Church of the Churchless

Experience is part of physical reality

Sometimes -- well, actually, quite a lot of times -- I find people arguing on this blog, and in other places, that science doesn't know how to deal with personal experience.

Further, that because experience seems to be something ineffable, as is consciousness (likely there's no difference between experience and consciousness), this means that the most intimate part of our being is outside the domain of science, which deals with physical reality.

Galen Strawson, a philosopher, disagrees. I wrote about his take on consciousness in "The hard problem isn't the nature of consciousness, but of matter." 

Many make the same mistake [as Leibniz] today -- the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can't be physical.

We don't. We don't know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff except -- Russell again -- insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience. 

We find this idea extremely difficult because we're so very deeply committed to the belief that we know more about the physical than we do, and (in particular) know enough to know that consciousness can't be physical. 

In Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me," he makes a similar point as regards experience.

So what do we know for sure? When we ask this question we get, first, an old answer. We know, each of us individually, that we exist, as Descartes pointed out. We also encounter another more general certainty, as Descartes also pointed out

We encounter the fact of consciousness, conscious experience, experience, the fact of the subjective qualitative character or "phenomenological" character of experience. The existence of experience is a certainly known general fact about concrete reality.

It is, therefor, for anyone who takes the concrete real to be entirely natural, a certainly known natural fact. It is therefore, for any realistic naturalist, a certainly known physical fact. So we have our starting point. 

The necessary, inevitable starting point of genuine, realistic  naturalism, real naturalism, as I call it, is outright realism about experience, conscious experience. 

...It's true, of course, that experience seems utterly and bewilderingly different from toe-stubbing physical stuff as it is ordinarily conceived of in everyday life. But this doesn't give us any reason to think that experience isn't wholly physical.

It's also true that experience seems bewilderingly different from physical stuff as it is usually conceived of in the physics laboratory. But this, again, doesn't give us any reason to think that experience isn't wholly physical.

India's 1947 partition shows destructiveness of religion

My previous blog post was about Indian Prime Minister Modi's involvement in the Gujarat massacre of 2002, where about 1,000 people (mostly Muslims, I assume) were killed by Hindu nationalists.

But that death toll is nothing compared to what happened after the British partitioned India into a Muslim territory and non-Muslim territory in 1947. 

I don't know a lot about the Indian Partition. However, I learned something about it in an article in the January 2 & 9 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine article is called "Blood Lines: Seventy-five years after Indian Partition, have we learned how to say what happened?"

The online article is called, "Seventy-five Years after Indian Partition, Who Owns the Narrative?: Literature once filled in archival gaps by saying the unsayable. Now a younger generation is finding new modes of telling the story and finding new stories to tell." 

Here's a PDF file.
Download Seventy-five Years After Indian Partition Who Owns the Narrative?  | The New Yorker

It's heartbreaking to read how the partition was described by people who lived through it and in novels that cast a light on the horrendous happening through the lens of fact-based fiction. 

A Wikipedia article about the Partition of India says that Ghandi was opposed to the splitting up of India. In retrospect, he probably was right. However, for a variety of reasons the British rushed through a not very well thought-out plan for partitioning along religious lines. Wikipedia says:

The two-nation theory is the ideology that the primary identity and unifying denominator of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent is their religion, rather than their language or ethnicity, and therefore Indian Hindus and Muslims are two distinct nations regardless of commonalities. It argued that religion resulted in cultural and social differences between Muslims and Hindus. The two-nation theory was a founding principle of the Pakistan Movement (i.e., the ideology of Pakistan as a Muslim nation-state in South Asia), and the partition of India in 1947.

The ideology that religion is the determining factor in defining the nationality of Indian Muslims was undertaken by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who termed it as the awakening of Muslims for the creation of Pakistan. It is also a source of inspiration to several Hindu nationalist organizations, with causes as varied as the redefinition of Indian Muslims as non-Indian foreigners and second-class citizens in India, the expulsion of all Muslims from India, the establishment of a legally Hindu state in India, prohibition of conversions to Islam, and the promotion of conversions or reconversions of Indian Muslims to Hinduism. 

There are varying interpretations of the two-nation theory, based on whether the two postulated nationalities can coexist in one territory or not, with radically different implications. One interpretation argued for sovereign autonomy, including the right to secede, for Muslim-majority areas of the Indian subcontinent, but without any transfer of populations (i.e., Hindus and Muslims would continue to live together).

A different interpretation contends that Hindus and Muslims constitute "two distinct and frequently antagonistic ways of life and that therefore they cannot coexist in one nation." In this version, a transfer of populations (i.e., the total removal of Hindus from Muslim-majority areas and the total removal of Muslims from Hindu-majority areas) was a desirable step towards a complete separation of two incompatible nations that "cannot coexist in a harmonious relationship."

Opposition to the theory has come from two sources. The first is the concept of a single Indian nation, of which Hindus and Muslims are two intertwined communities. This is a founding principle of the modern, officially-secular Republic of India. Even after the formation of Pakistan, debates on whether Muslims and Hindus are distinct nationalities or not continued in that country as well. The second source of opposition is the concept that while Indians are not one nation, neither are the Muslims or Hindus of the subcontinent, and it is instead the relatively homogeneous provincial units of the subcontinent which are true nations and deserving of sovereignty; the Baloch have presented this view, Sindhi, and Pashtun sub-nationalities of Pakistan and the Assamese  and Punjabi sub-nationalities of India.

In the end, religion was the primary criterion for dividing India into Muslim and non-Muslim nations. Of course, many Muslims still live in India, and I assume some Hindus, Sikhs, and members of other religions live in Pakistan and what is now Bangladesh. 

What's beyond sad is how communities where Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs used to live together harmoniously were afflicted by massive outbreaks of violence, which led to one of the largest migrations in human history. Here's how The New Yorker story by Perul Sehgal starts out.

Before it was an edict, and a death sentence, it was a rumor. To many, it must have seemed improbable; I imagine my grandmother, buying her vegetables at the market, settling her baby on her hip, craning to hear the news—a border, where? Two borders, to be exact.

On the eve of their departure, in 1947, after more than three hundred years on the subcontinent, the British sliced the land into a Hindu-majority India flanked by a Muslim-majority West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), a thousand miles apart. The boundaries were drawn up in five weeks by an English barrister who had famously never before been east of Paris; he flew home directly afterward and burned his papers. The slash of his pen is known as Partition.

