Church of the Churchless

Is the cosmos, including us, made of mathematics?

For several weeks I've been reading some of Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe" each morning. It's been a mind-bending journey, one which I'm about to complete -- just 26 pages left.

Tegmark argues that rather than mathematics just being able to describe the universe, mathematics actually is the universe. Along with everything else in existence, which includes four levels of the multiverse.

I'm enjoying the book. To me, Tegmark makes a lot of sense.

I've always wondered, Where are the laws of nature? Meaning, physicists can precisely model many of these laws via mathematical equations. But why should the universe be so orderly, so mathematical, so open to understanding by human minds capable of comprehending mathematics?

Some people argue that math is a human invention.

Well, if it is, how is it that this invention can be used by Einstein to reveal the mysteries of space and time with such precision? Or by Newton to come up with the laws that govern the motion of planets and everything else on a certain scale of reality?

I want to wait until I finish Tegmark's book before writing about what it means to me.

For now I'll just say that it is one of the most intriguing books I've ever read. Also, one of the most difficult to understand.

Not because Tegmark writes poorly or complexly. Quite the opposite. His book is very clearly written. It's some of the ideas that are diffcult to comprehend, because they are so far removed from everyday experience.

You can get a bite-sized taste of Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) in a Scientific American article he wrote: "Is the Universe Made of Math?"  Excerpt:

Modern mathematics is the formal study of structures that can be defined in a purely abstract way, without any human baggage. Think of mathematical symbols as mere labels without intrinsic meaning. It doesn't matter whether you write “two plus two equals four”, “2 + 2 = 4” or “dos mas dos igual a cuatro”.

The notation used to denote the entities and the relations is irrelevant; the only properties of integers are those embodied by the relations between them. That is, we don't invent mathematical structures – we discover them, and invent only the notation for describing them.

In summary, there are two key points to take away: The External Reality Hypothesis implies that a “theory of everything” (a complete description of our external physical reality) has no baggage, and something that has a complete baggage-free description is precisely a mathematical structure.

Taken together, this implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, i.e., that the external physical reality described by the theory of everything is a mathematical structure. So the bottom line is that if you believe in an external reality independent of humans, then you must also believe that our physical reality is a mathematical structure. Everything in our world is purely mathematical – including you.

I also searched my own blog for mentions of Tegmark, since it seemed like I'd heard of this mathematical universe notion before I started reading "Our Mathematical Universe." Google led me to a 2007 Church of the Churchless post, "What reality is really made of." 

(Answer: mathematical structures)

Tegmark has been working away on his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis for many years. He talks in his book about how other physicists have told him that he should give up this obsession for the sake of his career, since the MUH is just so damn weird. 

Well, I agree with Tegmark: scientists shouldn't shy away from entertaining really strange ideas, because the more we learn about the universe, the stranger it appears. 

So I don't understand the extreme resistance to Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. For sure, it makes a whole lot more sense than religious theologies. HIs ideas are equally far-out, yet have the advantage of being grounded in some solid logic and reasoning. 

If you want to delve into what others are saying about Tegmark's book, check out here, here, here, and here, 

I enjoy Kay Packard's hand analysis of my "philosopher's hands"

So what is irreligious, scientifically-minded, skeptical me doing holding prints of my hands that I was about to mail off to a person who does hand analysis -- and soon would tell me what those prints say about myself?

Well, Kay Packard, founder of the American Academy of Hand Analysis, is an old friend. Kay was the "little kid" next door during my childhood growing up in Three Rivers, California (small town in foothills of the Sierras, the gateway to Sequoia National Park). 

We've kept in touch over the years. Her mother, Rosemary, was an astrologer. Rosemary did charts for my wife and I around the time we got married in 1990. I don't believe in astrology, but I found the astrological analysis done by Kay's mother to be quite insightful.

Of course, Rosemary knew me. Nonetheless, I could separate out (1) astrology as scientific fact, and (2) insights gained through an astrological reading. So I didn't hesitate to reply "sure" when Kay emailed me and asked if I'd help her out professionally by supplying some "philosopher's hands" for her to analyze.

I don't really consider myself a philosopher. But I've written a well-received book about a Greek Neoplatonic philosopher, Plotinus, titled "Return to the One." And I think in a philosophical way. I think... which must indicate that I'm somewhat of a philosopher, since I'm not completely sure that I am.

