Church of the Churchless

Free will exists. Freedom of the will doesn't.

I've written a lot about free will on this blog. To me it seems obvious that free will doesn't exist. At least not in the way most people believe that it does. 

(You can find my numerous posts on this subject by typing "free will" into the Google search box in the right sidebar.)

But after finishing Paul Singh's book, "The Great Illusion: The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self," I realize that when commenters on my posts object to free will being an illusion, they're usually thinking of free will of being something different than how I see it. 

So hopefully this blog post will clear the confusion up. (Yeah, I'm an optimist.)

Singh makes a distinction between Free Will, which does exist, and Freedom of the Will, which doesn't. I agree with him. However, the problem is that when most people think of free will, they're really talking about freedom of the will. 

Free will, in Singh's view, is essentially the philosophical position of compatibilism. Meaning, this definition of free will is compatible with determinism. Wikipedia says:

Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent. Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in situations for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics. They define free will as freedom to act according to one's motives without arbitrary hindrance from other individuals or institutions.

Likewise, Singh writes:

Free will, according to common sense, is demonstrated by the way that a person's actions are as he or she wills their actions to be, and not otherwise. This basic conception of free will is the one built into our moral and legal systems, as we hold people responsible for their freely willed actions.

If you are able to rest content with this common sense conception of free will, then you can continue to speak of "free will" as something real and sensible, without worrying about science someday refuting it.

But this is a very weak view of free will. It just means, say, that when I will or desire to go grocery shopping in my car, nothing is stopping me from starting my car's engine, driving into town, and getting what's on our grocery list.

On the other hand, someone in jail could have the same desire, yet wouldn't have the freedom to carry out the willed actions. Thus they lack free will in this instance, and I don't. Meaning, I am free to do what I will -- go grocery shopping -- and they aren't.

This is far distant from how most people look upon free will. The usual conception of free will is that a person is able to freely choose what to will, and not merely freely carry out a willed action. 

Thus Freedom of the Will is really what's usually meant by Free Will. Singh explains:

Free will defenders agree that a person's willing decision to something should result in the intended action, in order for the person to display liberty of action. What about the liberty of the will itself?... A person's control over an action really isn't like controlling ones' will.

...Defenders of freedom of the will set a requirement along the following lines. A person's will, they say, could have willed otherwise in the moment of willing, if a person's will is truly free. They then design a required test for this "could have willed otherwise" that goes something like this: If a will is free, then at the moment of decision, and with everything exactly the way it is, a will could both decide to do an action and not to do that action.

These requirements go far beyond anything suggested by ordinary free will. We aren't really talking about ordinary free will any more, but rather "freedom of the will." 

...Defenders of freedom of the will treat the will as a mini-person, applying to the will the same sort of criteria for freedom that they apply to the whole person. If a person is free only if nothing outside of the self completely determines what he or she does, then the same must be true of the will itself; a will is free only if nothing outside of it completely determines what it does.

Even if things outside the will inform and influence it, the will must supply something extra to finally decide what is to be done, so that it retains the ability to both choose and change any choice.

There is no evidence that this sort of free will, "freedom of the will," exists. It goes agains everything science knows about the human brain, determinism, and the laws of nature. Freedom of the will requires a supernatural influence that overrides the physical goings-on in our craniums.

Singh says:

This FoW [Freedom of Will] criterion is commonly accepted among philosophers and theologians who prefer dualism over naturalism, usually for religious reasons. Dualism asserts that a person as a whole, and something within a person as well, cannot be entirely physical in nature and operation.

This non-physicality is manifested in a power to counter-balance and even override what would otherwise happen according to forces and laws. 

...What is clear is that devotion to the FoW criterion drives free will enthusiasm towards the speculation that the will must be entirely unnatural and transcendent. If it were just another cog in the material machine, it wouldn't be able to control the machine by itself.

Freedom of the will calls for freedom from reality.

Which is why freedom of the will doesn't exist, while free will does. Einstein had it right:

“Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).”

    -- Albert Einstein

Comic strip wisdom: happiness is now, or never

After many years of searching for wisdom in all the wrong places -- holy books, teachings of gurus, new age'y claptrap -- I've found a better wellspring of inspiration.