A tidy word, “Partition.” Amid what the Punjabis call the raula—the “uproar”—the region convulsed with violence, Hindus and Sikhs on one side, Muslims on the other. Entire villages were massacred. Neighbors turned on each other. It’s estimated that a million people were killed, and that seventy-five thousand women and girls were abducted and raped, a third of them under the age of twelve. Millions of refugees fled in one of the largest and most rapid migrations in history.

“Blood trains” crisscrossed the fresh border, carrying silent cargo—passengers slaughtered during the journey. Cities transformed into open-air refugee camps, like the one in Delhi to which my grandmother escaped in the night, alone with her children, feeding the baby opium, the story goes, so he would not cry.

Bhisham Sahni’s “Tamas,” a 1973 Hindi novel set in that period, brings such a camp to life. The exhausted refugees are greeted by a functionary of the Relief Committee with the unpropitious nickname Statistics Babu. “I want figures, only figures, nothing but figures,” he instructs. The refugees mill around him, unhearing. They weep, stare blankly. They repeat, in exasperating detail, every step of their journeys. “Why don’t you understand?” Statistics Babu pleads. “I am not here to listen to the whole ‘Ramayana.’ Give me figures—how many dead, how many wounded, how much loss of property and goods. That is all.”

Is that where the story lies? What do “figures, only figures” convey of the full horror and absurdity of 1947? Of a border that cut through forests, families, and shrines, that saw wild animals apportioned between the two countries and historical artifacts snapped in half?

In “Tamas,” the testimonies of the survivors reveal all that records omit and conceal. A refugee is desperate to recover his wife’s gold bangles: won’t Statistics Babu help him? Those bangles still circle his wife’s wrists, however, and she lies at the bottom of a well. It is a detail perhaps lifted from the case of the real-life village of Thoa Khalsa, now in Pakistan, where almost a hundred Sikh women drowned themselves and their children.

We don’t have the figures for women killed by their own families or forced to kill themselves in the name of protecting their honor. There are no records of those who died of heartbreak. My family migrated from an area not far from Thoa Khalsa. Only my great-uncle remained; he lay beheaded in the courtyard of his home. Three months later, his wife died—of grief, some say. Their children were scattered. There are no firm figures available for orphaned children, or for children abandoned along the journey because they were too small to walk quickly enough.

What I find difficult to understand, from my perspective here in the United States, is how it can be that India is still convulsed by Hindu-Muslim violence, with Prime Minister Modi's political party being devoted to Hindu nationalism.

Don't the people of India realize that the horrors of the Indian Partition must never be repeated, even on a much smaller scale? The United States has had to come to grips with the horror of slavery and the injustices African-Americans have had to deal with from 1619 to the present.

But at least there's an almost universal consensus that discrimination against Blacks has to be a thing of the past, though there's a lot of debate about how this is to be achieved. In India, though, my understanding is that Modi and his political party are dedicated to the proposition that Muslims are second-class citizens, and that India is basically a Hindu nation.

Sure, we have Christian nationalists in the United States. However, they are a fringe political movement.  Some Christian nationalists get elected to political positions, but they're nowhere close to controlling the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party, which controls the presidency and Senate, totally rejects Christian nationalism.

Which is why I worry about India. If Modi retains power in the 2024 elections, which recent polling says seems likely, Hindu nationalism will have even more of a foothold in India. That strikes me as really unfortunate, if it happens.

India's Modi doesn't want people to see BBC documentary critical of him

Politicians are much the same the world over. They hate criticism. But in countries with robust freedom of speech and a free press, like the United States, politicians find it difficult to shut down criticism of them.

Not so in India, where Prime Minister Modi and his allies are working hard to keep people from seeing a BBC documentary, "India: the Modi Question."

TWITTER AND YOUTUBE censored a report critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in coordination with the government of India, according to a top Indian official. Officials called for the Big Tech companies to take action against a BBC documentary exploring Modi’s role in a genocidal 2002 massacre in the Indian state of Gujarat, which the officials deemed a “propaganda piece.”

In a series of posts, Kanchan Gupta, senior adviser at the Indian government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, denounced the BBC documentary as “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage.” He said that both Twitter and YouTube had been ordered to block links to the film, before adding that the platforms “have complied with the directions.” Gupta’s statements coincided with posts from Twitter users in India who claimed to have shared links to the documentary but whose posts were later removed and replaced with a legal notice.

...The Gujarat riots, as the violence is sometimes known, occurred in 2002, when Modi was the chief minister of the state. A group of militants aligned with the Hindu nationalist movement, which encompasses Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, launched a violent campaign against local Muslims. Modi, who has been accused of personally encouraging the violence, reportedly told police forces to stand down in the face of the ongoing violence, which killed about 1,000 people.

“The documentary has unnerved Mr. Modi as he continues to evade accountability for his complicity in the violence,” Naik, the journalist, said. “He sees the documentary as a threat to his image internationally and has launched an unprecedented crackdown in India.”

Of course, when the Indian government tells people not to watch the documentary, that's tremendous free advertising for it.

I haven't watched the documentary yet. It's difficult to find it online without paying for a subscription to some video/movie service. The best source I could find was the IslamiCity web site, which says it provides "a non-sectarian, comprehensive and holistic view of Islam and Muslims."

Part 1 of the documentary is here on that site. Part 2 of the documentary is here on that site.

The BBC is a respected organization, so my bet is that the documentary mostly, if not totally, tells the truth about the Gujarat violence and Modi's subsequent embracing of extreme Hindu nationalism. 

Courageous people in India are screening the documentary despite the government's threats against those who do this. It's really disturbing that police in riot gear were sent to a university in advance of a planned screening. 

If Modi thinks the documentary is untrue or unfair to him, he could have commented on it prior to its release, as the BBC requested. But he didn't do this, which indicates to me that Modi just doesn't like the truth being revealed about his role in the Gujarat killings.

This episode puts Modi, and India, in a bad light. A Washington Post story is scathing. Here's excerpts from "Censorship, arrests, power cuts. India scrambles to block BBC documentary."

NEW DELHI — The film had already been banned, the social media posts censored. Now, the students huddled without light or electricity around glowing smartphones to watch what their government had deemed to be subversive foreign propaganda.

China? No. They were in India, ostensibly the world’s largest democracy, and watching the BBC.

The Indian government over the past week has embarked on an extraordinary campaign to prevent its citizens from viewing a new documentary by the British broadcaster that explores Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role in a deadly 2002 riot that saw more than 1,000 people — mostly Muslims — killed.

