Church of the Churchless

Science is the best lens we have to view the world

Here's a typically thoughtful comment from Appreciative Reader on a recent post. I made it into a blog post of its own for a couple of reasons.

Most importantly, the comment explains in a clear, persuasive fashion why science is just a great way of learning about the world and our place in it.

Secondly, Appreciative Reader's comment went into the spam filter of Typepad, my blogging service, and it took me several days to notice that this had happened, because I've been so obsessed with keeping track of what's going on with Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

So it's Putin's fault that the comment wasn't immediately available. At least, that's my spin on the situation. It could be also be argued, quite reasonably, that I simply forgot to check the spam filter. But I prefer the Putin hypothesis, since it puts me in a better light.

Enjoy...

"Science has its place .. no doubt about that but it has nothing to attribute as far as living life is concerned, it cannot offer an vision on life.

Trying to do that turns science into a religion."

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Sorry, um, but I'm afraid I disagree, squarely.

(With just that much, that I've quoted above, and the thrust of your last two comments addressed to me; I continue to agree, broadly that is, with your larger point that you keep making here, about the primacy of one's own experiences vis-a-vis someone elses's --- the whole restaurant thing, that we've discussed at length. But this last, I find this POV less than persuasive.)

You seem to see science as some kind of a tool that simply answers specific questions of a technical nature, and assists in developing technology that keeps us comfortable and happy.

I'm sorry, but that's seeing science as some kind of magic; you know, like how the king in the fairy tale orders the mage to rustle up some magick to help repel those invaders from overseas, or quickly rustle up a cure for the dying prince and heir, even as the royal household keeps sacrificing to the gods for rain and a good harvest.

You may have read my rather lengthy exchange with Spence, where Spence started out in disagreement with me but finally ended up seeing things my way. Without revisiting the detailed argument, and in short, what the rational-scientific worldview does is to open up for us a way of viewing the world, a sane clean world that isn't "demon-haunted" (to quote Carl Sagan).

It's a world where every time you see a storm you don't dance around wearing beads in an effort to propitiate Odin and Thor and Indra, until such time as every part of the mechanism of storms has been sussed out by those science boffins.

It's a world where you look at the things that you don't know as something you don't know, and something that, if you're so inclined, you try to find out more about, but don't immediately rush to fantastic supernatural explanations just because you still don't know all about it.

(Needless to say you remain open to accepting even the supernatural and the miraculous, should such be evidenced, but that isn't the default --- unlike in manjit's worldview, for instance, at least as he discusses it here in this thread.)

The kind of strictly skeptical spiritual approach that, for instance, Dungeness advocates, and sometimes Spence as well, is not what religions are normally like. Your garden variety religion that your garden variety theist follows basically offers people a lens through which to view the world.

(And in as much as that lense is entirely faulty, it presents a distorted upside-down view of the world, that occasionally by happenstance rings true, kind of like a stopped watch giving you the right time twice a day.)

Well, science, or more correctly a scientific worldview, also offers you a lens to view the world, a sane rational view of the world. To that very limited extent, yes, you may indeed liken science with religion, and that is a comparison I'm happy to embrace, in that very limited sense.

So is the lens that science provides to us perfect? No, obviously not. Clearly it is a work-in-process, clearly it is constantly being updated and improved. But it is the best we've got. It's the only one we've got that's reliable. It's head and shoulders above the craziness of religion in terms of both accuracy and precision, and utility as well.

But I suggest that it is also better than a personal idiosyncratic worldview, most times at least, in as much such a worldview is susceptible to a hundred and one biases.

Science, collectively done, isn't exactly entirely free of bias; but those biases are glitches, bugs, that are sought to be corrected. Correcting those biases is the whole point of science, even if it doesn't always succeed 100%. While personal biases generally stay on unaddressed, distorting one' view of the world.

Sure, if one takes the effort to rid oneself of one's personal biases when arriving at one's personal point of view, then I agree that it might be possible, at least in theory, to arrive at a personal worldview that is 'better' than an impersonal scientific one --- in the sense that such a worldview might embrace the best of both worlds.

But very few actually conceive of such, and far less actually execute it. So that my default remains the impersonal scientific worldview, while not discounting the carefully curated personal worldview provided the latter is very carefully curated and nurtured and weeded.

We live in a world of imperfect realism

A few days ago I explained why I wasn't writing about an idea I had: Embrace what's real, not an ideal. I was planning to revisit that topic tonight. But this morning I read a fascinating chapter in David Chalmers' new book, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. 

The chapter, "Have we fallen from the Garden of Eden?," reflected the basic notion I had. That there's a marked difference between viewing life as it actually is, versus how it could ideally be.

Chalmers starts off his chapter with a creative look at how science has changed the Eden-like view of reality where things are just as they appear. As you read the passage below, you'll understand why some words are capitalized, but I'll point out the reason now.

Those terms point to a Platonic sort of perspective where Time, Space, and Such are unchanging absolutes. The "fall" from Eden was a scientific understanding that things are not as they intuitively appear, necessitating the lower case time, space, and such. Chalmers writes:

I like to think of the Garden of Eden as a place where everything was exactly as it seemed to be, in our pre-theoretical picture of reality.

In Eden, everything was laid out in a three-dimensional Space. Space was Euclidean and was not relative to anything. Things in Eden changed with the passage of Time. Time flowed from moment to moment in one direction, with absolute simultaneity across the garden and across the universe.

The apple in the garden was gloriously, perfectly, and primitively Red. When we Perceived the apple, the apple and its Redness were simply revealed to us directly, without any mediation. 

Rocks in Eden were Solid, full of matter all the way through without any empty space. They had an absolute Weight, which did not vary from place to place.

People in Eden had Free Will. They could act with complete autonomy, and their actions were not predetermined. Their actions were Right or Wrong. They either met the standards of Morality or they did not.

There there was a Fall. We ate from the Tree of Science, and we were cast out of Eden.

We discovered that we didn't live in an absolute three-dimensional Space in a world of absolute Time that passes. Instead, we live in a four-dimensional and non-Euclidean spacetime. Space and time are relative to reference frames, and there's no absolute now.

We discovered that we didn't live in a world where objects have intrinsic qualitative Colors that are revealed to us by Perception. Instead, colors are complex physical properties that affect our eyes and our brains in complicated ways. In perception, colors aren't directly revealed to us but instead are inferred by the visual systems in our brains.

We discovered that rocks aren't Solid. They consist of mostly empty space and are merely solid. They don't have an absolute Weight. They have one weight on Earth, another on the Moon, and in other space they're weightless.

The jury is still out, but evidence suggests that we may not have Free Will. Our brains seem to be mechanical systems that determine our actions or at least strongly constrain them. However, we may still have free will -- the ability to choose our own actions and mostly do what we choose to do.

There may be no absolute standard of Morality by which our actions are Right or Wrong. Instead, there may simply be a system of morality that we construct and endorse, according to which our actions are right or wrong.

We no longer live in Eden. We're growing accustomed to our non-Edenic world. But Eden still plays a powerful role in our picture of reality. Perception still presents us with a world of Colorful and Solid objects laid out in Space and changing with Time. We naturally think of people as acting Freely and doing things that are Right or Wrong.

This is pretty damn brilliant of Chalmers. The Eden metaphor is marvelous. His use of capitalization draws our attention to how, while things are not Platonic Absolutes, they're still absolutely real. 

We don't have, or are, a Self. But we certainly have, or are, a self. There's no Consciousness floating around in some ethereal realm, but consciousness is with us from birth until brain death. God as an eternal heavenly being is fantasy, but god is as real as someone's conception of divinity.

Later in the chapter, Chalmers asks, "Is reality an illusion?" 

Was Vishnu right, after all? In light of the fall from Eden, is ordinary realty an illusion? We seem to be in an Edenic world, but we are not. Things seem to be Red and Square, but nothing in the external world is Red or Square. As Cornel West put it: Is it illusions all the way down?

Yes and no.

Insofar as perception says that objects are Red, it's illusory. Nothing is Red. Insofar as perception says that objects are red, it's not illusory. Many things are red.

I've argued that for perception to be perfectly accurate, things would have to be Red. But they can be imperfectly accurate, even if things are merely red. Perception has some illusory elements but nevertheless can be used as an accurate guide to reality.

Chalmers says that in some ways a digital simulation isn't all that different from the world we inhabit now. In a simulation, things appear more real than they actually are. Yet they're still real. A digital tree is real, yet not in the same way the trees in my yard are.

(Assuming I'm not living in a simulation.)

