Church of the Churchless

"No mind" in Zen doesn't mean what most people think it does

Something led me this morning to take a look at a book I'd already read, James Austin's Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen.

Austin is a clinical neurologist, researcher, and long-time Zen practitioner, so his background is right up my reading alley. And I enjoyed re-reading the first few pages of his book.

But the Great God Google, whose presence I feature in a search box in the right sidebar of this blog, led me to a couple of posts I wrote in 2011, when I bought this book.

Turns out that I didn't resonate all that much with it, according to "Selfless Insight" -- intriguing, yet disappointing, Zen book.

I didn't enjoy neurologist James Austin's book about Zen and neuroscience as much as I thought I would.

My reading of "Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness" may show, of course, that I'm neither selfless nor imbued with enlightened (or kensho'ened) insight -- both of which I plead guilty to.

Regardless, I expected that Austin would provide a clearer and simpler analysis of how Zen meditation and brain science relate. He's written two other books on this subject, this being the most recent, so perhaps "Selfless Insight" is more complicated than his earlier works.

I was left with just a few Memorable Impressions after reading each of the book's often-dense 269 pages.

The detailed descriptions of brain functioning and anatomy didn't resonate much with me, as I was looking for something other than a neurology text for the layman. Ditto with the many summaries of research on how this or that in the brain results in X sorts of awareness under condition Y.

Eventually the stylistic medium of the book became a main message for me, albeit a familiar one. Namely, whatever we experience in (or as) our consciousness is produced by certain states in the physical brain.

I like Zen philosophy and literature because it is grounded. Heaven, the supernatural, God, soul, spirit -- all this airy-fairy stuff is meaningless to a Zen Buddhist like Austin, which enables him to easily meld his scientific bent with his meditative practice.

One of the things I did like about the book was a simple meditation approach, which is described in James Austin's "Just This" meditation practice. I tried it out this morning for a whole 15 minutes and felt pleasingly Zen'ish. I'm entitled to my Enlightenment Diploma now!

And I enjoyed what Austin had to say about the Zen notion of "no-mind," which I came across in the few pages I read today.

Zen keeps reminding us to focus on more than the psychological problems caused by the way the Self has been conditioned. We also need to be alert to the huge problems caused by the way we use words. Zen itself has introduced some confusing words.

Consider the Zen phrase mu-shin, meaning "no-mind." It doesn't mean a vacuity, a mental blank, a state of unconsciousness. 

Instead, it refers to the basic clarity and receptive nature of our mind once we liberate it from discursive thoughts driven by unskillful emotional reverberations. The Korean Zen Master Chinul (1158-1210) devoted fifteen chapters to his "Straightforward Explanation of the True Mind."

Chinul carefully explained what this no-mind was. It was a mind not deluded by errant thinking. This mind could still access its full range of subtle discriminative mental functions.

Thus, "no-mind" refers, not only to our being keenly aware of each present moment in a calm, clear manner, it can also include our normal allied capacities for calm, clear, objective mindful introspection. 

Good friends of mine prove that morality doesn't require religion

Last night my wife and I attended a 61st anniversary celebration of a couple we've known for a long time, Russ and Delana Beaton. 

When I got home, I wrote a blog post about the evening. Excerpt:

Laurel, my wife, and I have known the Beatons for a long time, over 25 years. If there's one word that describes them, its nice. If you want two words, nice and caring. Going for three, nice and caring and competent. 

After a moving slide show of their married life narrated in a poetic rhyming fashion by their children, other people spoke about Russ and Delana. When a microphone was put in my hand, I said something like this:

Russ and Delana strike me as the nicest people I've ever known. I'm sitting at a table with three retired Willamette University professors. [Russ, and I think Delana also, taught there for many years.] Because I'm political and like to dig for truths under the surface, I asked them if in their experience, the Beatons really are as nice as they seem to be. Each of them said, Yes, they are. The only negative thing I heard from their Willamette colleagues was, Sometimes they can be too nice. Which doesn't seem like a flaw to me. Not at all. I only wish that one day someone would say about me, "He was too nice." For sure, this will never happen.

There were lots of stories and anecdotes about the accomplishments of Russ and Delana. They've changed so many lives for the better. To give a couple of examples -- and there are many more -- Russ was instrumental in getting Oregon's highly successful land use system off the ground, and Delana has been a tireless advocate for homeless people in Salem.

It was deeply moving to hear quite a few of the many people who attended the anniversary celebration, around 80, speak about how the Beatons had helped them, improved the community, or otherwise brought about positive change.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, naturally including Russ, Delana, and their three children, made the slightest mention of God or religion. That's because the Beatons are completely non-religious, being atheists. 

Religion hasn't played any role in their adult lives, though they might have gone to church as children. I'm not sure about that. 

What I am absolutely sure about is that the strong morality of the Beatons that's clearly manifested in their intense commitment to make the world a better place stems entirely from their secular beliefs. Their sense of right and wrong has no basis in religion or any form of supernaturalism.

So those who claim that religion is necessary for people to act ethically are mistaken. There are plenty of highly moral people like the Beatons who do the right thing because their atheist mind guides them in that upstanding direction.

As I put it back in 2008, morality doesn't need a middleman. 

Science says about dark energy: "So the mystery continues"

One of the most amazing scientific facts is how much of the universe is unknown to science. About 95%.

As discussed in the NASA article below (I copied it from a NASA web site), currently about 68% of all the stuff in the universe is considered to be dark energy, and nobody knows what it is. Another 27% is dark matter, and nobody knows what it is. That leaves 5% normal matter, and we do know what that is. 

Except the article says, Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the universe.

I love the honest humility of science. On the whole, scientists don't try to pretend that they know something when they're actually clueless about it.

They do this in part because science has some pretty damn good bullshit detectors, so any scientist who claims to know something without evidence to back that claim up likely will be challenged by other scientists. Also, scientists embrace mystery.

That's how they make progress -- by tackling mysteries, large or small, with the goal of making the mysterious less so. You'll see that the article says repeatedly about unproven dark energy possibilities, So the mystery continues.

Contrast this with religions and religious believers.

How often do you hear someone preach from a pulpit on the theme, "When it comes to God, the mystery continues"? How many people would follow a guru who says, "While I'm trying to understand what the cosmos is all about, the mystery continues"?

Illusory certainty gets high marks in religion, but a failing grade in science. Here's the NASA article.

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Dark Energy, Dark Matter

In the early 1990s, one thing was fairly certain about the expansion of the universe. It might have enough energy density to stop its expansion and recollapse, it might have so little energy density that it would never stop expanding, but gravity was certain to slow the expansion as time went on. Granted, the slowing had not been observed, but, theoretically, the universe had to slow. The universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together.

Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today. So the expansion of the universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it.

Eventually theorists came up with three sorts of explanations. Maybe it was a result of a long-discarded version of Einstein's theory of gravity, one that contained what was called a "cosmological constant." Maybe there was some strange kind of energy-fluid that filled space. Maybe there is something wrong with Einstein's theory of gravity and a new theory could include some kind of field that creates this cosmic acceleration. Theorists still don't know what the correct explanation is, but they have given the solution a name. It is called dark energy.

What Is Dark Energy?

More is unknown than is known. We know how much dark energy there is because we know how it affects the universe's expansion. Other than that, it is a complete mystery. But it is an important mystery. It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the universe.

Universe Dark Energy-1 Expanding Universe

This diagram reveals changes in the rate of expansion since the universe's birth 15 billion years ago. The more shallow the curve, the faster the rate of expansion. The curve changes noticeably about 7.5 billion years ago, when objects in the universe began flying apart as a faster rate. Astronomers theorize that the faster expansion rate is due to a mysterious, dark force that is pulling galaxies apart.

