Church of the Churchless

Non-duality tweets by David Chapman

Hey, Twitter certainly can be philosophical. In 140 characters or less.

Here's a series of recent tweets from David Chapman that I enjoyed.

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David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since All is One, seeming differences are illusion. Illusion is bad, so Oneness is better than differences. [The duality of #nonduality.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

In Oneness, all is equal. Equality is better than difference, so we who know Oneness are more equal than you. [Authoritarian #nonduality.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since your self is an illusion, doing what you want is meaningless—there's no "you" to want it—so stop now. [Renunciation in #nonduality.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since individuals are illusory, your individual desires and peculiarities should be ignored by the state. [Isn't #nonduality great?]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

Since All is One, everything is already perfect. You think otherwise because you are spiritually defective. [#Nonduality enjoys paradox.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

I have realized the Divine Oneness of #Nonduality, so I can teach you everything you need to know about Reality. Follow me! [On twitter.]

David Chapman @Meaningness · Jun 28

[In the mean time, here's the best thing I've read on what's wrong with Oneness: http://www.joeldiana.com/downloads/guru_papers/gp_oneness_chapter.pdf …]

 

Five simple rules of science from Neil deGrasse Tyson

The final episode of "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" ended with host Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, cogently describing how science is able to comprehend mysteries of the universe that other ways of knowing reality are unable to fathom.

Like religion.

Consider how Tyson's Five Simple Rules are almost diametrically opposed to the faith-based belief systems espoused by religions the world over. 

They ask us to revere authority, not question theological dogma, have unshakable faith, remain within a single chosen religion, and accept that some saint, prophet, or other godly person was able to perfectly know divine truth.

Whereas this, according to Tyson, is how science operates. He said:

Only a few centuries ago, a mere second in cosmic time, we knew nothing of where or when we were. Oblivious to the rest of the cosmos, we inhabited a kind of prison, a tiny universe bounded by a nutshell. 

How did we escape from the prison? It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart.

(1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me. 

(2) Think for yourself. Question yourself. Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so. 

(3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong. Get over it. 

(4) Follow the evidence wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment. 

And perhaps the most important rule of all...

(5) Remember: you could be wrong. Even the best scientists have been wrong about some things. Newton, Einstein, and every other great scientist in history -- they all made mistakes. Of course they did. They were human. 

Science is a way to keep from fooling ourselves, and each other.

In a God's eye view, who does the seeing?

I've heard the term, "God's eye view," before. But I haven't given it much thought. Maybe it was because I believed in God for so many years.

I never questioned the notion that there could be a way of looking upon reality that was godlike. After all, even scientists -- not just religious believers -- assume the cosmos can be viewed from some sort of detached objective transcendent perspective.

This is the way things are. 

OK. But says who? And where is that entity?

If inside the cosmos (which I define as everything that exists), then this being with a supposed God's eye view isn't seeing everything, since it is within everything. It is a part of reality, of existence, of the cosmos.

Thus this being not only can't see itself, it has its own perspective. It is situated within some aspect of the cosmos. For us this means time and space. Or more accurately, the space-time continuum.

This isn't nowhere. It is somewhere. 

When we imagine God being aware of everything, what does the vision consist of? For me, I either picture myself looking through God's consciousness (a fantasy, for sure) or see God as if from the outside, gazing upon everything (another fantasy).

In the latter case, I'm definitely taking a God's eye view of God.

Yet also in the first case, more subtly. Because I am picturing myself looking through God's consciousness, which is a perspective on God's perspective.

The Big Question is whether a God's eye view makes any sense.

Can any being really understand reality as it is -- detachedly objectified -- or is reality always a matter of subjective perspective? This subject-object problem is a key theme in Amanda Gefter's fascinating book, "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn."

As I blogged about before, the notion of observer-dependent reality is brought up early and often in the book. Today I passed the halfway point in my reading, coming across these passages:

My mind was officially blown. Top-down cosmology had suggested that you violate the law of causality when you try to take a God's-eye view of the universe, leaving me to wonder if you would violate other laws too. Laws of physics intact only when viewed inside a single light cone?

