Church of the Churchless

Happy New Year. Here's my gift of Joan Tollifson.

In a few hours it will be 2024 here in Oregon.

Of  course, in one sense tomorrow is just another day, another rotation of Earth on its axis. But we humans have come up with the calendar, so in another sense tomorrow is the beginning of a brand new year.

At any rate, I want to express how grateful I am that in 2023 not only was I able to write a Church of the Churchless post every other day (on the other days I tend to my HinesSight and Salem Political Snark blogs), but that my posts were enriched by the comments left on them by visitors to this blog.

I've learned a lot from those comments. I've been entertained by those comments. I've gotten recommendations for books and videos from those comments. And of course, since I'm human (what else could I be?), I've been irritated by comments that I disagree with.

Just as there's no doubt that my blog posts have irritated people also. Hey, if we're alive, we're prone to irritations. That's part of the nature of life -- unless, of course, someone subscribes to a idealized vision of what life is all about where perfection is possible, a vision I heartily disagree with.

Which gets me to my New Year's gift, courtesy of Sam Harris' Waking Up app. 

Recently I started listening to an interview Harris did with Joan Tollifson. After listening to an hour of it, with 45 minutes left to go, I really like her style. She's one of the most natural and unaffected spiritual practitioners I've ever come across. 

Tollifson gets into some fascinating discussions with Harris, who I also like a lot. But Tollifson is even more non-dogmatic that Harris is, being unafraid to puncture assumptions that Harris accepts quite uncritically.

Today I enjoyed her take on the notion that Harris promulgates that awareness, or consciousness, is like the open sky in which everything appears. Tollifson gently but firmly said that while she's enjoyed this conception of awareness, her problem with it is that open awareness can become one more thing that a spiritual seeker is supposed to aspire to, and Tollifson doesn't like aspirations.

So what does she like? Well, take a look at her web site.

There's a lot of material there to peruse, particularly in the Outpourings section, where each of those links points to a fairly lengthy writing. I've ordered one of her books to see if I like her written words as much as I'm enjoying listening to her spoken words.

Sure, almost certainly I'll get irritated by stuff Tollifson says, but like I said, that comes with being human. And from what I can tell, Tollifson is all about being fully human, flaws and all. Here's what's on her home page, which will give you a feel for her approach to spirituality. I like her approach.

We habitually search for special experiences, for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is an immense openness and freedom.

We can doubt all our ideas about what this is and what we are, but not the bare actuality of present experiencing and being here, present and aware. This presence has no inside or outside, and there is nowhere it is not. It appears like ever-changing kaleidoscopic Rorschach blots that the pattern-seeking mind is always reifying and interpreting—labeling them, putting them into categories, weaving narratives around them—and presto, the apparently solid and fractured world appears. But how solid and divided up is it really?

The beauty we see, the love we feel is in the listening presence that we are. We imagine we are something small and separate, a character in a movie, and we identify as the voice in our head, the thoughts posing as “me.” But can this mirage-like thinker behind the thoughts actually be found, and is presence-awareness divided up or encapsulated? A person is like a waving of the ocean—a movement inseparable from the whole.

What is offered here invites firsthand exploration and direct discovery, not belief or dogma. There is no finish-line, no formula, no method, only this one bottomless moment, this aliveness, Here-Now, just as it is.  

Why it makes sense to assemble your own unique spirituality

As I've noted many times before, and surely will note many times again, like right now, it took me just a few seconds back in 2004 to come up with the tag line, or slogan, that's below the title of this blog: Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence. 

I've never thought of changing those words, because they encapsulate what I consider to be the wisest form of spirituality. To me spirituality doesn't have anything to do with religion or supernatural stuff; it's a quest for the deeper side of life, which means it has no firm definition.

And that's the point of spiritual independence. Each of us should feel free to assemble our own unique form of spirituality.

Of course, many people don't want to do that. They prefer a ready-made religion, mystical pursuit, or whatever, just as lots of people don't want to make their own dinner, so they order takeout or pop a frozen store-bought meal in the microwave.

Which is fine. Being spiritually independent can include surrendering one's independence, if that's what seems appealing.

I enjoy reading and re-reading books about meditation, mindfulness, free will, philosophy, Buddhism, and other writings in the wonderfully vague genre of spirituality. Rarely, probably never, do I agree with everything an author says.

Heck, when I reread the books that I've written, I definitely don't agree with everything the author said, and that guy was me. The reason is that I'm constantly changing, as we all are. What struck me as profoundly meaningful at one point in my life seems absurdly wrong at another point. 

So I try to keep this in mind when I'm reading a new book that Amazon has delivered to me.

Almost certainly I'm going to find appealing much of what the author says, or I wouldn't have ordered the book. However, I also know that the author is going to say some things that will make me put a large question mark in the margin next to the offending statement.

Again, that's because spirituality is highly individualistic. Unlike science, there's no way to tell fact from fiction, reality from illusion, truth from falsehood. Rather than this being a drawback of spirituality, it's a good thing.

For the lack of standards means that every person drawn to some form of spiritual pursuit necessarily has to cobble together their own belief system, rather than having knowledge conveyed to them already fashioned via a textbook, as is the case with science.

Problem is, often people consider that their personal spiritual beliefs should be as unquestioned as a scientific fact. This is wrong. Just because someone is so confident in their beliefs, they seem akin to an objective law of nature, doesn't make that so.

It's absolutely fine to say, "I believe _____, but you're welcome to disagree." Not fine is an attitude of "I believe _____, and you should too, because it's a fact." Frequently that sentiment is justified in science. The earth is round no matter how many flat earthers claim otherwise.

But in spirituality, where we're talking about subjective meaning, not objective facts, no one has a right to demand that someone else believe as they do.

Yet this also means that no one should be barred from challenging someone else's beliefs, given that one form of spirituality my wife and I embrace (albeit in our own individual ways) is to critique dogmatic fundamentalist belief systems that wrongly claim they're 100% true.

Nothing is 100% true. Including what I just said. Every spiritual book, every spiritual teaching, every spiritual teacher -- they all include valuable gems that will be treasured by some people, as well as useless trinkets that will be rejected by other people. 

If I can find a few statements in a book or talk that ring true to me and stick in my mind, it doesn't matter if the rest of what's said strikes me as useless. I don't expect perfection in forms of spirituality because perfection doesn't exist. 

What's important to me is growth, change, open-mindedness, learning, and yes, entertainment.

I just got a new book about Buddhism that, after reading just the early pages, I can tell I disagree with some central premises of the author. However, I really liked the preface. That will stick with me. I just wish the entirety of The Art of Disappearing was written in the same style.

Here's the preface.

Do not read this book if you want to be a somebody. It will make you a nobody, a no-self.

I did not write this book. They are transcribed talks, edited with all the bad jokes removed. I did not say my bad jokes anyway. The five khandhas, which presumptively claim to be me, said them. I have the perfect alibi -- my self was absent from the scene of the crime!

This book does not tell you what you must do to get enlightened. It is not an instruction manual like Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond, which was also written by those pesky five khandhas pretending to be Ajahn Brahm. 

Doing things like following instructions just makes you more of a person. Instead, this book describes how disappearing happens in spite of you. Moreover, it is not just the "outside" that vanishes. The entire "inside," all that you take to be you, that also disappears. And that is so much fun it is sheer bliss.

The true purpose of practicing Buddhism is to let go of everything, not to get more things like attainments to show off to your friends. When we let go of something, really let go, then it disappears. We lose it. All successful meditators are losers. 

They lose their attachments. Enlightened ones lose everything. They truly are the Biggest Loser. At the very least, if you read this book and understand some of it, you may discover the meaning of freedom and, as a consequence, lose all the hair on your head!

I acknowledge the kind assistance of other nobodies, in particular Ron Storey for transcribing the talks, Ajahn Brahmali for editing the work, and all the empty beings at Wisdom Publications for publishing the book.

May you all Get Lost, 

Not really Ajahn Brahm
Perth, Australia

 

Here's a good description of what Buddhist mindfulness is all about

There's lots of ways to look upon mindfulness. Mostly I view mindfulness as a practice that doesn't require a grounding in Buddhism. However, I enjoy reading about how Buddhist practitioners view mindfulness, or vipassana insight meditation. 

A concluding chapter of Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, a Buddhist monk, contains a description of what mindfulness can lead to that I found clear and mostly convincing, though I have some doubts about whether the supposedly unconditioned state of nibbana/nirvana actually can be achieved.

Enjoy.

