Church of the Churchless

Freedom is what bugs me about Sartre. I don't believe in free will.

Message to those who visit this blog who aren't into Sartre's Being and Nothingness as much as I am (which includes almost everybody, I'm pretty sure):

Today I reached a point in my re-reading of the book where it dawned on me what my central problem with Sartre's existentialist philosophy is -- freedom. It's a big enough problem that I likely will put Being and Nothingness back on the shelf where I picked it up recently.

I enjoy trying to encapsulate complex philosophies and world views in a few words, as crazy as this would seem to an expert in them. 

"Humans are free" makes sense to me as a summary for Sartre. "Life is suffering" strikes me as appropriate for Buddhism. But Sartre also speaks a lot about anguish, which for him is the dilemma created by human freedom.

Here's how his translator defines anguish in her Key to Special Terminology, a handy thing to have around when it comes to reading Sartre, who often writes in a dense fashion.

The reflective apprehension of the Self as freedom, the realization that a nothingness slips in between my Self and my past and future so that nothing relieves me from the necessity of continually choosing myself and nothing guarantees the validity of the values which I choose. Fear is of something in the world, anguish is anguish before myself (as in Kierkegaard).

This obviously is different from suffering, but it's interesting that both Sartre and Buddhism find difficulty at the heart of the human condition.

For Sartre, the cause of this difficulty is our inherent freedom. For Buddhism, the cause of this difficulty is attachment, desire, craving -- which arises because we fail to understand that emptiness is the defining characteristic of everything in existence. Meaning, nothing possesses inherent existence but is part of an interconnected web of relationships and mutual dependencies.

I don't believe in freedom of the will, or free will. Most neuroscientists don't either, or at least lots don't.

Sartre, for some reason, doesn't accept the reality of the unconscious or subconscious. So he takes as self-evident the feeling that he has, which is common to the feeling everybody has, that it is possible to do something different from what we actually choose to do.

Sartre uses the example of a gambler who vows to stop gambling after this activity causes him problems. However, when he comes upon a gaming table, he decides to gamble. Sartre sees this as nothingness coming between his prior vow and his current decision to keep gambling. 

Hence, nothing guarantees that he will ever stop gambling, since he is always capable of exercising his inherent freedom to choose to act in a manner contrary to what his vow demands. That leads to anguish, given that he will always need to choose anew whether to gamble, in accord with his inescapable freedom.

This is pretty much exactly opposite to how I see things. I'm much more in the Buddhist camp. Which also is the neuroscientific camp. I find comfort in what I consider to be this fact: we humans don't have free will. Our beliefs, emotions, actions, and such are fully determined by the laws of nature.

As Sam Harris cogently points out, and I heartily agree with him on this, if we make a decision, and every atom in our brain and nervous system is in exactly the same state as it was when the decision was made, we would make the exact same decision again.

In other words, there is no mysterious nothingness or free-will-fairy in our consciousness that makes it possible for our thoughts, emotions, and actions to be outside of the realm of determinism, as Sartre believes is the case.

In my view of reality, the only psychological freedom we really have is the freedom to feel that we aren't making freely-chosen decisions. There's a tremendous benefit in trading a belief in illusory free will for the hugely more likely fact that we humans are as driven by deterministic forces as the planets in our solar system are.

Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

I love the idea that I've lost my free will because I never had it, though for much of my life I believed that I did. I find peace in the realization that everything that's happened in my past, everything that's happening now in my present, everything that will happen to me in the future -- my entire life is the result of deterministic causes and conditions (a thoroughly Buddhist concept) that extends from the moment of the big bang some 14 billion years ago to a possibly infinite future of the cosmos.

Sartre, of course, disagrees with this perspective. He's an exceedingly accomplished philosopher, so in Being and Nothingness he anticipated the objections of people like me to his assertion that freedom lies at the heart of human consciousness.

Psychological determinism, before being a theoretical conception, is first an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the basis of all attitudes of excuse. It is reflective conduct with respect to anguish; it asserts that there are within us antagonistic forces whose type of existence is comparable to that of things. 

It attempts to fill the void which encircles us, to re-establish the links between past and present, between present and future. It provides us with a nature productive of our acts, and these very acts it makes transcendent: it assigns to them a foundation in something other than themselves by endowing them with an inertia and externality eminently reassuring because they constitute a permanent game of excuses. 

Psychological determinism denies that transcendence of human reality which makes it emerge in anguish beyond its own essence. At the same time by reducing us to never being anything but what we are, it reintroduces in us the absolute positivity of being-in-itself and thereby reinstates us at the heart of being.

But this determinism, a reflective defense against anguish, is not given as a reflective intuition. It avails nothing against the evidence of freedom; hence it is given as a faith to take refuge in, as the ideal end toward which we can flee to escape anguish. 

That is made evident on the philosophical plane by the fact that deterministic psychologists do not claim to found their thesis on the pure givens of introspection. They present it as a satisfying hypothesis, the value of which comes from the fact that it accounts for the facts -- or as a necessary postulate for establishing all psychology.

Well, I would have loved to see a debate between Sartre and a modern neuroscientist. I suspect Sartre would be demolished in such a debate. 

I have no problem with links between my past and present, and between my present and future. I have no problem with a nature that produces my acts. I have no problem with never being anything but what I am. I have no problem with accepting a determinism that accounts for the facts.

But I do have a problem with Sartre calling introspection a "pure given." We all can be very wrong about what is in our minds. We can be led astray by unconscious influences. There are countless psychological experiments that demonstrate this. 

Sure, it seems like we have free will. It also seems that the sun sets. Both seemings are wrong. Almost certainly we don't have free will, and it is certain that the earth rotates while the sun remains at the center of our solar systems.

What seems to be true has to yield to facts. That's why I reject Sartre's view of freedom.

I enjoy reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness. (Yeah, I'm weird.)

OK, I lied. Or more accurately, I changed my mind.

After saying in my previous post about Sartre's Being and Nothingness that I didn't feel like re-reading (or re-re-reading) the 798 pages of dense philosophical prose, choosing to only read the 44 pages of the translator's introduction again, I've found myself plowing further into the book.

Because I'm enjoying it. 

I sort of figure that rather than attempting the New York Times crossword puzzle, I'd rather exercise my aging brain by reading passages that often simultaneously stretch my ability to comprehend them, while presenting me with fresh ways of looking upon reality.

What I admire about Sartre is how he is determined to view the world afresh from a bottom-up perspective founded on what he considers to be facts about how things are, the realm of ontology (and science), rather than why things are, the domain of metaphysics (and religion).

So in this post I want to try to convey in a broad-brush fashion what I find appealing and interesting about Being and Nothingness, which as noted in my other post about the book is Sartre's attempt to systematize the philosophy that he conveyed in previous works of fiction.

As mentioned before, consciousness is central to Sartre's project. It should be, since without consciousness, there is no world, and no us. It's impossible to consider the universe without consciousness, because all of our considering occurs within, or as, consciousness.

Sartre divides reality into two large clumps: unconscious Being-in-itself and conscious Being-for-itself. Mostly it's easy to distinguish the two. The chair I'm sitting on while I type these words is Being-in-itself. The person doing the typing, me, is Being-for-itself. 

Currently philosophy and neuroscience express Being-for-itself as having something it is like to be that entity. There is something it is like to be me or you. Also, to be our dog. Almost certainly there is nothing to be like to be a chair. It simply is.

That's the defining characteristic of Being-in-itself. It simply is. We who are Being-for-itself have a complicated relationship with Being-in-itself, which occupies a large part of Being and Nothingness. For while Being-in-itself simply is, we can imagine things that are not.

Unicorns. Fairies. God (in the opinion of Sartre, along with myself). The future. The past. 

Sartre uses as an example going to a coffeehouse to meet a friend, Pierre. As he enters the coffeehouse, he looks for Pierre. Failing to see him, Sartre thinks, "Pierre is not here." Out of all of the people and objects in the coffeehouse, he creates a bit of nothingness -- the non-presence of Pierre. 

Even though Sartre says that consciousness always is consciousness of something, we humans can make nothingness into something. A lack, an absence, becomes something noticed. I suspect our dog can do something similar, since she clearly notes the absence of a chew stick when I forget to give her one after her dinner.

But Sartre makes clear that Being and Nothingness are not equals. This points to the absurdity of the Christian notion of creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. Obviously, says Sartre, Being has to exist in order for Nothingness to exist, since nothing is the negation of something, Being. 

We can't say, "there was nothing before God created the universe," since that assumes the Being of God. And if we say simply, "there was nothing before the universe came into being," this still confers upon nothing an illusory solidity, a substance, a being. 

So I'd guess that if Sartre could comment on modern theories of the big bang, he'd hold that matter/energy always have existed in some form -- which makes the most sense, since why assume that an unseen God always has existed instead of visible matter/energy?

Subjectivity is the nature of Being-for-itself, conscious entities such as we humans. This is why we find disasters such as the recent wildfires that devastated Lahaina, a town on Maui, so disturbing, a subject I wrote about yesterday on one of my other blogs. 

Sartre points out that in a disaster of that sort, the Being of the world is unchanged, which reflects the scientific fact that matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It just changes form. All of Lahaina still exists in the form of rubble, smoke, ash, heat, and such.

However, that is no consolation to those who were in Lahaina when the wildfire struck, some of whom died. This creates a certain tension between our envy, if that's the right word, of Being-in-itself which always is, and those of us who are Being-for-itself, conscious entities who seek the permanence of Being but aren't able to find it.

Lastly, for this blog post, Sartre speaks of another tension embodied in the notion of the Other.

This arises because the only Being-for-itself that we know directly is our own self, our own consciousness. Everyone else is a Being-in-itself from our perspective -- a physical body that certainly appears to be conscious just as we are, yet which  lacks the subjectivity, the sense of something it is like to be, that we know directly.

In other words, we know ourself from the inside but everyone else only from the outside.

Thus another person is the Other to us, while we are the Other to them. The dream, or fantasy, of bridging this unbridgeable gap is what gives rise to love, poetry, conversation, dance, music, books, all the many and varied ways we humans try to make our subjectivity a reality for others who can really know us only as an object, not a subject.

Well, after spending almost a thousand words trying to explain why I enjoy reading Sartre so much, I feel like I've mostly failed. But that's the nature of life. No matter how hard we try to convey what it is like to be us, the divide between us and the Other remains.

This seems to explain the longing people have for mystical union, for the possibility that on some other plane of existence a sense of oneness dissolves our essential subjective isolation. I have a lot of sympathy for that longing, as it motivated me to embrace a strong pursuit of mysticism over fifty years ago.

I just have come to view that quest as doomed to failure, even as I understand why so many find it attractive. 

I'm enjoying the Stoic test. Haven't gotten an A or A+ yet.

As noted in my previous post about a modern approach to Stoicism, "Stoicism advises being happy with what we already have," the idea is to be content (or at least as content as possible) with what life brings us.

That doesn't mean we don't try to deal with problems. But we'll be better able to deal with them if we're not in the grip of a strong negative emotion like anger, despair, self-pity, and such.

And in accord with the Buddhist notion of two arrows, it's preferable to just have a single arrow strike us -- such as an illness or losing our job -- rather than having another arrow strike us: the above-mentioned negative emotions that can cause more distress than whatever caused us to become upset in the first place.

My previous post talked about how William B. Irvine looks on framing in his book, The Stoic Challenge. This isn't about what you put around a painting or photograph, but what you put around your problems. Change your frame of reference, and a problem can appear quite different.

The main way Irvine advises to do this is to take up the challenge of Stoic tests -- which means looking upon a setback as an opportunity to grow and learn something about yourself by viewing the setback as a test sent to you by the Stoic Gods (which Irvine views as imaginary, yet a helpful illusion, akin to Santa Claus, who some parents invoke when they want a child to behave: "you won't get any presents if you don't stop teasing the cat").

By employing the Stoic test strategy, your conscious mind can likewise shape the behavior of your credulous and rather childlike subconscious mind. It sounds strange, I know, but it works.

I've been experimenting with the Stoic test for the past few days. Obviously I'm just a beginner at this, but I'm finding that it isn't really necessary to visualize the Stoic gods, or any other entity, as being responsible for a problem or setback that is the occasion for me being tested. 