Credit: NASA/STSci/Ann Feild

One explanation for dark energy is that it is a property of space. Albert Einstein was the first person to realize that empty space is not nothing. Space has amazing properties, many of which are just beginning to be understood. The first property that Einstein discovered is that it is possible for more space to come into existence. Then one version of Einstein's gravity theory, the version that contains a cosmological constant, makes a second prediction: "empty space" can possess its own energy.

Because this energy is a property of space itself, it would not be diluted as space expands. As more space comes into existence, more of this energy-of-space would appear. As a result, this form of energy would cause the universe to expand faster and faster. Unfortunately, no one understands why the cosmological constant should even be there, much less why it would have exactly the right value to cause the observed acceleration of the universe. 

Dark Matter Core Defies Explanation

This image shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520. The result could present a challenge to basic theories of dark matter.

Another explanation for how space acquires energy comes from the quantum theory of matter. In this theory, "empty space" is actually full of temporary ("virtual") particles that continually form and then disappear. But when physicists tried to calculate how much energy this would give empty space, the answer came out wrong - wrong by a lot. The number came out 10¹²⁰ times too big. That's a 1 with 120 zeros after it. It's hard to get an answer that bad. So the mystery continues.

Another explanation for dark energy is that it is a new kind of dynamical energy fluid or field, something that fills all of space but something whose effect on the expansion of the universe is the opposite of that of matter and normal energy. Some theorists have named this "quintessence," after the fifth element of the Greek philosophers. But, if quintessence is the answer, we still don't know what it is like, what it interacts with, or why it exists. So the mystery continues.

A last possibility is that Einstein's theory of gravity is not correct. That would not only affect the expansion of the universe, but it would also affect the way that normal matter in galaxies and clusters of galaxies behaved. This fact would provide a way to decide if the solution to the dark energy problem is a new gravity theory or not: we could observe how galaxies come together in clusters.

But if it does turn out that a new theory of gravity is needed, what kind of theory would it be? How could it correctly describe the motion of the bodies in the Solar System, as Einstein's theory is known to do, and still give us the different prediction for the universe that we need? There are candidate theories, but none are compelling. So the mystery continues.

The thing that is needed to decide between dark energy possibilities - a property of space, a new dynamic fluid, or a new theory of gravity - is more data, better data.

What Is Dark Matter?

By fitting a theoretical model of the composition of the universe to the combined set of cosmological observations, scientists have come up with the composition that we described above, ~68% dark energy, ~27% dark matter, ~5% normal matter. What is dark matter?

We are much more certain what dark matter is not than we are what it is. First, it is dark, meaning that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see. Observations show that there is far too little visible matter in the universe to make up the 27% required by the observations.

Second, it is not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter, matter made up of particles called baryons. We know this because we would be able to detect baryonic clouds by their absorption of radiation passing through them.

Third, dark matter is not antimatter, because we do not see the unique gamma rays that are produced when antimatter annihilates with matter.

Finally, we can rule out large galaxy-sized black holes on the basis of how many gravitational lenses we see. High concentrations of matter bend light passing near them from objects further away, but we do not see enough lensing events to suggest that such objects to make up the required 25% dark matter contribution.

Abell 2744: Pandora's Cluster Revealed

One of the most complicated and dramatic collisions between galaxy clusters ever seen is captured in this new composite image of Abell 2744. The blue shows a map of the total mass concentration (mostly dark matter).

However, at this point, there are still a few dark matter possibilities that are viable. Baryonic matter could still make up the dark matter if it were all tied up in brown dwarfs or in small, dense chunks of heavy elements. These possibilities are known as massive compact halo objects, or "MACHOs". But the most common view is that dark matter is not baryonic at all, but that it is made up of other, more exotic particles like axions or WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).

Dark Matter Goes Missing in Oddball Galaxy

Researchers were surprised when they uncovered galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 which is missing most, if not all, of its dark matter.

 

School board ditches pledge of allegiance due to "under God" language

Nice to see the Fargo, North Dakota school board did the right thing and stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance at its meetings after a school board member made some great arguments about why this didn't fit with their policy of inclusion.

After all, "under God" does indeed refer to the Judeo-Christian god. If the pledge said "under gods, or no god," that would be an accurate reflection of the wide variety of religious beliefs in the United States, which includes atheists and agnostics who don't believe in any god.

To see a brief video of the persuasive argument used by the school board member, check out Fargo School Board nixes Pledge of Allegiance due to 'under God' phrase.

The universe is mind-blowingly huge

In my current atheist state of mind, I find thoughts about God thoroughly uninspiring.

After all, how is it possible to be inspired or awestruck by an entity that almost certainly doesn't exist? Or at the very least, has no demonstrable evidence in support of its existence.

But the universe...

Ah, that's something which obviously exists, and science knows enough about it for awe to be an entirely reasonable reaction to the immensity that not only surrounds us, but is us.

The July 30 issue of New Scientist features a cover story called Your Brief Guide to Everything Ever: An inventory of the universe from rogue planets to the cosmic web.

There's a lot of fascinating facts in those ten pages.

Here's some about the immensity of the universe -- which is so far beyond our capacity to visualize, all we can do is let our minds be transported to an oh-so-incomplete understanding of what lies in the vastness beyond the night sky.

The furthest any human has made it from Earth is just beyond the moon -- some 400,000 kilometres away, or 1.3 seconds at light speed. The edge of the observable universe lies 46.5 billion light years away.

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In the Milky Way alone, there are an estimated 100 billion stars, and beyond our galaxy there are billions of other galaxies. This means there are thought to be around 200 billion trillion stars in the universe.

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Every star we see in the night sky is part of just one galaxy -- our own Milky Way. Up until around 100 years ago, astronomers believed this was all there was. Now we know the Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe, if not more. NASA estimates there could be 2 trillion. 

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If you could zoom out of the Milky Way, you would start to see the Local Group -- a collection of at least 80 galaxies set in a dumb-bell shape. At one end is the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies, and at the other is our closest large neighbour, Andromeda, and its satellites.

Zoom out a bit further and you see that the Local Group is next door to a cluster of thousands of galaxies called the Virgo Cluster. That cluster and the Local Group are both, in turn, part of a much larger structure that is more than 100 million light years across and contains another 100 groups of galaxies, called the Virgo Supercluster.

Astronomers believe there to be some 10 million such superclusters in the observable universe. And yet a study in 2014 indicated that the Virgo Supercluster is part of an even bigger supercluster called Laniakea, showing that the universe is ordered on a much larger scale that we originally thought. 

Here's a BBC video that shows the scale of the universe.

Treat yourself like you would a friend: gently, kindly, compassionately

Loving-kindness meditation as I've learned it typically starts off with an "I" statement, then moves on to "you" and "all."

As in May I be happy... May you be happy... May all be happy.

Sometimes this rubs me the wrong way, as it seems egotistical to start off with an intention for my happiness, and only then visualize someone close to me (usually my wife) and all of humanity being happy.

But given the way most people treat themselves, it does seem like it makes sense to extend loving-kindness to our own self before extending it to others.

Often we're considerably harder on ourselves than on a friend or loved one. 

This is one of the points that Ethan Kross makes in his book, Chatter, about the voice in our heads and what it says to us.

If a friend wasn't careful enough when backing out of a parking space and hit a light pole, damaging their bumper, after hearing their tale of woe likely we'd say something like, "Hey, accidents happen, this is no big deal."

