothesis
Test the prediction

Prediction is all-important.

This is what separates ideas about objective reality from objective reality itself. Beliefs are cheap. Facts are expensive. Meaning, as already noted, the world's truth stays about the same while ideas about what is true proliferate exponentially. 

Anybody with an Internet connection can spread their notions of what the cosmos is all about, including hypotheses about the presence or absence of God. But the reality of God, or the lack thereof, almost certainly doesn't change.

If you're a member of a religion, form of spirituality, or mystical practice which makes specific testable predictions, congratulations. Please leave a comment on this post and tell me about your belief system. 

Seriously. I'm requesting this because I can't think of any that do. Certainly not the major world religions.

The evidence of salvation will be clear after death. Heaven will become a reality when the soul leaves the body. Miracles aren't subject to scientific investigation. Paranormal powers are to be kept secret, not revealed. Jesus' Second Coming is always about to come. Enlightenment is nothing special, so can't be objectively observed by others. And so on. And so on.

Religions don't come with specific predictions, like cars do. When you buy a new car, a warranty comes with it. The manufacturer predicts that you will be able to start the car, drive it where you want to go, and continue doing so with minimal or no problems for a certain number of miles/months.

But with religious belief, predicted outcomes usually are conveniently far into the future. Often after death, which makes scientific hypothesis testing impossible to accomplish. 

Or the results are so general, vague, or commonplace, there's no way to decide whether the spiritual "phenomenon" really was the result of a particular practice. For example, often people comment on this blog about how much better they feel after joining a certain faith.

Well, people also feel better after getting married. Or getting divorced. Or after taking a vacation. Or after accomplishing a goal that is important to them. Predicting that you'll feel better after signing on with a religion has little or nothing to do with how true the religion's view of objective reality is.

I'm doubtful that the scientific method will prove useful in proving or disproving religious claims, because other-worldly belief systems are adept at shunting their central claims into, well, another world. Which isn't evident or capable of objective investigation. 

However, individuals can still apply Silver's approach.

Consider what predictions your chosen form of spirituality makes. What can you expect to experience by following your belief system? If this doesn't happen, or if you can't think of any way to test the objective truth of what you believe, maybe its time to move on to embrace something with more reality in it.

Science loves being wrong. Religion hates it.

Are you sure you're right about something? Whether it is going to rain tomorrow; whether space aliens have visited Earth; whether God exists. Whatever.

If so, you've got a religious attitude, even if you don't consider yourself to be religious. That's because science is never completely certain. Scientists always are open to having their ideas about reality disproved. 

In short, they love being wrong. Indeed, says Steven Ross Pomeroy in his Scientific American blog post, "The Key to Science (and Life) is Being Wrong."

A good scientist must be willing to be wrong. Such an inclination is liberating, for it allows him or her to investigate potential answers — however unlikely they may be — to the difficult questions inspired by this vast, wondrous universe. Not only that, a willingness to be wrong frees a scientist to pursue any avenue opened by evidence, even if that evidence doesn’t support his or her original hunch.

“The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away,” The great science communicator Carl Sagan wrote. “Don’t waste neurons on what doesn’t work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data.”

Absolutely. 

I diligently conducted experiments in meditation for about thirty-five years, almost exactly following the precepts of Radha Soami Satsang Beas' Sant Mat-style soul-travel god-realization system. The evidence I experienced led me to conclude that truth lay in a different direction. 

As Carl Sagan says a scientist should, I threw away ideas that didn't work. And embraced better ones. Pomeroy writes:

Wrongness is something we all secretly or openly dread. According to self-described “Wrongologist” Kathryn Schulz, in the abstract, we all understand that we’re fallible, but on the personal level, we leave little to no room for being wrong.

But Schulz believes that we should view this situation in a slightly different light.Realizing you’re wrong is what’s devastating, but being wrong often feels pretty good. As a matter of fact, it often feels identical to being right.

Like Wile E. Coyote chasing Road Runner off a cliff in those old Warner Brothers cartoons, we only start to fall when we come to the realization that we, along with our incorrect notions, have no solid ground to stand on. But the simple fact of the matter is that we had already run off the end of the precipice a long time ago! Thus, it’s best to admit that we’re wrong and get the fall over with so we can land (hopefully not too harshly), dust ourselves off, and get back on our feet.

Now, using my non-mystical powers of seeing into the future, I can predict that almost surely (note that scientific "almost") some religious believers will read this post and think, This guy failed to experience divinity, but this doesn't mean _____ [God, spirit, soul, heaven, Allah, take your pick] isn't real.