Simply thinking something like, "Here's a test of my composure," appears to be enough for me to get the benefit of the Stoic test, as it creates a bit of distance between the problem and my habitual reaction to it.

For example, today I went to our bank to deposit a check and get some cash. (Yeah, I'm old enough to still use cash on occasion, along with those archaic things called postage stamps.) When I walked in I was first in line for a teller. But the two people being served by tellers ended up taking a long time with their transaction.

Usually this irritates me. But this time I said to myself, "Stoic test," and vowed to remain calmer than usual. Which, I succeeded in doing.

Though I'm a big fan of mindfulness, a downside of mindfulness is that it can simply make me more mindful of a negative state of mind, like irritation or anger, without doing a whole lot to reduce that negativity, though being aware of a negative emotion is better than being carried away by it in an uncontrolled fashion.

Here's how Irvine describes the grading process for a Stoic test.

The gods who administer Stoic tests do not grade them. You must therefore grade them yourself, and in coming up with a grade, you should take two things into account. 

The first is how you conducted your search for a workaround for the setback. Before committing to a course of action, did you consider your options? In doing so, did you engage in lateral thinking -- did you think "outside the box"? And was the workaround that you finally chose optimal?

An optimal workaround, by the way, won't necessarily be a pleasant workaround. To be optimal, it need only be less unpleasant than the other possible workarounds. Along these lines, getting a foot amputated won't be pleasant, but if the foot is severely gangrenous, amputation will be preferable to the next-best option -- death.

The second but more significant factor in grading your performance will be your emotional response to the setback. If you remain calm and collected, you will be worthy of, say, a B. 

If your goal is to get an A or even an A+ on the exam, though, you will have to do more than remain calm; you will have to welcome the setback and even perk up a bit on its appearance. In this respect, you need to resemble a fireman who, after years of training, is finally called on to put out a fire. At last, a chance to show his stuff!

Stoicism advises being happy with what we already have

A few weeks ago I wrote a philosophical post for my HinesSight blog: Stoic guide to happiness: want the things you already have. Here's an excerpt from the talk by William B. Irvine that I transcribed.

The ancient Stoics came up with a way to get off the hedonic treadmill. The trick, they said, is to want the things you already have, to love the life you happen to be living. 

To better understand this trick, let’s turn our attention back to the gap theory of happiness. The Stoics agreed that the presence of a gap between what you have and what you want will make you unhappy. Their insight was to realize there’s a second way to close the gap.

You can also close it by wanting what you already have. Let me restate that. Instead of working to get the thing you don’t have, spend your efforts learning to want the things you already do have. 

The Stoics would argue that the person who embraces the life that he happens to be living, even though the life is quite basic, is vastly better off than the millionaire who, despite living in a mansion, is convinced that he would be lastingly happy if only he replaced his Ferrari with a newer model.

Or perhaps replaced his wife of several decades with some young model. This millionaire, by the way, will likely be envied by many people. They will imagine that if only they were living his life, they would at last be happy. All their problems would disappear, and no new problems would arise to replace them.

These people are as deluded as the millionaire is. The primary difference between them and the millionaire is that the millionaire is on a more expensive and extravagant version of the hedonic treadmill than they are.

The Stoics said that one way to want what you already have is to practice negative visualization, where you imagine losing something in your life that means a lot to you. Even brief periods of negative visualization can lead you to value more highly what you already have, rather than longing for something more and better.

After writing that post, I bought a book by Irvine, The Stoic Challenge, that I've written one blog post about. I'm enjoying it.

Today I read a couple of chapters about anchoring and framing. These are psychological concepts that pertain to the Stoic approach to happiness. Anchors are notions that sink into the subconscious mind where they affect subsequent speculations about the world.

An example cited in the book is a store that has two options for selling shirts.

Plan A is to price the shirts at $32 each. Plan B is to price the shirts at $40, then have frequent 20% off sales. The benefit of Plan B is that the $40 price gets anchored in the minds of customers. Then when the shirts go on sale, customers think they're getting a good deal if they pay $32 for one.

Framing is related to a Stoic adage, "What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about the things." Meaning, we have a choice in how to frame or look upon a situation. Irvine gives the example of a doctor telling you that you have the choice between two medical procedures.

One has a one-month survival rate of 90%. The other has a 10% mortality rate in the first month. Obviously both are equally risky, but most people find a choice framed in terms of survival more attractive than a choice framed in terms of death.

Though I've got about half of Irvine's book left to read, it seems pretty clear that negative visualization, anchoring, and framing all point to the view that, as noted above, what keeps us dissatisfied with life isn't so much what is objectively happening with us but how we subjectively look upon our situation.

As you might expect, given my strong atheist leaning, I feel that most religions, mystical paths, and supernatural forms of spirituality are harmful to lasting happiness -- even though they admittedly can produce short-term satisfaction by making grandiose promises about returning to God, enjoying heaven, basking in unending bliss, and such.

The problem with putting such lofty goals in the minds of believers is that the goals serve to raise expectations about what is possible to achieve, even though there's no evidence for God, heaven, or unending bliss.

Once we view life through the frame of "this world sucks but a better one awaits," we're akin to someone with a decent middle-class income who falls prey to a huckster who promises much greater riches by following their illusory recipe for wealth.

From being happy with what they have, they now look upon their life as seriously lacking. This is similar to Christian missionaries who tell previously content members of a so-called "primitive" tribe that they are filled with sin that has to be washed clean by believing in the sacrifice of Jesus. 

Suddenly their contentment is reframed as ignorance of their fallen nature that must be redeemed by embracing Christianity. This same game is played by gurus who proclaim that they've been sent to save souls, leaving aside the not-insignificant fact that evidence for soul is lacking, much less the need to save this nonexistent entity.

Now is the key. Now, now, now.

Pema Chödrön is one of my favorite writers about Buddhism. She's an American Buddhist nun and one of the foremost students of Chogyam Trungpa, a renowned meditation master. Here's some excerpts from a wonderful little book by Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape. 

I love how she describes meditation as simply attending to who we are right now, with no intent of improving ourselves.

The book is a collection of talks she gave during a one-month practice period in 1989, which explains some repetition in what I've shared below, which come from the first eight of eighteen talks in the book.

When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are.

...But loving kindness -- maitri -- toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. 

The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whatever we are right now, just as we are.

...Meditation is a process of lightening up, of trusting the basic goodness of what we have and who we are, and of realizing that any wisdom that exists, exists in what we already have. 

Our wisdom is all mixed up with what we call our neurosis. Our brilliance, our juiciness, our spiciness, is all mixed up with our craziness and our confusion, and therefore it doesn't do any good to try to get rid of our so-called negative aspects, because in that process we also get rid of our basic wonderfulness.

We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we're doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are and what we're doing. The key is to wake up, to become more alert, more inquisitive and curious about ourselves. 

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves. We can become the world's greatest experts on anger, jealousy, and self-deprecation, as well as on joyfulness, clarity, and insight.

Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.

...The path is a sense of wonder, becoming a two- or three-year-old child again, wanting to know all the unknowable things, beginning to question everything.

We know we're never really going to find the answers, because these kinds of questions come from having a hunger and a passion for life -- they have nothing to do with resolving anything or tying it all up into a neat little package. 

This kind of questioning is the journey itself.

...The point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. It's who we are right now, and that's what we can make friends with and celebrate.

...The innocent mistake that keeps us caught in our own particular style of ignorance, unkindness, and shut-downness is that we are never encouraged to see clearly what is, with gentleness. Instead, there's a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy.

That is the innocent, naive misunderstanding that we all share, which keeps us unhappy.

Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It's about seeing how we react to all these things.

It's seeing our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It's not about trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness.

...No one else can really sort out for you what to accept -- what opens up your world -- and what to reject -- what seems to keep you going round and round in some kind of repetitive misery. This meditation is called nontheistic, which doesn't have anything to do with believing in God or not believing in God, but means that nobody but yourself can tell you what to accept and what to reject.

...Now. That's the key. Now, now. now. Mindfulness trains you to be awake and alive, fully curious, about what? Well, about now, right? You sit in meditation and the out-breath is now and waking up from your fantasies is now and even the fantasies are now, although they seem to take you into the past and into the future.

...Whatever you're given can wake you up or put you to sleep. That's the challenge of now: What are you going to do with what you have already -- your body, your speech, your mind?

...There isn't any hell or heaven except for how we relate to our world. Hell is just resistance to life.

...Holding on to beliefs limits our experience of life. That doesn't mean beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and thoughts, all these cause the problems. 

...There are wars all over the world because people are insulted that someone else doesn't agree with their belief system. Everybody is guilty of it. It's what is called fundamental theism. You want something to hold on to, you want to say, "Finally I have found it. This is it, and now I feel confirmed and secure and righteous."

Buddhism is not free of it either. This is a human thing. But in Buddhism there is a teaching that would undercut all this, if people would only listen to it. It says, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha." 

This means that if you can find Buddha and say, "It's this way; Buddha is like this," then you had better kill that "Buddha" that you found, that you can say is like this. Contemplative and mystical Christians, Hindus, Jews, people of all faiths and nonfaiths can also have this perspective: if you meet the Christ that can be named, kill that Christ. If you meet the Muhammad or the Jehovah or whoever that can be named and held on to and believed in, smash it.

..."When you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha" means that when you see that you're grasping or clinging to anything, whether conventionally it's called good or bad, make friends with that. Look into it. Get to know it completely and utterly. In that way it will let go of itself. 

The "many worlds" of quantum mechanics arguably is a "single world"

Here's my second post about Heinrich Pas' book The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, the first post being here. 

I realize that probably I'm more interested in quantum mechanics than most people visiting this blog, so I'll do my best to make my posts about the book as simple as possible.

Which isn't easy, since quantum mechanics is confusing at best and totally mystifying at worst -- at least for those of us who aren't professional physicists, and even they readily admit that much about quantum mechanics is difficult to grasp.

The so-called "measurement problem," for example. 

Quantum entities, like photons, are described by a wave function that evolves deterministically. However, the wave function doesn't say where a particle is located or what its momentum is. Rather, it gives probabilities for location and momentum.

Those probabilities exhaust all the possibilities, which can be surprising indeed. For example, while an oxygen atom is most likely in a box filled with oxygen, there's a slight probability that the atom is outside the box, a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling.

When a measurement is made, though, the wave function for the atom collapses to a single location and momentum. At least, that's the traditional Copenhagen view. (Copenhagen is where the early pioneers of quantum mechanics like Niels Bohr worked things out in the first part of the 20th century.)

As is well known, Albert Einstein didn't like quantum probabilities, famously saying that he couldn't believe that God played dice with the universe. God wasn't meant in the usual sense, but was shorthand for the primal laws of nature.

Einstein thought there were hidden variables that caused a measurement to reveal an atom in a certain way. But over time experiments ruled out the existence of hidden variables, so Einstein lost that argument.

The measurement problem remained, though. There was much debate among physicists about whether a conscious observer was needed for a quantum measurement or observation, or whether collapse of the wave function could happen in other ways.

Currently my understanding is that there's a fairly firm consensus that quantum decoherence, as it is called, happens as a result of an entity interacting with its environment.

Not to divert the subject of this blog post, but this is why quantum computers are so difficult to fashion: the quantum entities used for calculations have to be isolated from their environment in order to preserve their quantum nature where all things are possible in terms of probabilities. 

OK, most of what I've said so far in this post comes from my own understanding of quantum mechanics, which I've been reading about as an interesting layman for thirty or so years. I may have gotten some details wrong above, but what I've said is roughly right.

Which gets me to a key theme in Pas' book, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics formulated by Hugh Everett in the 1950s. His Ph.D. thesis put forward a theory that solved the measurement problem by stating that there is no collapse of the wave function.

Instead, Everett said that all of the possibilities and probabilities embodied in the wave function occur. All of them. Pas writes:

Thus, according to Everett, when a particle being in a superposition of two possible locations is observed, the particle doesn't collapse into one of the possible spots but rather the observer and its observation device split into two copies, one copy observing the particle in the first place and another copy finding the particle in the second place.