But our inner voice, which in this case is an inner critic, says, "Jeez, what a stupid thing to do; only an idiot would smash their bumper while backing up."

There's no way we'd say that to a friend or loved one. So why can't we look upon ourselves as deserving of the same positive attitude we'd give to someone in distress who we care about? Don't we care about ourselves?

An article in the May 2022 issue of Scientific American, "Others Don't Think You're a Mess," has some observations about the relationship between being vulnerable with others, and being compassionate to ourself.

Self-compassion originated from ancient Buddhist teachings. Today's scientists, however, have researcher Kristin Neff of the University of Texas at Austin to thank for defining the concept in detailed psychological terms.

According to Neff, self-compassion consists of three components. First, self-kindness entails a caring and understanding response toward one's own suffering.

For instance, when someone is struggling with feelings of failure, Neff encourages people to imagine how they might speak supportively to a friend in that position and then apply similar thoughts to themselves.

The second component -- common humanity -- refers to recognizing pain and failures as an unavoidable part of life. Finally, mindfulness entails clear awareness of the present moment -- neither ignoring one's difficulties nor exaggerating their magnitude.

My colleagues and I thought that self-compassion could influence how people perceive their own display of vulnerability. After all, vulnerable situations can trigger a lot of shame and fear, and these moments are precisely when self-compassion is most helpful.

For example, consider admitting a mistake. People who treat themselves as they would treat a good friend wouldn't shame themselves for being imperfect. Instead they would remind themselves that imperfection comes with the territory for all mortal creatures.

In addition, a mindful approach to the mistake would lessen the need to either exaggerate or deny its significance. 

...Luckily, our sense of self-compassion is not set in stone, and it can be intentionally cultivated. For example, journaling exercises can help people change the way they think about their own strengths and weaknesses by writing about one's feelings with awareness and acceptance, offering oneself words of support and reflecting on how others share difficult experiences.

By developing a kind, mindful attitude toward ourselves, we can become more comfortable with showing our vulnerabilities. This practice, in turn, can strengthen our close relationships.

Chatter is our inner voice gone rogue

There's nothing wrong with the voice that speaks inside our head. It's a vital part of being human.

But as Ethan Gross describes in his captivating book, Chatter, the conversations we have with ourselves can become as annoying as being trapped on a long plane flight with a person sitting next to us who talks about stupid stuff and just won't shut up.

Chatter consists of the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn our singular capacity for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing. It puts our performance, decision making, relationships, happiness, and health in jeopardy.

We think about that screwup at work or misunderstanding with a loved one and end up flooded with how bad we feel. Then we think about it again. And again. We introspect hoping to tap into our inner coach but find our inner critic instead.

The question, of course, is why. Why do people's attempts to "go inside" and think when they experience distress at times succeed and at other times fail? And just as important, once we find our introspective abilities running off course, what can we do to steer them back on track? 

I've spent my career examining those questions. I've learned that the answers hinge on changing the nature of one of the most important conversations of conscious life: the ones we have with ourselves.

I've only read the book's introduction and first two (of seven) chapters. But I'm already liking it a lot. Well written. Entertaining. Informative. Inspiring. Here's some additional passages from the part I've read so far that will give you a feel for some of the themes Gross talks about.

He makes the rather obvious point that always living in the now isn't possible nor desirable. 

A widespread cultural mantra of the twenty-first century is the exhortation to live in the present. I appreciate the wisdom of this maxim. Instead of succumbing to the pain of the past or anxiety about the future, it advises, we should concentrate on connecting with others and oneself right now.

And yet, as a scientist who studies the human mind, I can't help but note how this well-intentioned message runs counter to our biology. Humans weren't made to hold fast to the present all the time. That's just not what our brains evolved to do. 

We have a marvelous ability to engage in mental time travel. This is a feature, not a bug, of the human mind.

This pattern of hopscotching through time and space in their inner conversations highlights something we have all noticed about our own mind: It is an avid time traveler.

While memory lane can lead us down chatter lane, there's nothing inherently harmful about returning to the past or imagining the future. The ability to engage in mental time travel is an exceedingly valuable feature of the human mind.

It allow us to make sense of our experiences in ways that other animals can't, not to mention make plans and prepare for contingencies in the future. Just as we talk with friends about things we have done and things we will do or would like to do, we talk to ourselves about those same things. 

Many forms of self-talk are just fine. But when our inner voice goes rogue, chattering away in an unproductive fashion, that isn't fine. Our attention gets focused in the wrong direction.

Your labor-intense executive functions need every neuron they can get, but a negative inner voice hogs our neural capacity. Verbal rumination concentrates our attention narrowly on the source of our emotional distress, thus stealing neurons that could better serve us.

In effect, we jam our executive functions up by attending to a "dual task" -- the task of doing whatever it is we want to do and the task of listening to our pained inner voice. Neurologically, that's how chatter divides and blurs our attention.

Much of the book, the chapters I haven't read, deal with how we can manage the chatter of our inner voice. Today I read about one useful technique: distancing. Which isn't the same as distracting or avoidance.

In 1970, Aaron Beck, one of the founders of cognitive therapy and an influential figure in mental health, proposed that teaching patients how to objectively scrutinize their thoughts, a process he called "distancing," was a central tool that therapists should employ with their patients.

In the ensuing years, however, distancing had come to be equated with avoidance -- with not thinking about your problems. But in my mind, there is nothing inherently avoidant about distancing. In theory, you could use your mind to frame your problems from a zoomed-out perspective.

This approach differed from the meditative practice of mindfulness in that the goal wasn't to stand apart and watch one's thoughts drift by without engaging with them. The point was to engage,  but to do so from a distanced perspective, which isn't the same thing as an emotionally avoidant one.

...The immersers  -- the people who viewed the event from a first-person perspective -- got trapped in their emotions and the verbal flood they released. In their accounts describing their stream of thoughts, they tended to zero in on the hurt.

"Adrenaline infused. Pissed off. Betrayed," one person wrote. "Angry. Victimized. Hurt. Shamed. Stepped-on. Shitted on. Humiliated. Abandoned. Unappreciated. Pushed. Boundaries trampled upon." Their attempts to "go inside" and work through their internal conversations just led to more negative feelings.

The fly-on-the-wall group, meanwhile, offered contrasting narratives.

Where the immersers got tangled in the emotional weeds, the distancers went broad, which led them to feel better. "I was able to see the argument more clearly," wrote one person." I initially empathized better with myself but then I began to understand how my friend felt. It may have been irrational but I understand his motivation."

Their thinking was clearer and more complex, and, sure enough, they seemed to view events with the insight of a third-party observer. They were able to emerge from the experience with a constructive story.

The experiment provided evidence that stepping back to make sense of our experiences could be useful for changing the tone of our inner voice.

Alan Watts: live life like a cat falling out of a tree

Recently on Facebook I saw this quote from a book by Alan Watts, What is Tao? Makes a lot of sense to live life like a falling cat. Not too tense. Not too rigid. Just the right amount of relaxation.

The same attitude of relaxed gentleness [practiced in judo] is most beautifully seen when you watch cats climbing trees.

When a cat falls out of a tree, it lets go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground.

But if a cat were about to fall out of a tree and suddenly made up its mind that it didn't want to fall, it would become tense and rigid, and would be just a bag of broken bones upon landing.

In the same way, it is the philosophy of the Tao that we are all falling off a tree, at every moment of our lives. As a matter of fact, the moment we were born we were kicked off a precipice and we are falling, and there is nothing that can stop it.