True. And I haven't claimed that. 

What I'm saying is that I conducted a certain spiritual experiment, gathered a lot of evidence, considered how this evidence related to the hypotheses being investigated, and then came to certain conclusions. Noted physicist Richard Feynman said this is how science works. 

“If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong,” he asserted, craning his neck forward and adroitly pointing his left hand at the chalkboard to accentuate the point. “In that simple statement, is the key to science.”

“It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is,” Feynman proclaimed, gesticulating in wide, circular, somewhat flamboyant motions. “It doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

lf anyone wants to prove that I'm wrong about Sant Mat/RSSB teachings being wrong, they need to provide evidence to the contrary. Otherwise we're left with the usual situation in religiosity: claims about divinity being made on the basis of unsubstantiated personal experience.

Sure, space aliens may have visited Earth. Lots of people claim to have seen them. But without solid demonstrable evidence, there's no reason to accept those claims.

Sure, heaven may be real. Lots of people claim to have seen heaven in a near-death experience, meditation, or some other means. But without solid demonstrable evidence, there's no reason to accept those claims. 

This is why I've said that every religion and spiritual path is wrong. One big reason is that fundamentalist religious and spiritual believers don't consider they could be wrong. Science knows that it is impossible to be right if you're absolutely certain you can't be wrong. I wrote:

A personal experience is just that: one person's experience. End of story.

But if that person shares his or her tale with others, and it ends up getting written down, documented, formed into dogma, systematized, conceptualized, cast into philosophical stone, then a unique perspective on the cosmos can turn into a claim of universal truth.

Science, of course, doesn't work this way.

The laws of nature don't depend upon Newton's, Einstein's, Darwin's, or anybody else's personal experience. Confirmation of a scientific hypothesis is independent of the originator's individual perspective.

It's very different in the world of religion and spirituality. Jesus's supposed sayings are taken on faith as a reflection of divine reality. The Buddha's teachings are much less fundamentalist, but even here many devotees revere the messenger as much as the message.

I've read lots of books where the spiritual teaching is based on the author's questionable assumption: "I did this and that and experienced such and such, so this is how you can do it too."

For example, Ramana, an Indian sage, was told by his own guru to keep asking "Who is the seer?" So Ramana formed his own teachings around the question, "Who am I?" 

Well, that worked for Ramana. But why should it work for anyone else?

Salem (Oregon) skeptics meet under Center for Inquiry banner

Last night my wife and I entered a den of secular, scientific skeptics. Not surprisingly, we enjoyed our first CFI Salem Humanists meeting. There was some sort of merging between the local Center for Inquiry and Humanist groups, but CFI seems to be the main banner under which they meet now.

Laurel and I had read about the meeting, an honoring of Carl Sagan, in our local newspaper. We figured we'd meet some like-minded people. We figured right.

There were quite a few other newbies in an upstairs room at the IKE Box coffeehouse. So it took a while for the dozen or so people to settle into a communicative vibe. At first I wasn't sure whether the meeting was going to be more of a presentation or more of a discussion. 

It turned out to be a fairly free-floating discussion about a wide variety of interesting topics. Most of the themes were right up my churchless alley, so I had more trouble keeping my mouth shut than thinking of something to say.

Here's a sampling of conversation subjects which have stuck in my next-day mind.

Personal experience vs. demonstrable truth. The most religious'y man at the meeting spoke about his experience of "Christian kundalini." He had some sort of energetic awakening which turned him off from dogmatic religion, yet turned him on to a Christ-consciousness, universal mind, matter is an illusion, fifth dimension, sort of thing.

I told him that I respected his personal experiences, but couldn't accept his view of the cosmos without there being some demonstrable evidence for it. Several of us suggested that those experiences could be traced to goings-on in his brain, rather than features of the objective world. I could tell that he didn't believe that.

Openness to possibility without gullibility. The above-mentioned guy was the attendee at one end of the metaphysical spectrum. Some hard-nosed scientific types were at the other end. I felt that I was pretty much in the middle. Several times I argued along the lines of "anything is possible, but not everything is true."

For example, no one knows what consciousness and subjectivity is all about. Through meditation, psychedelic drugs, or whatever, people might be able to experience a deeper understanding of reality than standard science is able to provide. The operative word is "might." We need to be open to new visions of reality, yet not so open we blindly accept unproven assertions, religious or otherwise.

Subjectivity and objectivity. Along this line, I noted that everything science knows about the universe, along with everything any individual knows, comes about through experiences of the human brain. The brain is the lens through which we see reality. If (or when?) computers become vastly more intelligent than us, would their understanding of the universe be more or less truthful than ours? 