...As a consequence, every single quantum process results in a multitude of observers, witnessing every possible outcome and thus living in their private individual realities, universes, or "Everett branches": "This universe is constantly splitting into a stupendous number of branches... Moreover, every quantum transition taking place on every star, in every galaxy, in every remote corner of the universe is splitting our local world on earth into myriad copies of itself... Here is schizophrenia with a vengeance," Bryce DeWitt dramatically wrote of the unsettling consequence of Everett's interpretation.

Now, this doesn't seem like a recipe for finding the oneness that is the theme of Pas' book. Actually it is, though.

Because Everett did away with a key duality in the traditional Copenhagen view of quantum mechanics: the difference between the world of microscopic quantum phenomena and the macroscopic classical world of observers and measurement devices. Pas writes:

There is a core contradiction to be resolved as we explore what Everett's theory has to say about a monistic view of the universe. It may seem that by trying to take quantum mechanics seriously as a theory describing the reality of nature, Everett sacrificed the uniqueness of this universe and replaced it with a multiverse of many worlds.

But this conclusion results from a superficial consideration. What is typically overlooked in this picture is that Everett's multiverse is not fundamental but rather apparent or "emergent," as philosopher David Wallace of the University of Southern California insists.

From a fundamental perspective, rather than splitting the universe apart, Everett's formalism allows application of quantum mechanics to the entire universe and thereby enables entanglement to merge the universe into an all-encompassing "One." 

Everett put this point straight, when asked about it in 1977 by the young French physicist Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "The question is one of terminology: to my opinion there is but a single (quantum) world, with its universal wave function. There are not 'many worlds,' no 'branching,' etc., except as an artifact due to insisting once more on a classical picture of the world."

...The fundamental single quantum universe not only alleviates the purported problem of Everett's interpretation featuring a "heavy load of metaphysical baggage" (as Wheeler complained) but totally invalidates this criticism as such a fundamental reality isn't only a single universe but a single unique entity comprising matter, space, and time as well as all potentially possible events and situations.

Not only is there just a single world, but this single world is all there is!

Little known as it is, this consequence of his theory may turn out to be Everett's paramount legacy. As Wojciech Zurek affirmed,"It was Everett who gave us the permission to think about the universe as wholly quantum mechanical."

Well, that's more than enough for this blog post. Difficult stuff to grasp, but I find it fascinating, even as I struggle to understand it. Fortunately, I've got about half of the book left to read. And I haven't described all of the key points in the first half, so hang in there with me if you're confused. Hopefully my posts to come will resolve some of that confusion.

"The One" is a fresh look at the meaning of quantum mechanics

There's been two big problems with attempts to fathom the meaning of quantum mechanics (the commonly used term by scientists in that field, rather than quantum physics).

New Age types, along with other mystically-inclined fans of quantum mechanics, make too much of what quantum mechanics means -- spouting indefensible notions of how we create our own reality, consciousness pervades the cosmos, and such.

Physicists, along with others who work with the applications of quantum mechanics, typically make too little of what quantum mechanics means -- proclaiming that all that counts is the astoundingly precise mathematics underlying this field, often encapsulated as "shut up and calculate."

People like me fall into an in-between realm. We're fascinated by quantum mechanics and devour attempts to make sense of quantum phenomena, but have minimal comprehension of the mathematics needed to truly understand quantum mechanics.

So I was excited when I learned about Heinrich Pas' book The One: How An Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics. Pas is a professor of theoretical physics at a German university and has conducted research visits at CERN and Fermilab, which makes him well qualified to explore the meaning of quantum mechanics.

His first paragraph in the chapter following an introduction does a good job of outlining what his book is about.

Quantum mechanics is the science behind nuclear explosions, smart phones, and particle collisions. But it is more than that. It sketches a hidden reality beyond what we experience in our daily routines and holds within it the power to transform our notion of what is real -- provided that it is taken seriously as a theory about nature. And therein lies the debate that begins our journey: How can we know that there exists something hidden that we can't experience directly? Doubts about this question launched the debate that ultimately returned the notion that "all is One" to the science most concerned with the separate identities and behaviors of the universe's most finicky bits and pieces.

Because quantum mechanics can be so complex, Pas makes use of metaphors to help us non-physicists grasp the central issues. Here's a key metaphor which I'm going to share by quoting from the first chapter, "The Hidden One," since if I tried to summarize the metaphor, I'm worried that I'd leave out something important.

We can obtain an even better understanding by comparing cosmic history with an old Hollywood movie. When we watch a film like Bringing Up Baby, the 1938 American screwball comedy starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, we experience a hilarious plot about a paleontologist trying to assemble the skeleton of a huge dinosaur, a project disrupted when he meets the crazy but beautiful Susan, who owns a tame leopard, and Susan's dog steals the last missing bone and buries it somewhere.

But the story we experience in the theater is not really stored on the roll of film. Instead, a traditional movie projector displays the information on the film, one picture after another, flashed so quickly that the viewer has the impression of an unfolding story line. Again, the story is not really on tape; it is created by the viewer's perspective onto the projected film.

The story is created by us watching it, while the original source of information remains unswayed, mounted on the projector. In the same way, cosmic history may be understood as what we experience, created by our perspective onto a fundamental "quantum reality."

The "Hollywood movie plot interpretation of cosmic history" offers an astonishingly accurate picture of how quantum mechanics works, highlighting the most important question quantum mechanics forces us to ask: What is reality? Is it the light bulb and the collection of pictures stored on the film roll inside the projector, or is it the story experienced on-screen?

Even today, there are two camps of physicists and philosophers arguing fervently about exactly this question.

The orthodox "Copenhagen" interpretation of quantum mechanics, advocated by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and the overwhelming majority of physicists, insists that the movie plot constitutes reality. For many decades only a small number of outcasts, including (at least for some time) Erwin Schrödinger, Wheeler's student Hugh Everett, and the German physicist H. Dieter Zeh, populated the "projector camp."

This renegade view, however, is getting increasingly popular. It is part of a controversy that originated in the 1920s, as physicists fought out the question of how strange reality really is.

As you can probably guess, Pas is in the renegade projector camp. Otherwise his book would be a rather boring rendition of the traditional Copenhagen "shut up, calculate, and don't worry about the meaning of quantum mechanics" camp.

I'll be writing more about this book. For now, I'll end with the final paragraph in "The Hidden One" chapter, just to bookend how Pas begins and ends the chapter. Well, actually I need to include the next to final paragraph also. I'll break the paragraphs up to make them easier to read.

In a different place, though, Wheeler provided some clues: "The point is that the universe is a grand synthesis, putting itself together all the time as a whole... It is a totality." He also speculated whether "a comprehensive view of the physical world [would] come not from the bottom up -- from an endless tower of turtles standing one on the other --but from a grand pattern linking all of its parts."

The Hollywood movie plot interpretation can help to illustrate this point: Onscreen, Susan, the paleontologist, and the leopard appear as distinct, individual characters. On the film roll, though, they are all mere features of a single camera shot.

Quantum mechanics goes even further. In quantum mechanics, so-called entangled systems get so completely and entirely merged that it is not possible to say anything at all about the properties of their constituents anymore. In quantum mechanics, all individual objects and all their properties result from the perspective of the observer -- as, at least potentially, do matter, time and space: they don't really exist on the film but are part of the story experienced as unfolding on-screen.

In fact, this view again is strikingly similar to Plato's philosophy, which assumed that hidden on the most fundamental level there exists only one single object in the universe: the universe itself. Or, in the words of Plato, "The One."

Our brains don't see reality as it is, but as it's predicted to be

My new favorite book talks about a fascinating subject that I've read about before, but never so clearly and in so much depth as Andy Clark's The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

Now, before New Age types get all excited about how the human mind creates its own reality, this definitely isn't what Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, is describing. But it is true that each of us fashions our view of reality to some extent in accord with our previous experiences.

Clark starts off by relating a story of how he woke up to the sound of bird noises. Except, he soon realized that his surroundings were perfectly quiet. What had happened was that his partner had gotten a smartphone app that plays a birdsong rather than a traditional alarm.

After hearing the birdsong app for several days, Clark's brain had played a trick on him. Here's how he describes the trick, followed by a summary of his book's thesis.

I now find that I quite often awake well in advance of the start of the actual alarm, already seeming to hear the faint onset of those prerecorded chirps. These are genuine auditory hallucinations, caused by my new, strong expectation of waking to the subtle sound of the birds.

There is probably nothing sinister about my proneness to this hallucination. It has long been known that hallucinations, both auditory and visual, can be quite easily induced by the right kind of training. 

But these, as well as a myriad of other intriguing phenomena, are lately falling into place of signs of something much larger -- something that lies at the very heart of all human experience. The idea (the main topic of this book) is that human brains are prediction machines.

They are evolved organs that build and rebuild experiences from shifting mixtures of expectation and actual sensory evidence. According to that picture, my own unconscious predictions about what I was likely to be hearing as I awoke pulled my perceptual experience briefly in that direction, creating a short-lived hallucination that was soon corrected as more information flowed in through my senses.

That new information (signifying the lack of birdsong) generated "prediction error signals" and these -- on this occasion at least -- were all it took to bring my experience back into line with reality. The hallucination gave way to a clear experience of a silent room.

But in other cases, as we'll see, mistaken predictions can become entrenched and contact with reality (itself a complex and vexed notion) harder to achieve. Even when there are no mistakes involved, and we are seeing things "as they are," our brain's predictions are still playing a central role.

Predictions and prediction errors are increasingly recognized as the core currency of the human brain, and it is in their shifting balances that all human experience takes shape.

This book is about those balances and an emerging science that turns much of what we thought we knew about perceiving our worlds upside down. According to that science, the brain is constantly trying to guess how things in the world (and our own body) are most likely to be, given what has been learned from previous encounters.

Everything that I see, hear, touch, and feel -- so this new science suggests -- reflects hidden wells of prediction. If the expectations are sufficiently strong, or (as in early chirps of the bird alarm) the sensory evidence sufficiently subtle, I may get things wrong, in effect overwriting parts of the real sensory information with my brain's best guess of how things ought to be.

This does not mean that successful sensing is simply a form of hallucination, though the mechanisms are related to those of hallucination. We should not downplay the importance of all that rich sensory information arriving at the eyes, ears, and other senses.

But it casts the process of seeing -- and of perceiving more generally -- in a new and different way. It casts it as a process led by our brain's best predictions: predictions that are then checked and corrected using the sensory inputs as a guide.

With the prediction machinery up and running, perception becomes a process structured not simply by incoming sensory information but by difference -- the difference between the actual sensory signals and the ones the brain was expecting to encounter. 

I'll be interested to see if this is reflected in the rest of the book -- I've only finished the first chapter -- but it makes sense to me: that religious or mystical experiences occurring entirely within one's own mind, not out there in the world, are especially prone to being hallucinations resulting from strong predictions, or expectations, of what should occur.

After all, as we've seen in the above excerpt from Clark's book, what keeps the brain in close touch with reality is sensory information that corrects erroneous predictions about what ought to be perceived. 

So if a religious believer is engaged in closed-eyes meditation with the expectation that their devotion will result in experiencing God, Jesus, the astral form of their guru, divine light/sound, or whatever, and their brain manifests such an experience, there's no way for that person to use error-correcting sensory information to bring "what appears to be" into closer correspondence with "what actually is."

I said closer correspondence because in one of the last pages I read this morning, Clark dispels the notion that there's any such thing as reality "as it is" -- a favorite saying of many spiritual writers that I'm pleased to see makes little sense. Here he's talking about pain and other sorts of medical symptoms, but his point applies generally.

Since all human experience is constructed from mixtures of expectation, attention, and sensory stimulation, it will never be possible to experience either the world or your own body "as it really is." Indeed, it rapidly becomes unclear what this could even mean. 

Instead, there exists a deep continuity between cases where expectation and attention create symptoms (as we saw earlier) "from whole cloth" and cases where they also reflect the operation of some more standard form of disease and injury. Functional disorders simply lie at one end of this spectrum.

If you want to experience how your brain uses prior experience to predict current reality, check out these examples of sine-wave speech.