After Kay sent me a hand print-making kit and got the results, we talked by phone for about an hour. Usually Kay's hand analysis verbal report only takes about half an hour. However, I'm a talkative guy and we chatted about some personal/family stuff in addition to discussing what my hand and fingerprints say about me.

Just as with her mother, I was much impressed with Kay's ability to convey how she sees my strengths and weaknesses. Talking with her was a lot like a psychological counseling session. Like I said before, I separated out how Kay arrived at her insights from what she was telling me about myself.

For me this is the benefit of astrology, hand analysis, Tarot card reading, or consulting with a Hollywood medium/psychic -- which I've done also. Whether or not the means by which insights conveyed to the client are scientifically valid, the reality of how those insights appear to the client is undeniable.

Meaning, Kay would tell me something the hand analysis revealed about myself. Often I'd respond, "That rings true to me." Then we'd talk about this something some more. I definitely got some insights into how I deal with life, other people, and such that were fresh to me. 

I'm not sharing any details because these aren't relevant to the main point I wanted to convey in this post: hand analysis or another "woo-woo" New Age'y pursuit like astrology doesn't have to be viewed as scientific fact in order to be interesting and potentially beneficial to someone.

All that is needed, really, is a sensitive, caring, intuitive, compassionate person like Kay Packard. Talking with them in an open, non-judgmental, non-dogmatic way can be therapeutic and insightful in much the same way talking with a psychotherapist with the same qualities can be.

This is a video of Kay explaining why someone might want to learn hand analysis. It freaks me out in a way, because I still think of Kay being a young girl from my childhood memories, given that I haven't seen her in person for a long time. Kay is still just as sweet and caring as she was way back when, though.

 

Research shows meditation doesn't do much

I've meditated almost every day for thirty-four years. I like to think that those many, many hours of meditation (one to two hours a day for most of the time) have made me a better person.

Maybe.

But lots of stuff in my mind falls into the "I like to think..." category. This is true of everybody. We humans have a marvelous capacity for wishful thinking, rationalization, selective use of data, and confirmation bias.

A rigorous review of research on the effectiveness of meditation casts doubt on the buoyant claims of meditation advocates that it is good for just about anything that ails you: unhappiness, pain, inability to sleep, substance abuse, lack of concentration, etc. etc.

An interesting post on Tricycle, a Buddhist site, is well worth reading. "Meditation Nation" contains an interview about the study with a meditation researcher who also practices Buddhism.

For an insider’s perspective on these questions, Tricycle turned to clinical psychologist, neuroscience researcher, and Buddhist practitioner Willoughby Britton. Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University Medical School, Britton specializes in research on meditation in education and as treatment for depression and sleep disorders. Britton has long focused on sorting out confusion about meditation within the realm of science.

Several points made by Britton struck me as right on. 

First, anecdotal evidence along the lines of "Meditation has done great things for me" is pretty much useless. A lot of people leave comments like this on my blog posts. It's pretty much the same thing as saying "I had a bad cold, but after taking zinc lozenges for a few days I felt much better. Zinc really works!"

Here's the problem with this sort of reasoning.

If you're at a low point in your life, either mentally or physically, chances are you're going to start feeling better no matter what you do. The alternative would be sinking irrevocably deeper into despair or ill health, which, thankfully, rarely happens.

People often start meditating because they feel something is lacking in their lives. Likewise, sick people search out cures. Simple pre-post "research" doesn't prove meditation has an effect, just as finding that a cold goes away after taking zinc doesn't.

Control groups are necessary. Yet the researchers found only 47 randomized clinical trials in the 18,753 research citations. Examining those, they concluded:

Mindfulness meditation programs had moderate evidence of improved anxiety (effect size, 0.38 [95% CI, 0.12-0.64] at 8 weeks and 0.22 [0.02-0.43] at 3-6 months), depression (0.30 [0.00-0.59] at 8 weeks and 0.23 [0.05-0.42] at 3-6 months), and pain (0.33 [0.03- 0.62]) and low evidence of improved stress/distress and mental health–related quality of life.

We found low evidence of no effect or insufficient evidence of any effect of meditation programs on positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, and weight. We found no evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment (ie, drugs, exercise, and other behavioral therapies).

Second, note the last sentence above. Sometimes meditation programs were somewhat better than doing nothing, but they weren't better than other forms of "active treatment."