Or what about a highly advanced alien intelligence? If such an alien visited Earth and could comprehend our science and philosophy, likely our vaunted conclusions about what the cosmos is all about would be met with a "What the hell are you talking about? That's crazy" sort of response. There isn't any genuinely objective truth. The subjectivity of the human brain, and likely every sort of consciousness, prevents that.

Science is the best way of knowing we have. A number of people appropriately argued that while science makes mistakes and is an imperfect way of knowing reality, it is self-correcting, eventually homing in on what is true and what is false. Magic and optical illusions were discussed at the beginning of the meeting.There are explanations for these seemingly fantastical experiences. We can marvel at a magic trick or illusion without being taken in by them.

The human mind is easily deceived, but through science and reason we can come to understand how we're failing to understand reality rightly. This takes courage.

I cited the wonderful scene in the movie, "Cosmos," based on Carl Sagan's book, where Jodie Foster says "It's a go!" (or words to that effect) as a machine made from an alien transmission fires up in a shakingly violent manner. Foster's scientist character is willing to risk death in order to pursue a deeper understanding of truth.

We don't really know who "we" are. At one point I said some things that made perfect sense to me (of course), yet likely mystified other meeting attendees. Scientists, I asserted, are as deluded as the rest of us about two things: the apparent fact that "we" are not something separate from the physical brain, and the apparent fact that "we" do not have free will. 

Intellectually, scientists and others may accept reductionism and determinism. However, our experience of reality causes us to feel differently, in much the same way as we can know that the Earth orbits the Sun, yet still say "the sun is setting" because that's how it seems to us.

So I theorized that this opens up the possibility of an evolved consciousness, as Zen/Buddhism asserts, where our ego-centered sense of specialness and separation from the world dissolves; we relax into an acceptance of simply being something the universe has formed. And will un-form when we die.

The pale blue dot. A young guy at the meeting had been reading another book of Carl Sagan's, "Pale Blue Dot." He made quite a few cogent observations which, unfortunately, I don't remember well enough to share. So I'll end with some quotes from the book that I used in a 2006 blog post: "Wisdom from Carl Sagan: a pale blue dot."

[Factoid: at the meeting someone said that Carl Sagan was a regular marijuana user. Cool! I didn't know that. It's true.]

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

How religious fundamentalists are like dogmatic Republicans

Tom Tomorrow's "Their Own Reality" comic, which is serious as well as funny, applies equally to religion as to Republicans.

Just exchange some words and examples, and the comic shows how religious fundamentalists lose touch with reality just as political fundamentalists do.

(click image to enlarge)

Marvel at the Wizard of Is

With apologies to L. Frank Baum, I'm amending your book title for some philosophizing about "Is" rather than "Oz."

I'm no longer religious. But I've still as awe-inspired as I ever was. What I find so awesome now isn't God, or guru, or any other imagined divinity.

It's the inarguable presence of Is.

No faith, no dogma, no theology, no anything is required to demonstrate the existence of Is. That's because Is is existence. 

There Is is. Here Is is. Everywhere Is is. Awesome!

Yet as obvious as Is is, what I really love about Is is how mysterious it is. Is is like God, except infinitely more believable.

Religious believers claim that God always has been, is, and always will be. Well, I prefer to dump "God" and substitute "Is." Or "existence." (Note the "is" in the middle of "existence.")

Yes, something always has been, is, and always wil be. Praise Is! 

That's our past, our present, and our future. Forever and ever, without end or beginning. If this doesn't fill you with awe, wonder, and some spine-shivering when you contemplate it, the Wizard of Is hasn't graced you with its magic.

I feel Is. Deeply. Clearly. Passionately. Often I'm moved to say "thank you." Not to anyone or anything in particular. 

To Is. 

Which isn't anyone or anything in particular. Existence just Is. There's no need for God when Is enters your heart. 

You may think I'm crazy, as wild-eyed as any other religious nut who claims to understand what the cosmos is all about. You're welcome to your opinion.

I just invite you to contemplate the nature of existence, of Is, for yourself. There's no time or space between you and Is. The only distance between us and Is is our lack of attention.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur

I hold a glass of red wine. I start to set it down on a wood table at a friend's house. I notice the tile coaster on which glasses are to be set. I pause to read a message on the coaster.

True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
   Leo Tolstoy 

"Nice," I think. I take a sip of wine before putting the glass down. A tiny change. True life.

Looking to confirm the quote, I found some other Tolstoy quotations that appealed to me. 

Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.

If you want to be happy, be.

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on how we see them. 

Be adaptable like a fox, not stalwart like a hedgehog

In his fascinating book, "The Signal and the Noise," Nate Silver talks about two thinking styles: that of the fox and hedgehog. I've blogged about this before in "Sure you're right? You're probably wrong." 

In other words, those who were most certain they were right were more likely to be wrong. It's better to be a fox, someone who knows many things, than a hedgehog, who knows one big thing.

The article's author, Sharon Begley, lists the characteristics of foxes (better predictors) and hedgehogs (worse predictors).

Foxes... cognitively flexible, modest, open to self-criticism, consider competing views, doubt power of Big Ideas, recognize uncertainty, pepper their speech and writing with "however" and "but."

Hedgehogs... supremely confident, dismiss opposing views, drawn to top-down arguments based on a Big Idea, seek certainty, dismiss information that undercuts preconceptions.

In punditry though, and this applies to supposed secular and spiritual experts alike, most people like to hear decisive answers rather than tentative opinions.

Even though in my graduate school days I was taught that it's better to be roughly right instead of precisely wrong, brazen black and white statements generally appear more attractive than those in shades of gray.

However (yes, I'm a fox), reality is grayish.

Reading Silver's book this morning, I came across a figure that made me think of how confident most religious "hedgehogs" are about their chosen belief system. And why uncertain "foxes" are more likely to be correct about what, if anything, lies beyond the bounds of physical reality.

Here's Silver's summary of how foxes and hedgehogs think.

Foxes:
Multidisciplinary. Incorporate ideas from different disciplines and regardless of their origin on the political spectrum.
Adaptable. Find a new approach -- or pursue multiple approaches at the same time -- if they aren't sure the original one is working.
Self-critical. Sometimes willing (if rarely happy) to acknowledge mistakes in their predictions and accept the blame for them.
Tolerant of complexity. See the universe as complicated, perhaps to the point of many fundamental problems being insolvable or inherently unpredictable.
Cautious. Express their predictions in probabilistic terms and qualify their opinions.
Empirical. Rely more on observation than theory.

Hedgehogs:
Specialized. Often have spent the bulk of dtheir careers on one or two great problems. May view the opinions of "outsiders" skeptically. 
Stalwart. Stick to the same "all-in" approach -- new data is used to refine the original model.
Stubborn. Mistakes are blamed on bad luck or on idiosyncratic circumstances -- a good model had a bad day.
Order-seeking. Expect that the world will be found to abide by relatively simple governing relationships once the signal is identified through the noise.
Confident. Rarely hedge their predictions and are reluctant to change them.
Ideological. Expect that solutions to many day-to-day problems are manifestations of some grander theory or struggle.

This sure reminds me of how fundamentalists react to me and what is said on this blog.

They're critical of dumping a spiritual path, even one that isn't getting a seeker of truth where he or she wants to go, arguing that faith in a religion has to be absolute, never wavering, a lifelong commitment.

They're hugely confident in their chosen dogma, even though they can't provide any demonstrable evidence that what they believe is true. 

They're quick to blame a dissatisfied heretic of their religion because he or she didn't exactly follow the tenets of that faith, yet never question whether the religion itself is at fault for not being able to deliver the divine goods that it claims to have in hand.

They're prone to look upon almost everything in life as revolving around their belief system, considering that they've found the One Big Truth that explains everything.

Understand: these ideas about "foxes" and "hedgehogs" are derived from empirical research. Philip Tetlock, a professor of psychology and political science, has been studying expert predictions since 1987. He's written a well-reviewed book about his findings. 

Sure, it can be argued that predictions in religion, spirituality, and mysticism are not like other sorts of predictions.

In a sense this is true, because accuracy in foretelling the afterlife, salvation, a second coming, or such is impossible to assess when the predicted event doesn't occur in the lifetime of those making the prediction. But this doesn't change the general validity of fox and hedgehog outlooks.

After all, God either is real or illusory. Heaven and hell either exist or are non-existent. Life afer death either occurs or doesn't occur. We all have to come to grips with what is most likely, given the evidence for supernatural claims.

A blog post from Big Sky Ideas has a good summary of the differences between foxes and hedgehogs, including more excerpts from Nate Silver's book. 

Hedgehogs are type A personalities who believe in Big Ideas—in governing principles about the world that behave as though they were physical laws and undergird virtually every interaction in society. Think Karl Marx and class struggle, or Sigmund Freud and the unconscious. Or Malcolm Gladwell and the “tipping point.”