Likewise, modern science -- quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and so on -- tells us that things are not as solidly real as our everyday intuition leads us to believe. But they're still real.

Chalmers ends his chapter this way.

Has the onset of illusion in the fall from Eden made our life worse? In Eden, people perceived Red and Square things directly. We seem to experience a world of Red and Square things, but our world is merely a world of red and square things. But even if this makes our lives imperfect, it's hard to see how it makes our lives much worse.

Eden is a kind of hypothetical ideal.

We can think of it as Reality 0.0. Ordinary physical reality, after the fall, is Reality 1.0, at least assuming we're not in a simulation. Virtual reality is Reality 2.0. In both ordinary reality and virtual reality, Eden has been stripped down to its structural core, with consciousness at its center. But virtual reality remains on a par with ordinary reality.

Russia invading Ukraine makes religiosity seem irrelevant

This morning I had an idea for a Church of the Churchless blog post. I jotted down the topic: Embrace what's real, not an ideal. 

It had struck me that many, if not most, of our personal problems stem from expecting too much from life. We think, "Ideally, I wouldn't be ______" (fill in the blank).

Having so much pain. Failing to enjoy my job. Arguing with my teenage child. Wondering why I'm not happier. So many possible ideals that reality doesn't match up with.

Probably I'll revisit this subject later.

Right now, I find it hard to concentrate on anything except the breaking news that Russia has invaded Ukraine, with explosions, reportedly from missile strikes, being reported in various parts of the country. 

I don't believe in religious hell. I do believe that war is hell.

Especially in cases like this one, where Vladimir Putin, who I'm reluctant to call President of Russia because Russia isn't a democracy, is engaged in a war of brute force against a neighboring smaller country.

It almost makes me nostalgic for the Cold War days I remember so vividly.

Back then the battle was between two ideologies: Communism, exemplified by the Soviet Union and Red China, versus Capitalism, exemplified by the United States and our allies.

Because this was a Cold War, not a Hot War (though arguably the Vietnam War was cold becoming hot), mostly the ideologies took center stage, not armies. Marxism-Leninism was a coherent political philosophy, as was Liberal Capitalism. 

But Putin is especially scary because he stands for nothing except his own self-interest and those of his fellow billionaire oligarchs.

Putin is invading Ukraine primarily because he fears democracy and secondarily because he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union to the greatest extent possible by bringing previous portions of the USSR back under Russian control.

At the moment it's unclear whether Putin intends to occupy all of Ukraine, just the Eastern portion, or something in between. Regardless, I feel terrible for the people of Ukraine, whose lives are about to be turned upside down.

For most of us, life is quite predictable and dependable. This allows me to write about spirituality, religion, politics, and my personal life -- such as wearing a purple jacket yesterday. 

All of that becomes largely irrelevant for people living in a war zone. When bombs are falling nearby, staying alive is Job #1. Also, Job #2-100. We've all seen photos of the devastation in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and other places where fighting is going on.

Those situations are highly disturbing. I don't mean to discount their importance. However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is especially worrisome, because if Putin persists with his madness, this will be the first conquest of a European country since World War II.

And we all know how that worked out, following Hitler's false claim that all he wanted was a little more room for the German people, so he needed part of Czechoslovakia. Which eventually became almost all of Europe, and the murder of six million Jews.

Putin murders his enemies. He jails journalists. He tolerates no dissent among the Russian people. He lies incessantly. 

The people of Ukraine have good reason to be afraid tonight. It's extremely unlikely that Putin amassed 190,000 troops and a huge amount of supporting materiel just to solidify Russia's hold on the separatist regions in Eastern Ukraine -- which have languished economically since falling under Russian control.

Maybe the entirety of Ukraine is too large a military bite for Putin's forces to swallow. Even if this is so, it sure looks like war has come to Ukraine, since Putin has said that his goal is to demilitarize the country.

Absent an abject surrender by Ukraine, which I doubt the proud people of that country would go along with, this means that Russia will have to destroy Ukraine's military capability. Thousands of deaths likely would result, maybe tens of thousands.

So like I said, I'm having trouble concentrating on anything but Ukraine right now. Soon I'll be back to regular posts on this blog. I just feel so bad for Ukraine, and so much anger at Putin, there's no space in my mind to write about anything else at the moment.

A scientific theory never becomes a fact

New Scientist has a feature near the end of the magazine where reader questions shared in one issue are answered by other readers who send in submissions that are selected to appear in a later issue.

Below is a question and six answers related to when a theory becomes a fact. The answers make a lot of sense.

Even though I've been aware that when something is called a theory, this doesn't mean that it isn't a well-proven means of describing reality. But this is how many people view a theory -- as something speculative, as when we say "I've got a theory about why my car won't start."

All the answers are great, which isn't surprising, since they're chosen by staff of New Scientist, who obviously know a lot about science. I particularly like #3, which encapsulates some key features of science in just a few sentences.

Theories are interpretive structures that link facts. The more facts, the better. If facts are discovered that don't fit the theory, scientists embark on a search for a better theory. So science makes progress by being flexible, not viewing any truth as set in stone, since it can always be dislodged by fresh facts that call into question the validity of a theory.

Religions can't compete in this Game of Truth, because they typically are founded on faith, not facts. Even religions which claim to be a science of sorts aren't really open to having their Theory of God, or whatever, subjected to modification, improvement, or even rejection.

When does a theory become a fact and who decides?

Answer 1: A theory never becomes a fact. It is an explanation of one or more facts.
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Answer 2: A well-supported evidence-based theory becomes acceptable until disproved. It never evolves to a fact, and that's a fact.
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Answer 3: Many scientists, including the late Stephen Hawking, are happy to say that a theory never becomes a fact. It is always an interpretive structure that links facts, which are themselves reproducible experimental observations.

The "truth" of a theory is determined by its usefulness in linking the largest number of facts and predicting new ones that haven't been observed yet. Discovery of facts that don't fit the theory will lead to the search for a new theory.
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Answer 4: This question misunderstands what a theory is in the same way that creationists dismiss evolution as "just a theory." 

A theory isn't speculation about what might be true. It is a set of propositions that seek to explain a particular phenomenon or set of facts. A theory can be tested and shown to be accurate or modified as the evidence requires. Even when a theory is accepted as fact, it remains a theory.
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Answer 5: While a scientific theory such as Issac Newton's theory of gravitation makes an infinite number of predictions, it can only be verified by a finite number of observations, so it can never be seen as irrefutably correct. In philosophy, this is the problem of induction.

The fact that science rests on rather shaky epistemological foundations opens it to attack from anti-science movements, for example when creationists claim that Darwinian evolution is "only a theory." All science is, to some extent, "only theory," but its great strength is that theories that don't fit real world observations are eventually discarded. This has happened with Newton's theory of gravitation, now seen to be a special case of general relativity.

So in reality, in science we do not have facts or proof, all we have is the best available, most widely accepted theory at the time.
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Answer 6: Evolutionary pressures have favoured some organisms that are aware of their surroundings and able to react to them. Humans have become rather good at this.

We also have curiosity, which leads us to look hard at our surroundings and try to make sense of what we find. So, we gather information, and try to invent theories that could explain what we see. The better theories don't just explain all the data so far observed, they enable predictions. If confirmed by data, this strengthens our reliance on the theory.

Take satnav systems, for example. These rely on the predictions of relativity and quantum theories. Every time a satnav system is used, the theories it was based on are tested again. But, until we know "everything," theories, even the successful ones, will still be theories.

Mind-body dualism almost certainly isn't true, but it could be in a simulation

Are mind and body two different things, or one thing? Descartes, along with Eastern religions that view consciousness as immaterial, argue that mind and body belong to different realms, nonphysical and physical.

A big problem with this view, of course, is that it's obvious that mind and body are intimately connected. I think, "Type I think," and voila, that's what happens. If mind and body are different, how could an immaterial mind control the physical fingers that tap out letters on my keyboard?

And how is it that ingesting coffee, LSD, alcohol, or numerous other substances affects the mind, if the mind is immaterial? This is why dualism -- the notion that mind and body are different -- is rejected by almost all modern scientists. 

In David Chalmers' new book, "Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, he addresses the mind-body problem in a chapter called "How do mind and body interact in a virtual world?" He says:

These days, Cartesian dualism is widely rejected. Most people think that our behavior is produced entirely by physical processes in the brain, and many think that the idea of interaction between physical and nonphysical processes makes no sense.