First listen to the brief SWS (sine-wave speech) audio. Probably you can't make any sense of it. Then listen to the original audio. After you hear the original, listen again to the SWS audio. If you're like me, and probably you are, now the SWS audio will be quite clear, since your brain has the experience of the original audio to predict what the SWS audio is saying.

Truth-Default Theory explains a lot about religious belief and disbelief

A friend gave me his unread copy of Malcom Gladwell's book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know.

Since I'd heard of some of Gladwell's other books, like Blink and The Tipping Point, but not this one, I started reading Talking to Strangers with fairly low expectations. 

I was wrong. I ended up being fascinated by the book.

It's full of examples of people being fooled by other people who were lying, even though there was considerable evidence about the deception being foisted on them.

So Gladwell delves into the reasons why Neville Chamberlain was fooled by Adolf Hitler; why the CIA was fooled by a Cuban spy, Ana Montes, who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency; why sophisticated investors were fooled by Bernie Madoff's pyramid scheme; why college officials were fooled by Jerry Sandusky, a molester of students.

In each of these cases there were ample warning signs that something wasn't right with how someone was acting. But those warnings were mostly ignored. Why?

Largely because of the dynamics of Truth-Default Theory. Gladwell writes:

We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest. 

...To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a "trigger." A trigger is not the same as a suspicion, or the first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive.

We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion.

We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.

This proposition sounds at first like the kind of hairsplitting that social scientists love to engage in. It is not. It's a profound point that explains a lot of otherwise puzzling behavior. 

...You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don't have enough doubts about them.

I'm going to come back to the distinction between some doubts and enough doubts, because I think it's crucial. Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar.

You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that's the wrong way to think about the problem.

The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren't, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.

We default to truth because we humans are highly social animals.

Homo sapiens wasn't the strongest species in the beginning of our evolutionary history (nor are we today, absent our technology). A saber-toothed tiger could tear us limb from limb. However, early humans were able to band together into cohesive groups. Together, we could accomplish much that an isolated individual couldn't.

That drive to be social, which is still very much with us, required trust. If humans had an innate propensity to doubt other people, it would be very difficult for us to form lasting groups: a tribe, a nation, a society, a sports team, a political party.

And yes, a religion. 

Religions benefit from Truth-Default Theory. When someone hears about a religious teaching from another person that they trust, they're inclined to accept it as being true. Jesus loves you. He died for your sins. Believe in Jesus and you will enjoy eternal life in heaven.

As someone learns more about their chosen religion, likely they won't believe everything about the faith that they've embraced. But as Gladwell noted, those doubts aren't going to make someone become an unbeliever in their religion, since they don't have enough doubts to do that. 

Until, they do. Then they probably will deconvert from the religion.

This describes my religious trajectory. Even though in college I was fooled by a crazed Greek Yoga teacher with a Christananda ashram who thought Jesus was talking to him, that experience of being disillusioned by a spiritual "guru" didn't stop me from jumping right into the religious arms of another guru soon after I escaped the grasp of the Greek guy.

I talked about this in "My strange RSSB initiation story." The beginning of that 2008 post has clear echoes of Truth-Default Theory.

A few days ago I talked about how I came to have doubts about the guru-centered faith, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), that I followed diligently for over thirty years.

One of the commenters on that post asked a question about why I was so gullible in accepting teachings that, in retrospect, seemed so unlikely to be true.

I responded that all of us believe things which we're mistaken about. Discarding worn-out beliefs and accepting new ones is part of life's maturation process. I also said that to attempt to answer that question I'd need to tell the tale of how I came to be initiated into the RSSB fold.

This is a strange story. I don't think I've ever shared it on the Internet, though I've told it verbally quite a few times.

How a physicist embraces both science and spirituality

I embrace science. I also embrace spirituality, so long as "spirit" isn't viewed as something supernatural, but as a word that points to a deep personal understanding of existence that is compatible with science.

So when I heard about physicist Alan Lightman's book, The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, I knew that I wanted to read it. (I included an excerpt in this post.)

Now that I've finished the book, it met my expectations, though I didn't learn anything astoundingly new.

Lightman does a good job of explaining how we can feel a sense of belonging to a world that is far greater than our small self, which can even fade away to a near-nothing in a transcendent experience, without recourse to religious dogma or mystical mumbo-jumbo.

But I already believed that to be true. Which doesn't take away from the value of Lightman's book for me, because I enjoy hearing truths spoken in different ways.

Here's some excerpts from the book that will give you a feel for Lightman's perspective.

In the millions of experiments and probes of the physical world, modern scientists have not found any mysterious forces or phenomena that did not ultimately yield to a rational explanation.

Sometimes, we have had to revise our understanding and theories based on new observations and considerations, as happened in the twentieth century with relativity and quantum mechanics, but the revised theories have always been consistent with the law of the conservation of energy and, more generally, a material, rule-based understanding of nature.

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As I have said, I'm a materialist. Like almost all modern biologists, I believe that consciousness and all mental experiences are sensations brought about by the chemicals and electrical currents in the brain. But we may never be able to cross the first-person/third-person divide. The experience of consciousness, at least at its highest levels, is the first-person subjective par excellence. 

The analysis of three pounds of neurons sitting on the lab table, the probing of the brain with instruments, the measuring of its electrical quiverings, the writing of equations to describe it, even the mere talking about it as a thing are all third-person activities. 

We can't be inside the box and outside the box at the same time. Of course, in some sense we are always inside the box of our own minds, since we cannot experience the world except through our individual brains.

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Given that we cannot cross the first-person/third-person divide, that we cannot express in any objective way what it feels like to be a conscious being or thing, can we at least understand how a congregation of billions of material neurons might produce something as complex and qualitatively novel as consciousness? 

The answer is yes, and it comes from a study of what are called emergent phenomena. Emergence or emergentism is collective behavior of a complex system with many parts that is not apparent and often not predictable by understanding the individual parts.

...In particular, consciousness can emerge from the collective interaction of billions of neurons, following known laws of chemistry, physics, and biology, without the intervention of some additional ethereal or psychic force.

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The experiences described here, which express many of the features of spirituality as I have defined it -- feelings of connection to nature, the cosmos, and other people; the feeling of being part of something larger than one's self, the appreciation of beauty; the experience of awe -- are religious experiences, in that they are all mediated by an omniscient and purposeful Being and Creator we call God.

As such, the experiences may be considered to derive from God, or from the God-like soul in us, or from the pervasiveness of God in nature and the cosmos. For the unnamed clergyman and for Tagore and Muhammad and Moses, the existence and spiritual power of God are implicitly assumed.

I respect these beliefs and their divine attributions. My aim here is to show that these same spiritual feelings can arise completely from the forces of Darwinian natural selection and the capacities of a highly intelligent brain, without other agency. In other words, I am discussing here a nonreligious spirituality and its evolutionary origins, although the feelings of connection and awe may be quite similar to those of religious spirituality. 

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A detachment from one's Self plays an important role in various aspects of spirituality, especially the transcendent experience of being connected to something larger than ourselves. When we open ourselves up to a larger world, we are in some ways subjugating and dissolving our individual egos. For a few moments at least, we let go of Self.

Thus, there would seem to be an anticorrelation between the degree to which we focus on our individual selves and the degree to which we can connect to things larger than ourselves. More self, less connection to the larger world. 

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It is worth pausing here to acknowledge that the relative importance of one's self is partly shaped by one's society. Cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have long noticed substantial differences between Westerners and Easterners in their attitudes toward the individual versus the larger group.

Westerners (Americans, Europeans, Australians, etc.) celebrate the individual and the individual's freedom, independence, and autonomy, while Easterners (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc.) prioritize the group over the individual and emphasize the interdependent relationships between members of the group.

The two psychological and cultural dichotomies are referred to as "individualism" versus "collectivism." One particularly interesting feature of this dichotomy: To study a phenomenon or analyze a problem, individualists break the thing down into its component parts. Collectivists experience phenomena holistically, and in terms of the relationships between the parts.

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I believe that the capacity for awe also includes an openness to the world. Openness, in turn, requires a certain humility. To be open to the world is to recognize that there are things in the world that we do not yet possess, things bigger than us, things that we do not yet understand (or perhaps may never understand).

...Returning to the Hindu concept of darshan, which literally means "viewing" in Sanskrit, its fuller meaning is the experience of beholding a deity or sacred object. 

For Penrose, mathematics is that sacred object. For Bai Juyi, it was the view from a mountaintop. For my early morning in Maine, it was the shining air. For my two-year-old daughter, it was the ocean. The experience of darshan is considered to be reciprocal. 

When we open ourselves to the world and pay homage to that which is larger than ourselves, we receive a blessing from the outer world. We get something back. We are ourselves enriched by the larger understanding of the cosmos and our place in it.

Purity vs. pollution is a bizarre aspect of caste

Since I'm reading, and enjoying, Isabel Wilkerson's great book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, I was especially interested to read a recent newspaper story about Seattle becoming the first city in the United States to ban caste discrimination.

Caste, in Wilkerson's view, is at the heart of American racism, Nazi Germany's horrors against Jews, and naturally India's longstanding caste divisions.

I noted in a previous post how Wilkerson discovered that even currently among Indian scholars studying caste, she was able to tell who was upper caste and who was lower caste by the way they carried themselves and how they acted toward other Indians.

That surprised me. But I guess it shouldn't have.

After all, while discrimination against African-Americans is illegal in my county, there's still plenty of discrimination happening. Same applies to caste discrimination in India.

And in Seattle also, according to a BBC story, "Seattle: Why US city's ban on caste discrimination is historic for South Asian Americans."

On Tuesday, Seattle became the first US city to ban caste-based discrimination after a vote by the local council. Ahead of the vote, several South Asians stood in line for hours to share their stories with council members.

Academic Prem Pariyar was one of them. He says he fled to the US from Nepal in 2015 after his family was brutally attacked by a group of upper caste people for speaking up against atrocities.

But that didn't stop the discrimination he faced because of his caste. Once, he says, he was invited to lunch at a friend's house in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.

"I was hesitant [to go] as caste dictates where you sit and eat, but I thought it will be different here as people are educated, in a country where human rights are valued," Mr Pariyar says.

But just as he was about to serve food for himself, he was asked not to touch anything. Instead, someone else handed him a plate of food.

...Mr Pariyar says the incident at his friend's house reminded him of something from his childhood in Nepal: his teacher spat out the water he gave her after finding out he belonged to a lower caste.

In her "Purity versus Pollution" chapter that I read today, Wilkerson describes similar examples of how caste discrimination has functioned in India and the United States. The chapter starts with these paragraphs.

The fourth pillar of caste rests upon the fundamental belief in the purity of the dominant caste and the fear of pollution from the castes deemed beneath it. Over the centuries, the dominant caste has taken extreme measures to protect its sanctity from the perceived taint of the lower castes.

Both India and the United States at the zenith of their respective caste systems, and the short-lived but heinous regime of the Nazis, raised the obsession with purity to a high, if absurdist, art.

In some parts of India, the lowest-caste people were to remain a certain number of paces from any dominant-caste person while walking out in public -- somewhere between twelve and ninety-six steps away, depending on the castes in question. They had to wear bells to alert those deemed above them so as not to pollute them with their presence.

A person in the lowest subcastes in the Maratha region had to "drag a thorny branch with him to wipe out his footprints" and prostrate himself on the ground if a Brahmin passed, so that his "foul shadow might not defile the holy Brahmin."

Likewise, Wilkerson describes how well into the twentieth-century, African-Americans couldn't use white beaches, lakes, and swimming pools because the dominant caste -- Whites -- were afraid of being polluted by the subordinate caste, Blacks.

This is bizarre. Fear of pollution isn't solely a religious preoccupation, but it requires a religious mindset, even if not expressed explicitly as a religious dogma.

For example, I recall with present-day amusement how frantic my fellow devotees of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), an India-based religious group that I belonged to for 35 years, would become in a restaurant after the RSSB guru decreed that animal rennet couldn't be eaten.

Rennet is used to make cheese. So if a group of us RSSB disciples wanted to order a pizza at a restaurant, the most fanatic (which excluded me) would quiz the poor waiter if the cheese was made with animal rennet or vegetable rennet.

He or she wouldn't know, not surprisingly. "Please go in the kitchen and check," someone would say.

