Church of the Churchless

Stephen Hawking's "Genius" series looks at free will confusingly

Wow! As a big Stephen Hawking fan, I never thought that I'd write a blog post where I took him to task for getting a scientific subject wrong. 

But after watching Episode 3 of Hawking's new "Genius" series, I've got to point out how confusing this Why Are We Here? episode was when it came to free will. 

I've read a lot about free will. I've thought a lot about free will. I've written a lot about free will. (For example, see here, here, and here.)

So I was all eyes and ears as Hawking led three ordinary people -- meaning, non-scientists -- through exercises designed to get them thinking in a scientific way. Clips can be viewed on the PBS web page devoted to Episode 3, along with the entire hour long show. 

We see them marveling at floating plates in a room within an English castle. Not surprisingly, this isn't the result of magic, but magnetism. The lesson learned is that scientific understanding of the laws of nature is the way to comprehend the world, not supernatural explanations.

Then the three Genius explorers tackle a difficult problem: how to knock an olive on a toothpick that's balanced on the edge of a cocktail glass into the drink. Without touching it with their hands.

A pendulum device on a long chain looks promising. The swinging round ball definitely has what it takes, but the scientific students keep either missing short (no contact) or long (too much contact, so the glass breaks). After many tries, and many refills of the drink by a bartender in the room, they figure out what to do.

Use a board with markings to get the ball in a precise spot, and use a button that deactivates a magnet holding the ball in place so the "push" on the ball is exactly the same every time. It doesn't take long for them to find the sweet spot where the olive is gently knocked into the glass. 

And they can do this repeatedly. Lesson: if something is done in exactly the same way, the same thing will happen according to the laws of nature. 

A replication of the famous Libet experiment about conscious vs. unconscious choice gets us directly into questions of free will. The three people are asked to push a button (which sets off fireworks!) at a moment of their choice while staring at a large clock projected onto a castle wall. 

They note the time they consciously chose to push the button. As Libet found, and as other researchers have confirmed, a conscious decision to do something is preceded by unconscious activity in the brain. So this teaches the threesome that free will doesn't really exist, since the sense of "I freely choose to do this" is an illusion.

Actually, brain processes outside of our awareness determine what we choose. Thus they learn that determinism resulting from the laws of nature rules the universe, and us.

I was nodding along agreeably with Episode 3 up to this point. The points Hawking was making seemed eminently justified, being in line with familiar scientific principles I'd read about in numerous books and articles.

But then the episode took a turn.

A Doppelganger challenge featured many people wearing masks of the three Genius explorers. They lined up behind the real person. Then each individual decided to take a step to the right or left when a loud "beep" sounded. Before long these choices resulted in the Original and Doppelgangers being considerably out of step with each other, so to speak.

The lesson Hawking was teaching here struck me as way more scientifically problematic than what had been presented before. This exercise pointed to the Many Worlds (or Many Universes) theory of quantum mechanics. 

As a Wikipedia article discusses, the notion that all possible outcomes occur, that the "universe splits into all possible universes all the time" (as Hawking says near the end of Episode 3) is by no means a settled understanding of science. The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics has a lot of fans, but the article quotes a critic: "And who here believes the laws of physics are decided by a democratic vote?"

Yet Hawking and some other scientists, such as physicist Sean Carroll, speak as if it is virtually certain that every possible action or choice does occur in a parallel universe. 

Now, obviously there's no problem entertaining this hypothesis. It makes a lot of sense, and resolves some difficult questions about the quantum world. My problem is with how Episode 3 related free will to the Many Worlds theory. I failed to see how everything happening that could happen saves free will, as one of the threesome seemed to believe.

After all, Hawking had just led the three people to several understandings: the laws of nature rule the universe, and unconscious brain processes determine our conscious choices.

So someone decides to step to the right when hearing the beep in the Doppelganger exercise. This wasn't a freely willed choice. Yet certainly a different choice -- step to the left -- could have been made by the person's brain, given different causes acting within the brain.

I fail to see how everything that could happen, does happen has any relevance to free will. If anything, the Many Worlds theory points to Determinism Gone Wild. Not only does one thing happen according to the laws of nature, everything happens. 

Assuming the Many Worlds theory of the quantum realm is true. I'm not aware of any empirical evidence that it is. Thus Hawking's conclusion in Episode 3 struck me as poetic and appealing, but not convincing: "The universe you see is the one that gives rise to you out of all possible universes."