So instead of living in a state of chronic tension, and clinging to all sorts of things that are actually falling with us because the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat. Don't resist it.

This fits with a Taoist story from Chuang Tzu that I shared in a 2004 blog post, "I become a Taoist." 

Take the case of a drunken man falling from his carriage: though he may suffer injury he will not die. His bones and joints are the same as those of other men, but the injury which he receives is different: his spirit is entire.

He knew nothing about getting into the carriage and nothing about falling from it. The thought of death or life, or of any alarm or affright, does not enter his breast. Therefore he encounters danger without shrinking from it. Completely under the influence of the liquor he had drunk, it is thus with him.

How much more would it be so if he were under the influence of his Heavenly constitution! The sagely man is kept hid in his Heavenly constitution and therefore nothing can injure him.

Well, I'm pretty damn sure that a sagely man can indeed be injured, but I'll give Chuang Tzu his poetic license. 

His main point seems to be the same as what Alan Watts said above. Going through life in a relaxed fashion is better than being unduly tense. 

As regards cats, I found a You Tube video that explains how they can fall from high places and come away in pretty good shape. 

The brain creates the mind, which is us

Today Ron E. left a comment on a recent churchless post that I like a lot and share below.

I readily admit that my fondness for the comment, which extends to almost all of the comments Ron leaves on this blog, largely is based on the fact that he and I look at reality in much the same way.

In a word, naturalistically. Meaning, we as human beings are not separate from the natural world, but are an integral aspect of nature. Nature is us, to put it in three words.

But since we're Homo sapiens, not a rock, a bolt of lightning, or some other non-sentient aspect of nature, we're a part of nature with a mind. But mind isn't something ethereal. Consciousness isn't either. 

Mind and consciousness, which may be the same thing, arise from the physical goings-on of the human brain. No need to posit a soul or any other supernatural entity. The brain creates the mind, which is us. So it makes sense to say, the brain is us.

This is both really obvious, and really controversial -- for those who believe (without any demonstrable evidence) that humans possess some special ingredient that isn't physical, survives the death of the body, and/or has a connection with God or some other form of divinity.

Sure, awareness or consciousness does seem ethereal. But the Earth seems flat; the Sun seems to rise and set; matter seems solid; time seems separate from space. All of those seemings aren't true, so there's no reason to assume that the seeming transcendent nature of mind and consciousness is true either.

Many findings of science have come to be accepted by the vast majority of people. However, it's going to take quite a while for the near-certain fact that you and I and everyone else are made of meat, with the brain being a special form of meat, to become a truth that resonates intimately with most people.

It might be that this won't happen until advanced artificial intelligences are commonplace, being indistinguishable or even superior to human intelligence. Perhaps only then will humans truly understand that what we are is no different from what everything else in nature is: natural, not supernatural.

Here's the comment from Ron E. Courtesy of Amazon, I've ordered the book he's reading. I like that Barrett takes a contrarian approach to emotions and the mind. Maybe she's right. Maybe she's wrong. But her book seems to be well-written, thoughtful, and provocative, reason enough for me to buy it. 

I have recently been reading Lisa Fieldman Barrett’s, "How Emotions Are Made." Her research describes how the brain constructs everything we experience, including emotions. She states: “Its story features unfamiliar characters like simulation and concepts and degeneracy, and it takes place throughout the whole brain at once.”

I mention Barrett’s studies because similar to the studies described in Brian’s latest blog on the Self-Reference Effect which states that “SREs then, are a way to investigate how our sense of self emerges from the workings of the brain—something that multiple research groups have studied intensely”, it is another study that points to the brain as being the source of all that we experience.

For years, studies have revealed how much of what we experience results from the brain, including how the self emerges from the brain and builds our identities. By now, it should be pretty obvious that the brain creates the mind with its entire cognitive repertoire – and basically operates not through actualities but through predictions.

But apparently, the brain is not alone in creating the wonder that is us, simply because the brain's responses are dependent on the body and its senses and its environment – which importantly includes other people. The self then is a construct of all the on-going variables that our organism exists with and encounters every moment.

How revelatory it would be to realise the disconnectedness that we are and how we create our own worlds. How ‘heavenly’ it would be to be able to drop systems of belief that serve to separate and alienate us from each other and the world around us.

Having a minimal sense of self isn't a good thing

My problem with people who elevate the human "self" into something grandiose -- like an eternal soul -- is that they muddy the waters regarding what the self truly is.

An article in the August 2022 issue of Scientific American, "Creating Our Sense of Self," goes a long way toward clearing things up.
Download How Our Brain Preserves Our Sense of Self - Scientific American

The first paragraphs lay out the basics of the self. 

We are all time travelers. Every day we experience new things as we travel forward through time. As we do, the countless connections between the nerve cells in our brain recalibrate to accommodate these experiences. It's as if we reassemble ourselves daily, maintaining a mental construct of ourselves in physical time, and the glue that holds together our core identity is memory.

Our travels are not limited to physical time. We also experience mental time travel. We visit the past through our memories and then journey into the future by imagining what tomorrow or next year might bring. When we do so, we think of ourselves as we are now, remember who we once were and imagine how we will be.

Some religiously-minded people glibly talk about doing away with the self as if this was an unalloyed good thing. But as the excerpt above says, the self is our sense of a core identity. It requires memory and imagination to function as it should.

There's evidence that a particular region of the brain is responsible for this.

A study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN), explores how one particular brain region helps to knit together memories of the present and future self. When people sustain an injury to that area, it leads to an impaired sense of identity. The region—called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)—may produce a fundamental model of oneself and place it in mental time. When the region does so, this study suggests, it may be the source of our sense of self.

So how did the researchers determine the extent to which someone has a sense of self? This is necessary in science, but not in religion or mysticism, because science seeks what is real and true, not what is fantasized and false.

Psychologists have long noticed that a person's mind handles information about oneself differently from other details. Memories that reference the self are easier to recall than other forms of memory.

They benefit from what researchers have called a self-reference effect (SRE), in which information related to oneself is privileged and more salient in our thoughts. Self-related memories are distinct from both episodic memory, the category of recollections that pertains to specific events and experiences, and semantic memory, which connects to more general knowledge, such as the color of grass and the characteristics of the seasons.

SREs, then, are a way to investigate how our sense of self emerges from the workings of the brain—something that multiple research groups have studied intensely. For example, previous research employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a method that uses blood flow and oxygen consumption in specific brain areas as a measure of neural activity, to identify regions that were activated by self-reference. These studies identified the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as a brain region related to self-thought.

This area, the mPFC, can be further divided into upper and lower regions (called dorsal and ventral, respectively), and it turns out that each one makes different contributions to self-related thought. The dorsal section plays a role in distinguishing self from other and appears to be task-related, whereas the ventral section, the vmPFC, contributes more to emotional processing.

The researchers studied three groups of people. One group consisted of seven people who had lesions in the vmPFC part of the brain mentioned above. Another group consisted of eight people with injuries to other parts of the brain. The third group consisted of 23 healthy people. 

All people in the study underwent a thorough neuropsychological evaluation, which confirmed that they were within normal ranges for a variety of cognitive assessments, including measures of verbal fluency and spatial short-term memory. The researchers then asked the participants to list adjectives to describe themselves and a well-known celebrity, both in the present and 10 years in the future. Later, the participants had to recall these same traits.

These were the findings.

The researchers discovered that people in their control group could recall more adjectives linked to themselves in the present and future than adjectives linked to the celebrity. In other words, scientists found that the self-reference effect extends to both the future and the present self. Although there was some variation in the group—people with brain injuries to areas other than the vmPFC were somewhat less able to recall details about their future self when compared with healthy participants—the self-reference effect still held true.