Agreed. But I enjoyed how Chalmers analyzed the two main types of simulations, pure and impure, to cast light on how dualism fares in a simulated reality.

As you can read below, in a pure simulation the mind of a being/person is simulated along with the physics that controls the simulated world. In other words, both mind and body, along with everything else in that world, is made of digital bits created by the simulation's designer.

This leaves no room for dualism, in the same way there's no room for dualism in our physical world, where mind almost certainly is the brain in action, and the brain is physical, like everything else.

But in an impure simulation, mind can be one thing, and body can be something else. This is the case with virtual reality headsets, which exist now. The virtual reality is a digital simulation, while the mind of the person wearing the headset is part of the everyday world. Hence, dualism.

Not a supernatural sort of dualism, but a dualism all the same. This allows Chalmers to say that dualism is indeed possible in an impure simulation. The passages below are from the end of the chapter, so they assume that the reader has been exposed to preceding arguments.

So if what follows seems confusing, don't be surprised. It's sort of confusing to me also, and I've read the entire chapter. 

The arguments in this chapter can help us think clearly about the simulation hypothesis. We saw in chapter 2 that the hypothesis can be split into the pure simulation hypothesis, in which our cognitive system is part of the simulation, and the impure simulation hypothesis, in which it's not.

The traditional brain-in-a-vat scenario is an impure simulation, as is the situation in The Matrix. In this chapter we've mainly been focusing on impure simulations, in which the cognitive system and the physics of the virtual world are distinct.

If I accept the impure simulation hypothesis, I should accept the Cartesian dualist hypothesis that my cognitive system is nonphysical and interacting with physical systems. My mind is outside the physical space of my virtual world, and it interacts with my body, which is inside that space. 

My physical world derives entirely from bits in a computer, but my mind is tied to the brain in a vat, which need not derive from bits at all.

Earlier, I argued that the simulation hypothesis leads to the it-from-bit creation hypothesis. Now we see that the impure simulation hypothesis leads to the Cartesian it-from-bit creation hypothesis: Physical systems derive from computational processes, put in place by a creator, and our cognitive systems are distinct from, and interact with, these physical systems.

In effect, the impure simulation idea is akin to combining the it-from-bit creation idea about the physical world with Cartesian dualism about the mind. By contrast, the pure simulation hypothesis leads to the non-Cartesian it-from-bit creation hypothesis. Our cognitive systems derive from physical systems, which derive from computations, which are themselves created.

I'm not suggesting that the impure simulation hypothesis is especially plausible. If you take the simulation hypothesis seriously because of the statistical argument that simulations will be common, this reasoning tends to support the pure simulation hypothesis. It will be easier to create pure simulations (just set up the simulated physics of a world and watch it go), and much harder to create impure simulations (in which you'll need separate minds to interact with the simulation).

If you need a biological brain for every impure simulation, this poses a hurdle that may limit the supply of impure simulations. As long as pure simulations can also support minds like ours, statistical reasoning suggests that it's more probable that we're in a pure simulation than an impure one.

Furthermore, insofar as we have reasonable evidence that physics forms a closed network in our world, this is evidence against the Cartesian hypothesis and against the impure simulation hypothesis, or at least against versions of these hypotheses in which the mind makes a difference in the physical world.

Still, simulation reasoning may give us reason to take Cartesian dualism more seriously than before. Cartesian dualism initially seems supernatural -- inconsistent with a naturalistic view of the world. Simulation reasoning shows us how Cartesian dualism might be entirely naturalistic, deriving from natural processes in an outer world.

Just as simulation reasoning gives us a naturalistic version of theism, it also gives us a naturalistic version of Cartesian dualism. It also helps us to overcome Princess Elisabeth's objection that a nonphysical system could not in principle interact with a physical system. The impure simulation hypothesis provides us with a model of how this interaction might work.

Is this simulation-based Cartesian dualism consistent with our scientific knowledge of the world? Where physics in concerned, the idea that physics forms a closed network is an attractive hypothesis, but it's certainly not demonstrated. Current physics suggests that there may be forces not yet discovered. It would be surprising to learn that outer-world processes occasionally affected inner-world physics inside computation-based human bodies, but it wouldn't be inconsistent with our evidence.

Where neuroscience is concerned, we know we have highly sophisticated brain processes that correlate closely with perception, thought, and action. There are versions of the impure simulation hypothesis that are consistent with all this. One somewhat extravagant version is the duplicate-brain hypothesis with a nonvirtual brain in the outer world duplicating and overriding the virtual brain in the inner world. 

Less extravagant is a version in which a nonvirtual brain is connected to a semi-autonomous virtual brain, affecting it and controlling its behavior at key junctures. It's true that we have little in the way of direct evidence for this hypothesis, but we also have little evidence against it.

The impure simulation hypothesis suggests that Cartesian dualism is at least consistent with our scientific knowledge of the world. I'm not arguing that the impure simulation hypothesis is true, so I haven't provided an argument that Cartesian dualism is true. Still, simulation reasoning shows us a way in which Cartesian dualism could be true -- which is interesting in itself.

Atheism has no doctrines

In Armin Navabi's book, Why There is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God, he has a chapter called "Atheism has killed more people than religion, so it must be wrong."

Navabi's main argument against this is in a section called Atheism Has No Doctrines. He makes some great points, so I'm sharing that section here.

Atheism Has No Doctrines

The violence within Christianity or Islam can often be traced back to the teachings of those religions because it is embedded in the ideology of the religions themselves. 

Even though war and violence in the name of God are often motivated by non-religious ambitions, such as political and territorial gain, religions in such cases are often used as an excuse for justifying such acts, disguising their intentions as holy and recruiting armies of people who would not have been willing to risk their lives for purely secular causes.

People throughout history have been martyred and sacrificed in the name of religion, and holy wars have been fought over the tenets of those religions.

The same cannot be said of atheism for the simple fact that atheism is not a religion. Atheism is a lack of belief in deities. It has no governing dogmatic principles, no rule book and no core ideology. Comparing atheism to religion is like comparing apples and oranges.

It's more helpful to compare atheism to theism, which is simply belief in a deity. While some theists also hold fundamentalist beliefs, just believing that some god exists is not enough to cause wars and violence based on the belief alone. 

How many wars have been caused by deism? You'd need some additional dogmatic beliefs in order for that to happen.

No one commits mass murder in the name of theism or atheism alone. Additional dogmatic principles are needed to justify such grisly outcomes. In the case of theism, religions like Christianity and Islam provide such dogma, creating convenient excuses.

Secular totalitarian regimes and religion share this dogmatic element: a belief that a set of ideas are true because an authority figure says so and that questioning those ideas can lead to serious or even deadly consequences.

Therefore, it's not reasonable to say that atheism condones or promotes violence or that tyrants have killed in the name of atheism. Such actions or any other action, both good and bad, do not and cannot speak for atheism in general, as no two atheists necessarily hold any of the same beliefs or convictions about the world.

The only thing held in common between all atheists is a lack of belief in deities.

This means that some atheists are undoubtedly unkind, aggressive and violent. It also means that some atheists are kind, friendly and peaceful. Any type of person can be an atheist, just as any type of person can be not interested in golf. Just because some non-golfers are jerks doesn't make not golfing bad any more than atheism can be blamed for the behavior of a handful of atheists. 

If you're trying to make a decision about whether you believe in God based on how a certain non-believer you know acts, you're using flawed reasoning. 

For the same reason, not all religious people are bad or cruel individuals, yet the practice of violence and war is deeply embedded in many religious ideologies. It is, therefore, best to examine your views about God or other religious beliefs by evaluating the evidence provided for such claims, not based on the behavior of people who do or do not accept it as truth.

Wacky religious news: Islamic sex cult and baptism gone wrong

My wife, Laurel, a proud atheist, enjoys finding stories about the bizarre side of religions (assuming there is anything other than bizarre in religiosity).

Recently she came across the tale of Adnan Oktar, a Turkish sex cult leader. 

In the end, it was not the British deep state, Darwinists, Jews, Freemasons or any of the sinister cabals that Adnan Oktar long railed against that defeated him. It was the Turkish judiciary.

On Monday, the notorious 64-year-old preacher, often referred to in salacious headlines as a "sex cult leader," was sentenced to 1,075 years in jail for crimes including sexual assault, sexual abuse of minors, fraud, and attempted political and military espionage.

It marks the end of a long and bizarre career for the preacher, television host, author and filmmaker.