The Sunday comics. 

Though this "Pearls Before Swine" strip refers to the futility of worldly pursuits where the carrot of fulfillment is always just out of reach, it points equally at religious promises that are continually around the corner: salvation, enlightenment, bliss.

Benny the Beach Bum has seen through all that. (click to enlarge)

This comic strip reminds me of an anecdote I related in a 2006 blog post, "Paving over paradise."

Back in the 80s I spent some time on a Fiji island. There wasn’t much to do at the small resort where we were staying. That was the idea. Not doing much. One afternoon a Tahitian girl showed us how to make a native something or other. I don’t remember what it was. I do remember the girl.

She was gorgeous. A classic Tahitian beauty. Wise too. My fellow vacationers were mostly from Australia and the United States. Someone said, “Have you ever been to America?” “No,” she replied. Then she was asked, “Would you like to go?”

She tossed back her long dark hair and smiled. Her words stuck in my mind.

“Why would I want to? In America you live in big cities, work hard, and then die. Why should I leave here?”

There was an awkward silence. I could sense that we all were thinking, “Good question.” In an instant the proud U.S. citizen belief that ours is the land everyone wants to come to had been buried under the sparkling Fiji sand. I thought to myself, “Why do I want to go home? That’s the real question.”

A Sally Forth comic has a similar message.

The teenage daughter, Hillary (OK, Wikipedia says she is perpetually 12, but she seems teenage to me), reminds me of myself a lot of the time. Also, of most people I know. 

We've got to-do lists that are never completed. Before one thing is done, we're thinking of the next thing that needs doing. Whatever is happening Here-and-Now is viewed as a barrier to a seemingly more important There-and-Then.

Of course, when that moment happens, it isn't really satisfying or fulfilling, because there's something else awaiting our attention. 

And so it goes. Just like religious believing. The promised land is always, well, promised. What is, is always viewed as less than what could be. 

Happiness, of course, has to be ours now. Or it will be never. 

Role of religion in Orlando gay nightclub shootings

Over on my other blog, HinesSight, I've talked about how tough it is to figure out how to stop more mass shootings in this gun-crazed natiom. 

The main problem is that the United States has both way more guns than any other industrialized country, and also way more gun deaths. While it's obvious that the two are connected -- more guns means more gun deaths -- it won't be possible to make those guns disappear. 

Religion seemingly also played a role in Omar Mateen's attack on a gay nightclub. He pledged allegiance to ISIS during a 911 phone call in the midst of the attack. ISIS is known for killing suspected homosexuals because of their twisted view of Islam. 

But if there is a clear link between the attack in Orlando and the Islamic State, it would be the most high-profile incident yet in the group's wider, relentless campaign against gays. Ever since the group came to prominence amid security vacuums in Iraq and Syria, it has set about persecuting religious minorities, women and others whose identity and lifestyle are anathema to its puritanical creed. In areas under the control of the Islamic State, its fighters have issued edicts against homosexual behavior and flashy hairstyles and promised death for anyone caught in the act of sodomy.

Christianity, though, also has played a big part in the persecution of the LBGTQ community. Christians haven't been throwing gays off of tall buildings (as ISIS has done), but many of them believe that homosexuality is against God's law.

Vox has an interesting recent piece, "LGBTQ religion activist: it's time to talk about America's faith-based homophobia problem."

As with every mass shooting before it, politicians are responding to Sunday morning’s massacre at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando by extending their "thoughts and prayers" to the families of the 49 victims who lost their lives.

But what does it mean for politicians to offer their thoughts and prayers to a marginalized community they’ve prayed against?

"I find it so ironic when the same Christian leaders who put in the most footwork in oppressing us in this space try to use this tragedy as a talking point for their Islamophobia," Faith in America executive director Eliel Cruz told me in an interview Monday.

The Pulse shooting was a direct attack on Orlando’s LGBTQ community, which is consistently targeted by some politicians of faith who claim religious freedom when writing, lobbying for, and passing anti-LGBTQ laws.