This gets at another important point that rings true for me, based on my three-plus decades of meditation experience. Usually people who meditate don't just sit in a room all by themselves doing their thing. For them, meditation has other connections.

Someone who meditates often accepts a religious or spiritual belief system that is comforting. They may go to meetings of like-minded people, feeling good because they now have a social support system. A teacher, leader, guru, guide, or whoever may become a friend of sorts, someone who understands their life problems and offers some solutions.

Lastly, and more specifically, I was struck by Britton's observations about meditation and sleep, given that he has done research in this area. 

What I found from my study was that meditation made people’s brains more awake. From a very basic brain point of view, what happens in your brain when you fall asleep? The frontal cortex deactivates. Nobody agrees what meditation does to the brain, but across the board, one of the most common findings is that meditation increases blood flow and activity in the prefrontal cortex.

So how is that going to improve sleep? It doesn’t make any sense. It is completely incompatible with sleeping if you are doing it right.

...In the buddhadharma, meditation is never used to promote sleep. It is for waking up. Sleep is a hindrance.

Usually I don't have any trouble falling asleep at night. I just let my mind wander, mulling whatever I feel like mulling about, and bingo I'm in sleep land. But if I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, then try to get back to sleep, often I attempt some form of meditation.

Like repeating a mantra. Or counting my breaths. Focusing on my breathing or some other bodily sensation.  

But just as Britton says, I've found that becoming mindful in some way doesn't help me to get to sleep. What eventually works is letting my mind go, relaxing and letting thoughts and feelings flow wherever they want to, which is how I go to sleep when I first head to bed.

Anyway, read the whole Tricycle post. Anyone who meditates or is considering taking up meditation will find something of interest there.

If not... fire up the Google search engine. Type "meditation naked" in the search box. Then click on the "Images" option. The results could help explain why meditation is becoming so popular. Don't ask me why I thought of doing this Googling; it just popped into my wandering mind after I finished this post.

Atheists can enjoy religious beliefs also

I don't believe in God anymore.

Yet once in a while, just before I go to sleep at night, if my wife hasn't come into our bedroom yet, I'll get down on my knees, put my elbows on our mattress, fold my hands, and recite the Lord's Prayer.

I did this when I was a child. I'm pretty sure my mother, who raised me, didn't believe in God any more than I do now. But she thought it would be good for me to learn some religious rituals, such as praying. 

Sure, I remember some as being rather creepy. Like the "If I die before I wake..." prayer. Geez, I was ten years old, or whatever. How likely was it that I was going to kick the bucket during my sleep?

The Lord's Prayer, though -- innocuous. 

Give us this day our daily bread. Absolutely. I liked bread. Forgive us our debts. Cool. Lead us not into temptation. Well, at that pre-pubescent age there weren't many evils tempting me.

So when I was young I didn't mind that bedtime ritual of saying a few prayers. It made me feel like I was talking to somebody who cared about me, my Father in heaven.

My parents were divorced. I didn't have a father around. Maybe this helps explain why I felt good saying the  Lord's Prayer. Heck, now that I'm old, maybe the same psychological factor is at play.

In my early 20s I got initiated by an Indian guru. This was just a few years after the Beatles had gone to India to meditate with the Marharashi Mahesh Yogi. After tripping out with psychedelics, I was ready to try some journeying into higher regions of reality without drugs.

After many years, over thirty, I stopped believing in the guru and his teachings.

However, I still meditate every day. Sometimes I even repeat the so-called Five Holy Names that I was given as a mantra way back when. Gives me the sort of feeling saying the Lord's Prayer does. Well, even better, since I believed in the power of the mantra much more intensely and for a lot longer.

Thus while I don't believe in God or the guru, I do believe in the power of my mind to make me feel in certain ways. I explained this last year in "Imagine how you felt when you still believed."

I used to believe in God. Also, in a guru who was considered to be God in human form. I believed that I had, or rather was, a soul which could travel back to God -- either after I died or in this very lifetime. I believed that God, guru, and karma were directing what happened to me, which meant that both pleasant and unpleasant experiences were linked to a Big Cosmic Picture.

All of those beliefs felt good.

They felt like a warm coccoon, sheltering me from the harshness of reality. Though I followed an Eastern meditative practice, I wasn't much different from a Christian who takes comfort in believing "Jesus loves me; He has a plan for me."