I'd be embarrassed, since even though I've been a vegetarian for more than fifty years, I realized that the minuscule amount of animal rennet in a cheese pizza was meaningless to anyone but the people most obsessed with absolute vegetarian/karmic purity.

What's going on here, I'm pretty sure, is the doctrine of essences that I've read about in numerous books. This is the notion that things, or people, can possess an unseen essence that has certain magical powers even though there is no evidence for such.

So if someone is shown a sweater and asked whether they'd like to have it to wear, they typically say "yes." But if they're told that the sweater was worn by a murderer when he killed someone, they'll say "no," since now the sweater is viewed as possessing the essence of a murderer.

Wilkerson writes:

As the middle castes pressed for admittance to the rungs above them, what was consistent was the absolute exclusion of the "polluting" lowest caste. African-Americans were not just not citizens, they were, like their Dalit counterparts in India, forced outside the social contract.

They and the Dalits bore the daily brunt of the taint ascribed to their very beings. The Dalits were not permitted to drink from the same cups as the dominant castes in India, live in the villages of the upper-caste people, walk through the front doors of upper-caste homes, and neither were African-Americans in much of the United States for most of its history. 

...Their exclusion was used to justify their exclusion. Their degraded station justified their degradation. They were consigned to the lowliest, dirtiest jobs and thus were seen as lowly and dirty, and everyone in the caste system absorbed the message of their degradation.

The profundity of "There are no black people in Africa"

As Alan Watts was fond of saying, echoing a basic tenet of Taoism, you can't have good without bad, virtue without vice, up without down -- or indeed any quality without its opposite. 

Everything becomes what it is in relation to something that it isn't. 

If everybody in the world had always believed in God, there would be no religious people. There would just be people. Ditto if everybody had always lived without any conception of God. Then there would be no atheists, just people.

Before sentient creatures who can conceive of abstractions arrived on our planet, the natural world didn't have the conceptual divisions that are so much a part of human existence. 

A hurricane or earthquake wasn't destructive until we humans evolved the ability to conceive of "destructive." 

Of course, I'm not suggesting that we'd be better off with a more limited brain. Conceptualization is entertaining, valuable, and a great survival tool. If concepts weren't favored by natural selection, we wouldn't have evolved the capacity for them.

But it's wise to keep in mind how arbitrary many of our customary ways of dividing up the world are. Here's another excerpt from the book by Isabel Wilkerson that I'm reading: "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents."

(My first blog post about Caste is here.)

A few years ago, a Nigerian-born playwright came to a talk that I gave at the British Library in London. She was intrigued by the lecture: the idea that 6 million African-Americans had had to seek political asylum within the borders of their own country during the Great Migration, a history that she had not known of.

She talked with me afterward and said something that I have never forgotten that startled me in its simplicity. 

"You know that there are no black people in Africa," she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that?

"Africans are not black," she said. "They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are."

What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said.

"They don't become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.," she said. "It is then that they become black."

It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everybody else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production.

None of us are ourselves.

I think that's true. But wouldn't it be wonderful if it weren't true, if each of us actually were ourselves, and there was no societal pressure to put people into boxes that don't reflect who they truly are? Wilkerson speaks of containers.

Each of us is in a container of some kind. The label signals to the world what is presumed to be inside and what is to be done with it. The label tells you what shelf your container supposedly belongs on. In a caste system, the label is frequently out of sync with the contents, mistakenly put on the wrong shelf and this hurts people and institutions in ways we may not always know.

Caste is a powerful way of looking at prejudice in both India and America

Recently TIME magazine had a cover story about what's wrong with the United States (a big subject!) that featured a lengthy essay by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning Black author and university instructor.

I was blown away by her emphasis on caste being at the core of our nation's social problems, rather than the more familiar racism. Wilkerson talked about her 2020 book, "Caste: The Origin of our Discontents," which focuses on caste in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany.

Somehow I hadn't heard about that book until now. But I made up for that oversight by immediately ordering it from Amazon. I've only read the first 35 pages so far. I'm liking the book a lot. Here's how Wilkerson describes caste early on in the book.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.

A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.

Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.

Here's an excerpt from Caste that I found fascinating. When Wilkerson spoke to some Indian scholars of caste, she found that she could tell who was upper-caste and lower-caste from their bearing and behavior. I'll have more to say about the book after I'm further along in it.

In embarking upon this work, I devoured books about caste in India and in the United States. Anything with the word caste in it lit up my neurons. I discovered kindred spirits from the past -- sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, writers --- whose work carried me through time and across generations.

Many had labored against the tide, and I felt that I was carrying on a tradition and was not walking alone.

In the midst of my research, word of my inquiries spread to some Indian scholars of caste, based here in America. They invited me to speak at an inaugural conference on caste and race at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the town where W.E.B. Du Bois's papers are kept.

There, I told the audience that I had written a six-hundred-page book about the Jim Crow era in the American South, the time of naked white supremacy, but that the word racism did not appear anywhere in the narrative.

I told them that, after spending fifteen years studying the topic and hearing the testimony of the survivors of the era, I realized that the term was insufficient. Caste was the more accurate term, and I set out to them the reasons why.

They were both stunned and heartened. The plates of Indian food kindly set before me at the reception thereafter sat cold due to the press of questions and the sharing that went on into the night.

At a closing ceremony that I had not been aware of ahead of time, the hosts presented to me a bronze-colored bust of the patron saint of the low-born of India, Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Dalit leader who had written to Du Bois all those decades before.

It felt like an initiation into a caste to which I had somehow always belonged. Over and over, they shared scenarios of what they had endured, and I responded in personal recognition, as if even to anticipate some particular turn or outcome.

To their astonishment, I began to be able to tell who was high-born and who was low-born among the Indian people among us, not from what they looked like, as one might in the United States, but on the basis of the universal human response to hierarchy -- in the case of an upper-caste person, an inescapable certitude in bearing, demeanor, behavior, a visible expectation of centrality.

After one session, I went up to a woman presenter whose caste I had ascertained from observing her interactions. I noticed that she had reflexively stood over the Dalit speaker and had taken it upon herself to explain what the Dalit woman had just said or meant, to take a position of authority as if by second nature, perhaps without realizing it.

We chatted a bit, and then I said to her, "I believe you must be upper caste, are you not?" She looked crestfallen. "How did you know?" she said, "I try so hard."

We talked for what seemed an hour more, and I could see the effort it took to manage the unconscious signals of encoded superiority, the presence of mind necessary to counteract the programming of caste. I could see how hard it was even for someone committed to healing the caste divide, who was, as it turned out, married to a man from the subordinate caste and who was deeply invested in egalitarian ideals.

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. 

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. 

Often we know, but don't understand how we know

I used to be in love with mysticism, where hidden secrets of the cosmos supposedly are revealed in a mysterious fashion. 

I'm still enthralled with hidden secrets being revealed in a mysterious way, but now I realize that there's no need to invoke gurus, meditation, god, inner visions, and all the stuff that mysticism evokes, because everybody has that capacity in everyday life.

This is one of the fascinating messages of Blink, a 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell that a friend gave me, along with two other books by Gladwell that I'd never read before. 

Its subtitle is "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." This too is a notion that mystically inclined people like to claim as their own. Actually, it is an integral part of human nature. Of course, early on in his book Gladwell points out several caveats.

Yes, "decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. But, "it's not the case that our internal computer always shines through, instantly decoding the 'truth' of a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled."

What's surprising, though, is how often our intuition understands what's going on in the blink of an eye, no time-consuming thinking or reasoning required. 

This morning I finished the book's second chapter, "The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions." It starts off with the story of how Vic Braden, a top tennis coach (and former star player) found that he could tell whether an expert tennis player was doing to double-fault. 

Meaning, fail to get a serve in twice in a row, which gives a point to the opponent. Tennis pros might serve hundreds of times in a match and double-fault only three or four times. Yet in one tournament Braden correctly predicted sixteen out of seventeen double faults in the matches he watched.

But here's the catch: much to Braden's frustration, he simply cannot figure out how he knows.

Gladwell goes on to say this.

This is the second critical fact about the thoughts and decisions that bubble up from our unconscious. Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious. 

...Snap judgments and rapid cognition take place behind a locked door. Vic Braden tried to look inside that room. He stayed up at night, trying to figure out what it is in the delivery of a tennis serve that primes his judgment. But he couldn't.

...If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that -- sometimes -- we're better off that way.

...In high stakes, fast-moving situations, we don't want to be as dispassionate and purely rational as the Iowa ventromedial patients. We don't want to stand there endlessly talking through our options. Sometimes we're better off if the mind behind the locked door makes our decisions for us.

...Ted Williams could hit a baseball as well as anyone in history, and he could explain with utter confidence how to do it. But his explanation did not match his actions, just as Mary's explanation for what she wanted in a man did not necessarily match who she was attracted to in the moment.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

...After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute confidence, "Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision," psychologist Joshua Aronson says. "But how on earth could she know that? What my research with priming race and test performance, and Bargh's research with the interrupters, and Maier's experiment with the ropes show is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often."

Of course, there is a second, equally valuable, lesson in the Maier experiment. His subjects were stumped. They were frustrated. They were sitting there for ten minutes, and no doubt many of them felt that they were failing an important test, that they had been exposed as stupid. But they weren't stupid. Why not?

Because everyone in that room had not one mind but two, and all the while their conscious mind was blocked, their unconscious was scanning the room, sifting through possibilities, processing every possible clue. And the instant it found the answer, it guided them -- silently and surely -- to the solution. 

Beautiful. Religious believers like to ask God to give them a sign as to what to do. Or they pray for guidance. 

There's no need for any of that. Each of us has an astounding piece of intelligence within us: the human brain's unconscious workings. Sure, often we need to use our conscious intelligence to wend our way through life's many problems and opportunities. 

But we also need to trust the much vaster part of our cognition, the unconscious that has ways of knowing beyond our ability to know what those ways are. All we can do is be grateful for that often right-on intuitive capability.

Instead of trying to fix ourselves, it's better to be just be ourselves

One of the joys of reading for me is finding connections between seemingly disparate books. As I wrote about a few days ago, I'm reading a book about depression and mindfulness.

I've also started a book by a neuroscientist, "Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness." Patrick House, the author, says that he doesn't agree with all of those ways, but in brief creatively-written chapters he makes the case for each way in accord with how proponents argue for it.

In his first of the nineteen ways, House puts us in the place of a sea creature.

It needs fast reflexes rather than slow contemplation because by the time either prey or a predator appears in the short distance things are visible in highly murky water there's no time for planning. By contrast, when creatures evolved to live on land, now they could see a lion, say, on the far-0ff horizon, and so had an opportunity to decide on the best course of action.

Thus there isn't much need for clock making beyond intervals of a few seconds [for the sea creature], which means that there is no need for the brain to whir up an emergency motor-response plan for the shark cresting over the horizon of the Adriatic shelf, because there is no way to sense the shark cresting over the horizon of the Adriatic shelf.

This usefully constrains the metabolism needed to keep track of the far outer reaches of the outside environment and means any need to plan movements is limited to the timing of events with a small, near-reflexive range.

Hiding in the center of these plans is the observer, the conscious creature, who is just an accumulation of movement preferences and plans trapped inside a sensorium, keeping track of what it thinks the objects around it are and what it might otherwise do with itself.

Then, in his third way, House speaks of a theory of consciousness focused on movement, on doing, which fits with the first way.

A body, too, is restless to get moving; in fact, the entire purpose of the brain is to make efficient movement from experience, and everything else, including consciousness, is downstream of those efforts. 

...Any act of thinking is just pretending to act out. Consciousness requires cells that want to move and that know roughly what will happen when they do, but are prevented from doing so.

...We are irritable animals that move well and think no faster than ten times per second; we are the product of the reduction of the one-trillion body problem [number of cells in the body, I believe] to the one-body problem; we are the product of a brain that is creating hypotheses the entire time about how best to act, knowing that all the outside world can do is irritate it and all it can do is learn, while alive, as much as possible from those irritations.

So we're hard-wired for doing, for action, for dealing with problems and opportunities in the world as conveyed to us by our senses and interpreted by the brain.