Now horizon complementarity answered with a resounding yes. All the laws of physics --both relativity and quantum mechanics -- only hold true within a single light cone, finite and limited as it may be.

For years my father and I had talked about the impossibility of a God's-eye view. After all, that was Einstein's lesson: you can't talk about the universe without asking, from whose point of view? Reference frames make all the difference. There is nothing outside the universe.

Thanks to the finite speed of light, any given observer can see only a piece of it. But we had been talking about it as a philosophical point: if no one can ever see the universe from a God's-eye view, it makes good pragmatic sense to avoid using that view in your description of the universe.

...Horizon complementarity's message was clear: physics makes sense only within the reference frame of a single observer. 

The idea was so radical it was hard to wrap my head around it. The situation with the elephant seemed so weird because intuition tells us that even if we can't be inside and outside the [black hole] horizon simultaneously, there's still some ultimate answer to where the elephant really is. 

But "really" assumes a reality that can be described from a God's-eye view. There is no single "really." There's Safe's "really" and Screwed's "really." Nothing more.

Nothing is another recurring theme in Gefter's book. She and her father start off their search for ultimate reality in this fashion (page 7):

My father continued, his excitement mounting. "Usually people think that to get to nothing, you have to remove everything. But if nothing is defined as an infinite, unbounded homogeneous state, you don't have to remove everything to get to it -- you just have to put everything into a specific configuration.

"Think about it this way. You take a blender to the world -- you blend up every object, every chair and table and fortune cookie in this place, you blend it all until everything is just atoms and then you keep blending the atoms until any remaining structure is gone, until everything in the universe is spread out infinitely without bound.

"Everything will have disappeared into sameness. Everything becomes nothing. But in some sense it's still everything, because everything you started with is still in there. Nothing is just everything in a different configuration."

"Okay, that's pretty cool," I said. "Something and nothing aren't really opposites, they're just different patterns of the same thing."

I like this idea a lot.

But reading Gefter's words, I couldn't help thinking... 

Who the heck is taking a blender to the world? Is this being able to blend itself into a state of nothingness after it does this to everything except itself and the blender? If so, who knows this has happened? 

One hour with my father: a story with churchless subtext

Here's something different, Church of the Churchless blog post-wise. An audio recording of my ten-minute Stories from the Dark Side talk last month. 

Click here. Then on the orange play/stop button, top left side, next to my name: Brian Hines (Brian Hart is one of the organizers of Stories from the Dark Side).

The overall theme of the evening was Gone for Good. I blogged about it in "Telling a story from my dark side felt like church. Without the religion."

At the time the audio recording of my talk wasn't available. Now it is. 

I just stood at the microphone and shared my story. I knew pretty much what I wanted to say, but didn't really know what was going to come out of my mouth until the words did.

Some God-talk emerged right at the beginning. And that was it, God-wise. Explicitly at least. 

There's a churchless subtext in my father story, though. As a child, and also later to some extent, I fantasized about the father I'd never met. I felt that I was missing out by not having a relationship with him.

Until... I did. And learned that what I'd imagined, and what the reality was, were two very different things. 

Regarding God: How do you know? What are the chances?

After about fifty years of spiritual searching, what I've learned about God comes down not to answers but to two questions applicable to everybody -- including me.

How do you know?
What are the chances?

There's a lot to say about these eight words. I've done just that over my ten years of churchless blogging. (On the specific subject of chances, see here, here, and here.)

I'll reprise the basic reason I now subscribe to a decidedly skeptical view of religious, supernatural, and other-worldly claims:

It is damned unlikely, and also  egotistical, for anyone to believe they know the truth about some divine ultimate reality.

For this to be true, knowing the above-mentioned truth, two things have to be, well, TRUE.

First, there has to be a divine ultimate reality that can be known. I hope there is. I wish there were. But hopes and wishes aren't objectively real. Just subjectively real. It took me a long time to fully appreciate the difference.

My wife helped me with this.

I married her in 1990, a second marriage. Laurel had her own New Age'y beliefs. However, she was considerably less certain about them than I was about my Sant Mat beliefs, Radha Soami Satsang Beas version.

Laurel would keep asking me, "How do you know?" That God existed. That the guru was God in human form. That it was possible to know God through meditation. 