A member of the threesome said, "It took a whole universe to make me." OK, granted. The Big Bang can be viewed as the cosmic event that led to the present moment. Another quote from the episode: "We are a product of the universe, but the universe we live in is personal to us."

Well, sure.

We all experience the world through our own subjectivity. And the Many Worlds theory takes this farther, since there supposedly are countless other "me's" having subjective experiences in parallel universes. Naturally the only universe I'm aware of is the one I'm in.

It makes sense for Hawking and his collaborators on "Genius" to end Episode 3 on a semi-uplifting note after effectively putting free will on a skewer and roasting it to death. The basic answer he gives to the episode's main question, Why Are We Here?, is that we are here because we're not in an infinity of other parallel universes. 

Again, how this relates to free will and choice eludes me. But maybe the universe simply has determined that I'm not supposed to understand this.

2016 Portland Atheist Festival: Laurel Hines rocks the stage

Yesterday my wife, Laurel, and I made a non-religious pilgrimage northward up I-5, where we (and three other faithless Salem friends) took part in the first-ever Portland Atheist Festival.

Laurel volunteered to walk around with an "Atheists rock!!" sign and handouts. Which, not surprisingly, she handed out to people who wandered over to check out the booths in downtown Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square.

 

This video shows Laurel taking part in a "coming out" feature of the festival, as described in an Oregonian story, "Upcoming Atheist Festival hopes to coax non-believers out of the closet." 

This Thursday, one person after another will step up to a microphone in Pioneer Courthouse Square to boldly tell the city what he or she believes.

Or doesn't believe.

It is, after all, an event for atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and freethinkers.

Laurel's t-shirt reflected the commitment to science and reason she talked about in the video: "I think therefore I'm Atheist."

I did my own "coming out" thing on stage. However, since I shamelessly used the microphone to plug this blog that I started in 2004, my deep skepticism toward religion wasn't exactly a revelation.

Best I can remember, this is the gist of what I said:

Religions come in both Western and Eastern varieties.

Back in 1970, it was the time of the Beatles/Maharishi, psychedelics, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Timothy Leary, sex, drugs, rock and roll. Like so many others I wanted more reality, more life, more living. 

So I was attracted to an Indian guru who promised that with several hours of meditation a day, I and other disciples could experience higher regions of reality. We could leave this world behind and soar with our astral self, causal self, soul self. 

I ended up writing several books for the guru's organization. I gave talks about the teachings. In most of the talks, I'd quote Philip K. Dick, a science fiction author: Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

But often when I'd mention in a talk that I hadn't yet experienced those higher regions of reality -- cosmic light and sound -- sone fellow disciples would come up to me afterward and say, "Thank you for saying what you said. I thought I was the only one who wasn't experiencing those things."

It turned out that, so far as I could tell, nobody was.

So it began to dawn on me that when I and others stopped believing in the guru's teachings, when we stopped thinking about them, the supposed Extra Reality of which those teachings spoke did indeed go away. 

Thus the hours I was spending each day in a dark room, meditating, actually was taking me away from reality -- the reality of this world, the only evident reality there is. 

Now, I still meditate. Just for twenty minutes a day or so, though. And I don't try to escape from this world to some supernatural realm. Rather, I focus mindfully on my breathing and whatever else I'm aware of in my surroundings. 

Reality is a terrible thing to waste. Embrace science and this physical world, not religion.

Here's a few more photos from the Atheist Festival (and the surrounding area):

"Freedom is the distance between Church and State." Another good t-shirt slogan.


Buttons and other atheist paraphernalia on one of the festival displays.

A few blocks away from Pioneer Courthouse Square I found a gleaming Secular Cathedral that drew me in: the downtown Portland Apple Store.

I felt ever so comfortable after I entered the Cathedral, joining others who enjoy worshipping at the altar of all things Apple. Who needs the promise of God when, seemingly, an upgraded MacBook Pro lineup is supposed to be announced next month?

Cool! A video review of my "Return to the One" book about Plotinus

Here's an unexpected, but welcome, surprise from Jason Youngman -- his video review of "Return to the One," my book about the teachings of Plotinus, a Greek mystic philosopher, that was published in 2004 (in 2009, having gotten the rights back, I re-published it via Amazon's Create Space).