Which returns me to the depression and mindfulness book, "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness,"

The authors persuasively argue that a central problem of being human is that we try to apply the same procedures that work well in dealing with problems outside of us to problems inside of us.

This is a big mistake, though one that makes sense to most of us, since it is how we've succeeded in figuring out why our car won't start, how to get a better job, and so many other things that pop up every day that need dealing with.

In short, we assume that doing will work as well for our internal problems as it does for our external problems, while actually what we need is being.

We're rightly proud of what we can do through critical analytical thinking. It's one of the highest achievements of our evolutionary history as human beings and does get us out of a whole slew of fixes in life.

So when we see things are not going well in our internal, emotional life, it's hardly surprising that the mind often quickly reacts by recruiting the mode of mind that functions so effectively in solving problems in our external world. 

This mode of careful analysis, problem solving, judgment, and comparison is aimed at closing the gap between the way things are and the way we think they should be -- at solving perceived problems. Therefore we call it the doing mode of mind. It's the mode by which we respond to what we hear as a call to action.

...Imagine a car trip during which, every time we check to see how close we are to our destination, we find that the car has instantly moved farther away from it. This is tantamount to what happens in the interior world of emotions and feeling states when we call in the doing mode of mind.

That's why we often find ourselves saying things like "I don't know why I feel so depressed; I've got nothing to be depressed about," and then discovering that we feel even more unhappy. We've checked our destination of feeling happy and found ourselves farther away from it. We can't seem to stop reminding ourselves how bad we feel.

No big surprise, given the title of the book, but the way out of this trap is mindfulness, which puts in a being mode of mind. A subject for another blog post.

I'm reading a good book about depression and mindfulness

Given how disturbing it's been for me to endure four days of non-functionality from Typepad, my blogging service, following a failed data migration to new servers (shared that post on Blogger since Typepad is so screwed up at the moment), I guess it was good timing that I got a book from Amazon about depression and mindfulness.

 Not that I'm actually clinically depressed, though I was at one point in my life, about five years ago.

What attracted me to "The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness," was a reader review on Amazon that said this was one of the best books about meditation, whether or not someone is depressed.

I've only read a few chapters, but so far I'm anticipating that the reviewer was correct. I'll share a section called "Get Me Out of Here!" that illustrates a central theme of the book: how our efforts to fix ourselves can make things worse, not better.

The fact is that when emotions are telling us that something is not as it should be, the feeling is distinctly uncomfortable. It's meant to be. The signals are exquisitely designed to push us to act, to do something to rectify the situation.

If the signal didn't feel uncomfortable, didn't create an urge to act, would we leap out of the path of a speeding truck, step in when we saw a child being bullied, turn away from something we found repugnant? It's only when the mind registers that the situation is resolved that the signal shuts itself off.

When the problem that our emotions signal needs to be solved is "out there" -- a charging bull or a roaring funnel cloud -- reacting in a way that will allow us to avoid it or escape from it makes sense. 

The brain mobilizes a whole pattern of mostly automatic reactions that help us deal with whatever is threatening our survival, helping us get rid of or avoid the threat. We call this initial pattern of reactions -- in which we feel negatively toward and want to avoid or eliminate something -- aversion. 

Aversion forces us to act in some appropriate way to the situation and thereby turn off the warning signal. In this regard, it can serve us well, can even save our lives. Sometimes.

But it's not hard to see that the same reactions are going to be counterproductive and even dangerous to our well-being when directed at what's going on "in here" -- toward our own thoughts, feelings, and sense of self. 

None of us can run fast enough to escape our own inner experience. Nor can we eliminate unpleasant, oppressive, and threatening thoughts and feelings by fighting with them and trying to annihilate them. 

When we react to our own negative thoughts and feelings with aversion, the brain circuitry involved in physical avoidance, submission, or defensive attack (the "avoidance system" of the brain) is activated. Once this mechanism is switched on, the body tenses as if it were either getting ready to run or bracing itself for an assault. 

We can also sense the effects of aversion in our minds. When we are preoccupied, dwelling on how to get rid of our feelings of sadness or disconnection, our whole experience is one of contraction. The mind, driven to focus on the compelling yet futile task of getting rid of these feelings, closes in on itself. And with it, our experience of life itself narrows.

Somehow we feel cramped, boxed in. The choices available to us seem to dwindle. We come to feel increasingly cut off from the wider space of possibilities that we long to connect with.

Over our lifetime, we may have come to dislike or even hate emotions such as fear, sadness or anger, in ourselves and in others. If we have, for example, been taught not to "be so emotional," we will have picked up the message that expression of emotion is somewhat unseemly and may have assumed it wasn't okay to feel emotion either. 

Or maybe we remember clearly the drawn-out feeling of an emotional experience like grief and now react with dread when a hint of similar feelings arises.

When we react negatively -- with aversion -- to our own negative emotions, treating them as enemies to be overcome, eradicated, and defeated, we get into trouble. So understanding aversion becomes fundamental to understanding what gets us stuck in persistent unhappiness.

We run into problems because the unhappiness we are feeling now triggers old, extraordinarily unhelpful patterns of thinking from the past.

I'm giving "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness" another read

This morning I felt like brushing up on mindfulness, one of my favorite subjects, since mindfulness has become my meditation. 

Looking through my books about mindfulness, I decided to pick up Loch Kelly's The Way of Effortless Mindfulness. As I noted in a 2019 post, "Effortless mindfulness versus deliberate mindfulness," I liked the idea of putting in no effort.

A book by Loch Kelly, "The Way of Effortless Mindfulness," came to my attention via an interview Sam Harris conducted with Kelly and shared on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app that I'm a fan of. 

Any book about meditation that has effortless in the title is going to get my attention.

For thirty-five years I practiced a mystical meditative practice that involved considerable effort via repeating a mantra, sitting in a particular posture, and adhering to various other rules (such as ideally meditating for 2 1/2 hours a day, which I did for many years).

By comparison, mindfulness involves much less effort, since the focus is on attending to what is right before us, notably the breath.

In his interview with Harris, Loch Kelly talked about how his mindfulness approach derives from Tibetan Buddhism, which differs in some regards from other forms of Buddhism. Basically Kelly (along with Harris) considers that awareness itself is key to mindfulness, with the contents of awareness, though important, being secondary. 

OK, in a way this is obvious, especially if awareness is viewed as closely akin to consciousness, if not exactly the same thing. For we can't be mindful of anything unless we're able to be aware or conscious of that thing.

But even given this obviousness, re-reading the first few chapters of Kelly's book this morning was pleasurable, in part because so far I haven't come across anything that goes against the principles I listed in my first blog post about the book as being essential for me to resonate with a book of this sort.

Though I'm not 100% sure about anything -- the way of science -- I consider it highly probable that these premises are true.

(1) The mind is the brain in action
(2) There is no enduring, unchanging self or soul
(3) Free will is an illusion
(4) We humans see reality through a species-specific lens
(5) Consciousness is created by the brain
(6) All living beings exist in a web of interconnections

So my favorite books about mindfulness and meditation recognize that those six statements most likely are how us Homo sapiens relate to reality. The six truths are grounded in modern science and neuroscience, though naturally there's room for quibbling about the exact nature of what I've summarized above in a half dozen pithy sentences. 

I'm not saying that every author who writes about mindfulness/meditation needs to explicitly agree with each of the principles above to get my stamp of approval. However, at least what they say shouldn't conflict with those principles, or my highlighter is quick to insert question marks in the margin of their book's pages.

Often the sort of mindfulness Kelly espouses is described as being akin to the familiar sky/clouds metaphor. 

Mostly our attention is captured by clouds. Rarely do we view a clear blue sky as being worthy of special notice, though after a long rainy spell, it might be. Likewise, not surprisingly the contents of consciousness are what we're mostly mindful of -- thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and such.

Consciousness itself is like clear air. We need it to exist, but generally we aren't aware of air unless there's a breeze blowing. Inside as I am at the moment, air is an invisible entity that fills our house, yet isn't the sort of thing that draws anybody's attention.

(We've never had a visitor to our home say, "You have such beautiful air.")

Of course, a big difference between the sky/clouds analogy and consciousness/contents analogy is that we look at the sky as an object, while consciousness is the subjectivity that we are. Kelly uses "awake awareness" as a term for what effortless mindfulness is all about. He writes:

"So close that you can't see it" means that awake awareness is hidden in plain sight. It is closer than our own breath. We can't find aware awareness because awake awareness is not an "it." Awake awareness is neither an object nor thing that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted.

It isn't a thought, emotion, image, belief, feeling, or even energy. Awake awareness is invisibly inherent within us and is where we're looking from.

We need to learn how to have awake awareness look within, turn around, or rest back, so that awake awareness can discover itself. Then, awake awareness is the source of mind from which we are able to perceive. 

Well, if awake awareness is the same as consciousness, just under a different name, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. After all, consciousness discovering itself sounds more than a little crazy, since consciousness is how we know everything. 

Our ability to know isn't an object. Kelly has told us that. So how can awake awareness discover itself? Guess I need to re-read more of his book to find out.

Or maybe I should switch to a different mindfulness book.

A philosopher's take on fate, Buddhism, religions

Before the book I've been writing about recently -- Kieran Setiya's Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way -- is put away on a bookshelf where I'll have trouble finding it (my books aren't organized very well), I wanted to share some final observations from Setiya that I found interesting.

No such thing as fate. I agree with Setiya that fate doesn't exist, at least not in the sense of events in our life being preordained. I'd say, though, that they're ordained, in that chains of causes and effects control everything in the cosmos outside of the rarified realm of quantum mechanics where probabilities rule. But that realm has no bearing on everyday life.

In this passage Setiya is talking about an episode in baseball.

No one''s life can be reduced to one event, one enterprise, or one ambition. Each is made of facts and facts and facts. Nor is there any fate to be discerned in what transpires. As we relive the season, the at bat, we see how differently things could go, the sheer contingency of failure and success.

More than that, we see how tempting and how dangerous it is to tell the stories of our lives as if they had some hidden teleology, driving onward to predestined ends.

...We can be at fault for failure, but the chaos of contingency in life -- the pitch that dips or doesn't, the catch that bounces from the heel of a glove -- reminds us that control is never absolute and often limited. Whatever your mistakes, moreover, there is more to you than the failures they explain, more than any project you pursue.

Buddhism is mistaken. I can sort of see why Setiya makes the following critique of Buddhism, but he's speaking of the religious side of Buddhism, the supernatural side. There's also a secular side to Buddhism that does proclaim that living in the present moment is the wisest thing to do. (Atelic means being unfinished, incomplete.)

An alternative reading of the film treats life in Groundhog Day as an allegory for samsara, the cycle of suffering conjectured by Buddhist philosophy, in which we live life after woeful life according to the law of karma. The goal is to be free of this cycle, no longer reborn, in the nothingness of nirvana. Thus Phil escapes from repetition to mortality.

Whatever its merits, the Buddhist interpretation of Groundhog Day, and of human life, is not the same as mine. For Buddhists, the power of now is about the transience and emptiness of reality, overcoming attachment to persons and things, the liberation of disengaging from what is fragile, perishable, shifting. For me, it's the opposite. 

To value the atelic is to attach oneself to the present. It's not about emptiness but fullness, not about detachment or liberation but engagement with, and attention to, what is happening now.

...In Midlife, I wrote about meditation as a way to reorient oneself to the atelic. To focus mindfully on breathing, sitting, listening to sounds, detached from future goals to learn to appreciate the present; it nurtures an ability to find atelic value that transmits into everyday life.

Not all religions appeal to God. Setiya is absolutely correct about this. It's a good thing to remember when religious believers make a sharp distinction between atheism and religiosity. Actually, some religions, like Buddhism, are atheistic.

The first thing to say is that not all religions appeal to God. Beside the monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- there are polytheistic religions like Hinduism, and religions that arte nontheistic, like Buddhism.

It's not easy to say what these religions have in common, what makes them religions, binding together a "total reaction upon life" with creeds and doctrines, rituals and practices. But one element of any religion is belief, or faith, in something that transcends the ordinary world -- if not God or gods then a metaphysics of some kind, as in the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness and the puzzling proposition that there is no self.