Indian officials, invoking emergency powers, ordered clips from the documentary to be censored on social media platforms including YouTube and Twitter. The Foreign Ministry spokesman lambasted the BBC production as a “propaganda piece” made with a “colonial mind-set.” One junior minister from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) declared that watching the film amounted to “treason.”

On Tuesday evening, authorities cut electricity to the student union hall at New Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University in an attempt to prevent the film being screened — a move that only provoked defiant students around the country to try to host more viewings.

...All told, the remarkable steps taken by the government seemed to reinforce a central point of the BBC series: that the world’s largest democracy was sliding into authoritarianism under Modi, who rose to national power in 2014 and won reelection in 2019 on a Hindu nationalist platform.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific policy director of the digital rights group Access Now, said the episode should “give more attention” to the “dangerous situation” of eroding civil liberties in India. The government has become “far more efficient and aggressive” in blocking content during moments of national political controversy, he said.

“How is it acceptable for India, as a democracy, to be ordering such a large amount of web censorship in the country?” Chima said. “You have to look at this incident as part of a cumulative wave of censorship.”

More on why mindfulness is better than mantra meditation

It goes without saying, but I'll say it regardless, that my Church of the Churchless blog posts reflect what I find interesting and what makes sense to me. 

If you disagree with a post, naturally that's wonderful. You're you. I'm me. We're different people, so we're going to look at some things differently. Maybe a lot of things differently. 

All I can do is explain myself as best I can, while all you can do is explain yourself as best you can in comments on my blog posts -- should you choose to do that.

So here's another try at explaining why I view mindfulness as being better than using a mantra, either in meditation or outside of meditation, which is what I did for the 35 years I embraced a mantra when I was devoted to the spiritual practice taught by Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB).

I'll start by sharing what a friend said to me recently. She was meditating in the evening before going to bed. She likes the idea of oneness (as do I) and was getting frustrated with how her busy thoughts were keeping her from the inner quiet that she thought was needed to feel a sense of oneness.

Then a realization came over her: oneness means accepting everything, including her thoughts. Thus by viewing her thoughts as unwelcome, she was moving further away from oneness, while accepting them would bring her closer to oneness.

That happens to be a basic tenet of mindfulness, which typically is defined along this line: "a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations."

A mantra, on the other hand, generally is used as a means to stop thoughts other than the repetition of the mantra. 

That can be a way to practice concentration, a laudable aim. But it comes with a cost, since obviously when the mantra is the focus of attention, that leaves the mantra-repeater with less of an ability to focus on other things, both outside in the world and inside their mind.

In the case of RSSB, this was taken to an extreme. The mantra was composed of the five names of supposed rulers of supernatural regions of reality. By repeating these "Five Holy Names," the idea was that the consciousness of the meditator would leave behind the physical world and enter a higher one.

Thus this is an example of a mantra being a world-denying technique. RSSB disciples also were supposed to repeat the mantra as much as possible during the rest of the day outside of meditation, so long as they didn't have to concentrate on other things.

The "so long as" echoes what I've been saying in both my previous post on this subject, and this one. By its very nature, a mantra prevents us from paying full attention both to things out there in the world, and to things in here in our mind.

Imagine having an intimate conversation with someone who, while you're talking about something important to you, is mentally repeating a mantra instead of closely listening to you. If their mantra is "God," they're saying God, God, God... with their inner voice rather than focusing on you and what you're saying.

Aside from being impolite, this shows that a mantra can divide us from the reality both outside and inside us. It isn't quite like a child yelling at a parent "I can't hear you! I can't hear you!" as they stick their fingers in their ears after being told it's time to get ready for bed.

But it's damn close to that. I know, because like I said, for 35 years I did my best to repeat my RSSB mantra when I didn't have to concentrate on something else during my time outside of mediation. 

I'll admit that during the latter part of those 35 years I repeated the mantra less and less, since by that time I'd come to realize that repeating it was distancing me from other people, nature, and many other things.

That said, I understand why a mantra appeals to people. It's a simple way of meditating. It's easy to repeat a mantra. If you want to stop unwelcome thoughts, a mantra can be an effective way of doing this.

However, I've come to view a mantra as being akin to the hard style martial arts I embraced for about 13 years during my karate phase. It can knock down thoughts and feelings with a sort of brute force. Often effective, it isn't very elegant.

Mindfulness, on the other hand, is more difficult to learn than mantra meditation. It's akin to soft style martial arts like Tai Chi, which I've been practicing for the past 19 years. Mindfulness accepts whatever is present in reality, gently dealing with feelings, thoughts, and other things that need redirecting not through force, but by welcoming them as they are, then altering their direction with minimal exertion.

Again, though, you may disagree. This is just my experience.  

Mantra versus mindfulness -- which is better?

Paying $24.95 for a Learn to Meditate course based on a mantra, that is roughly akin to the Transcendental Meditation approach, had at least one immediate benefit for me.

It got me to pondering the pros and cons of using a mantra, versus pursuing mindfulness.

This is going to be a fairly short blog post, because after a couple of days where I experimented with repeating the one-word mantra that I chose for the course -- "peace" -- it dawned on me why I gave up on using a mantra and made mindfulness my meditation. 

Yes, I still play around with repeating a mantra. 

But almost always I've been doing this when going to sleep, when my eyes are closed and I'm not doing anything except falling asleep. As I said in the above-linked post:

When I was really into repeating a mantra, I found that this created a distance between what I was doing physically and my awareness, because part of my mental energy was devoted to the mantra while, say, I was doing the dishes.

Not surprisingly, that same distancing popped up when I tried repeating my "peace" mantra during the day when I was doing things. It was fine when I spent ten minutes or so in closed-eyes meditation during my morning reading/meditating time.

Not so fine when I was trying to repeat the mantra while doing anything else. I didn't like the split between that word being repeated in my head and what I was doing with my body.

So I found that what I wrote about in 2015 still held true for me: Mantra meditation basically is useless. For me, at least. In that post I quoted from a 2012 post. Guess I needed a $24.95 reminder.

I've never practiced Transcendental Meditation (TM). But for over forty years I've meditated daily, mostly using a mantra (a word or words repeated over and over) just as TM does.

...For most of those forty years I used a mantra taught by a Sant Mat organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, that was known as the Five Holy Names. The mantra bore some resemblance to the ones used by the Transcendental Meditation folks. 