Foxes, on the other hand, are scrappy creatures who believe in a plethora of little ideas and in taking a multitude of approaches toward a problem. They tend to be more tolerant of nuance, uncertainty, complexity, and dissenting opinion. If hedgehogs are hunters, always looking out for the big kill, then foxes are gatherers. Foxes, Tetlock found, are considerably better at forecasting than hedgehogs.

...Foxes may have emphatic convictions about the way the world ought to be. But they can usually separate that from their analysis of the way that the world actually is and how it is likely to be in the near future. Hedgehogs, by contrast, have more trouble distinguishing their rooting interest from their analysis.

Instead, in Tetlock’s words, they create “a blurry fusion between facts and values all lumped together.” They take a prejudicial view toward the evidence, seeing what they want to see and not what is really there.

Just like religious believers.

[Update: came across this humorous video, "Why Nate Silver Got Drunk." Believe in factual reality and his life could be yours!

 

Religious right got smacked down in U.S. 2012 election

We did it! Faithless, churchless, secular, non-believing Americans are on the political march. So says a fascinating story in the New York Times, "Christian Right Failed to Sway Voters on Issues."

Christian conservatives, for more than two decades a pivotal force in American politics, are grappling with Election Day results that repudiated their influence and suggested that the cultural tide — especially on gay issues — has shifted against them.

They are reeling not only from the loss of the presidency, but from what many of them see as a rejection of their agenda. They lost fights against same-sex marriage in all four states where it was on the ballot, and saw anti-abortion-rights Senate candidates defeated and two states vote to legalize marijuana for recreational use.

(Sadly, in the state where I live, Oregon, a citizen initiative that would have legalized marijuana failed to pass. But happily, Washington state passed marijuana legalization, including its sale in officially sanctioned stores. I'm predicting a tourism boom between Oregon and Washington.)

Back in 2004, after the Bush-Kerry presidential contest, I started this blog because I was so upset with how Christian fundamentalists had swayed the election in Bush's favor. They'd come out in droves to vote for hateful anti-gay marriage ballot measures in many states. 

So it's hugely satisfying to learn that Americans are turning away from that sort of misguided religiosity. Once again, the Christian right put a lot of time, money, and effort into defeating candidates and initiatives that offended their rigid moral sensibilities.

Didn't work this time.

“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.

“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”

I'm proud of voters in Washington state. Along with legalizing marijuana, they defeated an initiative that would have overturned legislative approval of gay marriage. Until this election no state had endorsed gay marriage through a vote of the people. 

But last Tuesday Maine, Maryland, and Washington did so. The times are a'changing, to quote Bob Dylan. It just has taken longer than us flower children types expected back in the '60s. The United States took a moralistic Christian turn for quite a while, which now is reversing according to the NY Times story.

The election results are just one indication of larger trends in American religion that Christian conservatives are still digesting, political analysts say. Americans who have no religious affiliation — pollsters call them the “nones” — are now about one-fifth of the population over all, according to a study released last month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The younger generation is even less religious: about one-third of Americans ages 18 to 22 say they are either atheists, agnostics or nothing in particular. Americans who are secular are far more likely to vote for liberal candidates and for same-sex marriage. Seventy percent of those who said they had no religion voted for Mr. Obama, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

Not surprising. However, what is surprising to me is how so many Republicans are supportive of policies that limit individual freedom.

This is a core contradiction in American conservatism: right-wingers want to keep government out of people's lives, except when it comes to who people can marry, what psychoactive substances they can ingest, whether women can choose to have a baby, and other decisions that libertarians seemingly should support -- but most Republicans don't.

My theory is that conservatives in this country have been infected with religion to a much greater extent than conservatives in other Western nations are. This disease weakens their commitment to individual liberty, because religions want control over people, believing that they alone know what pleases God. 

And it isn't libertarian-style freedom.

So it is the secularists and other open-minded voters who adhere to values that should appeal to small-government Republicans: allowing people to marry whoever they want; to use marijuana if they want; to have an abortion if they want; to have access to insurance coverage for contraceptives if they want.

I've got some advice for the recently soundly-defeated Republican Party. You'd get much more support from a much larger proportion of the electorate if you remained conservative on economic issues, and became more liberal on social issues. 

That's a formula which could work for you, given changing demographics. Relying on your traditional base, older white religious voters, is a recipe for continued electoral defeats. Loosen up on dogmatic morality and tighten up on deficit reduction, tax reform, and similar fiscal stuff.

Reality belongs to those who know, not believers

Reality is real. This is, for some, an unreal statement.