As you continue to observe these changes and you see how it all fits together, you become aware of the intimate connectedness of all mental, sensory, and affective phenomena. You watch one thought leading to another, you see destruction giving rise to emotional reactions and feelings giving rise to more thoughts.

Actions, thoughts, feelings, desires -- you see all of them intimately linked together in a delicate fabric of cause and effect. You watch pleasurable experiences arise and fall, and you see that they never last; you watch pain come uninvited and you watch yourself anxiously struggling to throw it off; you see yourself fail. It all happens over and over while you stand back quietly and just watch it all work.

Out of this living laboratory itself comes an inner and unassailable conclusion. You see that your life is marked by disappointment and frustration, and you clearly see the source.

These reactions arise out of your own inability to get what you want, your fear of losing what you have already gained, and your habit of never being satisfied with what you have. These are no longer theoretical concepts -- you have seen these things for yourself, and you know that they are real. You perceive your own fear, your own basic insecurity in the face of life and death.

It is a profound tension that goes all the way down to the root of thought and makes all of life a struggle. You watch yourself anxiously groping about, fearfully grasping after solid, trustworthy ground. You see yourself endlessly grasping for something, anything, to hold onto in the midst of all these shifting sands, and you see that there is nothing to hold onto, nothing that doesn't change.

You see the pain of loss and grief, you watch yourself being forced to adjust to painful developments day after day in your own ordinary existence. You witness the tensions and conflicts inherent in the very process of everyday living, and you see how superficial most of your concerns really are. You watch the progress of pain, sickness, old age, and death. 

You learn to marvel that all these horrible things are not fearful at all. They are simply reality.

...In the midst of every pleasant experience, you watch your own craving and clinging take place. In the midst of unpleasant experiences, you watch a very powerful resistance take hold. You do not block these phenomena, you just watch them; you see them as the very stuff of human thought. 

You search for that thing you call "me," but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones. You search further, and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns, and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them.

You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective, and defensive over these pitiful things, and you see how crazy that is. You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourself -- physical matter, bodily sensations, feelings, and emotions -- it all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for "me."

You find nothing.

In all that collection of mental hardware in this endless stream of ever-shifting experience, all you can find is innumerable impersonal processes that have been caused and conditioned by previous processes. There is no static self to be found; it is all process. You find thoughts but no thinker, you find emotions and desires, but nobody doing them. 

The house itself is empty. There is nobody home.

Your whole view of self changes at this point. You begin to look upon yourself as if you were a newspaper photograph. When viewed with the naked eyes, the photograph you see is a definite image. When viewed through a magnifying glass, it all breaks down into an intricate configuration of dots.

Similarly, under the penetrating gaze of mindfulness, the feeling of a self, an "I" or "being" anything, loses its solidity and dissolves. There comes a point in insight meditation where the three characteristics of existence -- impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness -- come rushing home with concept-searing force.

You vividly experience the impermanence of life, the suffering nature of human existence, and the truth of no-self. You experience these things so graphically that you suddenly awake to the utter futility of craving, grasping, and resistance. In the clarity and purity of this profound moment, our consciousness is transformed.

The entity of self evaporates. All that is left is an infinity of interrelated nonpersonal phenomena, which are conditioned and ever-changing. Craving is extinguished and a great burden is lifted. There remains only an effortless flow, without a trace of resistance or tension. There remains only peace, and blessed nibbana, the uncreated, is realized.

Here's my Christmas letter and blog post about not liking the holiday season

Well, here in Oregon, Christmas day is almost over. Per usual, it didn't mean much to me and my wife. Since neither of us are Christians -- not even close, since we're atheists -- the whole birth of Jesus thing is totally meaningless to Laurel and me.

We had five friends over for dinner last night, Christmas Eve. That was pleasant. Good conversation and a great vegetarian meal prepared almost entirely by my wife. My main contribution was washing a lot of dishes, a task that I'm well qualified for (as opposed to cooking).

Here's our 2023 Christmas Letter, otherwise known as our Holiday Letter. I'll share it as both a JPEG image and a PDF file. If you want to read more of my Christmas letters, which I've been writing every year since 1995, head to my aptly named "Collected Christmas Letters" post. 
Download 2023 Christmas Letter PDF

Last night I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog, "A message for people having a hard time during the Christmas season." If you click on that link you'll find a nice two minute video from Michael Shermer about the meaning of life. (Spoiler alert: it's in the here and now.) I also share some passages from one of my favorite books about mindfulness, "Mindfulness in Plain English."

Here's how the post starts out.

Many people, well, most people I'm sure, enjoy the Christmas season. Vacation. Gifts. Relatives. Eating. Drinking. Football. And for Christians, the birth of Jesus.

But for others, and I'm largely in your camp, all of these festivities, well-wishing, and positivity grate on their nerves, because for reasons unique to each person, the Christmas season isn't a time for celebration.

After all, as the Buddha pointed out, life is suffering. Or at least, full of disappointment. Sure, it's possible to put on a happy face and ignore this truth, but ignore it or not, that truth remains. 

Many people are lonely. Many people are in pain -- physical, emotional, or both. Many people struggle for a lack of money. Many people deeply feel the sorrow of those beset by war, starvation, oppression, discrimination. There's a myriad of reasons why merry-making feels wrong around Christmas.

So I just want to say to anyone who feels that way, know that you're not alone. Since I'm one of you, by and large, here's a couple of things that made me feel better on this Christmas Eve.

First, someone shared this video by Michael Shermer in a comment on my Church of the Churchless blog. It's just a few minutes long. I liked what Shermer had to say. Basically, be here now. Enjoy the small things of life to the extent that you can.

This morning I picked up my copy of a book by a Buddhist monk, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English. These passages from the first chapter resonated with me. I'd read them several times before, but I needed a reminder of the Buddhist message.

Ouspensky leaving Gurdjieff has lessons for spiritual independence

As noted in my previous post, "Between Gurdjieff and Zen, I much prefer Zen," after reading the first chapter in P.D. Ouspensky's book about his time with Gurdjieff, In Search of the Miraculous, I decided that I'd only read one additional chapter -- the last one where Ouspensky describes why he parted company with Gurdjieff.

Having done that, here's the reason Ouspensky gives.

In regard to my relations with G. I saw clearly at that time that I had been mistaken about many things that I had ascribed to G. and that by staying with him now I should not be going in the same direction I went at the beginning. And I thought that all the members of our small group, with very few exceptions, were in the same or a similar situation.

This was a very strange "observation" but it was absolutely a right one. I had nothing to say against G.'s methods except that they did not suit me.

A very clear example came to my mind then. I had never had a negative attitude towards the "way of the monk," to religious, mystical ways. At the same time I could never have thought for one moment that such a way was possible for me or suitable. 

And so, if after three years of work I perceived that G. was leading us in fact towards the way of religion, of the monastery, and required the observance of all religious forms and ceremonies, there would be of course a motive for disagreeing with this and for going away, even though at the risk of losing direct leadership.

And certainly this would not, at the same time, mean that I considered the religious way a wrong way in general. It may even be a more correct way than my way but it is not my way.

The decision to leave G.'s work and leave him exacted from me a great inner struggle. I had built very much upon it and it was difficult for me now to reconstruct everything from the beginning. But there was nothing else to do.

Of course, all that I had learned during those three years I retained. But a whole year passed by while I was going into all this and until I found it possible to continue to work in the same direction as G. but independently. 

I went into a separate house and again began work abandoned in St. Petersburg, on my book which afterwards appeared under the title A New Model of the Universe.

Since the tagline, or slogan, of this blog is "Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence," naturally I believe that Ouspensky did the right thing in following his own way, when the way his teacher, Gurdjieff, was espousing ended up taking Ouspensky in a direction that didn't feel right to him.

This fits with my own deconversion from an Eastern form of religion, though, I stuck with Radha Soami Satsang Beas for thirty-five years, while Ouspensky studied with Gurdjieff for just three years, or four, if we include the year Ouspensky spent transitioning away from Gurdjieff.

In my case, also, it took quite a while before I was able to separate what made sense to me in my previous religiosity (being a vegetarian and daily meditation, for example) versus what no longer made sense to me (devotion to a guru considered to be God in Human Form, for example).

Trust yourself. Those two words hold the key to knowing when to stick with a form of spiritual practice, and when to discard that form. After all, as we gain experience with a practice, we become more knowledgeable about it. 

That enables us to discern both what works for us, and what doesn't work for us. Keep doing the former. Stop doing the latter. Again, trust yourself.