 

Youngman did a good job enscapsulating Plotinus' (or, if you like, Plotinus's) teachings in a few words and images. "Letting go" is a nice way of describing how Plotinus viewed a return to the One -- the impersonal highest reality. 

My Facebook cover photo got morphed into an image in the video, as shown above. Below is the unaltered image of me rocking a mask that I'd bought at the marvelous Oregon Country Fair in Veneta. 

In the twelve years since "Return to the One" was published, my views about the nature of the cosmos have changed quite a bit. But I still resonate with the notion of One. 

It seems unarguable that something has always existed. Most religions refer to this something as God. Most scientists call this something nature, the laws of nature, the multiverse, or such.

Plotinus speaks of the One. I like to think of this something as Existence, a subject I've tackled (but never brought to ground) in various blog posts. See, for example, here, here, and here.

Regardless of the name we humans give to primal reality, I enjoy pondering its imponderableness. So did Plotinus. We have that much in common. Along with a beard.

Eating, drinking, shitting, fucking -- the most "spiritual" aspect of our reality

Religions typically disparage our animal and vegetative nature. They urge us to embrace soul, mind, spirit -- whatever immaterial essence supposedly lies within us and connects us with a higher divine reality.

Re-reading the first chapters of Hubert Benoit's marvelous book, "Zen and the Psychology of Self-Transformation: The Supreme Doctrine, " I was struck again by how brilliantly Benoit talks about Zen. His outlook is pleasingly fresh.

In The Existentialism of Zen chapter, Benoit says that we mistakenly value living more than existence.

We aren't content with just being an integral part of a much larger reality. No, we seek to elevate that part -- our individuality -- above a status commensurate with the way things really are. So figuring out how to live life fully and meaningfully to the greatest possible extent becomes an obsession, while simply embracing our everyday existence is seen as not enough, too obvious, insufficient for the Fulfillment Task at hand.

Benoit wrote in French, which was translated. He's intellectual. He's a psychoanalyst. He's philosophically sophisticated. So it can take a bit of effort to absorb his words. But I've found that the effort is worth it. 

Here's some passages from the above-mentioned chapter. I've bold-faced some passages that I really like:

A man declares, "My life is insipid and monotonous; I do not call that living; at most it is existing." Everyone understands what this man means to say, which proves that everyone carries in himself the idea of this distinction. At the same time, everyone feels that "living" is superior to "existing"; and this opinion is so clear, so categoric, in the mind of man, that he comes to regard to "exist" as nothing, and to "live" as everything.

...However, when man places living so much above existing the frontier of this preferential distinction does not lie between their vegetative phenomena and their actions; it lies within the domain of action, and in the following manner: among my actions some have for object the service of my vegetative life (to eat, to repose, to perform the sexual act by pure animal desire); these actions affirm me (that is to say maintain my creation) in so far as I am an organism in all respects similar to the other animals, in so far as I live from the point of view of the universe, as a cosmic cog-wheel, in so far as I am "universal." 

But every day, besides these actions, I perform others which do not serve my vegetative life, which often even impede it, and whose aim is to make me appear different from every other man, that is to say affirm me as distinct from every other man, as a particular man.

Between these two kinds of action lies the frontier which we are studying. My egotistical state, which carries the fiction of my personal divinity, makes me regard as senseless my vegetative life and all the actions by which I serve this life (it is this ensemble which constitutes in my eyes the contemptible notion of existing) and leads me to see sense only in those actions which distinguish me (there, in my eyes, is the precious, estimable notion of living).

I do not count in my own eyes in so far as I am a universal man; I only count in so far as I am the individual "I." According to my fiction of personal divinity, to found the sense of my life on my vegetative phenomena and the actions which serve them is absurd, while to found this sense on actions which tend to affirm me as separate is sensible. This view is profoundly rooted in the mind of man.

It is evident to anyone who thinks about it impartially that it is this opinion which is absurd. 

... My organism is a link in the immense chain of cosmic cause and effect, and I can only perceive its real sense by considering it in its real place, in its real connexion with all the rest, that is to say by considering it from the point of view of the Universe, in my capacity as universal man and not particular man, in so far as I am similar to all other men and not in so far as I am different.