...I've come to much the same concluson as Sudarsha has: following the breath mindfully is a better meditation approach than is repeating a mantra mindlessly. 

...Why would you repeat a mantra in your mind when your goal is to be aware of what exists in what I like to call really real reality?

It'd be ridiculous to remain focused on mentally repeating sex, sex, sex, sex, sex when a beautiful willing partner is lying next to you on a bed, arms outstretched for your embrace. 

Likewise, it'd be ridiculous to keep saying sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset, sunset as the REAL sun is dipping below the horizon, displaying gorgeous colors across the sky.

And even if your aim is religious, does it make any sense to utter God, God, God, God, God (or other supposed names of divinity) instead of being receptively open to whatever divine presence might be capable of being experienced at the moment?

Occasionally I still use a mantra, but more and more it seems pointless to speak repeated words inside my head. Life is going on all the time I'm awake and aware; experience is happening all the time I'm awake and aware.

A mantra now seems like an unnecessary distraction from life and experience. When I'm ballroom dancing, I don't think to myself dance, dance, dance, dance, dance. I just dance. 

I pay $24.95 for a Learn to Meditate course

As I was reading Galen Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc.", I read a mention by Stawson that he'd tried out psychologist Patricia Carrington's approach to meditation, liked it, but didn't stick with it for very long.

Curious, I headed to Carrington's web site, which has sort of an old-fashioned internet vibe to it. I poked around the site for a while, focusing on what she has to say about meditation, and liked her emphasis on meditation being as effortless as possible.

Since I'm a firm believer in spiritual laziness, I decided to fork over $24.95 for her Learn to Meditate course.

When the materials were delivered to me via an email message, I realized that if her web site seemed like something out of the early 2000's internet era, Carrington's meditation instruction manual and accompanying audio files seemed even more ancient.

Kind of charming in an old-fashioned way. Also kind of irritating. But I figured that for $24.95, the cost of some hard cover books that I buy, I shouldn't expect the meditation course to be packaged in a fancy manner.

Since I've been meditating every day for more than fifty years, I didn't expect to learn anything wildly new. Which I didn't. Carrington basically has repackaged the mantra-based approach of Transcendental Meditation into a pleasingly secular format with no religious overtones.

You get to pick your own one-word mantra. She suggests 16 or so. I settled on "peace."

Carrington says that you shouldn't share your mantra, though it isn't secret. So I've broken that rule. Her manual contains lots of other rules, which is kind of strange, since she says that her meditation approach is flexible, with the meditator being free to adapt her approach as desired.

For example, Carrington doesn't want you to chew gum while meditating because you might become so relaxed, you swallow the gum and choke yourself to death. And you're not supposed to ingest caffeine before meditating. Or alcohol. Or recreational drugs. Or eat more than a very light meal.

Naturally I ignored all those "should's," which drastically shortened the time it took for me to read her meditation manual. I think because Carrington is a licensed psychologist, she felt like she needed to cover her legal bases by warning purchasers of her meditation course to not do anything that might be remotely risky.

I did listen to several of her audio recordings. They were fine. Nothing new to me. Just a pleasant introduction to meditation. I'm enjoying my "peace" mantra, which is a nice change of pace from the mindfulness meditation I've been focusing on for quite a few years, after immersing myself in a more complex form of mantra meditation for over three decades.

I like how Carrington says that while effortful concentration works for some highly motivated meditators, her approach is to just let the mantra do its thing with as little effort as possible. If the mind wanders, no problem. Return to the mantra gently.

She appears to view positive change as happening naturally in meditation. It isn't something to be pursued, as that just makes meditation into another item on our to-do list.

There's some comparisons between mindfulness and mantra meditation on her web site that are fairly interesting. That link contains a description of her own approach.

My meditation program is not meant to “numb” any individual from experiencing and expressing our natural human tendencies to feel emotions of compassion, empathy, and full engagement with one’s surroundings.

I teach a type of mantra meditation, Clinically Standardized Meditation (CSM), which has much in common [with] Transcendental Meditation (TM).  I also teach Woolfolk’s breathing meditation, which is much like Benson’s technique.

CSM is a modern form of meditation that has been widely used, both in clinical practice to support psychotherapy, and as a self-taught method to create profound individual personality and life changes.

Unlike TM, or other forms of meditation, CSM, has no ceremonious or pre-conceptive goals, rather the meditator makes preparations to create a quiet space in which to relax and repeat a short, personally selected, standardized soothing sound, a “mantra.”

CSM is, ultimately, a non-directive form of meditating that is remarkably effective in bringing about profound positive changes in the meditator and it is very safe and simple to use. Furthermore, its beneficial effects have been widely supported by research. It is not based upon any religion or strict protocol.

With the CSM instruction, you can experience both mantra and breathing meditations to see how each feels for you, your family, and what comfortably compliments your goals for a meditative experience.

Believing in free will isolates us

Before I head off into other directions in my blog posts, I want to share some additional thoughts about free will, and the lack thereof -- a subject that has been a theme of mine recently.

(And also non-recently, since I've written a lot about free will over the years.)

The main reason I don't believe in free will is that there doesn't seem to be any good reason to believe in it. By and large I prefer truth over falsehood, reality over illusion. Especially when it comes to science. Movies, novels, and TV shows -- I'm fine with falsehoods and illusions there.

While it certainly seems that we humans possess free will, that subjective feeling doesn't count for much when it comes to understanding reality.

After all, it also feels like consciousness is something ethereal, whereas actually it is the product of electrochemical goings-on in the brain. If you truly believe that your consciousness is non-physical, ask someone to hit you on your head with a baseball bat and see if your consciousness is unchanged.

Often an objection is raised to those who, like me, don't believe that people are ultimately morally responsible for their actions, since we humans lack free will. If nobody believed in free will, goes the argument, how could society hold people accountable for bad behavior and reward people for good behavior?

The usual response is that echoed by Galen Strawson in his book, "Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc." Strawson, a philosopher, rejects free will. But he says in an interview that comprises a chapter in his book:

You may be convinced that determinism is true: You may believe that in five -- two -- minutes' time you will be able to look back on the situation you are now in and say truly, of what you will by then have done, "It was determined that I should do that."

But even if you do fervently believe this, I still don't think it's going to touch the feel of DMR [deep moral responsibility] that you have right now as you stand there. 

...Given that the experience of DMR is seemingly inevitable in our everyday lives, can we shake free of it, can we at least diminish it, can we somehow truly live, breathe the impossibility of DMR, and not just accept it as a merely theoretical context?