Having read all I wanted to of In Search of the Miraculous, this morning I read, or rather re-read, the first chapter of a book Ouspensky wrote after he left Gurdjieff, The Fourth Way: A Record of Talks and Answers to Questions based on the teaching of G.I. Gurdjieff.

My mother kept this book on a table next to her bed, where I found it after she died of a stroke in 1985. My sister and I donated almost all of my mother's books to the library in the small California town where she lived after moving there with me in 1954. But I kept The Fourth Way.

Pleasingly, I found that the notes and underlinings in pencil that my mother left in the book weren't obscured by my yellow highlighting. Also pleasingly, there was quite a bit in the first chapter that I read today which agreed with me, along with some weird stuff that made no sense to me.

I resonated with Ouspensky's emphasis on what seems very much like mindfulness, though he doesn't use that term. Here's some examples.

So, in self-observation for some time you may notice some strange things. For instance, you will find that what is really difficult in observing is that you forget about it. You start to observe, and your emotions connect with some kind of thought and you forget about self-observation.

...So, at the same time as self-observing, we try to be aware of ourselves by holding the sensation of 'I am here' -- nothing more. And this is the fact that all Western psychology, without the smallest exception, has missed.

But then there's this astrological sort of craziness.

So plants, animals and men serve a definite purpose: they serve for communication between earth and planets. With the help of organic life which can receive and retain them, planetary influences penetrate to the earth. This is the meaning and reason for organic life on earth.

I don't have to agree with everything in a book, or a spiritual practice, to enjoy it. However, if central assumptions of a book or practice strike me as absurd, I won't take the book or practice seriously. We grow. We learn. What appeals to us at one time in our life may not appeal to us at another time.

Again: trust yourself. 

Between Gurdjieff and Zen, I much prefer Zen

Wanting to read something different yesterday, I picked up my copy of P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Since that copy has a 1949 copyright date, it's a first edition of the book that was published after Ouspensky died in 1947.

My mother, though not at all religious, was a fan of P.D. Ouspensky, who studied a form of Eastern mysticism (roughly speaking) taught by George Gurdjieff.

I kept a few books of my mother's after she died. One was The Fourth Way by Ouspensky. I'm pretty sure In Search of the Miraculous also was her book, though it doesn't have her name in it, nor any markings.

I've read the first chapter of In Search of the Miraculous. It's an interesting tale of how Ouspensky met Gurdjieff in Russia during the beginning of the First World War, 1914. He was searching for the miraculous.

I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used by us. But where this new or forgotten road began I was unable to say.

After meeting Gurdjieff, Ouspensky learned of what Gurdjieff called the "work." It took him a while, through repeated conversations with Gurdjieff, to begin to learn what the work consisted of. The first chapter only gives glimpses of this.

Gurdjieff's system exists to this day. When I got my first research associate job in 1973 at the University of Oregon Medical School's Department of Family Practice, a young computer guy working with me spoke about how he and some other people were engaged in the Gurdjieff work. I recall that once he said he'd gone without sleep for several days as part of an experiment that was part of the work.

From the first chapter, it's clear that Gurdjieff had some sound ideas and also some crazy ones. Below I'll share part of a passage about how mechanical we humans are that sounds like something Robert Sapolsky, a denier of free will, could have said in his recent book, Determined. But Gurdjieff also believed that the sun, moon, and planets controlled human actions and were conscious.

This is what Gurdjieff said, according to Ouspensky.

All people think that they can do, all people want to do, and the first question all people ask is what they are to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood. Everything happens. 

All that befalls a man, all that is done by him, all that comes from him -- all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as rain falls as a result of a change in temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere or the surrounding clouds, as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind.

Man is a machine. All his deeds, actions, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions, and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action. Everything he says, does, thinks, feels -- all this happens. Man cannot discover anything, invent anything. It all happens. 

...It always seem to people that others invariably do things wrongly, not in the way they should be done. Everybody always thinks he could do it better. They do not understand, and do not want to understand, that what is being done, and particularly what has already been done in one way, cannot be, and could not have been, done in another way.

This is good stuff. However, I'm not sure if I want to read all eighteen chapters of In Search of the Miraculous to find occasional other good stuff that will be mixed in with the weird stuff. Well, I'll probably read the last chapter, since the Wikipedia article about Ouspensky says that he parted ways with Gurdjieff in 1924, for reasons explained in that final chapter.

After I finished reading the first chapter of In Search of the Miraculous, today I listened to a talk on Sam Harris' Waking Up app by Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist and Zen practitioner who co-authored The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. 

This was the second of a series of short talks called "Zen and the Art of Living." It was a breath of fresh clear spiritual air after my decidedly murky reading of In Search of the Miraculous. What struck me was how simple Waldinger's central message was: genuine wellbeing (eudaimonia, as the ancient Greeks termed it) is quite different from hedonic happiness based on pleasure.

There's nothing wrong with pleasure, of course. We should embrace whatever pleasures life offers us. However, what makes us feel fulfilled, what gives us a sense of purpose, what truly satisfies, is being as much concerned, or more concerned, with the happiness of other people as with our own happiness.

This is both part of the teachings of Zen, and a conclusion from the long-lasting scientific study of happiness. Social connections are what matter most to our happiness and well-being. And it isn't possible to be self-centered or selfish and have good social connections. Here's a video of a TED talk Waldinger gave on this subject. 

"The Rigor of Angels" ended up disappointing me

As noted in my previous post, I was disappointed when I got to the discussion of free will in William Egginton's book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, and found that Egginton embraced the absurd notion much beloved by philosophers like himself that determinism and free will are somehow compatible.

Hence, the term compatibilism for this nonsensical belief. It's nonsensical because it does away with the "free" in free will, since determinism holds that what came before this present moment determines how that moment unfolds. Where's the "free" in that?

But I became even more disappointed today when I finished Egginton's book and realized that his final chapters contradicted one of the main points he made in the core section of The Rigor of Angels.

Namely, that knowledge of reality, whether through science or some other means, but mainly science, requires following the truth of our space-time continuum wherever it leads, even if this means giving up some cherished previous view of reality.

Hard to disagree with that, though it is indeed difficult at times. I recall a quote about scientific revolutions that I'm going to mangle somewhat, but goes more or less like this: "A scientific revolution occurs when all of the scientists who held the traditional view die off."

The main example Egginton uses of this is quantum mechanics.

It was difficult for physicists in the early part of the twentieth century to give up the idea that the atomic and subatomic realm doesn't possess the same sort of objective reality as the larger world does. Einstein, for example, heartily resisted the conception in quantum mechanics of the position and momentum of a particle being a matter of probabilities, not certainties.

But that's what quantum mechanics found, along with the related Heisenberg uncertainty principle in which it is impossible to know both a particle's position and momentum with complete accuracy, since 100% knowledge of one means 0% knowledge of the other.

So I liked this aspect of Egginton's book. We should indeed be willing to follow the path of evidence wherever it leads, even, or especially, if it leads away from a previously cherished view of reality. After all, open-mindedness and willing to change our mind is a very good thing.

However, when I reached a concluding chapter, "Putting the Demon to Rest," I came away with the distinct impression that Egginton is so attached to his belief in free will, he couldn't see that he was ignoring the massive evidence in favor of determinism -- which he admits is the foundation of reality outside of the very small and the very large. (Meaning, the subatomic realm and the universe as a whole.)

Here's a passage from that chapter:

And just as the uncertainty Heisenberg discovered at the edges of scientific perception is utterly irrelevant to our tracing a plane's path on a map, we can and should brush aside any facile reference to his ideas when talking about, say, the reality of an accused person's actions and intents, or the meaning of a work of art.

The trouble comes when we take our common and perfectly acceptable image of reality as an independent space-time in which things are happening in blissful disregard of our knowledge and start applying it where it doesn't belong: below the limits of observability or beyond the very borders of existence itself; between the links of the mechanistic causal chain enabling a human action; or to the very sense of self underlying that action.

When we do so, we sacrifice the core of what has made the scientific method so extraordinarily successful: its profound humility; its awareness that our knowledge is always subject to revision; to improvement. 

Moreover, when we do this, we err profoundly about human agency and freedom, either erasing it along with all responsibility in a vain attempt to understand humans "scientifically" or projecting at the core of all decisions a purely rational agent, utterly transparent to itself as it navigates life's choices.

As we steer a course through the river of our lives, we are affected by innumerable forces, the vast majority unknown to us. By some accounts this makes of our freedom an illusion, for how can we purport to freely choose when we can't even see a fraction of the legion of influences acting on us, limiting our movements, sparking our appetites?