I had answers. Of course I did.

Like everyone else I was prone to motivated reasoning. I'd embrace any scrap of information that supported my beliefs, including rumors, hearsay, tales in holy books, and such. Arguments and evidence challenging my beliefs were rejected smugly.

"Those skeptics haven't experienced divine truth. They haven't opened their consciousness to the wonders of ultimate reality. They are stuck in a mental prison of their own making."

Which naturally implied that I'd been able to grasp truths few other people on earth had. I was a chosen person! I'd been singled out by God and the guru to know divinity! Lucky me, poor you!

(If this sounds like what's taught by lots of other religions, no surprise; the pleasant fantasy of being a "chosen people" is common.)

I rarely thought, What are the chances?

This question is closely related to How do you know? Assuming there is indeed some sort of divine ultimate reality -- a big assumption, given the lack of demonstrable evidence -- a religious believer has to have stumbled upon a theological or spiritual belief system that, out of the thousands in the world, is the True One.

Or One's, perhaps. Several closely related religions could be so alike, they each know the truth about "God", viewed as divine ultimate reality, details unknown. 

But all religions can't be true, since the differences are so large between them. How could God both be personal and deeply involved in the world, as Christianity says, and also an impersonal cosmic principle that operates automatically, as Taoism says?

(Note: Taoism arguably isn't a religion, but a philosophy; however it does have a religious aspect to it.)

Eventually it dawned on me that I was clinging to religious beliefs out of habit. And egotism. I really enjoyed feeling special, a chosen person, someone singled out for divine favor for reasons that didn't make sense, yet felt so good.

Now I realize that I don't know God exists. Further, I don't know anybody who does. More: if God does exist, I have no reason for believing that any of the world's religions understands the truth about God, or that I'd know if any religion actually did.

Not-knowing feels much more truthful and humbler to me. 

 

 

Glimpses of observer-dependent reality on "Einstein's Lawn"

"Excellent book buy, Brian." I enjoy praising myself. I rarely fail to make sense when I'm speaking to someone who understands me: Me.

The book I'm talking about to myself is Amanda Gefter's "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything."

I was worried it'd be too sentimental, with too much father-daughter stuff. I was mainly interested in the physics, the meaning of a cosmos that, as the subtitle says, is mainly (or completely?) comprised of nothing.

No worries. Three chapters in, I'm hooked.

Both on Gefter's compelling prose and the search for ultimate reality she embarks on with her father. Neither know much about physics and cosmology when they start on their quest (he is a radiologist; she is a free-spirited young woman who never completed a science class, I recall she says).

Here's an excerpt from the Amazon description of the book that helped tilt me toward buying it.

At a Chinese restaurant outside of Philadelphia, a father asks his fifteen-year-old daughter a deceptively simple question: “How would you define nothing?” With that, the girl who once tried to fail geometry as a conscientious objector starts reading up on general relativity and quantum mechanics, as she and her dad embark on a life-altering quest for the answers to the universe’s greatest mysteries.
       
Before Amanda Gefter became an accomplished science writer, she was a twenty-one-year-old magazine assistant willing to sneak her and her father, Warren, into a conference devoted to their physics hero, John Wheeler. Posing as journalists, Amanda and Warren met Wheeler, who offered them cryptic clues to the nature of reality: The universe is a self-excited circuit, he said. And, The boundary of a boundary is zero. Baffled, Amanda and Warren vowed to decode the phrases—and with them, the enigmas of existence. When we solve all that, they agreed, we’ll write a book.

...What they discover is extraordinary: the beginnings of a monumental paradigm shift in cosmology, from a single universe we all share to a splintered reality in which each observer has her own. Reality, the Gefters learn, is radically observer-dependent, far beyond anything of which Einstein or the founders of quantum mechanics ever dreamed—with shattering consequences for our understanding of the universe’s origin. And somehow it all ties back to that conversation, to that Chinese restaurant, and to the true meaning of nothing.

I've only gotten glimpses of the observer-dependent reality concept that is a central theme of Gefter's book. I''m looking forward to a closer view. 

At the moment this notion is balanced in my mind between absurdity and obviousness.