The shooter, Omar Saddiqui Mateen, has been identified as an Islamist extremist. And while politicians may pair his homophobia with his religious beliefs as a Muslim, faith-based homophobia is an all-too-familiar American tradition.

Cruz’s nonprofit organization for LGBTQ people of faith and allies aims to counter religion-based bigotry head on. Cruz weighed in on why the shooting in Orlando serves as a sobering reminder that people choosing to use religion to oppress people, regardless of one’s particular faith practice, can lead to deadly consequences.

Here's another connection I see between religion and the reaction of Americans to mass shootings: many people believe that "thoughts and prayers" actually do something. 

I don't. (see here and here)

At least, those thoughts and prayers don't do anything for the victims of a mass shooting, nor do they do anything to help prevent another attack. However, thoughts and prayers can make people feel better, especially if they're part of a ritual or gathering of like-minded people.

Otherwise, they're useless.

There's no evidence that God exists, so a non-existent God isn't going to respond to prayers. There's also no evidence of life after death, so now non-existent people killed in a mass shooting aren't going to be aware of thoughts. (Nor would they be even while alive, unless the thoughts were communicated directly them in speech, writing, or whatever.)

I strongly suspect that given how religious most people in the United States are, this religiosity plays a role in our continued inability to do much to combat gun violence. Consciously or unconsciously, those who believe in God and an afterlife don't think that someone killed by a gun is dead and gone forever.

Rather, they're dead and gone somewhere else. Heaven is the most common hypothesis. Or rebirth here on Earth, if the religious believer accepts reincarnation. 

We hear this all the time from relatives of people who have died unexpectedly. "I miss her so much, but I know she's in a better place now." 

I can understand how comforting it is to feel that way.

But I'm convinced that this attitude plays a role in our reluctance to do something concrete and realistic to reduce the very high number of gun deaths in the United States. If someone believes, as I do, that this is our one and only life, then life becomes exceedingly precious. 

Cutting lives short, as happened in the deaths of the 49 people who were killed in the Orlando shootings, then can be seen as even more outrageous. There is no consolation in an afterlife, no hope of being reunited with a deceased loved one, no imagining that the soul of the departed is now in a "better place."

So religion plays a role in the persecution of members of the LGBTQ community, 49 of whom died in Orlando. It also arguably plays a role in our inability and unwillingness to tackle head-on the problem of mass shootings in this country -- because believing that a dead person is now in heaven diminishes the urgency of making this world as heavenly as possible.

Science warns: don't get sucked into a black hole of belief

When I was in college forty-six years ago, back in the ancient year of 1970, I was attracted to a Eastern form of mysticism that went by various names, including Science of the Soul. 

I really liked the idea of being able to do a spiritual "experiment." 

Become a vegetarian. Live a moral life. Meditate for several hours a day as instructed by the guru. Observe what happens in meditation. Explore the hypothesis that there are higher non-physical domains of reality. Attempt to enter these via an altered form of consciousness.

For about thirty-five years I diligently conducted that experiment.

When I considered what I'd learned from all that meditating, all that following the teachings of the guru, all that volunteer service I'd put in on behalf of the spiritual organization, I came to a conclusion:

I no longer believed what I'd been told was true. I'd lost faith in the guru and his teachings. I didn't think that reality extended into supernatural realms, there was life after death, or that God existed.

To me, then as now, I viewed my change of heart and mind as completely consistent with my commitment to investigate a Science of the Soul. After all, scientists alter their views as new and better evidence becomes available. Science isn't a fixed set of facts, but a dynamic process of seeking what appears to be the most likely truths about the cosmos.

Below are some quotes from physicist Sean Carroll's marvelous book, "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself." In his Accepting Uncertainty chapter, Carroll talks about the scientific method in a fashion that resonates with me. 

In between the quotations, I've commented on them. First, Carroll speaks about absolute faith. This was something that many of my fellow disciples had. At least, they claimed they had 100% confidence that the Guru was God in human form and his teachings were true.

Me, I was never that sure.

For a long time I felt that the chances were high that it was indeed possible to leave this physical universe behind and enter higher regions of supernatural reality. But I had my doubts about this, even though I did my best to suppress them behind a covering of belief. 