Man achieves existence, but only (as he thinks) because existing is a necessary condition for living. He eats, he rests, but he does so uniquely because he cannot otherwise affirm himself egotistically, as distinct; he only performs commonplace actions, common to all, in order to do something that no one but he will ever do, he exists in order to live. Basing, thus, the idea of existing on the idea of living he runs counter to the real order of things since he bases the real on the illusory. 

... The natural man is only conscious of images, so it is not astonishing that he should be unconscious of existing, which is real, which has three dimensions. In short, I am unconscious of that in which I am real, and that of which I am conscious in myself is illusory.

The attainment of satori is nothing else than the becoming conscious of existing which is actually unconscious in me; becoming conscious of the Reality, unique and original, of this universal vegetative life which is the manifestation in my person of the Absolute Principle (that in which I am and infinitely more than I'; imminence and transcendence).

It is that which Zen call "seeing into one's own nature." One understands the insistence with which Zen keeps coming back to the maintenance of our vegetative life. To the disciple who asks for the way of Wisdom the master replies: "When you are hungry you eat; when you are tired you lie down."

There is therein the wherewithal to scandalise the vain egotist who dreams of "spiritual" prowess and of "extatic" personal relations with a personal "God" whose image he creates for himself. 

I love Hubert Benoit and his book. Writing in 1951, his words speak as strongly and persuasively now as then. 

Both science and everyday experience tell us that the natural, physical, material, evident world is the ONLY WORLD THERE IS. Yet we humans place so much importance on our vaunted capacity to imagine, to conceive of worlds that don't exist, but could, if our individual imaginations were to be converted into universal reality. 

There's nothing wrong with thought and imagination. After all, nature evolved us Homo sapiens, who do that stuff. But Zen, and Benoit's take on Zen, remind us that the best form of spirituality is accepting that there's no need to be spiritual. It is letting go of the unnecessary. 

The Zen master is too intelligent to advise the natural man to suggest to himself, when he satisfies his hunger, that he is at last in contact with Absolute Reality; that would be to replace the old imaginative reveries by a theoretical image of cosmic participation which would change nothing whatever. 

The natural man has not to revalorise his vegetative life, he has only to obtain one day the immediate perception of the infinite value of this life by the integral devalorisation of his egotistical life. The necessary inner task does not consist in "doing" anything whatsoever, but in "undoing" something, in undoing all the illusory egotistical beliefs which keep tightly closed the lid of the "third eye."

Here's some of my previous posts about Benoit's book:

Letting go -- the essence of Zen
"The Supreme Doctrine," 36 years overdue
Centering in on "The Supreme Doctrine"

Sean Carroll's "Planets of Belief" -- ideally constantly changing

I've loving a new book by theoretical physicist Sean Carroll,  "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself." After reading just a few chapters, I felt compelled to leave a laudatory Amazon reader review. Here's part of what I said.

I'm an inveterate consumer of both science and philosophy books. Almost always, the scientists lack the ability to talk about philosophy cogently, and almost always the philosophers are clueless about basic scientific understandings. So each frustrate my desire to simultaneously (1) learn about how the world is, and (2) find meaning in the world, given how it is.

Sean Carroll is the sort of writer I adore. The chapters I just read show that he's marvelously capable of talking about findings of modern science in a philosophically productive (and provocative) way. Meaning, he takes dry facts and infuses them with the moist richness of meaning.

For example, I was blown away by his discussion on p. 32 about determinism: "The universe is resolutely focused on the current moment; it marches forward, instant to instant, under the grip of unbreakable physical laws, with no heed paid to its glorious accomplishments or to its hopeful prospects."

That is freakishly great writing. I've never thought of the universe, or reality, this way before. Sure, I've meditated daily for most of my 67 years. I've been exposed to countless mystics, masters, yogis, and such who talk about living in the reality of the present moment. But I've never come across a scientist who said what Carroll did in his easily understandable way: at the deepest level, every happening of any sort is proceeding because of the present moment.

Today I read Carroll's Planets of Belief chapter. He starts off by asking, "How do we construct a comprehensive picture of how things work that is both reliable and consistent with our experience?"

One way is foundationalism.

A foundation keeps a structure firmly rooted in solid ground. Foundationalism is the search for such solid ground, on which to erect the edifice of knowledge.