Meaning, I find it difficult to give up the idea that reality exists independent of conscious observers. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. What state was it in before intelligence or consciousness evolved? Hard to believe that the universe wasn't anything until a conscious observer became aware of it.

On the other hand, I also find it difficult to visualize what the universe is like in a truly objective sense, absent the subjective consciousness of someone observing it. The closest I can come to this is viewing reality as purely mathematical, since there are good arguments for considering that mathematics exists in, or as, some sort of abstract Platonic'ish realm of forms.

(My mental split was reflected in two 2007 blog posts: "Consider a cosmos with no consciousness" and "Consider a cosmos that is only consciousness.")

It'll be interesting to see where Gefter leads me in the rest of her book.

Unlike books written by professional scientists, she doesn't give away much in her introductory chapter. This results in a pleasing sense of mystery about what's coming, unlike the "here's what I'm going to say" approach taken by many authors of popular science books.

I'm prepared to be surprised, being open to the possibility that whatever I consider to be true about reality, actually isn't. At the end of this paragraph is one of my favorite quotes in the part of the book I've read so far:

So here was the situation. A particle can't have a well-defined position and momentum, yet an observer can measure either one with perfect accuracy and is free to choose which one to measure. The moral of the story was clear: there's no normal reality lurking behind the quantum scene, no objective Einsteinian world that sits idly by regardless of who's looking. There's just the stuff we measure. The whole thing reeked of paradox, but Feynman said, "The 'paradox' is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality 'ought to be.'"

Society would do fine without a belief in free will

I'm fascinated by free will. Especially the lack thereof. Do a "free will" Google search of my blogs (via the box in the right sidebar) and you'll find lots of posts I've written on this fascinating subject. 

(Some are here, here, here, and here.)

It doesn't bother me at all that modern neuroscience is steadily demolishing philosophical and religious reasons for believing in free will. If this is the way the world works, where's the problem?

To me, worrying about the consequences if people stop believing in free will is almost exactly the same as previous worries about what would happen if people learned that the earth isn't the center of the cosmos, or that we evolved from other life forms rather than being God's unique creation.

How can scientific truth be harmful?

Sure, sometimes there is a period of psychological adjustment when science reveals uncomfortable facts -- What, we humans weren't made in the image of God, starting with Adam and Eve six thousand years ago??!! -- but it is better in the long run to embrace the way things truly are, rather than fantasies.

So I was skeptical about the conclusion of a Scientific American article, "The World Without Free Will: What happens to a society that believes people have no conscious control over their actions?" Here's some excerpts from the final paragraphs.

If neuroscience research continues to degrade people's belief that they have free will, how will society change? We see three possibilities. History is replete with examples of moral norms evolving with new knowledge about the world.

...New research unveiling the biological machinery behind human thought and action may prompt a similarly dramatic change in moral views. This is the first possiblity... Though uncomfortable at times, doubting free will may end up as a kind of growing pain for our society, aligning our moral intuitions and legal institutions with new scientific knowledge and making us stronger than before.

It may not happen that way though. As our research has suggested, the more people doubt free will, the more lenient they become toward those accused of crimes and the more willing they are to break the rules themselves and harm others to get what they want. Thus, the second possibility is that newfound skepticism of free will may end up threatening the humanitarian revolution, potentially culminating in anarchy.

More likely is the third possibility. In the 18th century Voltaire famously asserted that if God did not exist, we would need to invent him because the idea of God is so vital to keeping law and order in society. Given that a belief in free will restrains people from engaging in the kind of wrongdoing that could unravel an ordered society, the parallel is obvious. 

What will our society do if it finds itself without the concept of free will? It may well reinvent it.

I hope not. These arguments in favor of preserving an unscientific belief in something that almost certainly doesn't exist fail to make sense to me.

For one thing, Voltaire was wrong about the idea of God being vital to keeping society lawful and orderly. Atheists and agnostics aren't any more prone to lawlessness than religious believers. Arguably, less so, since the most secular countries tend to have less crime.

Likewise, I can't understand why not believing in free will would make someone less moral. If morality is determined, as everything else is, someone's attitude about free will is just one of many influences on his or her behavior.