The threat this picture poses to traditional notions of agency suggests a counternarrative. There must be some part of us that floats above the river, untouched by its waters and therefore utterly free and totally responsible for our every turn. But both these pictures are misleading, and for the same reason.

Our freedom, and hence our responsibility for the choices we make, is neither a thing to look for in our material existence nor some ghostlike essence unmoored from that existence. Rather, it is a necessary postulate for a being who can imagine having chosen differently, the condition of the possibility of conceiving of that life as one possible path among many.

This is plain nonsense coming from a highly intelligent and accomplished humanities professor. Here's how Robert Sapolsky demolishes such compatibilist crap in his book, Determined. He says that after reading lots of writings by philosophers and legal scholars concerning the relevance of neuroscience to free will, he's concluded that they usually "boil down to three sentences."

a. Wow, there've been all these cool advances in neuroscience, all reinforcing the conclusion that ours is a deterministic world.

b. Some of these neuroscience findings challenge our notions of agency, moral responsibility, and deservedness so deeply that one must conclude that there is no free will.

c. Nah, it still exists. 

Egginton does exactly what Sapolsky said above. In The Rigor of Angels quote above, Egginton says that yes, we humans are affected by innumerable forces, the vast majority unknown to us. He also dismisses the possibility of some non-physical supernatural entity, such as soul, that could float above the world and give us free will.

But then he bizarrely claims that freedom is a "necessary postulate," thereby ignoring the massive amount of evidence against free will in an attempt to preserve the notions of agency, moral resp0nsibility, and deservedness that Sapolsky correctly says have to be given up if we accept scientific reality.

In short, Egginton does just what he criticized others of doing in his book: ignoring a new conception of reality because it undermines a traditional view of the world: that our course in life is one possible path among many, as he put it in the quote above, and things could have turned out differently if we'd chosen differently.

There's no evidence for this, and much evidence against it. There's only one path in life, the one that actually happened in the past, is happening now, and will happen in the future. We can imagine alternative pasts and futures, but that imagination is determined by countless factors, not by free will.

Oh, no! The author of "The Rigor of Angels" is a compatibilist

Disappointment is part of life. Okay, a big part. Still, it hurt when I reached the Free Will chapter in the book by William Egginton that I'm enjoying a lot: The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality.

Up to that point, Egginton impressed me with his writing ability, intelligence, and ability to weave the lives and teachings of a poet, physicist, and philosopher into a satisfying picture of what reality is all about.

(One sentence summary of the book: we never learn what reality is, in itself, but how reality appears to us based on our questioning and observations.)

I figured that the discussion of free will which concludes the book would be equally thoughtful and persuasive. But this sentence dashed that hope:

We are physical beings whose every move occurs in the mechanistic flow of space-time, and we are rational agents who can visualize options and choose which one to take.

Now, that sentence may not seem off-base. In fact, taken by itself I have no problem with it, since it simply says that visualizing options and choosing one occurs within the determinism that rules our physical being. Which, of course, is the only being we have.

But the entire Free Will chapter makes clear that Egginton is a free will compatibilist.

That's a position much beloved by philosophers who agree that determinism rules us humans, yet want to preserve free will in some form, for reasons that are difficult to discern, but center around how horrible it supposedly would be if lots of people gave up a belief in free will.

Wikipedia has a brief description of compatibilism.

Compatibilists often define an instance of "free will" as one in which the agent had the freedom to act according to their own motivation. That is, the agent was not coerced or restrained. Arthur Schopenhauer famously said: "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." In other words, although an agent may often be free to act according to a motive, the nature of that motive is determined. This definition of free will does not rely on the truth or falsity of causal determinism. This view also makes free will close to autonomy, the ability to live according to one's own rules, as opposed to being submitted to external domination.

Compatibilism is an absurd bit of philosophizing.

It doesn't rescue free will, not in the slightest. It just redefines free will in a way that takes the "free" part out of it -- not as the ability to freely make decisions that aren't affected by prior influences, but as not being subject to external domination such as being in prison or coerced by someone to do something.  

In addition to being absurd, it's arguably useless. That's the point made in a post on the Why Evolution is True blog, "Why do we need free-will compatibilism?" Short answer: no reason. Here's excerpts from the post.

The laws of physics dictate that, from time to time, random thoughts about the free-will debate cross my mind. The latest one, which popped into my brain for no reason this morning, was the question, “Why are we even bothering with compatibilism?”

As you know, “compatibilism” is the philosophical view that even though we cannot control our thoughts and actions beyond what the laws of physics dictate, and therefore have no “free will” in the traditional sense, we have free will in a nontraditional sense.  Those “compatibilistic” varieties of free will vary among different philosophers; Dan Dennett has expounded several versions, and other philosophers still more versions. (This all makes me wonder what we’re supposed to tell people what really constitutes our [compatibilist] “free will.”)

Opposed to compatibilism are the two forms of incompatibilism that see free will as incompatible with physical law:

a.) Contracausal free will. This is the traditional “you could have done/chosen otherwise” free will in which we are agents whose wills can effect, at a given time, two or more different behaviors or choices. It is the kind of free will that most people think we really have, and is certainly the basis of Abrahamic religions whose gods either save you or doom you based on whether you make the “right” choice about God or a savior.

b.) Free will skepticism (sometimes called “hard determinism”). As you must know, this is the view to which I adhere. Though it’s often called “determinism”, with the implication that the laws of physics have already determined the entire future of the universe, including what you will do, that’s not my view. There is, if quantum mechanics be right, a fundamental form of indeterminism that is unpredictable, like when a given atom in a radioactive compound will decay. It’s unclear to what extent this fundamental unpredictability affects our actions or their predictability, but I’m sure it’s played some role in evolution (via mutation) or in the Big Bang (as Sean Carroll tells me). Thus I prefer to use the term “naturalism” rather than “determinism.” But, at any rate, fundamental quantum unpredictability cannot give us free will, for it has nothing to do with either “will” or “freedom”.

And this question struck me, as my neurons chugged through their program this morning:

Why do we even bother ruminating about compatibilism, much less write long books about it?

To me the really important issues are a) vs. b) above, which in principle can be attacked with science, while compatibilism is more or less a semantic issue. If naturalism be true, then we should trumpet it from the rooftops, as it flies in the face of what most people think and (as I note below), does have real and important implications for society.

But why bother so much with compatibilism? The only reason I can think of—and it’s a reason often voiced by philosophers—is that people need to have a definition of free will that comports with their “feeling” that they have contracausal free will, even if the definition itself isn’t contracausal.

But why this need? Even I feel like I have contracausal free will, but I realize that at best it’s an illusion and, at any rate, I have no use for a philosopher-confected definition of some compatibilistic free will. I do just fine, thank you.

l do just fine without compatibilistic free will also. I just wish that Egginton felt the same way, because then his Free Will chapter would have made more sense.

Watch this video of Sapolsky talking about accepting no free will

Here's a thought-provoking video of Robert Sapolsky speaking about how difficult it is for him, and others, to experientially live as if free will doesn't exist, even though he's spent fifty years not believing in it.

I've made the video start at this point of the interview. The next 20 minutes or so are interesting, as is the entire interview, since the conversation moves into atheism and other subjects. Enjoy, whether or not you agree with Sapolsky.

No free will is easily misunderstood. Some blog comments prove that.

I readily confess to being a no-free-will addict. However, I'd never join a 12-step program aimed at, um, freeing me from this addiction, because I consider it a good thing to embrace the reality of determinism instead of the illusion of free will.

I've been feeding my taste for no-free-will for quite a few years. I've read every book published in English on this subject that I can find. Some of them have been read repeatedly.

Most recently, I studied Robert Sapolsky's instant classic Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will closely, since Sapolsky has written the definitive critique of the illusion of free will. So far; maybe an even better book will come along.

As noted in my previous post, I've also been listening to You Tube videos of interviews of Sapolsky by a variety of  people. In the interview I'm watching currently while I exercise, Sapolsky says that almost universally philosophers hate his book.

Well, I consider that a plus, given that most philosophers believe in the nonsensical notion of compatibilism -- the absurd thesis that even though determinism rules the brain/mind, free will is compatible with determinism as long as someone isn't physically confined.

I'm philosophically inclined. So are some of the commenters on my blog posts. I've got no problem with philosophizing. But in my own small way, sort of like Sapolsky, I find myself having to defend blog posts I've written about the illusion of free will against criticisms that don't make sense to me.

Here's some examples from one of two comments on my previous post by always-thoughtful Appreciative Reader. He and I agree that free will doesn't exist. However, Appreciative Reader had some quibbles with my position on free will that seem misguided to me. Here's why.