Results were distinctly different, however, for the participants with injuries to the vmPFC. People with lesions in this area had little or no ability to recall references to the self, regardless of the context of time. Their identification of adjectives for celebrities in the present or future was also significantly impaired when compared with the rest of the participants' responses.

In addition, people with vmPFC lesions had less confidence about an individual's ability to possess traits than other people in the study. All of this evidence points to a central role for the vmPFC in the formation and maintenance of identity.

The last part of the article had a couple of observations that fascinated me. One is that other studies had shown that when we think of our past self, that former version of ourselves seems like a stranger to us.

More broadly, the study helps us understand how self- related memories—recollections key to maintaining our core sense of identity—depend on the function of the vmPFC. But what about our past selves? Curiously, in previous studies that asked people to consider their past selves, there was no more activation of the mPFC than when considering someone else. Our past selves seem foreign to us, as if they were individuals apart from us.

One idea that scientists have put forward to understand this distinction is that perhaps we are not very kind in our judgments of our past selves. Instead we may be rather critical and harshly judgmental of our previous behavior, emotions and personal traits. In these situations, we may use our past primarily to construct a more positive self-image in the present. Put another way, because we may recognize flaws in our past self's behavior, we tend to distance ourselves from the person we once were.

I also resonated with the notion that memory is a form of imagination. It's well known that every time we retrieve a memory, there's a strong likelihood that this changes the memory. So over time our memories may become less and less accurate as regards what actually happened, since we embellish the memory -- often to make the past more acceptable or satisfying to our present self.

Bringing the present and future into the spotlight, then, is central to understanding the way our brain and thoughts build our current identities. In many ways, it makes sense that the mPFC is important in this process of recalling present details and imagining future ones that build on our recollections. The prefrontal cortex, including the mPFC and its subdivisions, forms a network in the brain that is involved in future planning.

That network also includes the hippocampus, a brain structure that is central to episodic memory formation and that can track moments as sequential events in time. In past work, researchers have found that manipulating the activity of the hippocampus alters creative and future imaginings, which suggests an important role for brain structures supporting memory in imagining the future.

In fact, although we often think of memory as the brain's accurate and dispassionate recording device, some scholars have characterized it as a form of imagination.

Our inner voice is linked to our various selves

Most of us have an inner voice speaking to us inside our mind.

It can either be voluntary, as when I read "Most of us have an inner voice" and can hear those words silently echo within my brain. It can also be involuntary, as when I do something wrong and hear "You're an idiot" admonishing me without my consciously willing those words.

This inner voice generally is taken for granted. It's just part of our mental background. 

But a few years ago, when I was into vaping cartridges filled with concentrated cannabis oil (marijuana is legal here in Oregon), I overdid a new cartridge that was more potent than what I'd used before.

After a few inhales, I started to feel strange. Well, let's make that stranger than usual. In my high state of mind, the thoughts being spoken by my inner voice suddenly seemed really bizarre. Who the heck was doing that speaking inside my head? 

I didn't exactly freak out. However, I was hyper-conscious of my inner voice, which now felt more like a mental intruder than a companion that was part of me. It took an hour or two before I felt like my usual self again.

The July 9, 2022 issue of New Scientist has an article called "Internal affairs" in the print edition and "How to understand your inner voice and control your inner critic" in the online edition. Here's a PDF file.
Download How to understand your inner voice and control your inner critic | New Scientist

It turns out that my marijuana-induced experience of my inner voice pointed to a probable psychological truth. The voice inside our head reflects not just one self, but many.

Early theories of consciousness suggested that we each have one “self”, with distinct likes, dislikes and motivations. Yet while we generally feel like one coherent person, many psychologists now consider the singular self to be an illusion. Instead, they argue that we are made up of many selves, each with a different set of motivations and standards.

This means that our inner chatter may be a result of the different roles that form our sense of self. “I as a mother”, for example, would live by a different set of standards than “I as a friend”. And “I the deadline-meeter” has a different set of goals to “I, who likes a bit of celebrity gossip”.

So when I felt that my inner voice was an intruder, that may have been because the thoughts being spoken within my mind were at odds with the wordless sense of self that would have found the intense marijuana high more enjoyable without all that mental chattering.

A sidebar in the article talks about what happened when a woman lost her inner voice.

A silent mind

Losing your inner voice is an experience that neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor understands well. In 1996, a stroke knocked out her ability to talk to herself in her head for five weeks. Now recovered, she describes the aftermath of her stroke as a “blissful silence” without the cacophony of internal speech. It created a feeling of being untethered from her sense of self in a way that left her feeling peaceful. “It was liberating to not maintain the pressure of my ego self,” she says.

But it also had downsides. Bolte Taylor says the lack of a coherent inner narrative left her unable to function. Among other things, she couldn’t determine where her body was positioned in relation to the world around her, was unable to retrieve autobiographical memories and had a lack of self-conscious emotions, most notably embarrassment.

A typology of inner voices makes pretty good sense to me, though based on my own personal mental experience I'd quibble with the nature and number of these characters.

In getting to know our inner voice, it may also be helpful to identify who is actually doing the talking. Puchalska-Wasyl attempted to do this by asking hundreds of people to rate their most common inner speakers based on a variety of emotional outcomes.

Her analysis boiled down their inner speakers to four basic characters: the Faithful Friend, the Proud Rival, the Ambivalent Parent and the Helpless Child.

The Faithful Friend is an advocate: caring and positive and always on hand to provide encouragement. In Puchalska-Wasyl’s sample, this was the most common inner voice experienced. Second was the Proud Rival, a high-fiving positivity coach who challenges a person to up their game. The Ambivalent Parent offers love, support and, at times, a hefty dose of criticism. The Helpless Child is the most negative, arriving with a feeling of powerlessness and a need for support.

Determining which voice pops up most often can be difficult. One option is to pay attention to your inner dialogue and notice which version of your inner voice is talking and how it makes you feel. Given that internal dialogues are a useful tool in psychotherapy, identifying which type of voice predominantly guides you may help you to reframe the conversation for the better, writes Puchalska-Wasyl in a paper on the subject.

Prior experiences and assumptions determine how we view reality

As I've noted previously on this blog, one of the spiritual phrases that now irritates me, yet used to make sense to me, is "as it is." 

There's a mistaken notion that it's possible to see reality as it is, objectively. That notion gets elevated into various sorts of mumbo-jumbo where this or that meditation technique, or whatever, supposedly gives someone the ability to perceive what is actually there with no trace of illusion.

Today I finished reading another chapter in David McRaney's book, How Minds Change. "Socks and Crocs" was super-fascinating. I'll try to do the chapter justice in this summary of it.

He starts off by telling the familiar story of The Dress -- which some people see as white and gold (that's me) and others as black and blue.

There were various theories about why this occurred. A neuroscientist, Pascal Wallisch, is quoted in the chapter, having done extensive research on The Dress and similar images. He wrote a Slate piece, "Two Years Later, We Finally Know Why People Saw 'The Dress' Differently."

Even outside of vision scientists, most people just assume everyone sees the world in the same way. Which is why it’s awkward when disagreements arise—it suggests one party either is ignorant, is malicious, has an agenda, or is crazy. We believe what we see with our own eyes more than almost anything else, which may explain the feuds that occurred when “the dress” first struck and science lacked a clear explanation for what was happening.