Beginning his career in the 80s as a firebrand orator, railing against Jews, Freemasons and Charles Darwin, he later became (in)famous for his shows on Turkish TV, in which he would discuss Islamic principles while scantily clad women with bleached blonde hair danced around him to popular music. These women Oktar referred to as his "kittens".

Oktar did have some very attractive devotees.

Naturally I couldn't resist looking on You Tube for videos of the "kittens" dancing around Oktar on Turkish TV. Found one!

Another religious story I read about in our local newspaper was much less salacious, but equally weird in its own way. Who knew that a Catholic baptism would be invalid if the priest got one word wrong?

Damn, now I'm worried that my own ticket to heaven (admittedly, a heaven I don't believe in) is in danger, since I was baptized as a baby Catholic. 

When is a baptism not a baptism?

When the cleric presiding at the ceremony alters the ritual language in such a fundamental way that it undercuts its meaning, according to the Vatican.

And even the altering of a single, crucial pronoun can render a baptism invalid, it says.

A Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. Andres Arango, resigned Feb. 1 as pastor of his parish in Phoenix, after acknowledging he had been using the incorrect baptismal formula during more than two decades of priestly ministry in Arizona, California and Brazil.

Arango used the formula, “We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," instead of the prescribed singular pronoun: “I baptize you ...”

Theologically, that makes all the difference, the Vatican ruled in 2020, because it's not the “we” of the congregation doing the baptizing, but rather the “I” of Jesus Christ, working through the priest.

Now the Diocese of Phoenix is putting out a call to anyone who underwent the ritual under Arango to receive “valid” baptisms — and potentially other rites of initiation. The diocese estimates that thousands were affected.

Baptism is the basic rite of initiation into the Christian faith. In Catholic theology, baptism is considered a sacrament — a visible rite conveying spiritual grace — and is “necessary for salvation,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “The church does not know of any means other than baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude” — that is, heaven.

For a sacrament to be valid, it has to be presided over correctly, the church teaches.

“Baptism for us is for salvation, so it’s a big deal. We need to make sure to make it right,” said Jay Conzemius, moderator of the Diocese of Pittsburgh’s tribunal and past president of the Canon Law Society of America.

If we're in a simulation, its creator is our god

A few days ago I wrote about one of the central notions in David Chalmers' new book, "Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. Namely, that if we're in a simulation, our world is still real. 

In this post I'll talk about a chapter in the book with a compelling title: Is God a hacker in the next universe up? 

What I'm enjoying most about Reality+, aside from how clearly Chalmers writes and reasons, is how he integrates basic philosophical questions with the specific issue of us being in a simulation.

Does God exist? The question has been asked since the dawn of human history. The most convincing answer is No, since there's no demonstrable evidence for God.

Chalmers summarizes the usual arguments in favor of God. For example, the cosmological argument that he says goes something like this:

Everything has a cause. Therefore, the universe has a cause. That cause must be God.

That argument is easily refuted, something I've done many times on this blog. If God is the cause of the cosmos, everything that exists, which may be much more than our universe, then what caused God? Religions have an answer. God doesn't need a cause, having existed eternally.

The obvious response is, then why not assume the cosmos has existed eternally? The advantage to this is that the cosmos can be perceived, at least the portion we're familiar with, while God can't.

Now, if we're in a simulation, everything changes.

The entity doing the simulating -- such as a being with unlimited computing capacity in a galaxy far, far away -- still may wonder what brought the cosmos into existence (unless this question isn't of interest to them), but obviously they know who created us and our universe.

They did. Chalmers says:

If we create simulated worlds ourselves, we'll be the gods of those worlds. We'll be the creators of those worlds. We'll be all-powerful and all-knowing with respect to those worlds. As the simulated worlds we create grow more complex and come to include simulated beings who may be conscious in their own right, being the god of a simulated world will be an awesome responsibility.

If the simulation hypothesis is true and we're in a simulated world, then the creator of the simulation is our god. The simulator may well be all-knowing and all-powerful. What happens in our world depends on what the simulator wants. We may respect and fear the simulator. At the same time, our simulator may not resemble a traditional god. Perhaps our creator is a mad scientist, like Rick -- or perhaps it's a child, like my nephew.

The transhumanist philosopher David Pearce has observed that the simulation argument is the most interesting argument for the existence of God in a long time. He may be right.

I've considered myself an atheist for as long as I can remember. My family wasn't religious, and religious rituals always seemed a bit quaint to me. I didn't see much evidence for the existence of a god. God seemed supernatural, whereas I was drawn to the natural world of science. Still, the simulation hypothesis has made me take the existence of a god more seriously than I ever had before.

Of course, the god whose existence Chalmers now takes more seriously isn't anything like the gods assumed by most of the world's religions.

The simulation route leads to a distinctive sort of god. The simulator is a natural god, one who is part of nature. The ontological, cosmological, and design arguments are often used to argue for a supernatural god, one who stands outside nature. The simulator is beyond our own physical universe but not beyond nature as a cosmic whole. In principle, the simulator can be explained by the natural laws of the cosmos.

As a result, the simulation hypothesis is compatible with naturalism. Naturalism is a philosophical movement that, at a minimum, rejects the supernatural. It holds that everything is a part of nature and can be explained by natural laws. Many have thought that naturalism and God are hard to reconcile, so that naturalism should lead to atheism. The simulation hypothesis offers a path to reconciliation: a god that even a naturalist can believe in.

He says that the problem of evil, which is difficult to explain if God is good, is easily understood if we're in a simulation: "A simulator need not be all-good. She may well tolerate some evils in the simulation."

Chalmers doesn't see any need for worship if we're in a simulation.

Should we worship our simulator? It's hard to see why. The simulator may simply be a scientist or a decision-maker in the next universe up. We may be grateful to her for creating our world. We may be in awe of the power she has over our world. But gratitude and awe alone are not worship.

...I find myself thinking that even if our simulator is our creator, is all-powerful, is all-knowing, and is all-good, I still don't think of her as a god. The reason is that the simulator is not worthy of worship. And to be a god in the genuine sense, one must be worthy of worship.

For me, this is helpful in understanding why I'm not religious and why I consider myself an atheist. It turns out that I'm open to the idea of a creator who is close to all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. I had once thought that this idea is inconsistent with a naturalistic view of the world, but the simulation idea makes it consistent. There remains a more fundamental reason for my atheism, however: I do not think any being is worthy of worship.

The point here goes beyond simulation. Even if the Abrahamic God exists, with all those godlike qualities of perfection, I will respect, admire, and even be in awe of him, but I won't feel bound to worship him. If Aslan, the lion-god of Narnia, exists as the embodiment of all goodness and wisdom, I won't feel bound to worship him.

Being all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and entirely wise aren't sufficient reasons for worship. Generalizing the point, I don't think any qualities can make a being worthy of worship. As a result, we never have good reason to worship any being. No possible being is worthy of worship.

Even if we're in a simulation, our world is real

As computer simulations become more and more lifelike, the question could we be living in a simulation?  becomes more interesting. Especially to fans of The Matrix movies. 

But also to philosophers, since Plato, Descartes, and many others have wondered whether this world that we assume is real, actually is.

David Chalmers, a philosopher who is the codirector of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University, has written a fascinating book: Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. 

In an early chapter, Chalmers summarizes the central questions he addresses in the book, along with his one word answers.

To recap, our three main questions about virtual worlds are the following. The Reality Question: Are virtual worlds real? (My answer: yes.) The Knowledge Question: Can we know whether or not we're in a virtual world? (My answer: no.) The Value Question: Can you lead a good life in a virtual world? (My answer: yes.)

The Reality Question, the Knowledge Question, and the Value Question match up with three of the central divisions of philosophy.

(1) Metaphysics, the study of reality. Metaphysics asks questions like "What is the nature of reality?"
(2) Epistemology, the study of knowledge. Epistemology asks questions like "How can we know about the world?
(3) Value theory, the study of values. Value theory asks questions like "What is the difference between good and bad?"

I'm enjoying the book, though I have to admit that it's hard for me to get my head around the argument that there's a very good chance we're living in a simulation, even as I'm forced to agree that Chalmers presents persuasive reasons for why this could be true.

Or even, almost certainly is true. 

Chalmers engages in some sophisticated reasoning, thankfully in clear language. So it isn't possible for me to describe all of the nuances of his book in a few blog posts. I'll be content with writing about some subjects that particularly interest me.

Here's part of what he says about the Reality Question. I'll share this section in total, so you can get a feel for how Chalmers thinks through philosophical issues.

Whenever virtual reality is discussed, one hears the same refrain. Simulations are illusions. Virtual worlds aren't real. Virtual reality isn't genuine reality. 