In one comment, he said:

What I'm arguing against is what you'd previously quoted and linked to Sapolsky having said --- and although you don't spell out the argument again, but you do touch on it here briefly as well, in saying that the Dalai Lama is no more deserving of praise for his pacificism, than, presumably, a Hitler or a Netanyahu might be deserving of censure for their barbarity and their wanton disdain of human suffering. That specific part, that moral argument, I'm afraid I find myself questioning.

First, I never said that the Dalai Lama wasn't deserving of praise, nor that Hitler or a Netanyahu weren't deserving of censure. All I said about the Dalai Lama was:

What matters is that prior causes determine what living beings do, with no exceptions. This applies as much to a sea slug as to a Nobel prize winner or the Dalai Lama or anyone else. So even though Shermer and Sapolsky are both accomplished men, Sapolsky argued that neither of them deserve praise for their achievements, since they weren't responsible for them.

I stand behind that statement 100%. Note that when I said praise isn't deserved by anybody, the reason is that they weren't responsible for the achievements that supposedly merit praise. Since Appreciative Reader agrees that free will doesn't exist, I assume he would agree with this.

That leaves the issue of supporting people who do positive things and condemning people who do negative things. Sapolsky is totally fine with this, as am I, and as is every author who writes about the illusion of free will that I've read.

Think about it this way. A large primate, a gorilla or chimpanzee, say, kills a human. Or on the plus side, learns how to communicate with humans via sign language. Would we say that the primate deserves condemnation for the killing or praise for learning sign language? 

No. Condemnation or praise imply that the primate made a freely chosen decision to do what they did. Likewise, we wouldn't condemn a wolf pack that killed sheep in a rancher's field. We'd simply recognize that this is what wolves do, kill vulnerable prey.

So where is the rationale for condemning or praising humans? Do our minds/brains possess some free will magic that our fellow primates lack? No. Sapolsky is a primatologist. And a human. Thus he's well qualified to argue, as he does, that our actions are as determined as the actions of any other animal.

Appreciative Reader then says:

You start with that implicit premise; then show that there's no free will (an argument I fully agree with, I mean specifically the argument that there's no free will); and that leads you to the very odd conclusion that no one is deserving of admiration or censure. Well, what I question is that premise, which has been slipped in implicitly, undefended, surreptitiously as it were.

Think about it: Sure, we have no free will. Sure, everything is determined (bar the quantum randomness thing). But why would that mean that something good that someone does is not to be admired?

Well, again, words are being attributed to me that I'm pretty sure I haven't said in any of the posts I've written about the illusion of free will. I've said that no one is deserving of praise or blame. But admiration or censure? That's a different thing.

What's important to remember here is the difference between scientific reality and everyday life. As I've noted before, and surely will again (like right now), I'm confident even astronomers say "Wow, what a beautiful sunset," even though they know that the sun isn't really setting, the Earth is turning.

Similarly, the key point that Sapolsky makes in his 400 page book is that determinism rules the mind/brain, with not the slightest crevice where free will could enter. That's a bold assertion, but he does a great job of taking the best arguments in favor of free will and demolishing them.

Yet Sapolsky readily admits that even after his decades of researching and pondering this subject, he still lives his life as if he had free will, in much the same way that an astronomer looks upon a sunset even though it is impossible that the sun is setting. 

Admiration is a wonderful thing. So is condemnation or censure. These are natural reactions when we encounter something positive a person has done, or something negative. Again, I'm not aware that I've ever concluded in a blog post that admiration or condemnation should be avoided. I admire and condemn many times every day. Always have, always will.

I'll end by observing that this subject of the illusion of free will is both astoundingly simple and amazingly subtle.

I've spent so much time thinking about it, including visualizing instances in my own life where I wrongly felt (from my current understanding) that I deserved blame or praise, I consider that I've internalized the key arguments Sapolsky and Sam Harris make -- Sapolsky says that Sam Harris is brilliant in this regard, and he agrees completely with him -- to quite a high degree.

I realize that other people are coming to this subject with less exposure to it. Nonetheless, I resonate with Sapolsky's evident frustration when intelligent people, such as philosophers, fail to grasp basic facts about the argument he's making against free will.

Of course, that failure is determined, as is every other action by the mind/brain. To use Sapolsky's language, we may have read a book, or a blog post, a few days or weeks ago that introduces some new ideas about determinism in our psyche. But months, years, or decades ago, we were exposed to powerful cultural and society influences in favor of free will.

So it figures that grasping the subtleties of determinism and the illusion of free will is going to take some time and pondering. Even after all I've learned about this subject, my understanding still has a long ways to go. Which is why I'm grateful for the comments on my posts, whether they agree or disagree with my position on free will.

Gratitude, by the way, is an emotion that Sapolsky views as key to living wisely without a belief in free will. When things go well with us, we can be grateful that circumstances brought this about, even if we didn't of our own free will.

Emergent properties can't produce free will, says Sapolsky

I enjoyed Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, so much, I've been listening to You Tube interviews of Sapolsky while I do a workout every day with my Monkii 360 Core Training System (the Monkii ball and resistance bungees are an enjoyable way to exercise).

His interview with Michael Shermer was interesting because Shermer had some compatibilist views about free will that Sapolsky strongly disagreed with.

Compatibilism is a misguided attempt to save a form of free will by saying that even though our thoughts, actions, emotions and such are determined by causes, free will is compatible with determinism so long as we aren't physically constrained, such as by being in prison.

Shermer is an intelligent guy. Yet he was strangely incapable of grasping a simple truth that Sapolsky repeated over and over in his book, and again and again in this interview: it doesn't matter whether we feel that we're freely choosing between alternative courses of action, or how complex/sophisticated someone's mental ability is.

What matters is that prior causes determine what living beings do, with no exceptions. This applies as much to a sea slug as to a Nobel prize winner or the Dalai Lama or anyone else. So even though Shermer and Sapolsky are both accomplished men, Sapolsky argued that neither of them deserve praise for their achievements, since they weren't responsible for them.

Shermer seemed to agree with this, saying that gratitude is the more appropriate response to how they've been able to achieve so much. Sapolsky concurred. Gratitude, which I also try to manifest, is a form of thanks to the entire universe for bringing about conditions we're grateful for.

Shermer and Sapolsky discussed emergent properties, a subject that made for interesting reading in Determined. It's amazing how simple rules of behavior can result in complex outcomes when those rules are followed by many living beings.

Ants, for example. Or bees. Or termites. Or marching bands. Or... brains. No single ant knows how to fashion a thriving ant colony, or a single bee a hive. But when a multitude of ants and bees follow simple rules, a (seeming) miracle occurs: sophisticated well-working complexity.

Below I've shared the YouTube video of Shermer's interview with Sapolsky. I've made it start shortly before remarks by Sapolsky about emergent properties that I liked a lot. I also made a transcript of those remarks for those who prefer to read rather than watch a video. 

A key point Sapolsky makes is that the simple determinism guiding individual ants, bees, or neurons in the human brain doesn't change when lots of ants, bees, or neurons result in novel emergent properties that aren't present in individual cases.

Again, one ant can't fashion a colony. One bee can't fashion a hive. One neuron can't fashion a mind. But put many ants, bees, or neurons together, and from their workings higher order entities emerge. Here's the video and transcript.

Every single person who at that point decides that free will can be pulled out of this makes the same mistake, which is they decide that somehow itty-bitty building blocks are working differently now.  They've gotten smarter. They've got more degrees of freedom in their action.

And the real sort of Hail Mary desperate version of pulling free will out of it is to believe that somehow when the upper level emergent property comes out there, it enables you to reach down and now futz with those little building blocks and manipulate them so that they work differently. And they don't.

The whole point of what's amazing about it is that when all your neurons are together and they're inventing aesthetics, your neurons are just the same and stupid and have just the same number of limited rules. Saying this is where free will comes from is like saying one water molecule cannot have the property of wetness.

Wetness is an emergent property. But its like saying, what comes with wetness, is when enough water molecules come together, is that a water molecule comes in two hydrogen and one oxygen, but when enough of them come together, suddenly two oxygens and one hydrogen. And that's where the wetness comes from.

That's not how it works. All of the theories about emergence -- I so love emergence, I torture my students teaching them about this, but it's not where free will comes from. And it's something like, if you gave chimps as many neurons as we have, it's an emergent inevitability that they would come up with religion.

But they would come up with a religion like nothing we've ever seen before on Earth, because the chaoticism, that somehow theirs would feature something much more like bananas, though real chimps in the wild don't really eat bananas, I say as a primatologist. 