I used to believe in free will. Now I don't. I can't discern any effect this change has had on the way I go about my everyday life. I still make choices, decide what is right and wrong to do, and make moral judgments.

All that has changed is how I regard the philosophical implications of what I'm doing.

Meaning, I no longer consider that I'm capable of making decisions that are divorced from all of the causes impacting me: genetics, experience, upbringing, culture, environmental influences, bodily states, and such.

As the above-linked article points out, Japan is one of the countries where a small percentage of people believe in the Western notion of God. China is another. I'd argue that most Japanese and Chinese also have a different notion of free will than people in the United States do.

We are much more individualistic, by and large.

Yet does our indvidualism and belief in free will lead to lower crime rates and a greater concern for the welfare of others? No. This country lags behind many, if not most, industrialized nations in many indicators of social well-being.

A belief in free will tends to make us more judgmental toward other people, as argued here. it leads us to think that if someone does something wrong, they could have done otherwise, so deserve punishment or whatever else results from their bad decision (like poverty or poor health).

So I'm eager for society to give up a ill-founded belief in free will. Let's embrace reality.

All of us are connected. No man or woman is an island. We're all parts of an interconnected whole -- the universe -- that collectively determines what happens in every part of itself. To me this is a beautiful way of looking at the world, one that offers way more meaning than an illusory embrace of free will.

 

 

Once God is gone, the world shines more brightly

I've flown both ways.

For many years I Iooked upon the world through a conceptual prism where my belief in God, a being unseen and unknown, altered the perspective from which I saw things.

Now, I do my best to cast off the filter of spiritual imaginings, desiring to view reality as clearly as possible as it is rather than how I'd like it to be.

I've discovered something interesting: when I don't try to fashion the world into a place that it isn't, full of illusory ideas about salvation, divinity, soul, eternal existence, and such, what is turns out to be wonderfuly satisfying.

Not nirvana. Not perfection. Not an idealized Platonic realm. But a glorious fully natural godless corner of our vast mysterious cosmos.

Sure, it's easier to feel this way in beautiful locations.

Recently I walked along the Metolius River in central Oregon, where I took the photo above. The sun was setting. I wasn't aware of the beam of light making its way through the tall Lodgepole pines until I transferred the iPhone image to my laptop.

What should we call such moments? Spiritual? Elevating? Transcendent? 

Or just... experiencing how the world is.

I fully understand the lure of adding fantasized extras on to existence as it is known to be. Death is scary. Suffering sucks. Disappointments abound. The gap between is and should be begs to be bridged by theological consolations.

All I can say is that I've tried both ways of living: with and without religious beliefs.

I've enjoyed the feeling of having a special relationship with God, one that promised me both eternal life after my stay here on Earth and a way of looking upon happenings as having cosmic significance because of God's plan for me.

I'll admit that sometimes I miss the warm spiritual blanket, woven of pleasing beliefs, that sheltered me from the cold winds of reality for about 35 years. Well, I really should say "seemed to shelter me."

Because now that I'm committed to looking upon life naturally, rather than supernaturally, I realize that reality offers me a much firmer foundation than the fantasies I used to embrace so enthusiastically. Quaffing one ounce of "what is" is more satisfying than a pound of "what might be."

Even when I'm experiencing something painful, disturbing, distasteful. I'd rather feel the honest touch of life, even if it hurts, than shut myself away in an antispetic conceptual room where, I believed, I was protected from the world's dark side.

LIke I said before, dark and light appear to me as one now. The world seems to shine more brightly when I don't try to bring an illusory spiritual radiance into it. 

About ten years ago I blogged about corn on the cob. Specifically, about not pulling back the husk when choosing corn. This isn't necessary. Seemingly not a super-important subject to be concerned about. But I quoted Thoreau's "Walden" approvingly.

Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His companion’s prayer is forgotten. 

A brief conversation with a newly churchless friend

Sometimes a lot can be said in a short time. It all depends on how honest and direct the conversing is.

With Russell, a Tai Chi friend who I hadn't seen for quite a while after he stopped coming to classes, we covered a lot of philosophical ground in a few minutes after we ran into each other in a downtown Salem coffeehouse.