Religions use this approach when they ask us to have faith in certain assumptions about God, divinity, supernatural realms, and such. That faith supposedly is the foundation on which all else will be revealed.

Likewise, Carroll cites Descartes. From "I think, therefore I am," the base foundation of Descartes' philosophy, he derived a series of beliefs: (1) God, Omnipotent and Omnibenevolent; (2) Evidence of Our Senses; (3) Science.

But Carroll prefers another metaphor than a foundation established in solid ground.

On the scale of a human being, the ground beneath our feet is unquestionably solid and reliable. If we zoom out a bit, however, we see that the ground is simply part of the planet on which we live. And that planet, the Earth, isn't grounded on anything at all; it is moving freely through space, orbiting around the sun. 

The individual bits of matter that constitute the Earth aren't embedded in an unmoving structure; they are held together by their mutual gravitational force. All of the planets in the solar system formed gradually, as bits of rock and dust accreted together, each collection growing in influence and pulling together what remaining scraps of matter it could.

Without meaning to, we've discovered a much more accurate metaphor for how systems of belief actually work. Planets don't sit on foundations; they hold themselves together in a self-reinforcing pattern. The same is true for beliefs: they aren't (try as we may) founded on unimpeachable principles that can't be questioned.

Rather, whole systems of belief fit together with one another, in more or less comfortable ways, pulled in by a mutual epistemological force. 

This is a diagram that shows the planets of belief for Aristotle, Descartes, and a modern poetic naturalist -- the point of view Carroll takes in his book.

Carroll then goes on to talk more about our planets of belief.

According to this picture, a justified belief is one that belongs to a coherent set of propositions. This coherence plays the role of the gravitational pull that brings together dust and rocks to form real planets. A stable planet of belief will be one where all the individual beliefs are mutually coherent and reinforcing.

Some planets are not stable. People go through life with a very large number of beliefs, some of which may not be compatible with others, even if they don't recognize it. We should think of planets of belief as undergoing gradual but constant churning, bringing different beliefs into contact with one another, just as real planets experience convection in the mantle and plate tectonics near the surface.

When two dramatically incompatible beliefs come into direct contact, it can be like highly reactive chemicals being mixed together, leading to an impressive explosion -- possibly even blowing the entire planet apart, until a new one can be assembled from different parts.

This is a good description of what happened to my own planet of belief (though it was less an abrupt explosion, and more a massive restructuring of the planet). 

I was attracted to an Eastern/Indian form of spirituality often referred to as a science of the soul in part because I adored science. However, eventually the conflicts between understandings of modern science and the philosophy of ancient mystics grew too great. For example, I couldn't accept that consciousness was separable from the body when every bit of evidence showed that the physical brain was necessary for someone to be conscious. 

So I did what Carroll advises: reconstitute my planet of belief to be more in accord with reality. I've never regretted that decision. Reality is too precious to waste on fantastical beliefs that don't hold together.

Ideally, we should be constantly testing and probing our planets of belief for inconsistencies and structural deficiencies. Precisely because they are floating freely through space, rather than remaining anchored on solid and immovable ground, we should always be willing to improve on our planets' composition and architecture, even to the point of completely jettisoning old beliefs and replacing them with better ones.

Non-believers in religion urged to come out of the closet

Here's a Guest Opinion by my wife, Laurel, that is in the current issue of Salem Weekly -- our city's alternative paper.

In it she plugs the May 26 Portland Atheist Festival. Laurel and I are signed up to be some of the people who will speak for two minutes about why they're proud to be atheists.

Non-Believers Come Out of the Closet
by Laurel Hines

If you are one of the ever-growing numbers of people who don’t believe in a religion, you are “a-theist” (not part of a religion). If you don’t like the religious dogma that Ted Cruz and others hope to inflict on the nation, you must come out of the closet and declare your “a-theism”. If it worries you when legislators make policies based on religion instead of modern science, you must come out of the closet and declare yourself as “a-theist”!

A Pew Research survey recently found that 23 percent of the U. S. population is nonaffiliated, and a third of Millennials identify now as non-religious. Yet few are willing to declare themselves as atheist or even agnostic (uncertain about God’s existence). Yet politicians will continue to ignore secular Americans until they are convinced that there is a price to be paid for doing so.