We have to remember that evolution isn't much concerned with whether living beings are in touch with objective reality. Evolution favors changes in living beings that enhance their survival value, their ability to reproduce and pass on their genetic heritage to their offspring.

A feeling that we humans have free will seemingly has survival value. It puts our individuality front and center. Those two words, "free" and "will," are inherently egoistic. Here I am, an isolated being, free to do as I want by exercising my will.

This attitude, of course, ignores reality.

We all are dependent on the laws of nature and other people for our existence. We all are heavily influenced by our genetics that's handed down by countless generations of our ancestors, both human and non-human. We all are also heavily influenced by the experiences we have from the first breath we take at our birth until the last breath we take at our death.

All of that determines what we do and think and feel, even if it seems like we are able to freely choose what actions we take, what thoughts are in our mind, and what emotions impact us.

I'd much rather view myself as an integral aspect of the whole of reality, rather than as an isolated part disconnected from outside influences by my supposed free will. Aside from that second option not making any sense, it's unappealing.

There are too many divisions in the world: political, cultural, religious, etc. A belief in free will is one more division that leads people to see themselves as a stand-alone island rather than as a tiny bit of ground in a vast shared continent. 

Another good reason to not believe in free will

I'm addicted. To many things. One of them is reading about why free will makes no sense. I ingest books and essays on this subject with delight. Until another one comes along. Then I eagerly imbibe it also.

This morning I got my No Free Will fix courtesy of a chapter in Galen Strawson's book, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc.

The chapter, "Luck Swallows Everything," started off in a familiar fashion.

Strawson, a philosopher, picked apart the easily pickable argument that free will exists in the form of compatibilism, an incoherent argument that we humans have free will even if determinism holds true, because free will is compatible with determinism so long as our determined actions take place without us being forced to act that way, such as by someone holding a gun to our head.

He says about compatibilists:

Free will, they say, is simply a matter of being unconstrained in such a way that one has genuine options and opportunities for action, and is able to choose among them in the light of what one wants or thinks best.

It simply doesn't matter if one's character, personality, preferences, and general motivational set are entirely determined by things for which one is in no way responsible -- by one's genetic inheritance, upbringing, historical situation, chance encounters, and so on.

Einstein also found this point of view absurd.

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

Strawson expands upon the point Einstein alludes to in this quotation. Free will requires genuine unfettered freedom. Sure, just as the compatibilists argue, we all carry out lots of actions every day. I drive my car into Salem.

Like an annoying three year old endlessly asking a parent, "Why?," the question becomes, why did I drive my car into Salem. Answer: to go to my Tai Chi class. And why do I go to Tai Chi classes? Because I like Tai Chi. Why do I like Tai Chi? Partly because I like Taoist philosophy and Tai Chi can be viewed as Taoism in motion. And why do I like Taoism?... on and on go the string of Why's, which are rooted in determinism, causes and effects.

Strawson says that the basic reason we decide to do something, why we decide to do anything, is that this is simply the overall way we are. I guess this is akin to an exasperated parent finally saying, "Just because, that's why!"

But Strawson argues persuasively that free will requires that a person be able to trace it to a self-caused state, causa sui. 

In order for one to be truly or ultimately responsible for how one is in such a way that one can be truly responsible for what one does, something impossible has to be true: there has to be, and cannot be, a starting point in the series of acts of bringing it about that one has a certain nature; a starting point that constitutes an act of ultimate self-origination.

There's a more concise way of putting the point: in order to be ultimately responsible, one would have to be causa sui -- the ultimate cause or origin of oneself, or at least of some crucial part of one's mental nature. But nothing can be causa sui in any respect at all. Even if the property of being causa sui is allowed to belong unintelligibly to God, it can't plausibly be supposed to be possessed by ordinary finite human beings.

Obviously we don't originate ourselves. We are born because we were conceived. After our birth, countless influences other than genetics determine how we are. These experiences all have their own causes.

So nothing is self-caused, and nothing has free will.

Is it necessary to make our life into a narrative, a story?

As I noted a few days ago in "Are you endurant or transient? Me, I feel like I'm a bit of both", there was more to say about this distinction between people who feel a sense of continuity about themselves during their lifetime (endurants) and people who feel that they're being constituted anew as their life unfolds (transients).

Part of that additional saying relates to what Galen Strawson, whose book ("Things That Bother Me") is where I'm getting these ideas, calls a narrative approach to one's life.

Meaning, we not only recall events in our life, but make a story out of those events in somewhat the same way as a novelist would. If someone asks, Tell me about yourself, a person with a strong tilt toward narration likely would relate their life in a chronological order: birth, childhood, schooling, marriage, jobs, children, grandchildren, retirement, and such.

Someone who wasn't into a narrative approach probably would be inclined to speak more about their life right now, giving little or no attention to telling a story about how the past turned into the specifics of now. Strawson writes:

Psychological narrativity clearly involves putting some sort of construction -- a unifying or form-finding construction -- on the events of one's life, or parts of one's life. This needn't involve any clearly intentional activity, nor any departure from or addition to the facts, but the narrative attitude must amount to something more than a disposition to grasp one's life as a unity simply insofar as it is the life of a biologically single human being.

Nor can it consist just in the ability to give a sequential record of the actual course of one's life, even if one's life does in fact exemplify a classical pattern of narrative development, independently of any construction or interpretation. One must have some sort of relatively large-scale, coherence-seeking, unity-seeking, pattern-seeking, or most generally form-finding tendency when it comes to one's apprehension of one's life (or relatively large-scale parts of one's life).

Religion or spirituality often is part of that form-finding narrative tendency. I'm not a Christian, but I'm pretty confident that when devout Christians get together they like to talk about how someone found Jesus or was converted to Christianity.

I know this to be the case with the India-based group I belonged to for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). Learning how someone learned about "the Path" and was initiated by the RSSB guru was a frequent conversation topic. I certainly engaged in this, in part because I had such an interesting, and unusual, initiation story to tell.

But here's the thing about engaging in this sort of story-telling: as Strawson says, it involves more than just a straightforward description of the facts. This happened, then that, and afterward something else. In my experience a narrative view of life injects meaning into those facts that obviously isn't present when the facts are looked at from an objective point of view.

A key thing to remember is what I wrote about recently in "It had to be" -- a great four-word secular philosophy.

Looking forward from now, the future is uncertain. Looking backward from now, the conditions of this present moment were completely determined. Which means, everything that occurs in the future will eventually become the past that was also completely determined.