He was chatting with the barista when I walked up to the counter to order. Russell greeted me in his usual wonderfully friendly manner.

I told the barista, "I know Russell from Tai Chi. He's the only person I know who says Blessings to me when we part. Kind of cool, since I'm an atheist." 

Russell smiled. He said, "I'm an agnostic now myself. Yes, I was a devout Christian for a long time. But now I don't know what to believe about God." 

Then he added, "I read part of your Return to the One book. Do you still believe that some part of us continues on after death, whether this be soul or something else?" I recalled that I'd given Russell a copy, since he and I shared an interest in cosmic philosophical concerns.

"No," I told Russell.

"Well, let me clarify that. To me it's a matter of probabilities. What is the chance that, after I die, I'll live on in some form? Very small, the way I see it. But, hey, I'll be pleased to be surprised after my demise if my consciousness survives bodily disintegration. It'll be a pleasant Oops! I was wrong!"

Then we chatted about other Meaning of LIfe stuff. I had to go to a protest rally in a few minutes; someone was waiting for Russell at a table in the corner. Whatever I wanted to say, I needed to say quickly.

"You know, Russell, the older I get, the more I think about last times. I used to believe that I'd have another chance at life, either through reincarnation or living on in a non-bodily form. Now, I don't. So this life I'm living now has come to seem way more precious." 

"Infinitely precious, in a sense," I said. "What is the worth of every moment, since it won't ever happen again, and my moments are numbered? Sometimes I'm just dumbstruck by the fact that I'm alive... and one day I won't be."

"Further, increasingly I have the realization that with every thing I do, there will be a last time. A last time I mow our grass. A last time I hug my wife. A last time I talk with you, Russell."

"Thing is, likely I won't know when the last time is. I'll think that there will other mowings, other hugs, other talks. Yet eventually there won't be. So shouldn't I treat every time as the last time? That makes sense to me, even though I can't be so mindful as to do it as often as I'd like."

At this point Russell and I both needed to head off to what we were planning to do before we saw each other at the coffeehouse. I wish we'd had more time to talk.

Russell is one of those "gentle souls" who make the world a better place. He may have meanness and negativity within him; I've never seen any sign of such, though. He was a nice guy when he was a devout Christian. He's a nice agnostic guy now.

Which goes to show that what matters isn't someone's professed religion. it's what sort of person they are deep down, with or without a shallow covering of religiosity.

Inference to the best explanation. Fancy words, simple way of living.

Idly glancing at a bookshelf in our house a few days ago, I noticed a book that I bought back in 2010, Paul Thagard's "The Brain and The Meaning of Life." Since, I've been re-reading some of it each morning.

Great book, with some great ideas. I blogged about these before in "Reality is real, but brains construct knowledge" and "Divinity isn't necessary to make life meaningful."

Here's an excerpt from the first post.

When we go on our evening walk, my dog has a very different experience of reality than I do, given her vastly superior sense of smell. As I stand holding the leash, waiting for her to finish a comprehensive sniffing of a clump of grass that looks to me just like all the other clumps along the road, she is engaged in tasting an odor feast that's beyond my comprehension.

So we Homo sapiens do indeed construct our knowledge of reality through the only means available to us: the human brain. Thagard reviews some hypotheses about how we do this, and arrives at a favored theory: inference to the best explanation.

Don't be thrown off by this fancy phrase.

It's what we all do every day of our lives. Recently my wife excitedly told me that I had to come and see what was being done to a cherished twenty year old vine maple tree that is a centerpiece of our landscaping.

Bark was being chewed off. Not just a little. A lot. Some large branches were almost girdled, which could kill them. We talked about what animal could be the culprit. Deer? Raccoons? Ground squirrels?

We immediately suspected the latter, as they've been causing us other problems.

Some Googling revealed that they do indeed like to eat bark, something we hadn't noticed before. So ground squirrels became our inference to the best explanation and we've been acting accordingly to deal with the little furry irritants.

Re-reading Thagard's book reminded me how often he mentions "inference to the best explanation." This strikes me as simple common sense, but the concept has some pretty sophisticated philosophizing behind it. 