I can still recall, even reexperience, those enjoyable feelings that came from believing. All I have to do is put myself back into the state of mind I was in during my true-believing days. 

Impossible? Self-deception? Not really. I look upon this as being akin to getting a benefit from a placebo, even though the patient knows there is no active ingredient in the fake treatment. 

If someone felt good when they had certain religious beliefs, where did that feeling come from? From themselves. This is obvious. Other people can be exposed to the same beliefs and not feel anything.

Keep the genuine feeling. Discard the false beliefs. Here's how I ended that previous post:

So if, like me, you have given up believing in this and that (such as God), try remembering how you felt when you did believe.

What produced that feeling? Does the feeling still exist? Do you need to believe in the exact same thing(s) with the same faith-based fervor to re-experience the feeling? If everything seemed right with the world when you believed in something that you now consider to be untrue, what prevents you from having that same warm feeling right now?

I don't claim to have firm answers to these questions. I'm just suggesting that whatever benefits someone gets from a belief system don't have to be given up just because belief has been replaced by doubt. 

Those benefits were produced by the person's brain. Non-existent things like God or soul can't produce effects. Whatever warm and fuzzy feelings religious people have come from themselves, their own brains, not from an invisible entity that has no demonstrable effects in the world.

Just as it appears that a sugar pill can have positive health effects, even if recognized as a placebo, so can a belief, even if recognized as being untrue. Novels, television shows, and movies are recognized as being fictional, yet generate strong real emotions nonetheless.

No need to give up the good feelings a false belief brings. Keep the feelings. Give up considering the belief is true.

Typepad downtime is over. My blog is back.

If you've been frustrated by not being able to access this blog during the past five days or so, join the club. Me too.

Typepad, my blogging service, was hit with a full-force DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. It took them a long time to get their web site and associated blogs back up and running.

I don't believe in hell, but this would be a great place to send the jerks responsible for the attack. Reportedly they made a ransom demand to Typepad, which spurred an FBI investigation. 

Sorry to disappoint any religious believers who thought the Church of the Churchless had disappeared because of an act of God. It's temporary disappearance was because of hackers, who took down all Typepad blogs for a while.

"Meaning of life" is only meaningful some of the time

Every other day, usually, I write a post for this blog. it takes me about an hour, sometimes more, sometimes less. 

That's just about the only time when I really ponder The Meaning of It All. If even then, since I might be writing about a churchless subject that doesn't rise to that level of profundity. 

So very little of my daily life has anything to do with matters of philosophy, religion, mysticism, spirituality, or such. Mostly I'm doing everyday nitty-gritty stuff. 

For example, this morning I dealt with a turn of events in my campaign to save three large street trees in downtown Salem from being cut down for no good reason.

Last night it looked like the battle was lost (ignore the "update"). Today, things took a turn for the better. Such was the centerpiece of my psyche for much of the day.

My mind is focused on many other things during my typical waking moments, of course. But very little of my attention is on matters of cosmic significance. Does God exist? What will happen when I die? Where did the universe come from? 

Yet fairly often people will leave comments on this blog along the lines of, "Brian, you are obsessed with bashing religion. You need to get a life!" 

My usual response is something like, "News flash: I do have a life. A happy, fulfilling life. Very little of my life has anything to do with bashing religion. Most of the time I don't think about religion, or the lack thereof, at all."

David and Andrea-Diem Lane talk about this sort of thing in their essay, "Consciousness Interruptus: The Temporal Context and the Self-Referential Trap."

Don't be scared away by the title; the piece is fairly easy to read and understand. Here's some excerpts: 

A dog doesn't appear to meditate on how distant stars will die and transform into black holes, or how universes may appear and disappear over eons of time. Yet, as humans with enlarged brains we evolved to ponder all sorts of imponderables, and thus our Darwinian gift is also at times our Darwinian curse.

...The seemingly most important questions we tend to ask (Is there a God? Do I have a soul? Is there life after death? Etc.) only arise at certain moments in our awareness and completely subside at other moments. Indeed, within any normal 24 hour cycle, the issues we think that are so vital and so urgent only last for a set duration only to disappear when deep sleep overwhelms us and all such questions are forgotten until we awake again.

...Thus, I have long noticed that whenever we are happy—very happy—at a particular juncture in life we may also feel a certain anxiety, a certain fear that it may end. Yet, if we are deeply depressed or extremely ill, we don't worry as much (if at all) about death or non-existence.