The Catholic, Evangelical, and other religious lobbies, meanwhile, have significant influence in our government. The non-believers avoid the atheist label because of the tendency of people to assume only the religious are moral and good people. Yet those of us who are atheist/non-believers know that is hog-wash, and that actually the opposite is true ( atheists are under represented in prisons; some churches are awash in child molesters in the clergy).

Morals are inherent in social beings, and religion is not necessary for moral behavior.

Secular non-believers need to assert that our numbers are growing and significant, and that we vote. But it takes joiners to create a lobby!

Freedom of conscience for all – which exists only in secular democracies- should be a top concern for the non-religious.

Unless we non-believers accept a label and unite under a label, and join organizations that take action by fighting to keep our government secular (like Atheists of America or Freedom From Religion), we face legislation based on religious morals and beliefs,  and not science, reason, or facts.

On Thursday, May 26th, from 11 AM to 2 PM, the first ever Portland Atheist Festival will be held in Pioneer Courthouse Square (https://www.facebook.com/portlandatheistfestival/).  Come and meet an atheist, or come and declare your atheism! We need to come out of the closet and show the world who we really are. The success of LGBTs in the past couple years shows that coming out of the closet and demanding to be heard can create major change for oppressed groups. Atheists are oppressed because we don’t declare ourselves and we don’t unite.

So let’s do it! Come to the Atheist Festival May 26th.

Laurel Hines is a retired clinical social worker/psychotherapist. She now volunteers at Willamette Humane Society, is an active animal advocate, and champions reality that can be supported by science and reason. She is part of a growing group of Salem Freethinking Atheists.

Relatives of RSSB guru Gurinder Singh fined $400 million for hiding business facts

It's a fascinating soap opera, how billionaire nephews of guru Gurinder Singh are entangled with the Indian spiritual organization that he heads -- Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

Gurinder Singh's family earned about $250 million from shares of Religare Enterprises they paid about $3 million for, as I described in "Radha Soami Satsang Beas' guru makes $254 million."

Those shares came from Malvinder Singh, who is the guru's nephew. Malvinder's brother is Shivinder Singh. They formed Religare after selling their stake in Ranbaxy Laboratories to Japan’s Daaichi Sankyo Company.

A few years ago, Guru Gurinder Singh's son became CEO of Religare Health Trust, a wholly owned subsidiary of Religare Enterprises. As I said in this post, "Religare is a company that Malvinder and Shivinder Singh invested heavily in after selling their stake in Ranbaxy, a pharmaceutical company. So the money gifted to the guru and his family is rooted in previous Ranbaxy holdings."

Which gets us to a story in the Economic Times that was emailed to me recently.

It describes how Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, the guru's nephews, have been fined $400 million for concealing and misrepresenting facts about Ranbaxy from the eventual purchaser of that company, Daaichi. 

Former Ranbaxy promoters Malvinder and Shivinder Mohan Singh fined Rs 2,600 cr for hiding facts from Daiichi

By Arun Kumar, ET Bureau|

5 May, 2016, 03.16PM IST

Daiichi had filed the arbitration case in 2013 in Singapore and had accused the Indian promoters of concealment and misrepresented facts.

NEW DELHI: Malvinder Mohan Singh and Shivinder Mohan Singh, the erstwhile promoters of Ranbaxy Laboratories suffered a major setback earlier this week when the Singapore Court of Arbitration awarded about Rs 2,600 crore ($400) million fine for concealing and misrepresenting facts from Japanese pharmaceutical company Daiichi Sankyo when they sold the promoters' stake for $2.4 billion in 2008.

Daiichi had filed the arbitration case in 2013 in Singapore. It had accused the Indian promoters of concealment and misrepresented facts. The Japanese company had sought compensation for losses that it was forced to pay the US Department of Justice.

The arbitration order is a major setback on Malvinder Mohan Singh. His Younger brother Shivinder Mohan Singh has already stepped down from the executive role of group companies and had joined the Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a philosophical and spiritual organization that is well-known in Punjab and headquartered near the Amritsar.

Malvinder Mohan Singh could not be reached.

In May 2013, Ranbaxy, under the management control of Daiichi, was forced to reach a $500-million settlement with the US Department of Justice in May accusations that the company faked test results to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration for its medicines.

The US subsidiary of Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to seven felonies relating to the manufacture and distribution of certain adulterated drugs made at units in India and agreed to pay the money to settle criminal and legal suits.