I could understand the first part of the Wikipedia article on abductive reasoning, a.k.a. inference to the best explanation. The rest of it looked way too complex for me to attempt to fathom. Especially on a pleasant early summer Saturday. 

This part I grasped, though.

For example, the lawn is wet. But if it rained last night, then it would be unsurprising that the lawn is wet. Therefore, by abductive reasoning, the possibility that it rained last night is reasonable (but note that Peirce did not remain convinced that a single logical form covers all abduction). 

Moreover, abducing rain last night from the observation of the wet lawn can lead to a false conclusion. In this example, dew, lawn sprinklers, or some other process may have resulted in the wet lawn, even in the absence of rain.

Peirce argues that good abductive reasoning from P to Q involves not simply a determination that, e.g., Q is sufficient for P, but also that Q is among the most economical explanations for P. Simplification and economy both call for that "leap" of abduction.

It seems to me that, again, this is an example of common sense being dressed up in fancy philosophical language. As in my ground squirrel example, isn't this what everybody does when faced with a problem that needs figuring out?

Look at evidence. Consider alternative hypotheses that could explain the evidence. Pick the best one. Thagard puts it this way:

Inference to the best explanation in science has the same basic structure as does reasoning in law, medicine, and everyday life. 

In all these domains, you should collect as much relevant evidence as you can, consider higher-level hypotheses and alternative ones, and accept the ones that provide the best overall explanation of the evidence.

For example, Thagard argues persuasively, and I agree with him, that "minds are brains" is a better explanation than "consciousness is supernatural."

There is lots of evidence that supports the first hypothesis, ranging from a baseball bat to the head to sophisticated MRI machines. Evidence of the supernatural nature of consciousness is so few and far between, it might as well be considered zero.

Best explanation, of course, isn't the same as desired explanation.

This is where honest respect for factual evidence is important. Thagard explains how motivated reasoning skews good explanations of facts. When we want something to be true, we ignore evidence at odds with that desire.

Sure, it'd be nice to live forever, to continue to exist after death in a non-bodily form. This is why religions are so popular: they promise something that people desperately want, just as a con man does.

However, even religious true believers should admit that when it comes to demonstrable evidence, the inference to the best explanation leads to the conclusion that minds are brains. When the brain dies, so do we.

It'd be nice if reality were otherwise. But reality is real. It isn't nice.

Reduce the chatter of your inner anchorperson

The 24 hour cable news channels are a fairly recent invention. But the voice inside our head that chatters away almost non-stop likely is as old as modern human consciousness.

There's a lot of similarity between so-called news anchors and our own inner commentator.

(Who is it? Me? But it's giving me advice, berating me, encouraging me, talking to me. So how could it be me? Assuming there even is a "me" for the voice to be or not to be.)

They both spend a lot more time recollecting the past and musing about the future than reporting on what actually is going on. That's why I added "so-called" before "news anchors."

What passes for news these days is mostly speculation. Nobody knows who is going to win the 2016 presidential election, how the stock market will perform this year, or whether Kim Kardashian is going to stay married. But a lot of people pretend that they do.

Likewise, none of us knows what is going to happen in the next moment, much less the next day, next week, next month, or next whenever.

Yet our desire for security and illusory knowing leads us to make up stories about possible futures, along with selectively re-telling the past in ways that please us. Is this necessary? Does it serve much of a purpose? Would we miss our minds' inner anchorperson if it shut the fuck up?

I've finished reading Dan Harris' "10% Happier," a book I blogged about before.

Interestingly, Harris is both an ABC anchor and a student of meditation/ mindfulness. Initially skeptical about the whole tame the monkey mind thing, he comes to realize the benefit of reducing the chatterbox that sits inside his cranium, talking about crap it knows nothing about.

Harris learns from a Buddhist teacher, Joseph Goldstein, that thinking isn't the problem. Non-useful thinking is. Here's a report on Day 9 of a mostly-silent ten day meditation retreat Harris goes on.

As he [Goldstein] presses his case, he says something that bugs me. He urges us not to spend too much time thinking about the stuff we have do when the retreat is over. It's a waste of time, he says; they're just thoughts. This provokes me to raise my hand for the first time.