So, yeah, emergence is amazing, but you can't get free will by saying that in chaotic systems, unpredictable equals indeterministic. And you can't get free will out of emergent systems because every single version of how that happens requires the building blocks to suddenly get a lot fancier. And it can't work that way.

Lastly, here's a passage from an article in The New Yorker about the dilemma of environmentally minded people having to decide whether they want to have children given the threat climate change poses to human civilization. 

The author of the article, Jessica Winter, speaks of telling her boyfriend, "I am never having children." She really meant it. Now her kids are nine and six. How this came to be reminded me of the illusion of free will. Winter refers to long periods of unconscious change, but the same eloquent images apply to all forms of decisions and actions, short and long term.

This is often how it goes. There is the crystalline uncertainty of the structure and dynamics of the climate system, as limpid as the aquamarine sea: a wave is coming, even if we can't yet say how high or how fast it will be.

But then the plates shift beneath the ocean floor -- this can take years, a decade or more -- and something murky and unanswerable rears up, just under the surface of your consciousness, unknown and yet profoundly certain, humming at a low and dizzying frequency.

It's not a decision anymore. No one even asked you.

Kant is difficult to understand, but pleasingly irreligious

I haven't read much of Immanuel Kant directly. Basically, all I've known about this great philosopher is his distinction between noumenon, which can't be known, and phenomenon, which can be known.

But since the book I'm reading now, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, contains a heavy dose of Kant, I'm gradually learning more about his worldview.

Which is pleasingly irreligious. I had no idea that Kant was so down on religion and the supernatural. Here's some passages about his philosophy from what I read today. Like Kant's writing itself, they aren't the easiest reading. But there's some valuable wisdom here.

On the other side, philosophers from Plato all the way to Leibniz, who did believe humans could successfully come to know the world as it is and derive laws for the Good or the Beautiful, implicitly attributed the cause for this knowledge to God: if we can know the deepest nature of reality, that's because some deity has planted a knowledge of unchanging things in our souls from the beginning or has guided the flow of our existence by way of a "preestablished harmony."

But such a deus ex machina was intolerable to Kant, for whom it not only represented "the greatest absurdity one could hit upon in the determination of the origin and validity of our knowledge," but also had the additional disadvantage of encouraging "all sorts of wild notions and every pious and speculative brainstorm."

Indeed, Kant now knew that one of the pressing needs of his philosophy would be to cleanse humans of their destructive tendency to theorize about God and the spirit world, or use religion to say something meaningful about the world of the senses.

...Like Copernicus removing the earth from the center of creation, Kant had decided to do away with a fundamental presupposition common to all attempts to describe how humans come to know the world: namely, that what we are trying to understand is the world itself.  

What we are really trying to understand, he now saw, is our picture of the world. And our natural tendency to think we are speaking about the world is what must be subjected to critique. Thus would be born a new "age of critique" that would initiate the downfall of humanity's submission to the age-old idols of its own creation. This would be called Enlightenment.

The essence of his revolution was Kant's realization that the very coherence of the picture we make of the world depended on conditions that must hold true for a being who exists in time and space -- that is, for a being for whom things are located in relation to one another and events succeed one another -- to come to know anything at all.

For sensory input to become knowledge of the world requires that objects be located in respect to other things, and that events be sequenced as coming before, after, or simultaneous to other events. But locating objects in respect to one another in space, or sequencing events in time, is something that pure sense perception on its own cannot accomplish. Beings who experience the world through sensory exposure need to unify and organize that exposure.

Given that Kant came up with these ideas in the late 1700s, it's damn impressive that Kant could realize that pure sense perception can't know anything. After all, there's no such thing as reality "as it is." For us humans, modern science knows that reality is constructed by the brain, using sensory inputs that are unique to our Homo sapiens species. 

Perceptions are constructed. Emotions are constructed. Thoughts are constructed. But these workings are almost entirely hidden behind the curtain of the brain's workings. So it is easy for us to wrongly believe that our knowledge stems from ethereal, non-physical sources: soul, free will, immaterial consciousness.

Reason's amazing ability to unify the disparate exposures of inherently limited beings into a coherent narrative tends to run roughshod over those same limitations. In the case of the self that can blur the differences in moments of space-time enough to allow objects to appear to us at all, reason turns a necessary condition of the possibility of experience into an independent substance, even endowing it with superpowers like the immortality of the soul. 

In the case of the presumption of a shared space that unifies the manifold of our perceptions into objects, reason turns it into a "collective unity of a whole of experience."

Such a collective unity, "an individual thing containing in itself all empirical reality," this all-encompassing whole -- "Deus sive natura," [God and nature are interchangeable] Spinoza would call it God or nature -- only such a being could be truly unconditional, self-contained, and not contingent on anything else.

...But in practical terms, what would such a knowledge look like? The ideal of "seeing" the universe sub specie aeternitatis [viewed in relation to the eternal] has existed for millennia, but those who have grappled deeply with this ideal have all tended to founder on the same shoal.

As beings who must know the world in time and space, the notion of a knowledge unconstrained by time and space is quite simply inconceivable. 

...Seeing everything simultaneously or knowing all time in the blink of an eye would obliterate the very connection between objects and instances that constitutes knowing. Thus although godlike knowledge in its ostensible freedom from bias may seem like a desirable goal, its realization even in theory leads to an absolute contradiction in terms. 

We can't grasp reality as it is, only as we know it

My new favorite book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, had such a provocative title, as soon as I saw it recommended in The New Yorker I knew that I'd have to buy it.

Wow. It's a work of literary genius, based on my reading of the first part of it. The author, William Egginton, is a humanities professor, but he clearly has an excellent grasp of modern science also. The front cover has a one-sentence summary of what the book is about.

A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe -- the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind -- and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world.

I immediately liked Egginton's approach when I read this in the introduction.

For all their profound differences, Jorge Luis Borges, Immanuel Kant, and Werner Heisenberg shared an uncommon immunity to the temptation to think they knew God's secret plan. Each in his own way resisted the urge to project essential aspects of how human beings experience reality onto reality itself, independent of how we know it.

Indeed, Heisenberg's disruption of classical physics had its roots in an iconoclastic countercurrent to a powerful human tendency to conjure the ultimate nature of reality in our imagination, and then go out and discover it. There is indeed rigor in the world, as Borges famously wrote, but "humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels."

Knowledge is man-made, our own way of making sense of a reality whose ultimate nature may not conform to our conceptions of it. 

Is the saturated red of a Vermeer part of that ultimate reality? The soft fuzz of a peach's skin? The exalted crescendo of a Beethoven symphony? If we can grasp that such powerful experiences require the active engagement of observers and listeners, is it not possible, likely even, that the other phenomena we encounter have a similar origin? 

When we do the opposite, we forget the role we have in creating our own reality.

The first section of the book, which I finished today, is called "Standing on a Sliver of Time." It's fascinating reading, though sometimes a bit difficult to fathom. This section starts out by talking about people who have the rare ability to remember everything they've experienced in remarkable detail. 

It turns out that while this seems like a cool ability to have, in some ways it isn't, because these people lose the ability to generalize from experience. They deal in a vast multitude of specifics, endless moments of time that remain crystal clear in their mind. 

Borges wrote about a fictional person, Funes, with total recall. Egginton says about him:

The scientist can't perceive the way Funes ostensibly can because the very nature of observing something as it changes over time requires that the observer generalize, ever so slightly, and connect the difference between two moments in space-time.

Without this slight blur, this ever so subtle distancing, this lifting up and holding steady of a standard so as to register some infinitesimal alteration, all there would be is an eternal present.

...Like Borges and Kant, what Heisenberg grasped -- what he calculated mathematically, yes, but also what he was able to capture in language -- was that to simultaneously observe an electron's position and momentum would require a perfect presence in a single moment in time, which is utterly incompatible with the minimum condition of observing anything at all.

Not because of some spooky quality of the world of fundamental materials, but because, by its very nature, an observation must relate at least two distinct moments in space-time.

In Kant's words, an observation absolutely requires distinguishing "the time in the succession of impressions on one another." An observation, any observation, undermines perfect being in the present, because the observation itself brings space and time to the picture.

A fundamental particle captured in a singular moment of space-time is thus, by definition, unperceivable and "absolute unity," an infinitely thin sliver of space-time, with no before or after.

Kant couldn't stand Swedenborg's belief in eternal truths beyond the reach of the human senses. Here's why.