Two years later we have a much better idea of what may have been a reason for the varied perceptions: People’s perceived color is also informed by their perception of lighting. And the image of the dress, taken on a cellphone, contained a lot of uncertainty in terms of lighting conditions. Was it taken inside or outside? This matters because it implies artificial or natural light. Was the dress illuminated from the front or the back? This matters because if it was back-lit, it would be in a shadow, otherwise not.

The brain cannot be accused of epistemic modesty. It is well-known that in situations like this—where it faces profound uncertainty—it confidently fills in the gaps in knowledge by making assumptions. Usually, its assumptions are based on what it has most frequently encountered in the past. For instance, if the sensory information is more uncertain, observers will estimate object speeds to be slower than they actually are, presumably because slow objects are much more common in the environment than fast ones. (Indeed, most objects in any given field of view don’t move at all.) Color and lighting are no exception.

As the illumination conditions are impossible to clearly assess in the dress image, people make assumptions about what they are. Different people do this in differing ways, which is what causes the different interpretations of color. At least, that’s what my research shows, thanks to 13,000 people, including many Slate readers, who took surveys on what they saw when they saw the dress and also compiled other information about how they generally perceived the photo and the world.

The dress actually is blue and black. But most people see it as white and gold, at least initially. Why? Well, the more time someone had spent exposed to natural light, the more likely they saw the dress as white and gold. The more time someone had been exposed to artificial light, the more likely they saw the dress as blue and black.

McRaney says:

Either way -- and this is the important point for us going forward -- the ambiguity never registered. Whatever colors people saw subjectively, the image never seemed ambiguous because consciously people experienced only the output of their processes, and the output differed depending on a person's prior experiences with light. The result was a lie told to them by their brains that felt obviously true.

...When we encounter novel information that seems ambiguous, we unknowingly disambiguate it based on what we've experienced in the past. But starting at the level of perception, different life experiences can lead to very different disambiguations, and thus very different subjective realities.

When that happens in the presence of substantial uncertainty, we may vehemently disagree over reality itself -- but since no one on either side is aware of the brain processes leading up to that disagreement, it makes the people who see things differently seem, in a word, wrong.

...In psychology, there's a term for this cognitive blind spot, for when your disambiguations feel undeniably true. It's called naive realism, and it's the belief that you perceive the world as it truly is, free from assumption, interpretation, bias, or the limitations of your senses.

The late psychologist Lee Ross, who helped popularize the term, told me that it leads many of us to believe we arrived at our beliefs, attitudes, and values after careful, rational analysis through unmediated thoughts and perceptions.

Unaware that different priors can lead to different disambiguations, you believe you've been mainlining pure reality for years, and it was your intense study of the bare facts that naturally led to all of your conclusions. According to Ross, this is why people on each side of any debate believe their side is the only one rooted in reality.

...The truth is that we are always reaching our conclusions through disambiguation, but all of that work is done in our different brains without us knowing it. We just experience, in consciousness, the result.

You think you are experiencing the world as it truly is, and when a lot of people are sure their version of reality is the really real version at the same time that a lot of other people are sure that no, in fact, their version is, you get arguments that break the internet (like The Dress), but also the Inquisition, the Hundred Years' War, QAnon, and anti-mask protests during global pandemics.

Here's a figure in the chapter that apparently came from Pascal Wallisch.

McRaney summarizes this approach, called SURFPAD.

When you combine Substantial Uncertainty with Ramified (which means branching) or Forked Priors or Assumptions, you will get Disagreement. 

In other words, when the truth is uncertain, our brains resolve the uncertainty without our knowledge by creating the most likely reality they can imagine based on our prior experiences. People whose brains remove that uncertainty in similar ways will find themselves in agreement, like those who saw the dress as black and blue.

Others whose brains resolve that uncertainty in a different way will also find themselves in agreement, like those who saw the dress as white and gold.

The essence of SURFPAD is that these two groups each feel certain, and among the like-minded it seems those who disagree, no matter their numbers, must be mistaken. In both groups, people then begin searching for reasons why so many people in other groups can't see the truth without entertaining the possibility that they aren't seeing the truth themselves.

There isn't nature and humans. Nature is all there is, including us.

Recently a hugely important bill that, in part, contains hundreds of billions of dollars to fight global warming, passed the U.S. Senate with exactly zero support from Republicans. 

This is so crazy, it makes people in mental hospitals seem positively sane. 

There's no logical or empirical basis for the conservative claim of a need to balance human economic interests with environmental interests. Not when it comes to global warming, which threatens to upend human civilization if greenhouse gas emissions aren't cut dramatically, and soon.

Nature isn't a nice thing to preserve. Nature is what we are. 

It's absurd to consider that we Homo sapiens are somehow separate from nature, or controllers of nature, or that God created nature for our benefit, as many Christians believe. 

No nature. No us. That's the simple obvious fact. 

But just as dualism leads people to wrongly believe that an immaterial soul resides within the physical body, so a long history of dualism in both Western and Eastern philosophy leads people to wrongly believe that the natural world is a pale reflection of a higher supernatural reality that's our true birthright.

I've started reading a book by James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines -- The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. The Introduction speaks of how we need to look differently upon our relation to the natural world.

Here's some excerpts.

More than ever, it is time for re-imaginings. Yet this act of imagination cannot be ours alone. To think against human exceptionalism requires us to think outside and beyond it, and to recognize in Blake's vision the deep truth of his words: nature is imagination itself. 

In this truth is encapsulated the philosophy behind the phrase I used earlier: the more-than-human world. 

Coined by the American ecologist and philosopher David Abram, the 'more than human world' refers to a way of thinking which seeks to override our human tendency to separate ourselves from the natural world. 

This tendency is so pronounced it is rife even within environmentalism, the movement which seems to bring us closer to nature and thereby to preserve it. For in so framing our intentions, we have already set up an implicit separation between ourselves and nature, as if we were two separate entities, unbound by inseparable ties of place and origin.

Conventional terms such as 'the environment', and even 'nature' itself (particularly when opposed to 'culture'), compound the erroneous idea that there is a neat divide in the world between us and them, between humans and non-humans, between our lives and the teeming, multitudinous living and being of the planet.

In contrast, the 'more-than-human world' acknowledges that the very real human world -- the realm of our senses, breath, voice, cognition and culture -- is but one facet of something vastly greater. All human life and being is inextricably entangled with and suffused by everything else.

This broad commonwealth includes every inhabitant of the biosphere: the animals, plants, fungi, bacteria and viruses. It includes the rivers, seas, winds, stones and clouds that support, shake and shadow us.

These animate forces, these companions on the great adventure of time and becoming, have much to teach us and have already taught us a great deal. We are who we are because of them, and we cannot live without them.

...We have come, as the shock of more-than-human consciousness testifies, to think of 'nature' as something separate from ourselves. When we speak of the fantastical futures envisioned by high technology, we speak of a 'new' or 'next' nature, some utopia of computation which further alienates and supplants the actual ground we came from and still stand upon. 

It is time to put aside such adolescent solipsism -- both for the sake of ourselves and of the more-than-human world.

There is only nature, in all its eternal flowering, creating microprocessors and datacentres and satellites just as it produced oceans, trees, magpies, oil and us. Nature is imagination itself. Let us not re-imagine it, then, but begin to imagine anew, with nature as our co-conspirator: our partner, our comrade and our guide.

Anecdotes no substitute for good arguments and evidence

Here's a cartoon from the Skeptical Science web site, which is skeptical about global warming skepticism. It makes a great point about the limitations of personal experience and isolated examples.