Therefore our questions and worries are a priori predicated upon our wavering moods. Instead of getting trapped with our self-referential feedback loops, pondering conundrums that may never be resolved, it might be wise to introspect on why certain questions only emerge at certain times and not at others.

In other words, instead of a continual stream of unanswered queries, we focus on why we are asking why in the first place, such as why I fear death only when I am relatively happy but never when I am severely sick with stomach flu.

The questions we ask have less to do with some ultimate truth but more to do with our own neurological phases.

Makes sense. I never have been seriously ill. But I've had some nasty persistent colds. Bed-ridden, feverish, coughing, blowing my nose, the meaning of life doesn't matter to me at all. I just want to feel healthy again! 

Sometimes I wonder why the frail elderly don't seem to fear death as much as vigorous younger people do. As the Lane's say in their essay, likely this is partly because we naturally begin to let go of our attachment to life when living becomes more painful and difficult.

This does imply that the Big Questions of Life only demand answers in certain psychological circumstances.

When I'm out and about on my current exercise obsession, an outdoor elliptical bike called the StreetStrider, I'm in a consciousness zone where nothing matters except where I am and what I''m doing in that moment. I don't worry about being content because I am content.

Give the Lane essay a read. There's more to it than what I excerpted -- including mentions of how deep sleep is considered by some to be a desirable state of consciousness. 

I've never understood this.

To me, deep sleep is lack of consciousness. Yes, I've read Ramana (quoted in the essay). But deep dreamless sleep is one of the psychological states of beings with brains who are alive. I like to go to sleep because so far I've always woken up in the morning.

Deep sleep gives me the rest I need to be awake and aware the next day. Otherwise, deep sleep is just a death of sorts, in the same way anesthesia is a death of sorts. No consciousness, no awareness of being alive.

Which I'm pretty sure is what death minus the "of sorts" is.

No consciousness. No awareness of being alive. I don't get how this is a desirable state of consciousness, unless life is so unworth-living, not being alive seems preferable.

An evangelical climate scientist bridges science and religion

There isn't any inherent conflict between scientific facts and religious beliefs. The natural and the supernatural can be viewed as inhabiting different realms, with different laws.

Such was the view of leading scientists during the Enlightenment. There was this notion of The Book of Nature, where nature was viewed as the word of God. Learning about how the world works thus was akin to knowing the mind of God.

But nowadays many religious believers put their credence in what a Holy Book says rather than what nature says. Fundamentalist Christians in the United States deny evolution and global warming despite overwhelming evidence of their reality.

Last night my wife and I watched the first episode of a documentary series on Showtime, "Years of Living Dangerously." We were much impressed. Great cinematography, engaging script, excellent actors (Harrison Ford and Don Cheadle are featured), compelling "plot" lines.

The first episdode, and I assume others, can be viewed online if you don't have Showtime.

The most interesting person interviewed was a climate scientist at Texas Tech, Katharine Hayhoe. Not surprisingly she whole-heartedly embraces the scientific consensus about global warming: It is happening; It is causing big problems for life on Earth, including humans; We need to do something about it, now!

Hayhoe, though, is an evangelical Christian. This was surprising. And, fortunate.

Because Hayhoe has become a valuable bridge between fundamentalist Christians who don't think there is anything to worry about because God has the Earth's climate, along with everything else I guess, under control.

One focus of the first episode was a smallish town in Texas where drought has forced the closing of the biggest employer, a meat packing plant. Residents were shown walking around the closed plant praying for rain so grass could grow, cattle could eat it, and the plant could reopen.

Sure, that's crazy. But people believe all sorts of crazy things. I did for a long time. It isn't easy to talk them out of such deeply-held values.

In "Meet the Surprising Star of Showtime's New Climate Change Series," Hayhoe's two-year quest to convince her evangelical preacher husband, Andrew Farley, that human-caused global warming is real. 

Farley and Hayhoe found themselves at an impasse. They both respected the other person, not only as researchers and academics, but as people who shared the same deep faith. If those things were true, then they had to talk about it. Eventually, Farley came around, but it wasn’t easy. “We are both first borns who love to argue and will not back down,” Hayhoe said. In all, Hayhoe guesses Farley, her first climate change convert, took about two years to convince — though she notes “it wasn’t like we talked about this every day.”