It would take Kant many years to articulate what exactly about Swedenborg's pretensions so vexed him, but when he did, the reality came like a thunderclap. The problem was this: we are so accustomed to perceiving a world extended in space and successive in time that we naturally project those qualities onto all our intellectual endeavors.

Take the example of our very own personhood. Since we naturally tend to conceive of things as being extended in space and having duration in time, we implicitly apply the same structure to ourselves. 

We think of our self, be it our soul or our consciousness, as existing somewhere in our body. We imagine it to have come into being at a certain time, and perhaps openly believe or secretly hope it will live on past our physical demise.

However, we fool ourselves when we think that this way of talking about ourselves in space and time has any validity outside space and time.

...The soul or consciousness, in fact, is nothing but the unity of a sense of self over time, the bare fact that to perceive and then to articulate our perceptions something must connect from this very instant to another, and another after that.

This connecting of disparate slices of space-time is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowing anything at all, but it is not itself a thing in space and time, a thing that survives our existence on Earth. When we believe that it is, we end up conjuring the kinds of ghost stories with which Swedenborg beguiled his readership.

"I could be wrong" is what separates openness from dogmatism

Two wonderful sayings that every person should embrace are "I don't know" and "I could be wrong." Each points toward openness, humility, and a rejection of dogmatism.

My favorite, though, is I could be wrong. One reason is that there are so many things that each of us doesn't know. The number of things we know is far, far, far exceeded by the things we don't know. This makes I don't know a commonplace statement.

But I could be wrong is about a belief we hold that seems true to us, yet there's at least some chance we're incorrect about that. This is the way of science, where no truth is viewed as being true for evermore. 

Instead, every truth is provisional, since it might be overthrown by fresh facts. That isn't the way of religion, at least when it comes to fundamentalist religiosity. Rarely do we hear fundamentalists say, "I could be wrong" -- about God, life after death, the religion's founder, heaven, and such.

As an atheist, I'm perfectly willing to admit that I could be wrong about there being no God. However, my experience is that fervent religious believers, whether on this blog or elsewhere, are very reluctant to admit that they could be wrong about there being a God.

This goes a long way toward explaining why it is so difficult and frustrating to have a conversation about religious belief with a fundamentalist. Since they usually won't admit they could be wrong about their beliefs being true, that closed-mindedness shuts off open debate and discussion.

I wrote about this in a 2009 post, "Tips on talking to a fundamentalist." 

Fundamentalism is defined in various ways. I like this Wikipedia definition: "clinging to a stubborn, entrenched position that defies reasoned argument or contradictory evidence."

If someone is certain they're right, it's tough to have a productive conversation with them.

So it's good to learn early on whether you're dealing with a fundamentalist, since most of us have better things to do than try to open up a mind that is nailed shut. A simple question, if answered honestly, is a helpful aid:

Do you consider that you could be wrong?

When you hear a "yes," that's an indication of openness. It turns the conversation in the direction of offering reasons for a religious, spiritual, metaphysical, philosophical, or mystical belief.

Because if there's a possibility of being wrong, no one else should be expected to accept an assertion on blind faith. And if you are told, "no," I'd look elsewhere for conversational companionship (unless you're a glutton for dogmatism).

I've got wrongness on my mind today because yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog, "A kitchen faucet problem reminds me of the wisdom in 'I could be wrong.'" It starts with:

I don't like to be wrong. But I dislike problems that defy fixing even more, whether these be personal, political, or any other sort.

And what I've learned from painful experience is that when I believe I'm absolutely right, yet that rightness isn't resulting in progress at resolving a problem, the best thing I could do is tell myself, "I could be wrong."

When I'm able to do this, or better put, remember to do this, the possibility of fresh options opens up. This is how I was able to leave the religious organization I was an active member of for 35 years. When I was certain that the religion was true, despite a lack of evidence for this, I had no choice but to keep doing what I was doing.

But when I seriously entertained the idea that I could be wrong about the teachings of the religion being true, new avenues of growth appeared. That's the beauty of "I could be wrong." It's a path forward when we're stuck.

Belief in life after death precedes religious belief

Religious believers, of whom I used to be one, so I know what I'm talking about, like to view tenets of religiosity as being a higher form of knowledge than ordinary knowledge of this world. 

But from my current more enlightened atheist perspective, it's much more likely that the actual situation is reversed: religions make use of how people view things before religion comes along, which helps explain the appeal of religiosity. It feels natural.

Here's a good example. Death. Not the cheeriest topic, but a important one, since death arrives for everybody.

The October 14, 2023 issue of New Scientist has an article called "The legacy paradox: Why do people spend time, effort and money to be remembered after death? And can we use this quirk for good, wonders Conor Feehly [the author]."

The article notes that if you believe in an afterlife, "a desire for a positive legacy makes some sense because, in a way, your soul will be around to see how your legacy unfolds." But what about people who don't believe in life after death, who can be termed extinctivists?

Maybe, Feehly writes, they cultivate their legacy to lessen their death anxiety by creating a sort of symbolic immortality through what they produce in the world that will live on after them. However, the article goes on to say:

But there could be a simpler explanation for why extinctivists are motivated to build a legacy: perhaps, deep down, we all entertain some sort of notion of life after death. After all, nobody can consciously experience the absence of consciousness, making it effectively impossible to imagine your own death without being a conscious spectator. 

Indeed, research by [Jesse] Bering and his colleagues suggests that belief in continued existence of the mind following death is a default state for all of us. 

In one study, for example, children watched a puppet show where an alligator ate an anthropomorphised mouse. Older children were unlikely to ascribe any psychological functions to the dead mouse.

However, the youngest children, who were 3 or 4 years old, took a different view. While they understood that the dead mouse no longer had biological needs, they stated that it still had emotions, contradicting the notion that afterlife belief is something we learn.

The findings, which have been replicated across both secular and religious schools, suggest that belief in the continuity of consciousness after death is an intuitive position, with religious belief systems taking advantage of this quirk in our thinking. "I think a lot of [legacy motivation] has to do with these cognitive [processes]," says Bering.

So instead of religious founders bringing back the good news that they've experienced the reality of life after death, there's good reason to believe the opposite: from a young age we humans intuitively view consciousness as surviving bodily death, then that view is used in religious teachings.

But this could be just one source of the widespread assumption among people that death isn't the end of our existence, but a transition to another form of life. Wishful thinking probably also plays a role in this.

The November 20, 2023 issue of The New Yorker has a story about deepfakes, videos, photos, or whatever that are skillfully manipulated to fool others into believing they are true. Here's excerpts from "Your lying eyes."

In the midst of writing his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle grew obsessed with photographs of two girls consorting with fairies. The fakes weren't sophisticated -- one of the girls had drawn the fairies, cut them out, an arranged them before the camera with hatpins.

But Conan Doyle, undeterred, leaped upon the express train to Neverland. He published a breathless book in 1922, titled "The Coming of the Fairies," and another edition, in 1928, that further pushed aside doubts.

...The most effective fakes have been the simplest. Vaccines cause autism, Obama isn't American, the election was stolen, climate change is a myth -- these fictions are almost entirely verbal. They're too large to rely on records, and they have proven nearly impervious to evidence.

When it comes to "deep stories," as the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls them, facts are almost irrelevant. We accept them because they affirm our fundamental beliefs, not because we've seen convincing evidence.

This is how Arthur Conan Doyle fell for fairies. He'd long been interested in the supernatural, but the First World War -- during which his son and brother-in-law died -- pushed him over the edge. Unwilling to believe that the dead were truly gone, he decided that an invisible world existed; he then found counterevidence easy to bat away.

Were the fairies in the photograph not catching the light in a plausible way? That's because fairies are made of ectoplasm, he offered, which has a "faint luminosity of its own." But why didn't the shots of them dancing show any motion blur? Because fairies dance slowly, of course.

If Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales describe a detective who, from a few stray facts, sees through baffling mysteries, his "Coming of the Fairies" tells the story of a man who, with all the facts in the world, cannot see what is right in front of his face.

Alan Watts on how we create an illusory problem, then want it solved

You Tube works in mysterious ways. After I started listening on my iPhone to a video of Robert Sapolsky talking with an interviewer about how the brain constructs emotions, I noticed that an Alan Watts talk had popped up in a list of supposedly related videos.

Okay, I thought, I like Alan Watts, and the title sounds intriguing, "Alan Watts: Live Without Worry or Fear." Wow, all I have to do is spend 53 minutes listening to an Alan Watts talk, and I'll be worry and fear free. 