You can find this idea in The Matrix. In a waiting room inside the simulation, Neo sees a child apparently bending a spoon with the power of his mind. They engage in conversation:

CHILD: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
NEO: What truth?
CHILD: There is no spoon. 

This is presented as a deep truth. There is no spoon. The spoon inside the Matrix is not real but a mere illusion. The implication is that everything one experiences in the Matrix is an illusion.

In a commentary on The Matrix, the American philosopher Cornel West, who himself played Councilor West of Zion in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, takes this line of thinking even further.

Speaking of awakening from the Matrix, he says, "What you think you're awakening to may in fact be another species of illusion. It's illusions all the way down." Here there is an echo of Vishnu: Simulations are illusions, and ordinary reality may be an illusion, too.

The same line of thinking recurs in the TV series Atlanta. Three characters are sitting around a pool late at night discussing the simulation hypothesis. Nadine becomes convinced: "We're all nothing. It's a simulation, Van. We're all fake." She takes for granted that if we're living in a simulation, we're not real.

I think these claims are wrong.

Here's what I think: Simulations are not illusions. Virtual worlds are real. Virtual objects really exist. In my view, the Matrix child should have said, "Try to realize the truth. There is a spoon -- a digital spoon." Neo's world is perfectly real. So is Nadine's world, even if she is in a simulation. 

The same goes for our world. Even if we're in a simulation, our world is real.

There are still tables and chairs and people here. There are cities, there are mountains, there are oceans. Of course, there may  be many illusions in our world. We can be deceived by our senses and by other people. But the ordinary objects around us are real.

What do I mean by "real"? That's complicated -- the word "real" doesn't have a single, fixed meaning. In Chapter 6, I'll discuss five different criteria for being "real." I'll argue that even if we're in a simulation, the things we perceive meet all these criteria for reality.

What about ordinary virtual reality, experienced through a headset? This can sometimes involve illusion. If you don't know you're in VR and you take the virtual objects to be normal physical objects, you'd be wrong. But I'll argue in chapter 11 that for experienced users of VR, who know they're using VR, there need be no illusion. They're experiencing real virtual objects in virtual reality.

Virtual realities are different from nonvirtual realities. Virtual furniture isn't the same as nonvirtual furniture. Virtual entities are made one way and nonvirtual entities are made another.

Virtual entities are digital entities, made of computational and informational processes. More succinctly, they're made of bits. They're perfectly real objects that are grounded in a pattern of bits in a computer. When you interact with a virtual sofa, you're interacting with a pattern of bits. The pattern of bits is entirely real, and so is the virtual sofa.

"Virtual reality" is sometimes taken to mean "fake reality." If I'm right, that's the wrong way to define it. Instead it means something closer to "digital reality." A virtual chair or table is made of digital processes, just as a physical chair or table is made of atoms and quarks and ultimately of quantum processes.

The virtual object is different from the nonvirtual one, but both are equally real.

If I'm right, then Narada's life as a woman is not entirely an illusion. Nor is Morty's life as a football star and carpet salesman. The long lives that they experience really happen. Narada really lives a life as Sushilla. Morty really lives a life as Roy, albeit in a virtual world.

This view has major consequences for the problem of the external world. If I'm right, then even if I don't know whether or not we're in a simulation, it won't follow that I don't know whether the objects around us are real.

If we're in a simulation, tables are real (they're patterns of bits), and if we're not in a simulation, tables are real (they're something else). So either way, tables are real. This offers a new approach to the problem of the external world, one that I will spell out over the course of this book.

Like Walt Whitman said, we all contain multitudes

Yesterday I surprised myself. Also, the day before. And today. In fact, every day. I surprise myself when my view of life changes from what it was before.

Which isn't really surprising, since life is full of change. It could even be said that life is change. Hearts beat. Lungs breathe. Neurons fire. When life becomes unchanging, that's called death.

The surprise that brought this blog post to life was me saying in a comment that I agreed with what another commenter had said about theistic religions being more satisfying. I wrote:

You might be surprised to hear this, but I also agree that theistic religions tend to be more satisfying than non-theistic faiths like Buddhism. This seems to be why so many Buddhists look upon the Buddha as a divine being rather than a mere teacher. And why prayer wheels, repeating Namu Amida Butsu as a mantra, and such are more popular than following the breath in meditation. My problem is that while I can occasionally pretend that I believe in a personal divine being, I really don't, so my occasional half-hearted attempts at embracing theism don't get me very far.

So I'm a devout atheist who dabbles occasionally with believing in a god, in sort of the same way as I'm a raspberry jam lover who occasionally buys a different flavor to put on my morning toast, but so far I've always returned to raspberry after a brief dalliance with another type of jam.

Walt Whitman, the poet, famously said:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

We all do. There isn't a single stable unchanging "me" or "you" or "them" anywhere to be found. We all contain multitudes. We all contradict ourselves. 

Religious believers contain a bit of atheism, just as atheists contain a bit of religious belief. Faithful spouses contain a bit of promiscuity, just as promiscuous people contain a bit of faithful spouse'ness. Liberals contain a bit of conservatism, just as conservatives contain a bit of liberalism.

Those bits may be mostly hidden, barely recognized, rarely or never acted upon.

However, to be human is to be complicated. We may try to put on a simple consistent face to the world, but within us there's always the potential of being a considerably different person than we are now.

This is beautiful.

The multitudes that comprise each of us are hugely more interesting than a solitary unchanging self would be. Our capacity to be many, not one, allows for growth, development, progress, unpredictability, creativity.

Imagine how blah a movie about the life of someone with no contradictions would be. It wouldn't take long before we'd become bored with the character, since there would be little drama to them.

When my wife and I started watching Ted Lasso on Apple TV+, I grew worried after the first few episodes. Lasso was so upbeat and positive in every circumstance, he seemed one-dimensional, not all that interesting.

Gradually, though, we got to know Ted Lasso in more depth, thanks to excellent writing and plot lines. The darker side of Lasso was exposed. We got insights into why his demeanor is usually so cheerful, and why sometimes he falls into despair (and panic attacks).

I never felt that the Ted Lasso character got diminished as the multitudes within him were revealed, not just the original Happy Face Lasso. With every contradiction that came to light, Lasso became more interesting and human, not less.

A commentary on Whitman's poem includes this passage:

What are arguably Whitman’s most famous lines appear here: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Whitman is recasting one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s central ideas: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. . . . Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. . . . To be great is to be misunderstood.”

For Whitman, as we have seen, the self is a continually evolving and expanding entity, and new experiences will always broaden and challenge and upset what a self believed earlier.

We must learn to be grateful to arrive at contradictions and to cultivate a sense of a self open and aware enough to “speak against” (the root meaning of “contradict”) the self that existed yesterday.

As “Song of Myself” has demonstrated throughout, a self that does not change is a stunted identity, dead to the transforming stimuli of the multitudinous world around us, stimuli that include the transforming words of this poem.

A guided meditation by Sam Harris about the open sky of consciousness

Below is a transcript of a guided meditation by Sam Harris that I listened to recently on his Waking Up app. I enjoyed it a lot. His guided meditations last either 10 or 20 minutes, depending on how much non-speaking time you choose.

So the words by Harris should be experienced, not just thought about. Of course, there's quite a bit to ponder in how Harris views consciousness and its contents.

What he says reminds me of what I read about Descartes and his famous Cogito, ergo sum, I think therefore I am,  in an intriguing new book by David Chalmers that I'm reading, "Reality: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy."

Chalmers writes:

More deeply, Descartes reasoned that he could not doubt that he's thinking. Even if he doubted that he was thinking, his doubt was itself a sort of thinking. To doubt that one is thinking is internally inconsistent: The doubting itself shows that the doubt is wrong.

Once Descartes knew he was thinking, it was a small step to knowing his own existence. Where there is thinking, there must be a thinker. So Descartes concludes: Sum! I exist!

Plenty of philosophers have tried to poke holes in Descartes's Cogito ergo sum. Some question the cogito part. How can Descartes be so sure that he's even managing to doubt? That is, how does he know that he's not a mindless automaton?

Others question the step to sum. Is it so obvious that thinking requires a thinker? According to the 18th century German philosopher Georg Lichtenberg, Descartes should have said, "There is thinking, therefore thought exists." 

That way, he could have known that thoughts exist, but he should not have been so sure about himself. 

...Speaking for myself, I don't think there's anything special about thinking per se. Descartes could have said, "I feel, therefore I am," or "I see, therefore I am." All of these are claims about his mind that he can be certain of and that aren't threatened by the evil demon.