That lingering skepticism probably protected me from being sucked into a black hole of belief, for which I'm grateful. Carroll writes:

The word "faith" is highly charged, and this isn't the place to argue over how it should be defined. Let us merely note that sometimes faith is taken as something that is absolutely certain. Consider these statements from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: [I've just included one of them]

...Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie.

It is this kind of stance -- that there is a kind of knowledge that is certain, which we should receive with docility, to which we should submit -- that I'm arguing against. There are no such kinds of knowledge. We can always be mistaken, and one of the most important features of a successful strategy for understanding the world is that it will constantly be testing its presuppositions, admitting the possibility of error, and trying to do better.

We all want to live on a stable planet of belief, but we want to avoid being sucked into a black hole of belief, where our convictions are so strong that we can never escape, no matter what kind of new insight or information we obtain.

In the next passage, Carroll speaks about a subject that has frequently come up on this blog since I started Church of the Churchless in 2004, disturbed at how the religious right had played a big role in getting George W. Bush re-elected as president. When I disparage blind faith, religious believers often respond with "But Brian, you have your own kind of faith -- faith in the ability of science to uncover the truth about reality."

Here's how Carroll deals with that spurious argument.

You will sometimes hear the claim that even science is based on a kind of "faith," for example, in the reliability of our experimental data or in the existence of unbreakable physical laws. That is wrong. As part of the practice of science, we certainly make assumptions -- our sense data is giving us roughly reliable information about the world, simple explanations are preferable to complex ones, we are not brains in vats, and so forth.

But we don't have "faith" in those assumptions; they are components of our planets of belief, but they are always subject to revision and improvement and even, if necessary, outright rejection. By its nature, science needs to be completely open to the actual operation of the world, and that means that we stand ready to discard any idea that is no longer useful, no matter how cherished and central it may once have seemed.

Then Carroll talks about an important subject, our inability to know anything for certain. It's all a matter of probabilities. That's how my spiritual beliefs (and then the lack thereof) altered over the years: gradually, as I experienced increasing evidence that pointed to naturalism, rather than supernaturalism, being most likely to be true.

Am I completely convinced of this? No.

I'm very much open to the cosmos, or God, proving me wrong. If I come across convincing evidence for life after death, soul travel, and an immaterial divinity, I'd be overjoyed to say, Changed my mind again! 

For now, though, I'm going with what seems much more likely to be true. This is my one and only life; there's no spiritual reality beyond the physical world; consciousness is produced by the brain and ends when the brain does. Carroll says:

Because we should have nonzero credences for ideas that might seem completely unlikely or even crazy, it becomes useful to distinguish between "knowing" and "knowing with absolute logical certainty." If our credence for some proposition is 0.0000000001, we're not absolutely certain it's wrong -- but it's okay to proceed as if we know it is.

...Consider going home tonight and cooking some pasta for dinner. But before you open the lid on that jar of marinara sauce, ask yourself: What if a freak mutation inside the jar has created a deadly pathogen that will be released if and only if you open the lid, spreading through the world and killing all forms of life. Clearly that would be bad; just as clearly, it seems very unlikely. But you can't prove that it won't happen. There's a chance, even if it's very small.

I'm not bothered by the loss of my once-cherished beliefs in God, an afterlife, and zipping around heavenly regions in my astral, causal, and soul-selves. I started out my spiritual quest by wanting to know the truth about the cosmos. I'm still committed to that quest. 

It just has led me to change my beliefs to be in accord with how reality most likely is. I'll keep searching for More Reality, as we all do. Like Carroll says, certainty never happens. 

The resolution is to admit that some credences are so small that they're not worth taking seriously. It makes sense to act as if we know those possibilities to be false.

So we take "I believe x" not to mean "I can prove x is the case," but rather "I feel it would be counterproductive to spend any substantial amount of time and effort doubting x." We can accumulate so much evidence in favor of a theory that maintaining skepticism about it goes from being "prudent caution" to being "crackpottery." We should always be open to changing our beliefs in the face of new evidence, but the evidence required might need to be so overwhelmingly strong that it's not worth the effort to seek it out.