“A lot of my political opinions are Republican,” Farley tells Cheadle from the couple’s kitchen table. “The politics, the questions about God, and then the climate change — it’s all just become this ball of sound bites and people can’t parse it out.”

The tipping point for Farley? When the two went to the NASA website, downloaded global temperature data, and plotted it on their own computer. “It was clearly going up,” Hayhoe said, so “he had to decide, was NASA, the organization that put people on the moon, involved in some worldwide massive hoax or were they telling the truth?”

Having succeeded in converting her husband to scientific facts, they have teamed up to preach the gospel of science to other devoted Christians.

The inroads Hayhoe has been able to make with conservative religious communities focuses around one fundamental guiding belief: the key to bridging what has become such a divisive, heated issue is not hoping to present people with enough information that they adopt new values. “As Christians, we already have all of the values we need to care about climate change,” she said. And when climate change is presented in terms of its impacts on people, impacts that will disproportionately affect the world’s poor, then the path for engaging Christians is clear.

The Showtime episode showed how skilled Hayhoe is at communicating with those who share her Christian values. I don't consider that humans have free will, and I certainly don't believe in Christianity (or any other religion), but Hayhoe uses these beliefs in making the theological case for accepting the reality of global warming.

God gave us the freedom to choose, she says.

Humans have chosen to dramatically increase the level of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by burning "fossil fuels." Now it is up to us to choose a different path -- reducing our emissions of those gases in order to keep Earth livable.

I'd prefer that people embace scientific facts directly. But since many religious believers need coaxing through someone who speaks their own value system, I'm glad Katharine Hayhoe has taken on that job.

Belief in free will linked to desire to punish

There are lots of reasons not to believe in free will. Also, there are plenty of reasons to believe in free will. 

Which shows why it makes much more sense not to believe in free will. After all, if free will really exists, reasons wouldn't matter. People would just freely will to either believe or not believe in free will.

If that sounds crazy to you, join the No Free Will club. 

Reasons... cause and effect... influences... interrelationships... laws of nature. A belief in free will, genuine free will, not the fakey compatibilism variety, does away with most of our knowledge about how the human mind, brain, and body work. 

Yet most people cling to this belief because it just feels like it is true. It also appeals to some of our baser emotions, like the desire to punish.

Chris Mooney writes about this in "The Surprising Link Between Homicide Rates and... Belief in Free Will."

Do you have free will? In all likelihood, your late night college bull sessions failed to resolve the matter. Even today, there is not really any definitive evidence as to whether human free will does or doesn't exist, although there are certainly plenty of reasons to doubt it: For instance, the very powerful evidence suggesting that our conscious thoughts are preceded by automatic emotional reactions, of which we are simply unaware.

But it's one thing to gab about whether free will exists, and quite another to question why humans overwhelmingly tend to believe that it does.

If you've read your Friedrich Nietzsche, you know that the consummate anti-philosopher had a pretty cynical take on this question. Nietzsche didn't simply call free will itself "the foulest of all theological fictions." In his work Twilight of the Idols he went further, psychoanalyzing the ubiquitous belief in free will and concluding that deep down, we want to believe that people have control over their own choices so that we can justify and feel good about punishing them. "Whenever responsibility is assigned," wrote Nietzsche, "it is usually so that judgment and punishment may follow."

Modern psychological research suggests that Nietzsche was on to something. In fact, in a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a team of authors from several universities (the University of California-Irvine, Yale University, and two others) have put Nietzsche's thesis to the experimental test. "We propose that the pervasive belief in free will partially flows from a desire for moral responsibility in order to justify punishing others for their anti-social behaviors," state the authors. "Therefore, when there is a desire to punish, people should be motivated to believe in free will."

I wrote about this general subject in "Sitting in the jury box, I deny free will."

Aside from my own brilliant words (I had no choice but to say that), the blog post includes some persuasive quotations from Richard Oerton, a British lawyer who is the author of "The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing Up to a False Belief."

If those involved with our justice system would really take Oerton's arguments to heart, they'd be less inclined to focus on retribution and punishment rather than rehabilitation. Here's the quotes:

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. 

My mini not-really-mystical revelation

Hey, when you're as churchless and unreligious as I am, you take your revelations in any form they might appear.

Today I was driving around, aimlessly switching channels on satellite radio, trying to decide whether listening to news stations or the music of Chill was better for my non-soul.