At least, he can be certain about these claims if they're understood as states of consciousness, or subjective experience. If we understand "see" as referring simply to the subjective experience of seeing, then Descartes can be certain he is seeing.

In my view, the best statement of the cogito is "I am conscious, therefore I am."

Here's the guided meditation by Sam Harris. It echoes how David Chalmers views Descartes.

OK, just find a comfortable seat, and take a few deep breaths. See if you can recognize a sky-like nature of your mind, right at the outset.

There's just this vast, open, undefined, centerless condition in which everything is appearing, all by itself.

Sights, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes, thoughts, moods, emotions -- everything you can notice, along with the noticing itself, is simply springing into view in the space of awareness. 

Just drop back and rest as that. 

Any thought about the past is simply appearing in this space. Any thought about the future, any reaction to the present -- everything you can experience is a modification of this condition to which you are identical.

There's nothing to do here to meditate. There's nothing to focus on or to improve. Simply rest as this openness. Grasping at nothing, pushing nothing away.

It's as though you're watching a movie. And everything, including the watching itself, is on the screen. Just recognize as a matter of experience, you're identical to the screen.

You are the condition in which everything that appears, appears. You're not outside it. You're not on the edge of it. You're not merely observing it. 

You're it.

See if you can recognize what that feels like. That openness, that boundarylessness, that centerlessness. Notice how it transcends any object or process that appears within it. 

Does it feel like "I"? Or "Me"? How could it be a self? How could it be personal? How could it be happy or sad? 

At the moment you notice a thought, recognize the condition in which it already is unraveling. Rest as that. 

In the last minutes of the session, pay careful attention to the breath. See if you can refine your mindfulness, just for a minute. 

OK. Again, thank you for your practice. And I wish you much happiness for the rest of your day. I'll see you back here next time, for the next session of Waking Up.

Thoughts on the Sant Mat teachings

Today I got this message from someone who wants to be referred to as Godot. They are still dedicated to the spiritual philosophy of Sant Mat that I embraced for thirty five years.

But they have problems with the direction Radha Soami Satsang Beas has gone since the death in 1990 of Charan Singh, the guru who initiated this person and myself.

My thoughts on the teachings of Sant Mat.

In 1972, I received Nam. The Path is inside, and meditation has been my focus. When Charan Singh passed away in 1990, I was not concerned that he had left this world.  During his lifetime, he used to advise us not to run after the physical form of the guru.   

I have known satsangis who have not seen the guru in the flesh, and felt no urgency to do so. The organization has never been of interest to me, I’ve gone for years without attending Sant Mat group meetings. 

Around the time I was Initiated, I bought a number of Sant Mat books, and still have them. After 50 years, I can say that the time I have spent in meditation has been the best investment of time in my life.  

I spent about five weeks in the physical presence of Charan Singh. At no time did he say or do anything that indicated he was under the sway of the mind and senses. I am disillusioned by the nepotism of anointing his nephew as his spiritual successor. 

I am further disillusioned by developments/events since 1990 until now. It looks as if rssb.org has regressed into a cult. As I remember Dera Baba Jaimal Singh Ji, it was a small ashram dedicated to the teachings of Sant Mat.   

In the past few years, newspapers have described rssb.org as the most powerful sect in India - not a compliment.

Life is a journey, not a destination. The Path is within. The technique of meditation we are given at the time of Initiation takes us back to our source. 

"My only advice is that whatever we may do and in whatever circumstance we may live, our meditation should be our main concern, and this should never be sacrificed to anything of this life.”     
         -- Charan Singh

Sam Harris on the riddle of the self

Figured I might as well continue on with how Sam Harris views meditation, spirituality, and the non-existence of an enduring self, even though I've previously written quite a bit about this.

As noted before, Harris is one of my favorite spiritual writers because he both recognizes the downside of religions and believing in a God for which there's no evidence, while also recognizing that there is much to learn about the human mind and how we can live more pleasantly through meditation and mindfulness.

Here's a footnote to my recent post about Harris and Dzogchen, the Tibetan form of Buddhism he's fond of.

I didn't mention in that post how Harris views the transmission of wisdom from a Dzogchen master to a disciple not as something mystical or supernatural, but as akin to someone showing how the eye's blind spot can be directly experienced instead of merely known intellectually. 

(I won't share those simple steps; this web page describes them.)

Harris' point is that a skilled teacher can do the same thing with regard to an intellectual belief in the non-existence of an enduring self.

In The Riddle of the Self chapter in his "Waking Up" book, Harris starts off by describing what happened during his visit to the Sea of Galilee where Jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon.

As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self -- an "I" or a "me" -- vanished. 

Everything was as it had been -- the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water -- but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.

The experience lasted just a few seconds, but it returned many times as I looked out over the land where Jesus is believed to have walked, gathered his apostles, and worked many of his miracles. If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly have interpreted this experience in Christian terms.

I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of God or been touched by the Holy Spirit. If I were a Hindu, I might think in terms of Brahman, the eternal Self, of which the world and all individual minds are thought to be a mere modification. If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the "dharmakaya of emptiness," in which all apparent things manifest as in a dream.

But I am simply someone who is making his best effort to be a rational human being. Consequently, I am very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from experiences of this sort. And yet, I glimpse what I will call the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness every day, whether at a traditional holy site, or at my desk, or while having my teeth cleaned.

This is not an accident. I've spend many years practicing meditation, the purpose of which is to cut through the illusion of the self.

This passage contains the basics of how Harris views intrinsic selflessness. It isn't something to be attained, since there is no self to be gotten rid of. It is something to be experientially realized, either spontaneously or as the result of a meditative practice.

As Harris says in the first paragraph, the key is silencing of thoughts. Or at least, keeping them to a whisper rather than a shout. Thoughts make us feel like we have a self because we assume that thoughts require a thinker, some little guy or gal inside our head who is in charge of us.

Of course, writing that last sentence the way I did shows the absurdity of believing that we have a self. What the heck is the difference between "we" or "I" and the self that we/I have? If I have a self, does my self have its own self? 

It doesn't help much to say "I am a self." That still leaves "I" and "self" connected by a meaningless "am." Meaningless, because it is like saying a flash of lightning. The flash is lighting. 

So as Harris is gazing at his surroundings, he feels his "I" slipping away until there is just the outside world. This isn't a mystical experience. It is the normal experience when inner stillness replaces the mental motion that usually is present for most people.

I've been critical of those who claim that it's possible to attain a state of consciousness without conscious content.

At times Harris can sound like he's saying this, but I don't think he really is. Instead, there's conscious content -- such as a vision of the Sea of Galilee -- yet without the sense of a self inside our head who is separate from the contents of consciousness.

Has this ever happened to you? Probably it has.

Fairly frequently I'll wake up in the morning, open my eyes, and see the room where I sleep. For a few seconds all I'm aware of is my physical surrounding. Then, sort of like a computer with a flash drive booting up really rapidly, suddenly a worry, say, of a problem I was dealing with before I went to bed pops into my mind.

From simple clear relaxed consciousness of the outside world to complex foggy anxious awareness of my inner world in little more than an instant. This is a good example of how no-self becomes self. Harris writes:

From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It's a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis.

Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is. Taking oneself to be the thinker of one's thoughts -- that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness -- is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness.

It doesn't matter if your mind is wandering over current problems in set theory or cancer research; if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are. The practice of meditation is a method of breaking the spell of thought. 

...Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self -- the sense that there is a thinker behind one's thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience -- is an illusion.

The feeling that we call "I" is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. 

....What are we conscious of? We are conscious of the world; we are conscious of our bodies in the world; and we also imagine that we are conscious of our selves within our bodies. After all, most of us don't feel merely identical to our bodies.

We seem to be riding around inside our bodies. We feel like inner subjects that can use the body as a kind of object. This last impression is an illusion that can be dispelled. The selflessness of consciousness is in plain view in every present moment -- and yet, it remains difficult to see.

...No doubt most people in human history have been totally unaware of the optic blind spot. Even those of us who know about it go for decades without noticing it. And yet, it is always there, right on the surface of experience. 

The absence of the self is also there to be noticed. As with the optic blind spot, the evidence is not far away or deep within; rather, it is almost too close to be observed. For most people, experiencing the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness requires considerable training.

It is, however, possible to notice that consciousness -- that in you which is aware of your experience in this moment -- does not feel like a self. It does not feel like "I." What you are calling "I" is itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness.