From the back of the echoey hall, in full-on reporter mode, with my over-loud voice apparently not atrophied one bit from disuse, I ask, "How can you advise us not to worry about the things we have to do when we reenter the world? If I miss my plane, that's a genuine problem. These are not just irrelevant thoughts."

Fair enough, he concedes. "But when you find yourself running through your trip to the airport for the seventeenth time, perhaps ask yourself the following question, 'Is this useful'?"

His answer is so smart I involuntarily jolt back in my chair and smile.

"Is this useful?" It's a simple, elegant corrective to my "price of security" motto. It's okay to worry, plot, and plan, he's saying -- but only until it's not useful anymore. I've spent the better part of my life trying to balance my penchant for maniacal overthinking with the desire for peace of mind.

And here, with one little phrase, Goldstein has handed me what seems like a hugely constructive tool for taming this impulse without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 

I also liked this advice from a how-to-meditate section at the end of the book.

Write down this quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn and put it up on your wall: "Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It's about feeling the way you feel."

It's amazing how many times I can hear this message and yet forget it when I sit down to meditate. You don't need to achieve some special state; you just need to be as aware as possible of whatever's happening right now. This is what the Buddhists mean by "letting go" -- better translated as "letting be."

Try to have your philosophy disturbed every day

Driving home this evening, on my car radio I heard the end of an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who hosts the new Cosmos series. Tyson said:

I try to have my philosophy disturbed every day. 

Beautiful.

That's obviously an open-minded scientist speaking, not a fundamentalist religious believer. People of faith don't want to have their philosophy disturbed, because its foundation is so shaky.

They don't know. They aren't sure of the facts. They don't possess demonstrable evidence.

No, they just have faith that maybe, perhaps, possibly, what they want to be true really is: salvation, eternal life, God's love for them, a special place reserved in the cosmic scheme of things.

Tyson, on the other hand, is committed to learning the truth about reality, no matter where that search leads. Naturally it isn't necessary to be a scientist to have this sort of commitment to truth-seeking. It simply takes a willingness to have one's cherished assumptions challenged -- over and over again.

I don't know if I remember the exact words Tyson said next, but this is pretty close.

The essence of science is making sure that our biases don't make us turn away what is true, or embrace what is not true.

Biases. We all have them. Scientists included. 

Like most people, I have a bias toward living rather than dying; being happy rather than sad; wisdom rather than ignorance; pleasure rather than pain; love rather than hate.

So, sure, I found it really easy to follow a religious path (for over thirty years) that promised me everything I was biased toward: life after death, eternal bliss, revelation of the secrets of the cosmos. For a long time I resisted both my own doubts that all this was true, along with the skepticism of my wife and other people.

Eventually, though, I took a more scientific attitude toward the spiritual philosophy that appealed to me so much. I became more concerned with truth, and less with how comfortable my religion made me feel. 

Like Tyson advised, I was willing to have my belief system disturbed.

I figured that if it can't withstand close inspection and tough questions, it damn sure wasn't capable of sustaining me in this life and, possibly, beyond. Better to do my best to learn the truth now. After all, I knew that I had at least this one life to live. That might be it for me: one lifetime.

Seemed senseless to dilute and diminish it by living a one and only life that was founded on falsehoods. 

Near the end of the portion of the interview with Tyson, he said something like:

Science enables us to gain knowledge of the objective outside world which is apart from what is only inside our heads.

Yes. Yes. Yes. 

I used to believe in "going within" via closed-eye (and closed-minded) meditation. Meaning, I had faith that there were realms of reality beyond the physical, and it was possible to enter them by raising my consciousness to a higher state of awareness.

Who knows? This might be possible. But now I'm in a "I'll believe it when I see it" frame of mind, as contrasted with my previous "I'll see it when I believe it" attitude.

My focus is on enjoying and learning about the world outside of me.

I know that this exists. I love its otherness, its not-me'ness, its grandeur, mystery, and beauty. Residing inside my head is fine from time to time; I'm just no longer interested in making it a permanent habitation.

The truth is out there, said The X-Files show. Science agrees. It just isn't what we want truth to be, but what it truly is.