They believe that reality is whatever someone considers it to be, that it's possible to create our own reality, that reason, logic, facts, and demonstrable evidence are useless in revealing whatever lies behind obvious appearances, that intuition and a gut feeling are better guides to truth.

Well, as I said in a post a few days ago, Tuesday's national election in the United States was a victory for reality. And a concomitant defeat for those who value subjectivity over objectivity, passionate belief over reasonable facts, "I feel..." over "I know... ."

Quite a few readers of this blog reside outside of the United States. You may not be aware of the extent to which politics in my country is polarized.

Our Republican Party has become the haven of dogmatic religious fundamentalists. They're matched in their closed-mindedness by dogmatic "Tea Party" types who yearn for good old days that never were, days when America commanded other nations, women were kept in their place, and the rich bestowed some of their wealth to whoever they felt deserved charity, social programs for the poor not yet having come into existence.

In their world view it was unthinkable that President Obama could be re-elected, since they expected that the imagined reality in their minds actually existed in the objective world.

When respected political analysts like Nate Silver of Five Thirty Eight dispassionately studied polls and other evidence that bore on who would be elected President, concluding that Obama was a clear favorite to win, these pundits consulted their gut and tuned into their feelings.

Then said: "Romney will be victorious."

But they were wrong. Nate Silver was right. In fact, the most right of anyone. He picked the winner in every state, all fifty of them. And almost exactly predicted the percentage of the national vote Obama and Romney would receive.

Now, what does this have to do with the sort of philosophizing about churchless matters that usually is the central theme of this blog? A lot, in my pro-science, anti-religion opinion. 

Knowledge is known in a similar fashion, no matter the subject matter. How we distinguish between truth and falsity isn't all that different, whether we're talking about the likely result of a presidential election or how likely it is that God exists.

The big difference between these examples is that an election settles the question of who knew the most about the reality of voters' intentions, whereas the question of God's existence remains unsettled after thousands of years of human debating.

On November 6, once most of the votes had been tabulated, it was obvious that careful analysis of polls resulted in a much closer approximation of truth than the intuitive feelings of pundits. Demonstrable evidence mirrored reality, while personal beliefs didn't.

Consider a thought experiment.

What if the United States hadn't held an election on November 6? What if all the polling and punditry had proceeded just as it did up to that point, yet somehow we never knew whether it was Obama or Romney who had been elected president?

The objective reality of who voters planned to cast a ballot for would remain. There still would be true and false predictions of the election outcome. We just couldn't know for sure that Nate Silver was right, and all of the pundits on Fox News predicting a Romney victory were wrong.

But Silver still would have been right. And those pundits still would have been wrong. Objective reality is what it is, whether or not we know it to be that.

Similarly, God either exists or does not exist. There is essentially zero demonstrable evidence that any God believed in by the major world religions exists. So a dispassionate analysis of the question, "Does God exist?", leads to a simple prediction: No.

Yet pundits, who in this case are the myriads of religious true believers who have a feeling that God is real, continue to proclaim their own prediction: Yes, God exists.

So who is correct?

The 2012 United States election points to a firm answer: those who consider all of the evidence for and against the existence of something (like a presidential victory, or God), not just the evidence which supports a deeply held personal belief. 

There's nothing wrong with believing. Everyone does this. What's wrong with believing is considering that we can't be wrong.  

U.S. election a victory for reality

Reality won tonight! I've been glued to my television, laptop, and iPhone for about six hours, sweating out the results of our national election.

Obama has been re-elected president. Democrats are going to maintain control of the Senate. Virtually every Republican I was hoping would lose, did. 

I'm happy. Both for the political philosophy that I favor, and for the reality based community that I consider myself to be a proud member of.

Because this was more than an election between Republicans and Democrats. Borrowing a fancy term from a highly respected political analyst, Nate Silver, who I like a lot, this was a epistemological watershed. 

So said I in a post yesterday on my other blog.

Knowledge vs. feeling. Facts vs. fantasy. Science vs. religion. 

A watershed is marked by a divide.

The choice between Romney and Obama, along with the choice between Republicans and Democrats generally, indeed involves two ways of how we gain an understanding about reality -- the province of epistemology. 

Nate Silver is a proud member of the knowledge/facts/science community.

So am I. So is Obama, by and large. Romney and most Republicans running for office at the national level are part of the feeling/fantasy/religion community.

Thus when ballots are counted tomorrow, voters not only will be electing candidates, they'll be choosing a worldview that will be a basis for guiding our country during the next four years. Or longer.