In 2014, Daiichi, that has spent over nearly $4 billion to acquire about 58% stake in Ranbaxy finally decided to exit from the company. In April 2014, it decided to merge Ranbaxy with home grown multinational Sun Pharma. The merger was completed in March 2015.

This story appears to have been replaced on the Economic Times website by an updated story, "Malvinder and Shivinder Mohan Singh to contest arbitration panel order on damages to Daiichi."

NEW DELHI: Malvinder Mohan Singh and Shivinder Mohan Singh will challenge the order of an arbitration panel that asked them to pay Rs 2,562.78 crore in damages to Daiichi Sankyo. In a majority ruling this week, the three member panel in Singapore said the brothers hid key info while selling their controlling stake in Ranbaxy Lab to the Japanese company in 2008.

...The arbitration order is a major setback for Malvinder Mohan Singh. His younger brother, Shivinder Mohan Singh, isn't associated with the family business now and has joined the Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a philosophical and spiritual organisation that is well known in Punjab and is headquartered near Amritsar.

Yes, in 2015 Shivinder Singh announced that he was going to be engaged full-time with Radha Soami Satsang Beas, which I wrote about in "Billionaire Shivinder Singh plans to volunteer for Indian guru." Here's how I ended the post about Singh's stated desire to request seva, or selfless service, at RSSB.

I strongly suspect that Shivinder Singh, like almost all RSSB sevadars, considers that he will be earning good karma and God's/guru's grace through his seva. Otherwise, why wouldn't he do some sort of other volunteer work, given how many unmet needs there are in India that he could help fulfill?

Understand: I'm not criticizing his decision to stop being a businessman and start being a sevadar at RSSB's spiritual community in the Punjab known as the Dera. That's up to him. During my time as a RSSB member, I knew other people who did the same thing -- become full-time volunteers at the Dera.

I'm just saying this: seva is simply volunteer work. It's no different from what countless people do without pay every day all around the world. Giving it a special name doesn't make it special.  

I'm pretty sure this isn't the last we've heard from the Singh brothers, or other people involved with the tangled web of relationships between Religare, Ranbaxy, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, the Daiichi lawsuit, and guru Gurinder Singh.

Like I said, its fascinating stuff. 

My (only) big problem with Sam Harris' "Waking Up" book

I'm re-reading Sam Harris' Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.

Having read it first in 2014, I wanted to see if I looked upon the book any differently now -- having altered my views about meditation, consciousness, and such during the past few years.

Well, I'm still having a problem with how Harris looks upon consciousness. It's pretty much the same problem I talked about in "Questions I had in Sam Harris' 'Waking Up' meditation chapter."

It sure seems in the "In fact..." passage that Harris is touting the good that comes from feeling that he is a subject with awareness, who looks upon sadness or fear as a content of the consciousness that he is not, he being consciousness itself.

Well, I have no idea what "consciousness itself" could be like. Yet in various places in his book Harris implies that consciousness isn't just the workings of the mind/brain, even though he also says that no one is sure what consciousness is.

This bothered me. It appeared to bring back a big dose of dualism into "Waking Up" that wasn't much different from the soul-body dualism Harris had decried in earlier chapters.

For now Harris was implying that there is (1) consciousness and (2) what consciousness knows. In order for this to be true, rather than just a belief, seemingly there would have to be demonstrable evidence that consciousness can be separated from any and all objects or contents of consciousness. 

Let's be clear: Sam Harris considers that the brain produces consciousness. He doesn't show any sign of believing in a transcendent non-physical consciousness (like soul or spirit) which exists apart from the brain. So I have no problem with this aspect of Harris' view of consciousness.

But as I said in the previous post, I can't grasp what Harris is getting at when he writes about what he experienced while meditating:

There were periods during which all thought subsided, and any sense of having a body disappeared. What remained was a blissful expanse of conscious peace that had no reference point in any of the usual sensory channels. 

Many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to one of the five senses -- and that the idea of a "pure consciousness" apart from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. I am confident that they are mistaken.

Hmmmm. I'm just as confident that they are not mistaken.  It seems obvious that everyday consciousness isn't limited to sense experiences. Dreaming is a conscious act. It doesn't involve seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching via the five senses. 