Consciousness is prior to it, a mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle.

How Sam Harris views Dzogchen

Sam Harris is a fascinating guy. To me, he pretty much epitomizes the "middle way" that Buddhism espouses. Meaning, he is at home both with science and spirituality, finding both compatible with each other and with reality.

Which I guess isn't too surprising, since Harris has a deep fondness for Buddhism, particularly Dzogchen, a variety of Tibetan Buddhism.

Harris is a leader of the New Atheism movement. He has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience. The personal section of his Wikipedia page contains interesting information about him. (I've taken out the links and footnotes.)

Samuel Benjamin Harris was born in Los Angeles, California, on April 9, 1967. He is the son of actor Berkeley Harris, who appeared mainly in Western films, and TV writer and producer Susan Harris (née Spivak), who created Soap (TV series) and The Golden Girls among other series. His father, born in North Carolina, came from a Quaker background, and his mother is Jewish but not religious. He was raised by his mother following his parents' divorce when he was aged two. Harris has stated that his upbringing was entirely secular and that his parents rarely discussed religion, though he also stated that he was not raised as an atheist.

While his original major was in English, Harris became interested in philosophical questions while at Stanford University after an experience with the empathogen–entactogen MDMA (colloquially known as ecstasy). The experience led him to be interested in the idea that he might be able to achieve spiritual insights without the use of drugs. Leaving Stanford in his second year, a quarter after his psychedelic experience, he visited India and Nepal, where he studied meditation with teachers of Buddhist and Hindu religions, including Dilgo Khyentse. Eleven years later, in 1997, he returned to Stanford, completing a B.A. degree in philosophy in 2000. Harris began writing his first book, The End of Faith, immediately after the September 11 attacks.

He received a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience in 2009 from the University of California, Los Angeles, using functional magnetic resonance imaging to conduct research into the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. His thesis was titled The Moral Landscape: How Science Could Determine Human Values. His advisor was Mark S. Cohen. 

Early on in his book, Waking Up, Harris describes his central thesis.

Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience -- self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light -- constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work.

That principle is the subject of this book. The feeling that we call "I" is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is -- the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes looking out at a world separate from yourself -- can be altered or entirely extinguished.

Although such experiences of "self-transcendence" are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are.

Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by "spirituality" in the context of this book.

Given how much Harris dislikes religion and dogmatism, how is it that he has so much fondness for Dzogchen? Here's some excerpts from Waking Up about Dzogchen.

Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche lived in a hermitage on the southern slope of Shivapuri Mountain, overlooking the Kathmandu Valley. He spent more than twenty years of his life on formal retreat and was deservedly famous for the clarity with which he gave the "pointing-out instruction" of Dzogchen, a formal initiation in which a teacher seeks to impart the experience of self-transcendence directly to a student.

I received this teaching from several Dzogchen masters, as well as similar instructions from teachers like Poonja-ji in other traditions, but I never met anyone who spoke about the nature of consciousness as precisely as Tulku Urgyen. In the last five years of his life, I made several trips to Nepal to study with him.

The practice of Dzogchen requires that one be able to experience the intrinsic selflessness of awareness in every moment (that is when one is not otherwise distracted by thought) -- which is to say that for a Dzogchen meditator, mindfulness must be synonymous with dispelling the illusion of the self.

Rather than teach a technique of meditation -- such as paying close attention to one's breathing -- a Dzogchen master must precipitate an insight on the basis of which a student can thereafter practice a form of awareness (Tibetan: rigpa) that is unencumbered by subject/object dualism. 

Thus it is often said that, in Dzogchen, one "takes the goal as the path," because the freedom from self that one might otherwise seek is the very thing that one practices. The goal of Dzogchen, if one can call it such, is to grow increasingly familiar with this way of being in the world.

...I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self-transcendence, and in a few minutes he showed me that I had no self to transcend. 

In my view, there is nothing supernatural, or even mysterious, about this transmission of wisdom from master to disciple. Tulku Urgyen's effect on me came purely from the clarity of his teaching. As with any challenging endeavor, the difference between being utterly misled by false information, being nudged in the general direction, and being precisely guided by an expert is difficult to overstate. 

...This instruction was without question the most important thing I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being. It has given me a way to escape the usual tides of psychological suffering -- fear, anger, shame -- in an instant.

At my level of practice, this freedom lasts only a few moments. But these moments can be repeated, and they can grow in duration.

Punctuating ordinary experience in this way makes all the difference. In fact, when I pay attention, it is impossible for me to feel like a self at all: The implied center of cognition and emotion simply falls away, and it is obvious that consciousness is never truly confined by what it knows.

That which is aware of sadness is not sad. That which is aware of fear is not fearful. The moment I am lost in thought, however, I'm as confused as anyone else.

Given this change in my perception of the world, I understand the attractions of traditional spirituality. I also recognize the needless confusion and harm that inexorably arise from the doctrines of faith-based religion.

I did not have to believe anything irrational about the universe, or about my place in it, to learn the practice of Dzogchen. I didn't have to accept Tibetan Buddhist beliefs about karma and rebirth or imagine that Tulku Urgyen or the other meditation masters I met possessed magic powers. 

And whatever the traditional liabilities of the guru-devotee relationship, I know from direct experience that it is possible to meet a teacher who can deliver the goods.

In his guided meditations on the Waking Up app (I have the iPhone version), Harris offers a simplified version of Dzogchen. I suspect the practices he uses bear a relationship to the direct pointing techniques of "real" Dzogchen.

For example, Harris will say something like this (these are my own words):

With your eyes open, on an in-breath visualize that you are breathing in the world. On an out-breath visualize yourself being projected out into the world. Then, quickly, in an instant as short as a finger snap, look for the place where you feel the breathing-in and breathing-out of the world is happening. 

Note the absence of a self in that place. Again, quickly, in an instant. That absence is what you are looking for. And if what I just said doesn't make sense to you now, it may later.

You can't go beyond mind, because that's what you are

Yesterday Spence Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog, responded to Appreciative Reader, another frequent commenter. I enjoy how Tepper thinks, even when I don't agree with him. Below I've shared in bold italics some observations on his interesting comment.

Hi AR
You asked
""Please explain in clear words what exactly you were trying to say."
Thank you for the clarity of your question.

It was a great question. And I appreciate the response from Tepper below, which is pleasingly direct.

Beyond mind meaning beyond your own conventional thinking.

OK, I agree that it isn't possible to go beyond the mind, because mind isn't something we can go beyond, since mind is what we are. At least, that's what all the neuroscientific evidence shows. When mental activity ceases, we're brain dead. In other words, dead.

From your perspective, all human experience is biologically based. If you start with that gooey bag called the brain and the intricate and delicate biochemical network of trees within it, and the active network of billions of interacting signals, you can reduce the brain to two levels of functioning, maybe three.
1. The brain itself as described above.
2.the programming / conditioning of the brain.
3.it's operating system programming

This is a dubious description of the brain and how it works. It assumes that the brain is akin to a computer. Some neuroscientists believe this, but many or most recent books I've read on this subject say that the mental activity, or consciousness, is inseparable from that amazingly complex network of neurons and the connections between neurons.

Meaning, the brain is a physical entity and mind can't be separated from that messy, gooey activity. Maybe one day mind and consciousness can be off-loaded to a computer or some other device. For now, though, there's no evidence that the mind is anything other than the brain in action. So (2) and (3) above also are the brain in action.

The view of consciousness can be viewed from this perspective.
Normally we are only conscious of item 2, and even then only a portion of that. .We therefore think there is nothing beyond it. We identify with it, personalize our experiences and identify purely with our programming.

The last sentence above is close to how mindfulness is viewed in Buddhism and secular versions of mindfulness. We can indeed be carried away by thoughts, emotions, and the like. However, once again, there's no evidence that the programming of the brain is separable from the brain itself. 

Sure, it is possible to make a verbal distinction, as when Alan Watts pointed out that "flash of lightning" actually refers to only one thing, since there's no difference between a flash and lightning. So naturally I'd agree that we can develop new mental habits -- that's a big part of what life is all about -- but I disagree that this involves going beyond the conditioning of the brain. The brain just can be conditioned to do new things.

Mystics claim that you can learn to withdraw from the senses and mind and look within and watch item 2. above functioning from a distance, as an observer.

Sure, they claim that. I used to believe that claim. Where, though, is the evidence that anyone has had an experience that didn't involve their mind, which again, I define as the brain in action? If there's a different definition, it would have to be a supernatural one, since as noted before, a brain is necessary for mind, and mind is necessary for awareness/consciousness.