CNN was still heavy into its obsessive coverage of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. For a while I tuned into a discussion of the effort to locate the plane's black box device by picking up its battery-powered "pings." 

An expert said something along the lines of, "The batteries should last 30 to 45 days. Before they go dead, though, the power of the batteries will begin to fade, making it more difficult to locate the plane."

At that moment something weirdly clicked in my brain. Maybe I had a mini-satori. A Zennish micro taste of enlightenment.

I felt like I was those black box batteries. Or they were me. 

I'm running down also. We all are. Everything alive is on a steady downward trajectory that leads to a touchdown on the runway of death. Crash-landing might be a better analogy.

For a few seconds I was at peace. With myself. With the world. WIth life. With death. It was like a weight had lifted off of my psyche. The weight of feeling that I was a separate conscious free-willing entity.

I realized that the batteries powering the black box are simply running down. Deep in the ocean they aren't going through a Woody Allen neurotic anxiety attack. "Oh, no, we're going to die!"

One instant they will be emitting their pings. The next instant they won't be.

No one will mourn the batteries. They did what they were supposed to do for as long as they could. Then they became something else: dead batteries.

If this little tale of mine leaves you with a what the f__k ? feeling, I totally understand. As the saying goes, you had to be there. In my mind. As my mind. 

It was just a pleasant insight into... something or other. 

Religious abstractions like the "devil" are ridiculous

It's crazy to believe in a world that doesn't exist. This is what many mentally ill people suffer from: a mistaken belief that what their dysfunctional minds tell them is true, really is. 

Today I heard on the radio that a pastor presiding over a service in the town where the Fort Hood shootings took place said "the devil is the author of what happened." 

Whatever made Ivan Lopez kill three soldiers before he killed himself almost certainly was not the devil.

(I added the "almost" to show my scientific credentials, since absolute certainty isn't a hallmark of the scientific method. However, the chance of the devil actually existing as an objectively real entity that causes people to do bad things is so low, as to approach zero.)

It's interesting that Lopez apparently put up a Facebook post before the shooting where he said the "devil" had taken him and he was full of hatred. 

Lopez was undergoing treatment for mental health problems. Plus, lots of people believe the devil is real. The above-mentioned pastor and Lopez share this delusion. Which obviously isn't the only religious abstracton that holds sway over true believers.

God. Heaven. Soul. Sin. Angels. Devil. Hell. Salvation.

These are all concepts conjured up by the human mind.

There is no demonstrable evidence that the concepts reflect anything that exists in objective reality. By contrast, "electrical charge" also is a concept. But it is based on careful observations of goings-on in the physical world. There is proof electrical charge is something more than an abstract notion.

I understand the appeal of living in an imaginary religious mental realm filled with comforting ideas that make the believer in them feel special and protected. I embraced such a realm for many years. 

Thankfully, though, I had a deconversion experience. I saw through the insubstantial mirages that I had mistaken for solid reality. I got tired of living in my head; I wanted my life to be marked by real living, not fantasies about an unreal religious theology. 

I doubt there is life after death.

But even if there is, I choose to focus on living life now. Let me be pleasantly (or fundamentalist Christians would say, unpleasantly) surprised by an extremely unlikely, yet possible, afterlife.

That would be real. Not an abstraction. So until God, Heaven, Soul, Sin, Angels, Devil, Hell, Salvation, or whatever other religious notion shows up as really real reality, I'll pass on fantasies.

Existence is the only unchanging thing. If it exists.

I've loved pondering the mystery of existence. Not individual stuff that exists within existence. Existence pure and simple. The fact that existence itself exists.

(Some of my ponders, along with links to others, can be found here, here, here, and here.)

However, lately I've been wondering whether this whole existence pure and simple notion makes any sense. For a long time I've had this intuitive, emotional, awestruck feeling that somehow there is an existential underpinning to the cosmos that is, duh, existence. 

Meaning, existence is akin or identical to "being." Which is a word that both philosophers and ordinary people use with ease. Yet usually without musing much about the concept.

It is. I am. We are.

Is, am, are.. these forms of "to be" sound so solid, so immutable, so unchanging. However, in reality everything does change. I am something for an instant. Then I'm something else.

Cells die and are born. Ideas come and go. Sensations flash into my psyche, then depart as quickly as they came. My internal organs are in constant motion. My body nearly so, in some fashion, for most of my waking moments.