Whenever someone claims to have experienced the presence of God or some other supernatural phenomena, a valid response is "So what?" People claim that all sorts of crazy stuff are true. A lot more than a claim is needed before anyone else takes them seriously.

Best way to change someone's mind is to let them change it on their own

I've read another chapter in How Minds Change, by David McRaney.

This one is called "Deep Canvassing," as opposed to the shallow sort of canvassing that I've done occasionally where you knock on the door of a person you want to encourage to vote in a certain way, have a brief chat with them, and hand them a brochure about your favored candidate.

Deep Canvassing is the brainchild of a California group, the Leadership LAB (stands for Learn Act Build), which is the political action arm of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, the largest LGBTQ organization on earth.

The LAB wanted to change opinions about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other people with a queer identity. Through a lot of experience knocking on doors in southern California and having fairly lengthy conversations with people, they evolved an approach to changing minds that research has shown to be effective even with just a single conversation.

(See here and here for stories in the Atlantic and New York Times about that research.)

Below are excerpts from the Deep Canvassing chapter that provide a pretty good overview of what was found to work, and not to work, in changing minds. Basically, providing facts or arguing with someone rarely is productive. Encouraging the person to think about their own thinking -- that's the way to change a mind.

Naturally my own mind wondered about how that applies to this Church of the Churchless blog. After all, since 2004 I've been encouraging people to be spiritually independent rather than a follower of an organized religion, mystical path, or form of spirituality.

Since regular commenters on this blog run the gamut from avid religious believer to fervent atheist, over the years I've observed that by and large, trying to convince someone to alter their frame of mind regarding religion/God/spirituality may be interesting and entertaining, but almost always fruitless.

My own conversion from religious believer to skeptic was along the line of what the LAB folks found, albeit slower. The change in my outlook didn't come from any outside pressure. It evolved organically over quite a few years as, bit by bit, I came to see things differently as regards the guru-led organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

If someone had come to my door during the time I was a RSSB devotee and told me that I'd be better off leaving the group, I would have shut the door in their face. Instead, Laurel, the woman I married in 1990 after getting divorced from my first wife, would simply ask questions about RSSB, some of which I had difficulty answering.

I didn't have a dramatic change of heart about RSSB in the same way the LAB has found that attitudes to LGBTQ people can sometimes alter significantly after a single meaningful conversation. Probably this is because religious beliefs tend to be more complex and more central to a person's identity than how they feel about gays.

But my many talks with Laurel about our spiritual beliefs (at the time she followed a New Age channeler, which caused me to question her about him) seemed to help sow some seeds within my mind that eventually sprouted into me changing my mind about RSSB.

Here's the chapter excerpts. The "I," of course, is the author, David McRaney.

I couldn't shake the idea that I, too, was probably one conversation away from changing my mind about something, maybe a lot of things. But I also recalled how many conversations I'd had that only made my convictions stronger.

I thought about the truthers and all the conversations they had in New York. I wondered what made these interactions different. 

In the training after the videos, Laura handed things over to Steve, and I got my first clue. He opened by telling the crowd that facts don't work. A serene man with a gentle and patient spirit, Steve put away his persistent smile and raised his voice to address the audience on this point.

"There is no superior argument, no piece of information that we can offer, that is going to change their mind," he said, taking a long pause before continuing.

"The only way they are going to change their mind is by changing their own mind -- by talking themselves through their own thinking, by processing things they've never thought about before, things from their own life that are going to help them see things differently."

He stood by a paper easel on which Laura had drawn a cartoon layer cake. Steve pointed to the smallest portion at the top with a candle sticking out. It was labeled "rapport," the next smallest layer was "our story," and the huge base was "their story."

He said to keep that image in mind while standing in front of someone, to remember to spend as little time as possible talking about yourself, just enough to show that you are friendly, that you aren't selling anything.

Show you are genuinely interested in what they have to say. That, he said, keeps them from assuming a defensive position. You should share your story, he said, pointing to the portion of the cake that sat on top of the biggest layer, but it's their story that should take up most of the conversation.

You want them to think about their own thinking.

The team tossed out lots of metaphors like these. For instance, Steve later said to think of questions as keys on a giant ring. If you keep asking and listening, he told the crowd, one of those keys was bound to unlock the door to a personal experience related to the topic.

Once that real, lived memory was out in the open, you could (if done correctly) steer the conversation away from the world of conclusions with their facts googled for support, away from ideological abstractions and into the world of concrete details from that individual's personal experiences.

It was there, and only there, he said, that a single conversation could change someone's mind.

...Steve would tell me later that they had learned over many conversations that reasons, justifications, and explanations for maintaining one's existing opinion can be endless, spawning like heads of a hydra. If you cut away one, two more would appear to take its place.

Deep canvassers want to avoid that unwinnable fight. To do that they allow a person's justifications to remain unchallenged. They nod and listen.

The idea is to move forward, make the person feel heard and respected, avoid arguing over a person's conclusions, and instead work to discover the motivations behind them. To that end, the next step is to evoke a person's emotional response to the issue. 

...I nodded, still unsure why facts and logic were such a bad idea.

Steve explained that after thousands of recorded conversations they had found that battling over differing interpretations of the evidence kept the people they met from exploring why they felt so strongly one way or the other.

People could remain in the logic space doing battle with the canvasser's facts for hours and never leave, safe and unable to tap into why those facts evoked such powerful feelings. The LAB tried arguing the facts for years, and it had long proved a waste of time.

"Doing this work has taught me that people make their decisions about issues like this, in their life and when they're voting, at a really emotional, visceral level," said Steve.

"What I envision when I'm standing in front of a voter is that people have this intellectual, logical reasoning process. That's one part of how they process the world and make decisions. But they have this almost entirely separate emotional reasoning process which is based on feelings and things they've experienced."

Steve said they used to hand-hold people and try to walk them through why certain facts should be compelling, why they should obviously change their minds, but his hunch now is that it will never work. 

A canvasser's reasoning can't be copied and pasted into another person. The facts that matter to them probably won't matter to the other person at all.

Great Zen story about letting go

Recently I tried to tell someone about a story in the Zen Flesh, Zen Bones book that I've had since my college days, 1966-71. 

(It's got a price of 95 cents on the cover. I see that Amazon has a copy of that 1961 edition listed for $81.53. But to me its priceless (almost), I've enjoyed the book so much over the years.)

When I checked the book today, I found that while I'd gotten the gist of the story correct, but not the details. Regardless, I really like the story.

Great advice about letting go, whether of the past or of anything else that needs releasing.

This was my misremembered version.

Two Zen monks who are walking along come to a river where a woman is standing on a bank, unable to cross the rushing water.

 

One monk puts her on his back and carries her across. The monks then walk on in silence for a while until his companion says, “We monks are not supposed to have anything to do with women. Why did you do what you did?” The other monk says, “I dropped her a mile back. You are still carrying her in your mind.”

 

And this is the version in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. 

Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.

Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection. 

"Come on, girl," said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.

Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he could no longer restrain himself.

"We monks don't go near females," he told Tanzan, "especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?"

"I left the girl there," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her?"

Leaving dogma behind is like discarding a confining diving suit

I've read a couple of chapters in David McRaney's book, "How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion." 

One chapter I skipped ahead to read, because I was curious to learn how some people enmeshed in the hateful Westboro Baptist Church were able to leave this Christian cult. 

(The book says Westboro members would do things like protesting the funeral of Matthew Shepard, "a young gay man who was beaten, tortured, and left for dead in a remote portion of Wyoming by two men who offered him a ride home from a bar. At his funeral, the church carried signs that read NO TEARS FOR QUEERS.")