Religion is, I believe, essentially metaphysical. It provides a picture of the world as a whole that guides our total reaction: how we are meant to feel about life, the universe, and everything. This might involve our relation to God or it might not; but it always involves a metaphysics of transcendence. 

Take Buddhism, for instance. What distinguishes Buddhist meditation from mindfulness as a method of stress control is the aim of ending suffering through discovering the truth -- in particular, the truth that you don't exist. If neither you nor those you love are real in anything like the way you once believed, mortality and loss are less traumatic.

(That is the idea, anyway; it's never been clear to me why discovering this "truth" is not at least as traumatic, like being told that everyone you know, including you, is already dead.)

To come to terms with life through meditation for serenity, or through talk therapy, is not to be religious, or to know the meaning of life, since it is not to discover any such truth.

Hope is the secular equivalent of religious faith

I've finished Kieran Setiya's book, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.

As might be expected, Setiya doesn't conclude that's there some magical bit of philosophy that can be sprinkled over his first six chapter titles -- Infirmity, Loneliness, Grief, Failure, Injustice, Absurdiy -- and renders those manifestations of life's hardness harmless, or at least bearable.

The best Setiya can come up with is Hope, the title of his concluding chapter. He warms up to that topic in the Absurdity chapter.

Thus the existentialists were wrong: reason may dictate a total reaction to the world, and that reaction may be, if not exactly affirmation, then acceptance of the universe and the place of human life within it. 

This need not rest on anything transcendent or divine, the nonexistence of the self or the immortality of the soul. The afterlife it calls for is collective. The meaning of life -- the truth that tells us how to feel about the whole residual cosmos -- would lie in our halting, perhaps perpetual, progress toward justice in this world.

This vision is less distant from religion than it seems. It is often said that religious belief originates in fear of death, that it's meant to console us in our mortality. But that view is simplistic.

As the pioneering theologian John Bowker argued, the ubiquitous injustice of our world -- where the innocent suffer and the guilty go free -- cries out for metaphysical solution. That is why religions look for justice in a world beyond, or dismiss the world we know as an illusion. The truth would otherwise be intolerable.

The point of being immortal is not simply to cheat death but to make room for the justice our mortality frustrates. The virtuous must be rewarded and the vicious damned; and if that does not happen in this world, it must happen in another. Justice comes first -- as it does in my account of the meaning of life.

I don't believe in another world, not one that compensates for ours. If there is meaning to be found, we must find it in the shape of history, the arc of the moral universe that bends, or does not bend, toward justice.

...I am not by nature optimistic. When I look at whee we are heading, I am terrified, by climate change most of all... If climate change leads to widespread food and water insecurity, mass migration, conflict, and war, we can forget about equality and human rights.

That climate change threatens the meaning of life is not mere rhetoric; it is plain fact. Human life could have meaning. It's meaning could be to limp slowly, painfully, contingently, toward a justice that repairs, so far as it can, the atrocities of the past.

If human history had that shape, we should accept it and play our part. In our small corner of the vast, indifferent universe, we would have made a home. If climate change leads instead to social collapse, that meaning will be lost, not in absurdity but in shame. 

...Our task now is to pull the emergency brake on climate change -- along with the injustice, domestic and global, gendered and racial, with which it is entwined. Our efforts will shape the facts that tell us how to feel. We'll rise to the challenge or we won't. Things may look bad, but remember how they looked before, when we faced the vacuum of absurdity. The question of life's meaning is intelligible and the answer is up to us.

Today, the future is uncertain. We can't be sure, can hardly guess, how history's arc will bend. And so we cannot say what human life means, if it means anything at all. The question that remains is what to feel when so much is unknown. What total reaction makes sense when the meaning of life is unsettled and at risk. Should we be lifted by hope or flattened by despair?

Great question. Me, I answer it either way depending on my mood. My mother, who raised me after my parents divorced, was highly political. So am I.

I love to follow the ins and outs of politics, even as American and world politics both elates and depresses me, depending on how the arc of justice Setiya speaks of appears to be bending. In three weeks the United States will hold midterm elections that will determine which party controls Congress and state legislatures.

Since I care so much about politics, and the related subjects of climate change, American support for Ukraine in its fight against the war crimes of Russia, and other pressing issues, I'm unable to simply live my everyday life, as appealing as that seems at times.

So how do I, or anybody, who cares about making the world a better place, find the energy and determination to pursue justice in all of its varied forms? I think Setiya has it right when he gives a qualified nod to Hope in his final chapter.

Until recently, I didn't think much about hope, and when I did, I was suspicious. My chronic pain is here to stay. To hope otherwise is to be dishonest. And when there's something to be done, what matters is to do it, not whether one does it with hope or resignation. 

Hope isn't important to me. My therapist disagrees. She believes that its significance in my life shows up in my resistance to it. The problem is that I'm afraid to hope; and what I need is courage. It's not just me. For many, hope blurs into wishful thinking. And the more we hope, the more we risk despair.

Why put ourselves through it? At the same time, we cling to hope, a seeming source of light when times are dark. I have come to think that none of us are wrong. Hope is and ought to be an object of ambivalence. Imprisoned in Pandora's jar, hope is both useless and essential.

What is hope, anyway? Philosophers have spilled some ink on this in recent years and, amid dissent, a broad consensus has emerged. 

Hope has elements of both desire and belief. To hope for something is, in part, to wish for it, in part to see it as possible, though not inevitable. You don't hope for what you don't want. Nor do you hope for what is out of the question or what you're sure is bound to happen.

What's more, to hope for something is to think it isn't wholly up to you. It doesn't make sense to hope for what you can simply bring about. Hope is a concession to what you cannot control.

...It is much easier to say why despair is bad than why hope is good. We despair when things are hopeless, but we remain attached to them. "The relationship is over; she is gone forever," cries the jilted lover. The terminal patient weeps: "There is no cure." What they feel is grief or something like it. The pain of passion for a possibility that has died.

But that doesn't mean there's merit in hope. Sometimes impossibility is a fact. My mother's Alzheimer's is not going to get better, only worse, and it would be foolish to hope otherwise, however much I wish it weren't.

Even where hope is rational, what is the good of it? I think of the U.S. elections in 2016 and 2020, when I watched the returns with agonized hope. There was nothing to do but manage my anxiety and vehemently plead for the better result.

Where is the value in that? Hope coexists with quiescence. If there's courage in hoping, it's the courage to face the disappointment that hope creates. When things turn out badly, hope is more harrowing than despair. 

...This is where the myth of hope's value starts. Hope is a precondition of what matters: the pursuit of meaningful change. But that doesn't make hope worthy in itself.

...Hope is like the forging point of iron: the temperature at which it can be wrought. Hope is the point at which we can be moved to act. But it is not the source of heat that brings us to that point or the force that moves us forward, the hammer blow with which we bend the world. Like hot iron, hope is dangerous: it can hurt us. 

And by itself, hope does nothing at all.

Hope doesn't inspire us to act: it makes room for grief and rage to do that. Fear, too, can be a motivating force, as it is for those who work on climate change. "I don't want you to be hopeful," the activist Greta Thunberg told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "I want you to panic."

Hope is consistent with inaction. It's a precondition of something good -- of striving, uncertainly, for what matters -- but it's not good in itself. 

If you are trying to find a therapy for your illness, to adapt to disability, to cope with loneliness or escape from it, to succeed against the odds or to learn from failure, you are living in hope. Depending on your temperament, you may feel good about this or, like me, beset with fear.

If hoping makes you anxious, you'll need courage. My therapist was right: I have to fight the fear of hope that inhibits me from taking risks. But hope itself is idle -- a prerequisite, not a goal. 

I said hope is and ought to be an object of ambivalence, but I've been mostly negative so far. Hope doesn't do much for us: at best it correlates with something good; and the correlation is imperfect. When we give up hope, we give up trying; but we can hope while doing nothing. 

And it's action, not hope, that matters.

...The virtue of hoping well is a matter of belief, of standing with or searching for the truth, attending to what's possible. And it's a matter of will, the courage to conceive alternatives, even when it's not clear what to do. 

This is how we should approach life's hardships, finding possibility where we can: the possibility of flourishing with disability or disease, of finding one's way through loneliness, failure, grief. The question, then, is not whether to hope but what we should hope for.

In the spirit of this book, the answer's not an ideal life. What we need is acknowledgement and close reading of the lives we have. I can hope to ignore my pain or to make something of it, even if I don't hope for a cure.

I can hope to see my mother again, to hold her hand and walk with her along the foreshore where the estuary gathers the tides and the great bridge sweeps across the river mouth, curving with the Earth. But I know she won't recover.

...Other concepts we should leave behind: the concept of the best life as a guideline or a goal, of being happy as the human good, of self-interest divorced from the good of others. Disability need not make life worse and pain is not lost for words. Love need not be earned; grief is no mistake, and the tempering of grief is not betrayal.

Life is not a narrative "that swells and tautens until climax"; it's not all about getting things done. Responsibility for justice need not rest on blame; and while we cannot know we've done enough, that's not a reason to do nothing. Human life is not inevitably absurd; there is room for hope.

Unconditional friendship explains a lot in politics and religion

I'm continuing to enjoy Kieran Setiya's book, "Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way." Every chapter offers up fresh insights into issues that only a skilled philosopher who is dedicated to making philosophy a practical guide for everyday life could come up with.

In the Loneliness chapter, Setiya speaks about friendship. As he did in other chapters, Setiya starts with Aristotle, then picks apart Aristotle's perspective, showing where it is lacking.

As you can read below, Setiya disagrees with Aristotle's contention that when a friend loses the qualities that make him or her lovable, the friend should be dropped. Rather, friendship means being loved for oneself, not for the qualities that you possess.

This rings true to me. Sure, it is easier to be friends with someone who has qualities that you like. But a deep friendship can remain intact even when your friend changes for the worse.

When I read the passage below, it struck me that this helps explain why, say, those who are devoted to Donald Trump stick with him through scandals that seemingly should turn them off to America's most notorious politician. 

Trump's base of support remains amazingly constant even through two impeachments, a failed re-election attempt, countless blatant lies, serious legal troubles, and his attempt to prevent Biden from being installed as president.

I've always thought that Trump's supporters simply were incapable of recognizing the truth about him. But after reading Setiya, I think a more likely explanation is that Trump's charisma and ability to stir up a crowd lead his supporters to view him as a friend.

And friends can disregard a lot of failings in the other person, because as Setiya says, they value their friend for who they are, not the qualities they possess. Same holds true for religious leaders.

So in both politics and religion, if followers consider a leader as a friend (even if they've never met the leader in person), they will be inclined to look past their flaws and mistakes, just as they would for a personal friend.

Here's some of what Setiya had to say about friendship.

Seeing where Aristotle went astray shows something deep about love for friends and family. His mistake was to think of friendship as meritocratic: for him, it's conditional on virtue.

"But if one accepts another man as good, and he turns out badly and is seen to do so," Aristotle asks, "must one still love him? Surely it is impossible, since not everything can be loved, but only what is good."

For Aristotle, friends ought to be flaky, in a way. They should drop you, and stop loving you, the moment you lose the qualities that make you friends. That's pretty much the opposite of the truth. I'm not saying that friendship must be unconditional -- but it can be.

I've had friendships in which a friend changed utterly, to the point that I no longer liked them. I still cared about them. When my friend becomes an asshole, their redemption matters to me vastly more than that of any random schmuck. I suspect that you're the same.

Aristotle's oversight goes back to his initial argument, that loving someone for himself is loving him for his character. That just isn't so.

You are not your character, an assemblage of quirks and traits, virtues and vices, all of which you can outlive. You are a particular, concrete human being, not defined by the attributes you have. Being loved for yourself, therefore, is not being loved for qualities that make you, you, and being valued as a friend is not the same as being admired.

In fact, it's the other way round. Being loved for yourself is being loved precisely not for any special qualities by which love must be earned. And to be valued as a friend is to be valued irrespective of your faults.

Philosophers sometimes claim that to love someone is to see the best in them, even to the point of exaggeration; this is known as "epistemic partiality." 

I hesitate to generalize, but that is not my experience. Parents can be unsparingly critical, and whether or not that's for the best, it doesn't conflict with their claim to love. What is more, their children may be happy to reciprocate. 