Of course, that didn't happen, unless there's a delayed reaction after hearing what Watts said. But I really didn't expect anything different. I just hoped to enjoy the talk and get some fresh insights into the philosophy Watts espoused with such clarity and wisdom.

That did happen. 

Watts gives away the secret to living without worry and fear early on in the talk. Basically it is to not fight life but to flow with life. Hard to argue with that, for we make life more difficult when we strain and struggle to control the uncontrollable. 

Problems always will be with us. However, we make matters worse when we view life itself as a problem to be solved, as opposed to dealing with problems that arise within a nonproblematic life. 

Religion, mysticism, and many forms of spirituality are all about viewing life itself as a problem. When we go along with this, Watts says that we fall prey to a trap. We create an illusory problem, then we want that problem solved.

There are lots of religious leaders, gurus, masters, and such who are happy to help with this. Salvation, enlightenment, God realization -- these and other wares are offered in the religious/spiritual marketplace as solutions to the illusory problem of life not being what life actually is.

Actually, we die. Actually, our knowledge of the cosmos is limited. Actually, happiness doesn't exist without sadness. But not being content with the actual nature of life, many people seek out a "guru" who will fix them by making their life into something that isn't an actual life.

Zen, says Watts, attracts some of these people. Traditionally, it was difficult to be accepted as a student by a Zen master. They'd tell the would-be student, "I have nothing to offer you. Go away." 

Viewing that brushoff as an invitation to try harder, the person who wants to be fixed by Zen makes an even stronger effort to be accepted as a Zen student. Sure, the Zen master knows that there is nothing wrong with the person that needs to be fixed. However, the only way to lead the person to that realization is by playing along with their illusion.

Watts likens this to someone who believes the Earth is flat. They can't be reasoned out of this false belief. So a wiser person says to them, "Lets go together to the edge of the world and peer over it." 

Moving in a single direction along a certain latitude, eventually they will return to the place from which they started, demonstrating that the Earth is circular in two dimensions. If they repeated this exercise by traveling along a certain longitude, they'd experience Earth as the globe that it is.

Watts shares a William Blake quote: "The fool who persists in his folly will become wise."

Likewise, a teacher of Zen indulges a student by pressing them to find the nature of themselves that is having the problem they want fixed by Zen. Typically this is done rather indirectly through statements such as "Show me the face that you possessed before you were born." 

Of course, being steeped in the Zen form of Buddhism, the Zen teacher knows that the student doesn't have a self that is separate from the life they are living now. But just as a flat-earth believer needs to experience the roundness of our planet to break free of their illusion, so does a Zen student need to expend much time and energy searching for the illusory self, or ego, or soul, that doesn't exist.

Eventually they will recognize that the search is useless, because there is nothing to be found but the life they're already living. A Donovan song comes to mind: "First there is a mountain, then there isn't, then there is." Wikipedia explains:

The lyrics refer to a Buddhist saying originally formulated by Qingyuan Weixin, later translated by D. T. Suzuki in his Essays in Zen Buddhism, one of the first books to popularize Buddhism in Europe and the US:

Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.

Now, this paraphrase of the talk by Watts doesn't do justice to what he said. It's simply my way of expressing some key points that I recall from the talk.

Near the end of the talk Watts says that a Zen student is brought to the realization that the ego is phoney, not genuine, so it is impossible for the student to either act or to not act, since who they think they are isn't the reality of who they are.

For another way of expressing what I've said here, check out my 2014 post, "Watts: Wanting to clean up the messiness of life IS the mess." It includes a quotation from one of Watts' books on the same theme as the talk I've trued to describe. The quotation ends with:

Sometimes life is telling you that the course you are on is not the way to go, and the message underlying all of this is that you cannot transform yourself. Life is giving you the message that the "you" that you imagine to be capable of transforming yourself does not exist.

In other words, as an ego, I am separate from my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences. So the one who is supposed to be in control of them cannot control them because it isn't there. 

And as soon as you understand that, things will be greatly improved.

More atheist wisdom from "We of Little Faith"

The more I read of Kate Cohen's book, We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (And Maybe You Should Too), the more I enjoy what this talented writer has to say about openly, honestly, and bravely proclaiming one's atheism.

Here's some additional excerpts from the book, which I wrote about in an initial post a few days ago. First, I recall that one of the comments on the post said that it isn't possible, or at least very difficult, to be a Jewish atheist, since Judaism is a religion that believes in God.

That ridiculous, as anyone familiar with the actual beliefs of people in a religion would know. For example, there are Christian pastors who don't believe in God, though they don't proclaim this from the pulpit.

More obviously, it is common to be an atheist Jew. Cohen says this about atheism and being Jewish:

Whether someone is "still Jewish" is not a question you hear in an area with a sizable Jewish population. Anyone familiar with Jews is also familiar with the concept that being Jewish is as much about belonging as belief. It isn't something you change easily. Or at all. You can be more or less observant, you can downgrade to "culturally" Jewish, but it's hard to give it up entirely. I'm pretty sure you can even convert to Hinduism and still be Jewish. 

In a chapter with the engaging title, "Sorry, Honey, God's Just Pretend," Cohen speaks about why she taught her children that we know there's no God, rather than leaving the question of God open. I heartily agree with her logic.

One day, in the middle of doing her math homework at age nine, after having heard a casual remark I made to her father, she [her daughter] paused, pencil poised, to ask me the obvious but as yet never asked question: "How do we know there's no God?"

It's a question atheists get asked all the time, often by people who think we should use that gentler term "agnostic," people who are comfortable with doubt and suspicious of certainty. In answer I would say that all evidence points to the fact that God is a popular and useful fiction, and that no evidence points to the fact that he actually exists.

...So chances were good that teaching my kids there was no God would likely result in... their not believing in God. I can't prove that God does not exist. So how can I teach my children as fact something that cannot actually be proven? Isn't that intellectually irresponsible?

Well, I can't prove that monsters don't exist, either but I have no trouble saying to my kids, "Monsters are pretend." What, after all, is the alternative?

"Mommy, are monsters real?"

"Well, honey, I don't believe monsters are real and neither does your father. Certainly, we've never seen one. But a lot of people do believe they are real. What do you think?"

Of course not. Monsters are pretend. No one would accuse me of indoctrinating my children with a nonbelief in monsters or of brainwashing them with my skepticism about the paranormal. And yet that's precisely what happens when the subject is God.

...Belief in God seems harmless enough. What's the harm in imagining that a kindly old man runs the world? There is none -- as long as they know it's not actually true. Being able to tell fact from fiction comes in quite handy in life, personally and politically, and at least one study has shown that kids who are raised with religion can't do that as well as kids who are raised without it.

So, sure, let's imagine Great-Grandma looking down on us from heaven, but let's be clear we are making that up. And because our surrounding culture tells us, over and over, that heaven might be true, we have to be extra clear that the heaven scenario is no more plausible than the idea that Great-Grandma's spirit has been distilled in a bottle of scotch.

When the kids are old enough, they can have a sip. Or that Great-Grandma now haunts the 793s of the public library; where, in the Dewey decimal system would they like to be filed?

It's okay -- not just okay; mind-expanding, pleasurable -- to think about those things. To picture an alternative universe and ponder its metaphorical significance. I'm happy to do that and happy for my kids too. But I would never say such speculative flights of fancy are or even might be factually true, and I would never say that of heaven or God, either.

Just as I would never say, "It could be that ladybug is in charge; one day you can decide for yourself," I would never say, "I don't think God is in charge, but who knows?" I taught my children there is no God. Or, to be more accurate, I taught them that there are lots and lots of gods, all of them fascinating and all of them invented by human beings.

...Each of these beliefs is something they could learn among the local religious offerings. Not just fiction posing as fact, but also, in some cases, wrong posing as right. Shall I refrain from imposing my moral values on my children as well?

Let's consider a few more imaginary conversations:

"Teddy says wives have to do whatever their husbands say. Is that true?"

"You know, people disagree about that. I think women and men are equal, but a lot of people don't. It sure is an interesting question."

or 

"My teacher says it's now legal for men to marry other men. That's gross, isn't it?"

"No, I don't think it's gross. I think two adults who love each other should be able to get married. But some people think marriage should only be between a man and a woman. They think men who want to marry other men are doomed to burn in hell for all eternity. When you get older, you can decide for yourself."

Not a chance.

...As a parent, I am not willing to say "that's just my opinion" about whether something is fact or fiction, right or wrong. All beliefs -- mine, theirs, Mike Pence's -- are not equal. Many are wrong. Some are harmlessly wrong (I'll go to heaven after I die) and some are harmfully wrong (gay people will go to hell after they die).