So It had to be, while a truism, is a valuable reminder of how reality outside of our subjective perceptions actually is. 

We worry about an uncertain future, losing sight of the fact that it really isn't uncertain at all. Only one thing is going to happen: that which happens. Likewise, we engage in regrets about a past that didn't turn out as we wanted, losing sight of the fact that the past could only turn out in one way: that which occurred.

The big bang had to be. The formation of the Milky Way Galaxy had to be. The creation of our solar system had to be. Earth had to be. Evolution had to be. Extinction of the dinosaurs had to be. The rise of Homo sapiens had to be. The birth and death of each of our ancestors had to be. The circumstances of our life from infancy to the present moment had to be.

Pretty damn simple: It all had to be. No exceptions. Our joys and sorrows had to be. Our successes and failures had to be. My writing this blog post had to be. Your reading it had to be.

So the problem I now have with a narrative attitude toward my life is that I've come to feel that it doesn't make sense to view events as pointing toward a predestined conclusion. I'll use marriage to Laurel, my second wife, as an example, though I could have used my RSSB invitation and subsequent history with the group as another example.

A lot of things had to happen just so in order for Laurel and I to end up getting married in 1990. I've spoken about some of these things in other blog posts. 

If I hadn't overheard a conversation in the San Jose State cafeteria back in 1970 about being able to get a Master's of Social Work degree in two years, almost certainly I wouldn't have applied to the school of social work at Portland State University here in Oregon, which brought me to this state in 1971, where I've never left.

And if I hadn't picked up a copy of Willamette Week, Portland's alternative paper, to pass time before a meeting of the state legislature started in 1989, I wouldn't have seen Laurel's personal ad, which appealed to me, and which I responded to. 

When people ask how we met, there's a story I've cobbled together from these and other facts. And I admit that I tend to tell the story as if it was "meant to be" that Laurel and I met, dated, and decided to get married, since if any of the key facts in my story had happened differently, we wouldn't be celebrating our 33rd anniversary in a few months.

Here's the problem, though, with that sort of story-telling, whether it be about how someone found a religion or a marriage partner or a job or anything else. 

Everything in life is meant to be once it has happened. That's a truism, and the point of my "It had to be" blog post. If I hadn't gone to a School of Social Work after getting a B.A. in Psychology, I would have done something else, and probably not in Oregon.

In that other place, doing that other thing, my first wife and I would have had a much different life than we actually did. Maybe we never would have gotten divorced. If we did, it wouldn't have been at the same time. And if I'd gotten divorced and remarried, it would have been to a different woman, not Laurel.

In that alternative reality, I'd be telling a story about how all that was "meant to be," because it was what actually happened. But in real life, only one thing happens. So making a story out of what had to happen isn't at all like a novel where the author can fabricate all kinds of different plot lines.

In real life there's only one plot line: what actually happened. And for that, we don't really need a story. Just a recollection of what happened.

Are you endurant or transient? Me, I feel like I'm a bit of both.

In Galen Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me," he makes an interesting distinction between people who feel a sense of continuity about themselves during their lifetime (endurants) and people who feel that they're being constituted anew as their life unfolds (transients).

There's a lot to say about this.

For now, the hour is late, I've been working on getting new iPhone 14's up and running for my wife and I today/tonight, so I'm simply going to share how Strawson defines "endurants" and "transients." He says he's a strong transient, while most people are endurants. Me, I kind of split the difference.

To take this further, it helps to distinguish between one's sense of oneself as a living embodied human being, a human being considered as a whole, and one's sense of oneself as an inner mental entity or "self" of some sort -- I'll call this one's "self-experience."

When Henry James says of one of his early books "I think of... the masterpiece in question... as the work of quite another person than myself... a rich... relation, say, who... suffers me still to claim a shy fourth cousinship," he has no doubt that he's the same human being as the author of the book, but he doesn't feel he's the same self or person as the author of the book.

This feeling is familiar to most of us: one of the most important ways in which people tend to think of themselves (wholly independently of any religious belief they may have) is as things whose conditions of persistence aren't obviously or automatically the same as the conditions of persistence of a human being considered as a whole.

Petrarch, Proust, Parfit and thousands of others have given this idea vivid expression. I'm going to take its viability for granted and set up another distinction in terms of it: a distinction between "transient" and "enduring" self-experience. (In the past I've called these forms of self-experience "episodic" and "diachronic.")

The core form of endurant self-experience is simply that one naturally figures oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future -- something that has relatively long-term temporal continuity, something that persists over a long stretch of time, perhaps for life (the word "further" is intentionally indefinite). I take it that many people are naturally endurers and that many who endurers are also narrative.

If one is transient, by contrast, if one is a transient, one doesn't figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there in the (further) past and will be there in the (further) future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being. 

God should be able to find us, so give up the God search

After spending 35 years searching for God, some time ago I came to the belated conclusion that this is a really stupid thing to do.

For if God is too ignorant, or too uncaring, or too weak, or too busy with other stuff to find us, why should we exert any effort to search for a God who is much more limited than a human being?

Consider: experts say that if you're lost outdoors here on Earth, the best thing to do is stay put if you're unsure where to go and get unlost. (See here, here, and here.)

One reason to do this is that those looking for you will have it easier if you aren't wandering around aimlessly, expanding the area that needs to be searched. 

Note that I said "those looking for you." When people are lost, other people jump into action to try to find them, often at considerable risk to themselves. We humans care about each other. If someone needs help badly, almost always they'll get it.

God, though, assuming God exists (a highly dubious assumption), clearly isn't as compassionate as an average person, since God demands that we search for Him/Her/It rather than finding us and taking us to safety in God's abode, often termed "heaven."

It's understandable why an ever-increasing percentage of people decide to give up on this ridiculous game of hide-and-seek.

If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, and present everywhere, then why does God hide and demand that we do the seeking? That's what an asshole of a supreme being would do. Rather than waste time trying to please such a jerk, just say no to searching for God.

If you have an urge to know God, and feel there's a non-zero probability God exists and is worthy of being known, I suggest that you heed the advice of survival experts.

Stay right where you are. Ask God to find you. Then relax and live your life. If God shows up one day in a can't-be-denied fashion, great. If God continues to be absent, also great. Either way, you haven't wasted time and energy searching for a God who probably doesn't even exist.

I'm an atheist. That word means "not a theist." Meaning, us atheists don't believe in God because there's no demonstrable evidence God exists.