...I very much want Obama to win tomorrow. I also want Silver's epistemological perspective as shared on Five Thirty Eight to win. Which it will, if Obama gets an electoral college win close to the 315 (O) - 223 (R) split Silver is projecting. 

That would be a giant Obama victory. And also a victory for the reality-based community.

Currently Obama has 285 electoral votes, according to the New York Times. If he wins Florida and Ohio, as seems likely, that'll add 47 to his total, making it at least 332. Pretty damn close to what Nate Silver predicted.

That's the power of reality, fueled by facts, evidence, reason, respect for truth. It's what science has, and religion lacks. 

Silver has written a book called "The Signal and the Noise."

With great timing, it arrived in the mail today from Amazon. I like the title. Distinguishing between truth/the signal and falsity/the noise is central to both political polling analysis and understanding of what the cosmos is all about.

Religiosity pays a lot of attention to noise, intermittent unreliable static that doesn't reflect solid reality. Examples: supposed miracles, divine visions, and other subjective experiences reported by individuals yet unconfirmed as part of objective truth.

It's easy to miss reality's signal when our focus is on meaningless noise. Today voters in the United States rejected falsities offered up by Republican candidates. That's a win for reality. I hope this is a sign that the noise of religion will be similarly rejected by increasing numbers of Americans.

Why I like D.T. Suzuki's brand of Zen

For me, minimally Buddhist'y Zen is one of my foraging spots when I feel the need to feast on some "spiritual but not religious" food. 

Seven years ago I bought "The Zen Koan as a means of Attaining Enlightenment," by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, a.k.a. D.T. Suzuki. (Check here for a recent update on my enlightenment; in brief, it's going great.)

Many books come and go in my meditation area. A few are permanent residents. D.T. Suzuki's is one of them.

Parts of it are so steeped in Zen lore/tradition, I don't resonate with them. But otherwise I can usually turn to a page and find something there to invigorate my churchless non-soul.

The past few days I've been re-reading an introductory section. Even though I'd already pondered these passages several times, Suzuki's prose continues to surprise me with fresh insights.

His words in the book obviously don't change. Must be me. Here's some sharings.

...in satori there is always what we may call a sense of the Beyond; the experience indeed is my own but I feel it to be rooted elsewhere. The individual shell in which my personality is so solidly encased explodes at the moment of satori. 

Not, necessarily, that I get unified with a being greater than myself or absorbed in it, but that my individuality, which I found rigidly held together and definitely kept separate from other individual existences, becomes loosened somehow from its tightening grip and melts away into something indescribable, something which is of quite a different order from what I am accustomed to.

The feeling that follows is that of a complete release or a complete rest -- the feeling that one has arrived finally at the destination. 'Coming home and quietly resting' is the expression generally used by Zen followers.

...As far as the psychology of satori is considered, a sense of the Beyond is all we can say about it; to call this the Beyond, the Absolute, or God, or a Person is to go further than the experience itself and to plunge into a theology or metaphysics. Even the 'Beyond' is saying a little too much.

...Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Zen experience is that it has no personal note in it as is observable in Christian mystic experiences. There is no reference whatever in Buddhist satori to such personal and frequently sexual feelings and experiences as are to be gleaned from these terms: flame of love, a wonderful love shed in the heart, embrace, the beloved, bride, bridegroom, spiritual matrimony, Father, God, the Son of God, God's child, etc. 

We may say that all these terms are interpretations based on a definite system of thought and really have nothing to do with the experience itself. At any rate, alike in India, China, and Japan, satori has remained thoroughly impersonal, or rather highly intellectual. 

...Not only satori itself is such a prosaic and non-glorious event, but the occasion that inspires it also seems to be unromantic and altogether lacking in super-sensuality. Satori is experienced in connection with any ordinary occurrence in one's daily life.

...There is no romance of love-making, no voice of the Holy Ghost, no plenitude of Divine Grace, no glorification of any sort. Here is nothing painted in high colours, all is grey and extremely unobtrusive and unattractive.

...He [Hui-neng] must have worked very hard while cleaning rice to have delved so successfully into the secrets of his own mind.

...Is it not illuminating to note that Hui-neng passed his life in a most prosaic and apparently non-religious employment while in the monastery, working up his mind to develop into the state of satori? 

He did not repeat the name of the Buddha, he did not worship the Buddha according to the prescribed rules of the monastery life, he did not confess his sins and ask for pardon through the grace of God, he did not throw himself down before a Buddha and offer most ardent prayers to be relieved of the eternal bond of transmigration. He simply pounded his rice so that it could be ready for his Brotherhood's consumption. 