Here's some excerpts from the Westboro chapter. They're about Zach, who used to be a Westboro member. The first passage relates to the fact that a gay waiter at an Olive Garden restaurant recognized Zach as having recently left Westboro.

After that meal [which the gay waiter paid for], he started wondering if all of the assumptions tied to his former life were true. If his beliefs about gay men were wrong, then what else? 

His first thoughts were of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and how Westboro had told them the girls who go to their concerts were "simple sluts." Simple-minded, stupid, and promiscuous. He immediately, and for the first time, questioned it.

He felt overwhelmed by a torrent of information that he once considered noise. All at once, he began to feel an intense uncertainty not only about what was true, but about who he was.

He said the most alarming thing was the realization that if he had gone to Olive Garden while he was still in the church, the waiter's act of kindness might not have made any difference at all. He would have found a way to interpret it differently.

Zach was still unpacking what it all meant. He was shocked to realize he was open to all sorts of change, and once he realized it, an array of alternative beliefs, attitudes, and values became newly acceptable.

"The first time I talked to a Jewish person, I thought what Westboro taught me at first, and then I was like, 'I don't want to listen to that.' I want to try to see reality for what it is. I want to think with an open mind and to make discoveries. There's a great deal of mystery in this world that I walk in, in this universe."

Today, he said, "I have gay friends. I have bisexual friends. I have pansexual friends." He was still struggling, though, still rebuilding his models, still expanding his mind. Zach said he recently began dabbling with Buddhism.

Zach reiterated that he didn't leave the church because he changed his opinions; he changed his opinions because he left the church. And he left the church because it had become intolerable for other reasons. 

Leaving opened him up to the possibility he could be wrong about many things, and that began a difficult period of rebirth.

...His whole life, Zach remained trapped in dogma, wearing it like a diving suit, interacting with the same world as the people shouting from across the picket line but never making actual human connection with it.

Zach has since taken off that suit.

He is even taking part in the parallel universe across the street. He's spent time at Equality House and participated in pickets against the church, holding signs with messages like YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL and FORGIVE AND FORGET. At those protests, he shouts, "Let's kill them with kindness," and "Let's show them what loving your neighbor is all about."

...I said it reminded me of what we had spoken about earlier, an insight from Piaget: how once we learn something is incorrect, we also learn that the source from which we learned that thing can be incorrect, which opens us up to the idea that maybe the sources we trust could be wrong about a lot of other things.

In science, intuition arises from facts, not facts from intuition

I found a column by Chandra Prescod-Weinstein in the July 9, 2022 issue of New Scientist interesting for several reasons. 

This professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire has a take on the expanding universe that I hadn't come across before. As she says in the column, the simplest way to describe this is a familiar one: just as the distance between dots on a balloon that fills with air will increase as the balloon expands, so do galaxies within our universe.

But this image is misleading, because a balloon exists in a larger reality, like a room. So we can be led to think that the universe is expanding into a larger space, which can't be correct, since space-time is what's expanding. You'll see that Prescod-Weinstein finds the mathematics of relativity theory to be much superior to the balloon analogy. Unfortunately, most of us can't grasp that mathematics.

It's often said that intuition plays a big role in science, as in everyday life. However, intuition isn't divorced from facts, but is an outgrowth of facts. I experience this whenever I'm in the market for a new car. I'll research some automotive options for months, reading reviews, perusing car manufacturer web sites, watching You Tube videos, and such.

All that information will confuse me at first. I'll see the pros and cons of various cars, unable to decide which would be best for me. Then one day... I know. I don't consciously arrive at the knowing. My mind just settles on an intuitive choice: Car X is what I should buy, not Cars A, B, or C. But without all the facts I'd learned, my brain wouldn't have been able to come up with a wise intuitive decision. Prescod-Weinstein speaks of something similar.

I've ordered her book, The Disordered Cosmos. At first I was going to pass on it after looking at the Amazon listing, since the book includes more than science. In the end, though, I decided that I liked her non-traditional outlook on science, as described in the listing.

One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly nontraditional, and grounded in Black and queer feminist lineages. 

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society, beginning with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.

Here's her New Scientist column.

THE origin story we tell about the universe goes roughly like this: there may have been a big bang (we aren’t sure), then space-time expanded extremely rapidly (we think) and has continued to expand ever since, even picking up the pace in relatively recent times (we are fairly certain). It is a nice story, and one I largely believe is true. But what does it mean when we say that space-time expanded?

In presentations to broad audiences, I explain by asking people to imagine an unfilled balloon with special dots on it. Imagine that as the balloon fills with air, the dots stay the same size, but, as one would expect, the distance between the dots expands. Pretend those dots are galaxies and, roughly speaking, this is what is happening to space-time.

The expansion of space-time means the space-time between galaxies grows, making the distance between galaxies larger as time goes on. There are exceptions to this. Galaxies that are gravitationally bound to each other won’t be pulled apart; for example, the Milky Way and Andromeda are on course to eventually collide and merge. The Milky Way also has many satellite galaxies in its orbit or otherwise gravitationally bound to it.

Other than ties through gravity, galaxies are generally “moving” away from each other because space-time continues to grow between them. The balloon analogy helps us understand this with some intuition, without needing to take several years of courses in order to fully understand general relativity as a technical subject. However, it also introduces problems that one can avoid if the subject is only looked at in mathematical terms.

As a scientist with deep knowledge of general relativity – the first advanced physics subject I trained in – I don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of time interpreting the equations to suit my intuition. Rather, part of my job is to develop new intuition based on the latest results from mathematical derivations, lab experiments and astronomical observations. The way I lead my life as a scientist involves a foundational commitment to looking at the world as it is and revising my understanding as I gather new information.

In the case of expanding space-time, I have to think carefully about what I mean by “space-time”. General relativity teaches me to think about space-time as a phenomenon that is described by the ruler we use to measure distances, an equation we call the metric. Therefore, expanding space-time means that the metric changes with time in such a way that spatial distances get larger as time goes on. This is something of an idealisation: we know this isn’t happening on the scales of everyday life here on Earth.

I am lucky because I can work through the equations and get a feeling for how this works mathematically, which makes it intuitive in a language that has more words than everyday English. This raises the question of translation from my technical, mathematical vocabulary into phrases that are comprehensible to broader audiences.

So we return to the balloon, which, yes, gives some good intuition, but can also get a reader thinking. Specifically, I know at least one person who is a regular reader of this column (thank you!) started to wonder where the space-time is expanding into. Certainly that is a limit of the balloon analogy. When we are blowing up a balloon, the balloon is expanding into the room we are in. Another way of putting it is that the balloon exists in a background, where the room is that background.

I introduce this way of thinking because it is one we scientists use when we describe general relativity, which we call a “background independent theory”. Relativity is described in this way because it doesn’t matter how we map out the coordinates in this theory, the physical reality it describes stays the same. There is a lot more to unpack here and not enough space (or time!), so let me just point out that this implies the space-time of general relativity doesn’t have a room. In other words, space-time is expanding, but into nothing in particular. The expansion is simply a growth in distances. It isn’t a material either, so it isn’t coming from somewhere. The distances just grow and grow.

Weird, right? If you don’t think so, that itself is odd. As I write in The Disordered Cosmos (now available in paperback), the universe is always more queer and fantastical than we think. The fundamental nature of space-time is an example of this fact. We exist in space-time and nothing in daily life necessarily makes us think it is a particularly strange phenomenon. Then again, we exist, and we are pretty odd, so maybe we should expect the nature of most things to be, on some level, unexpected.