But most atheists, me certainly included, aren't 100% certain that God is a fiction. Being scientifically minded, I'm not 100% certain about anything, the way of science. So I'm open to the remote possibility that God could appear and make me into a believer, a theist. 

This is why I like to spend a bit of time in that drowsy period when I'm in bed at night, about to fall asleep, saying "God...God...God...".

I don't view this as a means of searching for God, as a mantra might be used. Instead, I see it as a sort of atheist locator beacon. Climbers will take a physical locator beacon with them in case they run into trouble while climbing a mountain.

My "God...God...God..." is like a GPS signal to me. Sure, if God exists and is omniscient, God should be able to know where everybody and everything in the universe is. I just like the idea of sending out a one word communication to God just in case God needs a mental locator beacon.

Plus, this helps me get to sleep. Not surprisingly, so far I've gotten no sign that God has found me. If this does happen, I'll be sure to write a post about it. And maybe change the name of this blog to Church of the Churched.

Could this happen? Sure. Is it at all likely to happen? Absolutely not.

Image of Muhammad causes uproar. I'm pleased to share it.

It's bizarre how fundamentalist Muslims get so upset over images of their Prophet Muhammad, whether these be paintings or cartoons. Just another example of the utter irrationality of religious believers.

Today the New York Times had a story, "A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job." This happened even after the instructor told her students in advance what she was going to do and on the day of the showing gave the students another chance to say if they had a problem with this.

Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder.

In the syllabus, she warned that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course. She asked students to contact her with any concerns, and she said no one did.

In class, she prepped students, telling them that in a few minutes, the painting would be displayed, in case anyone wanted to leave.

Then Dr. López Prater showed the image — and lost her teaching gig.

...After Dr. López Prater showed the image, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Other Muslim students, not in the course, supported the student, saying the class was an attack on their religion. They demanded that officials take action.

Officials told Dr. López Prater that her services next semester were no longer needed. In emails to students and faculty, they said that the incident was clearly Islamophobic. Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.” At a town hall, an invited Muslim speaker compared showing the images to teaching that Hitler was good.

After reading the story, naturally my first thought was, I've got to share the image on my blog. Here it is, along with two other Muhammad images in the New York Times story.

Over the years I've taken pleasure in writing other blog posts about Muslim sensitivity regarding images of Muhammad. It's really disturbing that Muslim fanatics have killed people over this absurd religious dogma.

Cartoons of Muhammad create huge uproar
Muslims have been depicting Muhammad for centuries
If a cartoon inflames religious passions, so what?

"It had to be" -- a great four-word secular philosophy

At my age, 74, it gets more common to have worries pop up in my life that are different from younger person concerns.

Health problems, for example. They occur at any age, but when you're young, things that are wrong with you tend to get better. However, the older we get, the more likely we have to deal with chronic problems, things that aren't going to go away. 

Best we can do is manage them so they're annoyances, not major obstacles to living an enjoyable life.

I find that when I have a doctor appointment scheduled where I'm not sure whether the news I'm going to get about a health problem will be good or bad, my mind sometimes gets anxious over the uncertainty.

Then, when the day of the appointment comes and I learn what the doctor has to say, I feel better -- no matter what happened. 

One lesson from this is what I've known for a long time: our minds are adept at imagining both the worst that can happen, and the best that can happen, even though usually what actually happens is somewhere in-between. 

A related lesson is how comforting four simple words can be when I take them to heart: It had to be.

When I say that to myself, no matter what the "It" is that has occurred, I feel grounded, in touch with reality, part of the whole of life that is so much greater than my small self. 

Sure, in a sense It had to be is a truism. After all, if something has happened, obviously it had to be, or it wouldn't have happened.

But saying those words reminds me that just as religious believers like to submit themselves to what they regard as God's will, or God's plan for them, us atheists can enjoy our submission to the marvelous chains of cause and effect, or determinism, that produce everything in existence.

Including the state of our health. And happiness. And all the other thoughts, emotions, actions, and states of being that combine to produce what we call "my life."

Looking forward from now, the future is uncertain. Looking backward from now, the conditions of this present moment were completely determined. Which means, everything that occurs in the future will eventually become the past that was also completely determined.

So It had to be, while a truism, is a valuable reminder of how reality outside of our subjective perceptions actually is. 

We worry about an uncertain future, losing sight of the fact that it really isn't uncertain at all. Only one thing is going to happen: that which happens. Likewise, we engage in regrets about a past that didn't turn out as we wanted, losing sight of the fact that the past could only turn out in one way: that which occurred.

The big bang had to be. The formation of the Milky Way Galaxy had to be. The creation of our solar system had to be. Earth had to be. Evolution had to be. Extinction of the dinosaurs had to be. The rise of Homo sapiens had to be. The birth and death of each of our ancestors had to be. The circumstances of our life from infancy to the present moment had to be.

Pretty damn simple: It all had to be. No exceptions. Our joys and sorrows had to be. Our successes and failures had to be. My writing this blog post had to be. Your reading it had to be.

We can complicate life all we want, or simplify it all we want. Regardless, it had to be. That's why I love those four words: It had to be.

The hard problem isn't the nature of consciousness, but of matter

The Portland Oregonian sometimes has the New York Times Book Review section in its Sunday online edition. Looking it over last weekend, I noted an ad for a book containing 133 essays from the Times' award-winning philosophy series.

I gave "Question Everything" to myself as a belated Christmas present. It arrived recently, and I read one of the essays by Galen Strawson this morning: Consciousness Isn't a Mystery. It's Matter.

Wow. Really interesting and thought-provoking.

Strawson presented a fresh view of consciousness that I'd never come across before. This is the power of philosophy, which to me simply means clear thinking -- not the academic version of modern-day philosophy that in large part is devoted to linguistic games, in my decidedly personal opinion.

Here's excerpts from the essay that capture Strawson's main points.

Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don't know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery.

...I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is -- where by "consciousness" I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It's the most familiar thing there is, whether it's experience of emotion, hearing, touching, tasting, or feeling. 

It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious. 

The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour... Or rather, more carefully: The nature of physical stuff is mysterious except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff. 

This point, which is at first extremely startling, was well put by Bertrand Russell in the 1950s in his essay "Mind and Matter": "We know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events," he wrote," except when these are mental events that we directly experience."

In having conscious experience, he claims, we learn something about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, for conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff. I think Russell is right: Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and particularly the brain. 