We are left with, not absolute proof of anything, but a high degree of confidence in some things, and greater uncertainty in others. That's both the best we can hope for and what the world does as a matter of fact grant us. Life is short, and certainty never happens.

"Existence exists" -- the cosmic lock to which humans have no key

I'm obsessed, in a pleasing way, with a cosmic notion: existence exists. 

(A Google search of my blogs reveals the posts where I've tried to "eff" this ineffable subject. Some are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Seemingly there's not much I could add to what I've said about this ultimate mystery. Except... what I'm going to add right now.

Which is another attempt to speak about the unspeakable feeling that comes over me when I contemplate the fact that existence exists.

This feeling can't be produced on demand.

Right now I'm talking about a memory of it, not the feeling itself. For me, it's a sort of godless grace. When the feeling happens, I'm grateful for the sensation of getting a glimpse of what can't be known. 

At least, I'm pretty sure, not by a human brain. Any human brain. Doesn't matter if you're a genius, a mystic, a Nobel prize winner, a poet, a savant, a philosophical mastermind. 

I'm convinced that the feeling I've talked about in my blog posts is a cosmic lock, not a key. It vaguely points in the general direction of Ultimate Mystery, but in no way does it lead closer to an understanding. 

Here's one of my attempts to talk about the cosmic lock.

It happened again today. That sudden "bottom falling out from under me" feeling, sort of the mental equivalent of being startled by an elevator going into free fall.

I like the feeling. It's the most genuine sensation of spirituality, not really an apt word, but best I can come up with, that comes over me in my churchless way of looking at the world.

What it is -- and I'm also struggling to find the right words here -- is awe that existence exists. 

I was walking along with one of our dogs on a pleasant rainless mild Oregon day, enjoying the early spring sprouting greenness on a trail that leads through woods to a nearby lake. 

I'd been thinking about how nature has no straight lines, no obvious rigid order, no firm demarcations between this and that. Only the human-built structures along my way possessed those features.

Then my vision of nature became much more cosmic. In an instant I was swept past all the various manifestations of nature into a void of mystery which was as much an ultimate fullness as an absolute emptiness.

Down the rabbit hole. Cut the elevator cable. Dive out of the balloon with no parachute. Exhilarating. 

Time stood still. Or rather, time no longer existed. I was face to face with what is for me the only unarguably true spiritual sensation:

Existence exists. Always has. Always will. Is now. 

After my most recent "bottom falling out from under me" feeling I had this intuition: that sensation is mind-blowing because the human brain lacks the ability to cognize the primal reality of existence existing... eternally, uncaused, uncreated, just freaking there. 

Evolution has brought us Homo sapiens some marvelous cognitive abilities compared to other species. We have unraveled many cosmic mysteries -- quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and so much else. 

There are significant gaps in our knowledge of the universe. But I agree with leading scientists that there don't appear to be any insurmountable obstacles to vastly expanding our already-immense grasp of how the cosmos is put together and operates.

When it comes to the sheer facticity of existence, though, the is'ness of reality, it seems extremely unlikely that we humans ever will be able to open that cosmic knowledge lock. The feeling I have when contemplating existence exists is akin to a psychological short-circuit.

My brain just doesn't seem capable of grasping the fact that all facts can be friends with "why?" -- except the primal fact of existence. I have the sense that natural selection has given us humans the ability to unravel complex tangles of cause and effect, but NOT the ability to grasp the meaning of existence pure and simple. 

Assuming there is such a meaning. Or such a thing as "existence pure and simple."

Maybe advanced beings from an alien civilization in a galaxy far, far away possess the cosmic understanding of existence exists that eludes me, and seemingly every other member of my species. 

But how would we know this, even if we came into contact with such a civilization? I strongly suspect that if an alien being handed me the key to the ultimate cosmic lock, I'd have no idea how to use it.

Or, how to grasp what lay beyond the open door. 

Rare Metolius River fog: my misty philosophical musings

Just when you think you've seen it all...

A familiar saying. Yesterday I lived it. Big time. 

I've walked along the banks of central Oregon's Metolius River many, many times. I've seen the Metolius in sunny, rainy, snowy, dry, stormy, calm, and all sorts of other meteorological conditions. 