Likewise, I can believe that in a state of deep meditation, Sam Harris did indeed lose any sense of having a body, and wasn't thinking in any ordinary sense. But Harris was still conscious of something, right? He speaks of this as "a blissful expanse of conscious peace." 

That doesn't sound like "pure consciousness." It sounds like consciousness of a blissful expanse of conscious peace. No thought. No sensory impressions. But there were contents within Harris' consciousness: bliss, an expanse, peace.

Harris appears to view consciousness as something separate and distinct from what the brain does. Yet Harris makes clear that brains are us. For example:

We know, of course, that human minds are the product of human brains. There is simply no question that your ability to decode and understand this sentence depends upon neurophysiological events taking place inside your head at this moment. But most of this mental work occurs entirely in the dark, and it is a mystery why any part of the process should be attended by consciousness.

This passage makes good sense. Aside from the final part of the last sentence. 

Harris sees a mystery where there doesn't have to be one. He distinguishes between (1) brain processes and (2) consciousness. But if consciousness is a product of the human brain, not something separate and distinct from the brain, then consciousness is part of what the brain does.

Consciousness is a brain process.

Another book I'm reading, Paul Singh's The Great Illusion: The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self, has a more accurate way of looking upon consciousness.

Unscientific philosophy has been able to talk about "consciousness" ever since the word was invented during the Middle Ages. For centuries, this consciousness (mind or soul) has been credited with possessing all sorts of unnatural and immaterial features and powers.

Philosophical discussions of consciousness down to this day have a common strategy: start from the claim that this consciousness has key features that aren't simply examples of being aware or sentient or thoughtful about what is going on, and then claim that only a second kind of mental reality can explain those peculiar features.

Philosophers make this claim appear intuitive and hard to deny. It's so easy to convert being "conscious" into "consciousness" just by adding the suffix "ness" to that word. The English language makes it easy to convert an adjective into a noun. What else can the suffix "ness" get attached to, in order [to] make a new thing seem to pop into its own existence?

If that apple looks red, then why can't that apple have redness. Then why can't we just detach that redness and suppose that redness can be its own sort of entity, quite apart from red things like apples? After this linguistic magic, philosophers can then say things like, "I see the red apple in front of me, but I can also be conscious of that redness as well, and that redness is something else besides any apple's color."

And where is this extra redness, if it isn't something in the apple itself?

Likewise, Sam Harris seems to believe that consciousness is something "extra" that gets added on to brain processes. Otherwise, why would Harris speak about "pure consciousness"? 

Here's another passage from Singh's book which speaks to this issue.

Complaining that psychology can't explain why red things look red to our brains is like complaining that a chef who has demonstrated how to combine and cook all the ingredients of a casserole still hasn't explained why a casserole has come out of the oven.

Casseroles simply are what get produced by that precise cooking procedure. Conscious experiences simply are what get produced by environments stimulating brains to deal with ongoing events.

I'm with Singh.

Harris has an extensive history of meditating under the tutelage of various teachers. He has left behind most of the mystical crap that was part of those teachings, but seemingly not all of it. Harris' attachment to "consciousness" being something distinct from what the brain does appears to be a holdover from those earlier Buddhist days. 

This is another Paul Singh quote that makes a lot of sense to me.

Being conscious is necessary for enjoying life, but consciousness isn't something that people have. Biologically and psychologically, it only makes sense to say that an animal can consciously enjoy eating food, but it is the eating of food that is enjoyed and not the consciousness as well.

We don't say, "That meal was a pleasure to eat, and my consciousness of eating was pleasurable too." There is no such thing as consciousness as yet another thing for us to enjoy. We simply enjoy the things around us. It is the food that is enjoyable, not the consciousness of the food.

Similarly, when I open my eyes and look at an apple on the table in front of me, I see the apple, not a consciousness of the apple. There aren't two things, a seen apple and a consciousness of the apple, involved here. If I say, "The apple is in my consciousness," I can only mean to say "I see the apple," or "The apple is in my range of vision."

Imagine a psychologist asking a subject to look at that apple on the table, and then asking, "Don't tell me whether you see the apple. I'm sure that you see the apple. I just want you to tell me if the apple is in your consciousness." 

Surely this would be a joke. Seeing the apple is just being conscious of the apple. Having consciousness is simply being conscious of what's going on. There is no such thing as consciousness over and above simply being alive and aware of one's surroundings.