This ultra commonplaceness of Hui-neng's role in the monastery life is the beginning of the Zen discipline which distinguishes itself remarkably from that of other Buddhist communities. 

Free will is a wonderful thing to lose

Most of us are afraid of losing our freedom.

We like being able to say what we want, go where we want, do what we want. Within limits, of course. Absolute freedom is impossible. Constraints are part of the human condition.

This helps explain the almost universal belief in free will, and the desire to exercise free will to the fullest.

Even if we're constrained by outer circumstances, such as not being able to drive 200 miles an hour because our car won't go that fast, most people have the feeling that what they are capable of choosing to do is within their control.

I walk into Starbucks. I'm asked "What would you like?" It certainly seems as if I'm free to order whatever is on the menu, even though I've never had a desire for any drink other than a latte or regular coffee.

In one sense, this is true.

My brain and vocal cords are capable of speaking the sounds that correspond to the dizzying variety of beverages that can be ordered at Starbucks. However, the notion that I can freely will to do whatever at any moment is ridiculously wrong.

Free will is an illusion. More accurately, as Richard Oerton says in his book "The Nonsense of Free Will," it is an illusion of an illusion.

Determinists sometimes speak of "the illusion of free will", but this is a very odd sort of illusion. If you see a mirage in the desert, the illusion is of something which conforms with the laws of nature and might really be there. But the illusion of free will, surely, is an illusion of something incomprehensible: an illusion of an illusion?

Incomprehensible, because genuine free will (as contrasted with watered-down varieties such as compatibilism) can't coexist with causality. And everywhere we look, causes and effects rule the roost. Oerton writes:

Human beings, according to a believer in free will, manage somehow to stand outside the natural laws which govern the rest of the universe and, despite being inextricably a part of it, are somehow exempt from the inter-dependent causal relationships of its other elements.

So that's why I titled this post as I did.

Free will, if it existed, would cut us loose from everything else in the cosmos. We'd be free-floating bits of... what? Hard to imagine. What would it be like to be unaffected by anything in existence, utterly detached from every other sentient being and insentient object, having no relationship with them?

Sounds like hell to me. Which got me to thinking about why the illusion of free will is worshipped so highly by most religions.

Shouldn't a primary life goal, whether spiritual or secular, involve relating more intimately, lovingly, caringly, and compassionately with other parts of the universe? Isn't it better to be connected than alone, part of the pattern woven into the fabric of the All rather than an isolated thread?

In Christianity, probably along with other monotheistic religions, God supposedly gave humans free will. (Of course, if we weren't free to accept or reject that gift, that seems to limit our freedom.) This supports notions of heaven, hell, salvation, redemption, and such.

Because if everything we do and all that we are is determined by forces outside our control, the theological basis for divine rewards and punishments dissolves. Stuff just happens naturally, causes and effects proceeding in accord with the laws of nature.

Eastern views of karma thus seem closer to reality than Western views of sin and virtue. However, there still remains the question of what gets the karmic ball rolling for an individual soul/self.

Meaning, if what we do is determined by previous causes and effects, yet we still have to go through rewards and punishments of our current actions, where is the fairness in that if free will wasn't present at the beginning of a long causative chain?

That's one problem with karma-based spirituality. Another is that our interconnectedness with the cosmos through causes and effects generally is viewed by Eastern religions as something to escape from, rather than to embrace.

Traditionally, Hinduism and Buddhism speak of being freed from cycles of birth and rebirth controlled by karmic law. We keep being born in different bodies, human or otherwise, until our store of karma is exhausted through some means: meditation, selfless service, guru's grace, or whatever.

This used to make sense to me. So much sense, I spent several years writing a book, "Life is Fair," about the karmic rationale for vegetarianism that was published in India. (A PDF file of the book can be downloaded via the previous link.)

Now, though, I'm happy to see myself as nothing special. I'm just a temporarily existing part of a vast cosmos that existed long before me and will continue on long after me. I'm affected by the countless connections I have with other things and people.

Those interrelationships have made me who I am, and continue to form me. I'm not free to do whatever I will. My will, intentions, desires, actions, and such spring from causes which, ultimately, can be traced all the way back to the big bang some 14 billion years ago.

And also are as recent as the sights and sounds cascading into my brain right now, along with every other influence acting upon me at the moment.

Would I have it any other way? No. Thankfully, because I've got no choice.

Free will doesn't exist, and I don't exist apart from everything else in the cosmos. I'm a part of the whole, dependent, not independent. Naturally I also am not free to lose my belief in free will; that's just happened, for reasons not of my own making.