The Metolius is so beautiful, I'm always awed by it when we visit our cabin in Camp Sherman -- a two hour drive or so from our home in Salem. 

After a cloudless 94 degree day suddenly turned into a 62 degree afternoon thunderstorm with heavy rain and hail, some sort of rare weather happenstance created fog on the cold spring-fed waters of the upper Metolius -- where family dog and I set out on our usual walk.

Which I quickly realized was going to be marvelously unusual. 

A fog was floating above the river. It created an atmosphere, a presence, that threw me out of my customary Metolius River Walk Mental Zone.

I felt blessed, but not by anyone or anything.

I felt worshipful, but not toward any sort of supernatural or transcendent entity.

I felt awe and a sense of mystery, but not outside of the laws of nature which produced the phenomenon that was blowing my mind in a highly positive fashion. 

The setting sun illuminated the fog through the Ponderosa trees that line the Metolius. I was struck by how pitiful manmade cathedrals are compared to the beauty nature effortlessly produces.

I felt hugely grateful that in my longstanding churchless frame of mind, I could look upon sundrenched fog-beams as they actually were, rather than as a religious metaphor of God's imagined glory. 

Unexpected, unusual, awesome, inspiring -- I began to sense that the feelings being produced in me by the fog were always close at hand (or rather, close at mind). It just takes a Big Knock on my head, in this case by nature, to jolt me out of my habitual ways of looking upon reality.

Since I don't believe in divine miracles, this opens the door to everything being naturally miraculous.

The chance of what I was experiencing some 14 billion years after the big bang did its universe-producing thing was simultaneously vanishingly small and absolutely inescapable.

I only encountered two other people on the trail. They were camping. Asked if the fog was common, I said, "No, not at all. I've walked along this part of the river hundreds of times during the past twenty years. Never seen anything like this before. You're fortunate to be here just now."

Well, as we all are, not matter what the "here" and "now" consist of.

Since I consider that every human life is a singular event, a one-off never to be repeated, no second chances in an afterlife, rebirth, or whatever, each moment, without exception, is an experience that will never be seen again and has never been seen before.

Some moments, of course, grab our attention more strongly than others. But lurking behind the familiar backdrop of our usual everyday life is... NOBODY KNOWS! 

I find this marvelous. Mystery is so much more intriguing than knowing-it-all -- another reason I'm happy being irreligious. For devout true believing religious people, God or some other higher power is the answer to all unanswered questions. 

For "poetic naturalists" like me, a term I embrace that physicist Sean Carroll uses in his new book, we're pleased to have so much Unknown in the universe.

I stood on the bridge that crosses the Metolius near our cabin and enjoyed the unfamiliar sight of foggy nothingness.

Having been a big Lord of the Rings fan during my college years in the 1960's ( the Tolkien books obviously), thoughts of the Mists of Mordor, which may or may not exist in the trilogy, wafted through my psyche. 

If I'd seen this creeping fog while stoned on LSD or mescaline, a common occurrence back then, I might have seen it as malevolent. Or, comforting. Hard to predict how a psychedelic experience unfolds. 

Yesterday the fog just struck me as being... what it was. And that was all the profundity I needed or wanted. 

After taking a few last photos from the bridge I walked the short distance back to our cabin. Fed the dog. Gave her a rawhide chew stick for dessert. Made myself a cup of coffee. I felt refreshed by the fog.

Fortunately, I knew that my next experience of not being able to see clearly what's going on in my life was near at hand. Like, as close as the next moment.

"Liberal Redneck" Trae Crowder is one funny irreligious guy

Trae Crowder is a comedian who says some damn funny stuff in his "Liberal Redneck" You Tube videos.  But his mocking has a serious side to it, because often he's making fun of small-minded dogmatic religious believers. 

Here's four short Liberal Redneck videos that I liked a lot.

Being familiar with a southern accent, United States style, I had no problem understanding Crowder. Other English speakers might have some difficulty grasping what he's saying.

Even if you don't get every word, though, give him a watch. This Liberal Redneck has an engaging style and outlook on life.