Though godless and churchless now, I'm coming to realize that existence is a supposedly eternal omnipresent abstraction that, in some ways, took the place of a personal divinity for me. 

God doesn't exist. But existence damn well does! Just look around, and believe!

It's been comforting to envision a transcendent Mystery of Existence that always has been, is now, and always will be. Hey, in a world of change, it's good to know that something in the cosmos will always remain the same.

Existence. 

Well, this presumes that "existence" refers to something real, not just a concept conjured up by neurons in the human brain. No one has ever seen, felt, touched, heard, or otherwise sensed existence pure and simple. 

All we can experience is stuff that exists, not existence itself. In this regard, "existence" is like the idea of "self." We never catch ourselves as being a pure "self." Rather we experience happenings within and without ourselves. 

Which can include the feeling that existence exists, or I am soul.

I'm coming to embrace a foundational view of the cosmos that is based on the deep philosophical premise of: Who the Fuck Knows?

Yeah, I know that certain things exist. But when it comes to Existence separate from any particular thing, I'm clueless. Maybe the cosmos just is what it is, as I am what I am: an ever-changing process, nothing eternal, including the laws of nature. 

You see, my old notion of existence pure and simple lacks the ability to explain how all the stuff within existence came to be. So -- and this isn't an original idea -- existence must contain a creative principle in addition to a quality of just being. Otherwise existence would just sit there as a near-nothing.

Religious believers would jump at what I just said and scream, "That's God!"

To which I'd reply, "There's no proof of God, but plenty of proof that stuff exists. Why not just assume that the cosmos always has existed, and part of what exists is the ability to create more stuff that exists?" 

Praise Something or Other! Glory be to Whatever the Hell Makes Things Be! This is enough for me.

Slomo's simple philosophy of life: "Do what you want to"

For today's spiritual uplift, there is no better way for you to spend 16 minutes than by watching "Slomo." 

I loved this documentary about a 69 year old guy, John Kitchin, who gives up his life as a neurologist and becomes a full-time inline skater -- in slow motion, sort of -- on the San Diego boardwalk. The filmmaker says: 

I’ve long been fascinated by people who make seismic changes late in life. It goes against the mainstream narrative: Grow up, pick a career, stick it out, retire.

I was also curious about Slomo’s concept of “the zone,” a realm of pure subjectivity and connectedness that he achieves through his skating. The only thing Slomo loves more than being in the zone is talking about the zone, so it wasn’t hard to persuade him to take part in a documentary film.

Slomo’s combination of candor and eloquence made him a natural on camera, and his background as a neurologist legitimized his metaphysical theories about skating, lateral motion and the brain.

But like many of the people who saw him skating by, I couldn’t help wondering: was this guy nuts, or was he onto something? And was his mantra – “Do what you want to” – translatable to those of us without the nest egg of a retired doctor?

But just like the throngs of Slomo fans on Pacific Beach, I couldn’t get enough of him, and was determined to capture the effect he had on people in a cinematic way.

Maybe (well, more than maybe) I liked the film so much because I'm a senior citizen longboarder /skateboarder myself. (Did my thing on the Venice Beach boardwalk recently.) Along with, most recently, an addiction to the StreetStrider, an outdoor elliptical bike. 

Hopefully the documentary video is still available when you read this. I had to sit through a short NY Times ad before being able to watch it at the top of the page. Small price to pay. The film made me smile. It inspired me. 

"Do what you want to."

Sure, Kitchin's philosophy of life will strike some as too simplistic, too self-centered, too impractical. But, hey, he's doing it. Beautifully.

For more insights into Slomo, as Kitchins is called these days, here's an interview with him. And for a fascinating look into his deeper view of the cosmos, read his "The Zone." Excerpt:

The Zone is all that is pure subjectivity. The Zone is composed entirely of subjectivity. Subjectivity extends into space right up to the edge of perception and thought, but it does not extend beyond perception into the Non-Zone.

Subjectivity has its own type of relationship with space and time.  Subjectivity is the part of the human experience that exists as happening right now to one's self. The Zone is the "inside" part of this realm of pure subjectivity. For practical purposes, the Zone is pure subjectivity itself, and pure subjectivity is the Zone itself.

Part of Kitchin's essay makes sense, part doesn't; but who am I to know the difference, really.

Here's the trailer for the film.