If what's being talked about here is just mindfulness, I have no problem with the idea that it's possible to develop some distance between our thoughts/emotions and the part of mind that is able to be aware of thoughts/emotions. But mindfulness occurs as part of the mind, obviously. It doesn't involve going somewhere outside the mind/brain.

From a purely biological view, this isn't out of body. But it is real and a regular part of advanced meditation practice. Moving consciousness inward and upward through practice: Beyond mind. Beyond 2.

Agreed. It isn't out of body. However, since it isn't out of body, what does "inward" and "upward" really mean? We're always inward, because all experience occurs through the brain, which is encased in our skull. There's no outward to experience. It's all inward. There's no upward, unless this is meant in a metaphorical sense. How can you move up when the mind is a hundred billion neurons with a trillion or so connections?

That means seeing from a different vantage point, which I suggest is 3, the operating system. From that perspective we are entirely free of emotional drives, reactive conditioning. We are liberated from those and can watch them from that vantage point. That provides us with a new perspective, like the Space Telescope.

Well, the Space Telescope is in space, while the vantage point spoken of here is within the mind/brain. Perhaps it is possible to be entirely free of emotional drives and reactive conditioning, though I doubt it. What does seem entirely possible is to be more free of negative emotions and unproductive reactions than we are now. This is what mindfulness is all about.

That perspective offers completely different views and observations, and of course increases our objectivity. We see that we aren't our thinking, nor our emotions. We aren't even this body, because we can view these in action from a separate point. One that is reached through practice, such as those advocated by Buddha and his more advanced followers.

Again, we can be less attached to our body, but we're still a body with a mind/brain. So the separate point mentioned above is just a manner of speaking about a certain sense of detachment, not an actual point separate from the body/mind/brain. 

I'll end by sharing how Sam Harris, who is very knowledgeable about Buddhism and mindfulness, describes what was generally discussed above by Tepper and me. This is from the Spirituality chapter in his Waking Up book.

So what would a spiritual master be a master of? At a minimum, she will no longer suffer certain cognitive and emotional illusions -- above all, she will no longer feel identical to her thoughts.

Once again, this is not to say that such a person will no longer think, but she would no longer succumb to the primary confusion that thoughts produce in most of us: She would no longer feel that there is an inner self who is a thinker of these thoughts.

Such a person will naturally maintain an openness and serenity of mind that is available to most of us only for brief moments, even after years of practice. I remain agnostic as to whether anyone has achieved such a state permanently, but I know from direct experience that it is possible to be far more enlightened than I tend to be.

The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present. 

Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states -- deeply, not merely as an idea -- can transform your life. Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact -- but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being can readily confirm.

We don't have to know any more about the brain or about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about our own mind. 

The promise of spiritual life -- indeed, the very thing that makes it "spiritual" in the sense I invoke throughout this book -- is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

Say yes to drugs. The war on drugs is crazy.

Over on my HinesSight blog, tonight I wrote "MDMA research shows war on drugs is absurd." Check it out. I shared part of a story Sam Harris tells in his Waking Up book about taking MDMA (Ecstasy) with a friend in 1987, which produced a marvelous feeling of love in them.

Does spacetime emerge from a more fundamental reality?

The title of this blog post is a question posed on the cover of the February 2022 issue of Scientific American. It refers to a story in the issue, "The Origins of Space and Time." 

I enjoyed the story, even though it was difficult to understand. 

Here's an image that encapsulates the two main approaches to figuring out what space and time (or as relativity theory puts it, spacetime) emerge from -- assuming they emerge from anything.

So if you were expecting some explanation that could be fit, or crammed, into a religious or mystical worldview, expect again.

Science of this sort is complicated, mathematical, provisional. Currently there's no way to test whether space and time emerge from something more fundamental. But just raising that possibility is fascinating, since most of us view space and time as fundamental realities themselves.

One reason physicists are pursuing this issue is that while quantum mechanics and relativity theory are both fantastically accurate depictions of reality, quantum mechanics focuses on the very small and relativity theory on the very large.

Plus, quantum mechanics does an excellent job of explaining three forces of nature -- weak, strong, electromagnetism -- while relativity theory does an excellent job of explaining the fourth, gravity. 

It's too simplistic to say that three are more than one, so that's why physicists are interested in finding a quantum theory of gravity, but probably there's some truth to that. Relativity theory isn't capable of explaining the other three forces, so the goal is to find a quantum way to explain how gravity works.

It is indeed strange that so far quantum mechanics and relativity theory aren't compatible with each other, even though each is amazingly successful at explaining the realm in which they operate. 

Hence, the appeal of finding a theory of how spacetime emerges from something more fundamental, which would demote relativity theory into a non-fundamental theory and, hopefully, bring about a understanding that explains gravity without using relativity theory.

Here's how the story starts out:

Natalie Paquette spends her time thinking about how to grow an extra dimension. Start with little circles, scattered across every point in space and time -- a curlicue dimension, looped back on itself. 

Then shrink those circles down, smaller and smaller, tightening the loop, until a curious transformation occurs: the dimension stops seeming tiny and instead becomes enormous, like when you realize something that looks small and nearby is actually huge and distant.

"We're shrinking a spatial direction," Paquette says. "But when we try to shrink it past a certain point, a new, large, spatial direction emerges instead."

Paquette, a theoretical physicist at the University of Washington, is not alone in thinking about this strange kind of dimensional transmutation. A growing number of physicists, working in different areas of the discipline with different approaches, are increasingly converging on a profound idea: space -- and perhaps even time -- is not fundamental.

Instead space and time may be emergent: they could arise from the structure and behavior of more basic components of nature. At the deepest level of reality, questions like "Where?" and "When?" simply may not have answers at all. "We have a lot of hints from physics that spacetime as we understand it isn't the fundamental thing," Paquette says.

These radical notions come from the latest twists in the century-long hunt for a theory of quantum gravity. Physicist's best theory of gravity is general relativity, Albert Einstein's famous conception of how matter warps space and time.

The best theory of everything else is quantum physics, which is astonishingly accurate when it comes to the properties of matter, energy and subatomic particles. Both theories have easily passed all the tests physicists have been able to devise for the past century. Put them together, one might think, and you would have a "theory of everything."

But the two theories don't play nicely. Ask general relativity what happens in the context of quantum physics, and you'll get contradictory answers, with untamed infinities breaking loose across your calculations. Nature knows how to apply gravity in quantum contexts -- it happened in the first moments of the big bang, and it still happens in the hearts of black holes -- but we humans are still struggling to understand how the trick is done.

Part of the problem lies in the ways the theories deal with space and time. While quantum physics treats space and time as immutable, general relativity warps them for breakfast. Somehow a theory of quantum gravity would need to reconcile these ideas about space and time.

One way to do that would be to eliminate the problem at the source, spacetime itself, by making space and time emerge from something more fundamental.

Some thoughts about Shivinder Singh and his wife

Here's a message someone sent to me about Shivinder Singh, the brother of Malvinder Singh and a relative of Gurinder Singh -- the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a religious organization based in India. Charan Singh was the previous guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

There was a recent article in India Today that describes how Shivinder Singh’s wife was conned out of 215 crore rupees by a man who posed as a high government official. He told her he could spring her husband from jail where he has been in custody for a quite a while. This brings forward quite a few questions. 

If she is the daughter-in-law of God in Human Form, why would she bribe a government official when God is her father-in-law? If she thought she was bribing a government official, shouldn’t she also be in jail? Last I heard, this is illegal in India. 

215 crore is around 30 million dollars. That would certainly be a good faith gesture for paying off the debt that landed Shivinder in jail in the first place. He told the courts he would cooperate and pay his debts but it looks like he is hiding his cash. I imagine the courts took notice of this and are wondering where the rest of the loot is.  

If we are supposed to obey the laws of our country, why is he hiding his money rather than doing what he promised when initiated into the Radha Soami faith? 

He is Charan Singh’s grandson and was raised by Charan Singh’s daughter. The entire family had the great boon of the “company of the saints” yet raised two crooks whose greed knows no bounds. Charan Singh used to say if you put a good man with a gang of thieves he will soon become a thief himself. Did all of this start when they came under the influence of their guru and mentor, Gurinder Singh?

I am not sure what happened here because I still have a lot of faith in Charan Singh’s  good character and spiritual attainment. I guess I don’t have any choice but to live with the cognitive dissonance. 

Next time I will look for a guru like Bhagat Singh though, I expect it will take some time to recover.