...We know what conscious experience is because the having is the knowing: Having conscious experience is knowing what it is. You don't have to think about it (it's really much better not to). You just have to have it.

It's true that people can make all kinds of mistakes about what is going on when they have experience, but none of them threaten the fundamental sense in which we know exactly what experience is just in having it.

...So we all know what consciousness is. Once we're clear on this we can try to go further, for consciousness does of course raise a hard problem. The problem arises from the fact that we accept that consciousness is wholly a matter of physical goings-on, but can't see how this can be so.

We examine the brain in ever greater detail, using incredibly powerful techniques like fMRI, and we observe extraordinarily complex neuroelectrochemical goings-on, but we can't even begin to understand how these goings-on can be (or give rise to) conscious experience.

...Many make the same mistake [as Leibniz] today -- the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can't be physical.

We don't. We don't know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff except -- Russell again -- insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience. 

We find this idea extremely difficult because we're so very deeply committed to the belief that we know more about the physical than we do, and (in particular) know enough to know that consciousness can't be physical. 

We don't see that the hard problem is not what consciousness is, it's what matter is -- what the physical is... Physics is silent -- perfectly and forever silent -- on this question.

This point was a commonplace one a hundred years ago, but it has gotten lost in the recent discussion of consciousness. Stephen Hawking makes it dramatically in his book A Brief History of Time. Physics, he says, is "just a set of rules and equations." The question is what "breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"

What is the fundamental stuff of physical reality, the stuff that is structured in the way physics reveals? The answer, again, is that we don't know -- except insofar as this stuff takes the form of conscious experience.

We can say that it is energy that breathes fire into the equations, using the word "energy" as Heisenberg does when he says, for example, that "all particles are made of the same substance: energy," but the fundamental question arises again -- "What is the intrinsic nature of this energy, this energy-stuff?"

And the answer, again, is that we don't know, and that physics can't tell us; that's just not its business. This point about the limits on what physics can tell us is rock-solid, and it arises before we begin to consider any of the deep problems of understanding that arise within physics -- problems with "dark matter" or "dark energy," for example -- or with reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity theory.

...So the hard problem is the problem of matter (physical stuff in general). If physics made any claim that couldn't be squared with the fact that our conscious experience is brain activity, then I believe that claim would be false. 

But physics doesn't do any such thing. It's not the physics picture of matter that's the problem; it's the ordinary everyday picture of matter.

It's ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness (on the grounds that everything is physical, and that consciousness can't possibly be physical) are also those who are most insistent on the primacy of science, because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine most brightly: the point that there is a fundamental respect in which the ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us -- except insofar as it is consciousness.

Mind-blowing idea to start 2023: thoughts aren't about anything

Might as well make my first churchless blog post in 2023 about a subject that first caught my attention back in 2011, which was the first time I read Alex Rosenberg's book, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. 

It's the notion that our thoughts aren't about anything at all. That link leads to a blog post where I did my best to describe why Rosenberg says this. I won't repeat most of what was said in that post, so I invite you to read it if you want to have your mind blown so early in the new year.

This quotation from the book that I included in the previous post lays out what's at stake here, according to Rosenberg, a philosopher at Duke University and codirector of the Duke Center for Philosophy of Biology -- a pleasingly cool title.

What you absolutely cannot be wrong about is that your conscious thought was about something. Even having a wildly wrong thought about something requires that the thought be about something.

It's this last notion that introspection conveys that science has to deny. Thinking about things can't happen at all. The brain can't have thoughts about Paris, or about France, or about capitals, or about anything else for that matter.

When consciousness convinces you that you, or your mind, or your brain has thoughts about things, it is wrong. 

Don't misunderstand, no one denies that the brain receives, stores, and transmits information. But it can't do these things in anything like the way introspection tells us it does -- by having thoughts about things. The way the brain deals with information is totally different from the way introspection tells us it does.

Seeing why and understanding how the brain does the work that consciousness gets so wrong is the key to answering all the rest of the questions that keep us awake at night worrying over the mind, the self, the soul, the person.

As I said in the blog post, this question of the about'ness of thoughts is the most difficult part of the book, which I've been re-re-reading parts of. Rosenberg tries different approaches to convince the reader that he's correct, several of which I described in the earlier blog post.

One approach I didn't describe, but noted in my recent re-re-reading (third time, I'm pretty sure), concerns an admittedly difficult to understand conception of the regress necessary if neurons in the brain were to be about something. 

I won't try to summarize this concept, as Rosenberg does a good job himself in these paragraphs.

Now the problem is clear. We see why the Paris neurons can't be about Paris the way that red octagons are about stopping. It's because that way lies a regress that will prevent us from ever understanding what we wanted to figure out in the first place: how one chunk of stuff -- the Paris neurons -- can be about another chunk of stuff -- Paris.

We started out trying to figure out how the Paris neurons could be about Paris, and our tentative answer is that they are about Paris because some other part of the brain -- the neural interpreter -- is both about the Paris neurons and about Paris. We set out to explain how one set of neurons is about something out there in the world.

We find ourselves adopting the theory that it's because another set of neurons is about the first batch of neurons and about the thing in the world, too. This won't do.

What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted -- by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain) -- as being about the stuff outside the brain. 

What we need is a clump of matter, in this case the Paris neurons, that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for "being about") another clump of matter outside the brain. 

But there is no such physical stuff.

Physics has ruled out the existence of clumps of matter of the required sort. There are just fermions and bosons and combinations of them. None of that stuff is just, all by itself, about any other stuff. There is nothing in the whole universe -- including, of course, all the neurons in your brain -- that just by its nature or composition can do this job of being about some other clump of matter.

So when consciousness assures us that we have thoughts about stuff, it has to be wrong. The brain nonconsciously stores information in thoughts. But the thoughts are not about stuff. Therefore, consciousness cannot retrieve thoughts about stuff. There are none to retrieve. So it can't have thoughts about stuff either. 

Now, I view this excerpt, and Rosenberg's entire book, as evidence that philosophy is a good marriage partner with neuroscience. What Rosenberg has done is apply a form of philosophical analysis to neuroscientific knowledge about how the brain works.

Which demolishes many common sense notions, including that we can think about things in the world, and that there is an independent self having such thoughts.

However, I can understand why others might view what Rosenberg says as gibberish. My response to that is this: if you look upon his book that way, do your best to grasp why he dismisses the idea that thoughts are about stuff in the world. Only then can you make an informed judgement about what he says.