Nor is this confined to parental and filial love. No one knows my faults better than my wife, and I know plenty of hers. This doesn't prevent us from loving each other. 

All of which helps us locate the value in friendship, and so, by negation, the harm in being lonely. The rewards of friendship are manifold; friendship offers meaning and pleasure of many kinds. But its value flows ultimately, I believe, from the unconditional value of the people who are friends. 

Pick a friendship that matters in your life: it matters, in the end, because your friend matters and so do you. True friends cherish each other, not just the friendship that connects them. 

Don't protest that something should not be, or it is for the best

I've read a lot of books in my seven decades or so of avid reading.

What I've learned is that sometimes a book is worth reading for a single memorable thought that sticks in the mind long after the rest of the book has been forgotten.

I feel this happening with a sentence that keeps popping up in my psyche several days after I came across it in "Life is Hard," by Kieran Setiya, a philosopher who teaches at MIT. I've boldfaced the sentence below, placing it in the context of where it appears in Setiya's book.

Here it is by itself in all its thought-provoking glory.

Religious or not, we conjure the problem of evil whenever we protest that something should not be; and we engage in something like theodicy when we say it's for the best.

Here's an experience you may have had. You tell a friend about a problem you are coping with, maybe a blowup at work or in a close relationship, a health scare that has you rattled. They are quick to reassure you -- "Don't worry; it will all be fine!" -- or to offer you advice.

But their response is not consoling. Instead, it feels like disavowal: a refusal to acknowledge what you're going through. What we learn in moments like these is that assurance and advice can operate as denial.

Worse than denial, even, is the urge to justify human suffering. "Everything happens for a reason" -- except, of course, it doesn't. Philosophers have a word, "theodicy," for an argument that vindicates the ways of God to man.

Theodicies address the problem of evil: if God is omnipotent and benevolent, what accounts for the manifold evils of the world? 

But theodicy has a life of its own, outside of narrowly theistic or doctrinal contexts. Religious or not, we conjure the problem of evil whenever we protest that something should not be; and we engage in something like theodicy when we say it's for the best.

The problem with theodicy is not just intellectual -- none of the arguments work -- but ethical, too. It's wrong to justify your own or others' suffering, to mute pity or protest in that way. 

I find this sentence amazingly brilliant and well-said. It shows the value of having a philosopher take on the problem of living as well as possible in a world filled with suffering of many varieties.

Every day, many times a day in fact, I protest that something should not be.

When the sciatica in my right leg is more painful than usual. When our dog won't come when I call her. When Putin fires missiles at Ukraine apartment buildings, killing innocent civilians. When I'm late for my Tai Chi class and can't find a nearby parking space.

I'd never thought that I was conjuring the problem of evil when I do this. But it makes sense. After all, evil is viewed as the presence of something horrible that shouldn't be. In the paragraph above, that would be Putin wantonly killing Ukrainians who have no connection to the military.

Yet I think Setiya is correct that the conjuring of evil occurs when we protest that anything should not be.

After all, what exists is a fact. We may not like that it exists. We may want to work to stop it from existing. However, Setiya correctly says in his book that "We have to live in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it would be."

Evil is a creation of the human mind. I use the word occasionally. From now on I'm going to try to use it less often, because it serves no real purpose. What Putin is doing to the Ukrainian people isn't evil; it is terribly wrong. 

Evil demands an explanation for its existence. But we conjure it into existence by viewing evil as something substantively real, often supernaturally real. Dealing with serious problems can happen just as easily without bringing evil into it. 

Politicians like to use the term "evildoers" to justify harsh reactions, as was the case after 9/11. Why not just call them terrorists or extremists? 

More broadly and personally, why do I need to tell myself that such-and-such shouldn't be in my life, when it so obviously is? I can dislike what is happening to me without feeling that its very existence is a mistake.

What is real never is a mistake. It is simply reality. If I don't like the pain in my leg, I can try to lessen the pain. But I gain nothing by complaining to myself that the pain shouldn't be, since it clearly is.

Regarding theodicy, which Setiya defines as vindicating the ways of God to man, I also agree with him that we engage in a secular version of theodicy when we say something is for the best. No, it is just a thing. It is just what is.

The sciatica in my right leg isn't for the best. There's no outside message being communicated to me when I feel that pain. Sure, I've learned some things from the pain, like having the fortitude to ignore it as much as possible for the 75 minutes or so of a Tai Chi class. 

However, this is different than viewing something disagreeable as being for the best, as if there's a Cosmic Teacher who gives us suffering to convey a life lesson. That's absurd, and as Setiya says, "It's wrong to justify your own or others' suffering, to mute pity or protest in that way."

Suffering is simply suffering.

If we find meaning in our suffering, that's our business, and our creation. But to tell someone that they should look upon their suffering as being justified either by God's will or some human rationalization, that's cruel and wrong.

Tools for reducing undesirable mental chatter

Having finished Ethan Kross' book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, I want to share some tools listed at the end of the book for dealing with the voice in our head when it gets too annoying.

These are the tools that Kross says can be implemented on your own. They're in order of how easily each can be implemented when chatter strikes. A basic theme is that they're aimed at stepping back from the echo chamber of our own mind.

The last two involve embracing a superstition or performing a ritual. All perfectly fine for even us atheists, since there's no need to believe in the supernatural to do these things.

(1) Use distanced self-talk. One way to create distance when you're experiencing chatter involves language. When you're trying to work through a difficult experience, use your name and the second-person "you" to refer to yourself. Doing so is linked with less activation in brain networks associated with rumination and leads to improved performance under stress, wiser thinking, and less negative emotion.

(2) Imagine advising a friend. Another way to think about your experience from a distanced perspective is to imagine what you would say to a friend experiencing the same problem as you. Think about the advice you'd give that person, and then apply it to yourself.

(3) Broaden your perspective. Chatter involves narrowly focusing on the problems we're experiencing. A natural antidote to this involves broadening our perspective. To do this, think about how the experience you're worrying about compares with other adverse events you (or others) have endured, how it fits into the broader scheme of your life and the world, and/or how other people you admire would respond to the same situation.

(4) Reframe your experience as a challenge. A theme of this book is that you possess the ability to change the way you think about your experiences. Chatter is often triggered when we interpret a situation as a threat -- something we can't manage. To aid your inner voice, reinterpret the situation as a challenge that you can handle, for example, by reminding yourself of how you've succeeded in similar situations in the past, or by using distanced self-talk.

(5) Reinterpret your body's chatter response. The bodily symptoms of stress (for example, an upset stomach before, say, a date or presentation) are often themselves stressful (for instance, chatter causes your stomach to grumble, which perpetuates your chatter, which leads your stomach to continue to grumble). When this happens, remind yourself that your bodily response to stress is an adaptive evolutionary reaction that improves performance under high-stress situations. In other words, tell yourself that your sudden rapid breathing, pounding heartbeat, and sweaty palms are there not to sabotage you but to help you respond to a challenge.

(6) Normalize your experience. Knowing that you are not alone in your experience can be a potent way of quelling chatter. There's a linguistic tool for helping people do this: Use the word "you" to refer to people in general when you think and talk about negative experiences. Doing so helps people reflect on their experiences from a healthy distance and makes it clear that what happened is not unique to them but characteristic of human experience in general. 

(7) Engage in mental time travel. Another way to gain distance and broaden your perspective is to think about how you'll feel a month, a year, or even longer from now. Remind yourself that you'll look back on whatever is upsetting you in the future and it'll seem much less upsetting. Doing so highlights the impermanence of your current emotional state.

(8) Change the view. As you think about a negative experience, visualize the event in your mind from the perspective of a fly on the wall peering down on the scene. Try to understand why your "distant self" is feeling the way it is. Adopting this perspective leads people to focus less on the emotional features of their experience and more on reinterpreting the event in ways that promote insight and closure. You can also gain distance through visual imagery by imagining moving away from the upsetting scene in your mind's eye, like a camera panning out until the scene shrinks to the size of a postage stamp.

(9) Write expressively. Write about your deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding your negative experience for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for one to three consecutive days. Really let yourself go as you jot down your stream of thoughts; don't worry about grammar or spelling. Focusing on your experience from the perspective of a narrative provides you with distance from the experience, which helps you make sense of what you felt in ways that improve how you feel over time.

(10) Adopt the perspective of a neutral third party. If you find yourself experiencing chatter over a negative interaction you've had with another person or group of people, assume the perspective of a neutral, third-party observer who is motivated to find the best outcome for all parties involved. Doing so reduces negative emotions, quiets an agitated inner voice, and enhances the quality of the relationships we share with the people we've had negative interactions with, including our romantic partners.

(11) Clutch a lucky charm or embrace a superstition. Simply believing that an object or superstitious behavior will help relieve your chatter has precisely that effect by harnessing the brain's power of expectation. Importantly, we don't have to believe in supernatural forces to benefit from these actions. Simply understanding how they harness the power of the brain to heal is sufficient. 

(12) Perform a ritual. Performing a ritual -- a fixed sequence of behaviors that is suffused with meaning -- provides people with a sense of order and control that can be helpful when they're experiencing chatter. Although many of the rituals we engage in (for example, silent prayer, meditation) are passed down to us from our families and cultures, performing rituals that you create can likewise be effective for quieting chatter. 

"Living as a River" is a great non-religious Buddhist book

A few days ago I was drawn to look over the Buddhism section of my bookcase to see if a title appealed to me as something to re-read.

One did. Bodhipaksa's Living as a River: Finding Fearlessness in the Face of Change. (The author was born as Graeme Stephen in Scotland before he took on a Buddhist name.)

After buying the book in 2011, I've written several blog posts about it.

Live as a river -- fluid, dynamic, interconnected
We have a conventional self, but not a soul-self

And I mentioned the book in Overcoming the fear of non-existence, where I tried to answer a question from a commenter, Chris, about how I've been doing in this regard.

Chris, if you haven't done this already, I encourage you to delve into what I look upon as "neuroscientific Buddhism." Or, "Buddhist neuroscience."

Namely, writers and researchers who are trying to make sense of the apparently solid fact that the self (or soul) doesn't exist as a separate, distinct, independent entity. Currently I'm reading, and enjoying, "Living as a River" -- a book I've blogged about recently.

I think the approach Bodhipaksa, the author, takes is right on for dealing with a fear of non-existence. HIs subtitle is fearlessness in the face of change. Well, what's a bigger change than death?

Fear, of anything, usually doesn't disappear suddenly.

The Six Element Practice described in "Living as a River" is traditional Buddhism, yet pleasingly updated with modern scientific insights and stripped of unnecessary religious dogma (such as rebirth).

Again, it seems to be that the best way to deal with a fear of not-existing is to undertand -- really understand, intutively, emotionally, in your gut -- that you have never existed as the self that is afraid of non-existence.

The Introduction is available to read at no charge. When I re-read the Introduction yesterday, I was much impressed by how clearly Bodhipaksa writes, with a pleasing focus on melding science and Buddhist philosophy.

His take on consciousness makes a lot of sense. 

Mentally, we are each "networked" to other minds through the action of mirror neurons, which allow us to share other people's experiences. You could not in fact have a conscious self, in the sense that you have one now, without having encountered other conscious selves.

Consciousness is something "caught." In fact, there's no such "thing" as consciousness. Consciousness is not an entity that sits within us, awaiting contact with the outside world; rather it's a series of activities that arise in dependence upon contact with the world.

The ultimate act of letting go is to abandon the delusion that consciousness and the world are separate things. The more we reflect, the more we can recognize that there is nothing permanent or separate in the body or mind that can constitute the very limited and limiting kind of self we commonly assume we have.

I also like how Bodhipaksa views the Buddha.

The Buddha wasn't a god, or a prophet, but an introspective philosopher who attempted to live a life of ethics and intellectual integrity, based as much as possible on truths discoverable by the unaided (although not untrained) mind.

Because the title "Buddha," which means "awakened one," can be a bit offputting for some people, for the purposes of this chapter I won't refer to him as "the Buddha," but by his family name, Gautama. Perhaps this may bring him down to earth and make him seem less of a "religious" figure.

All it takes are particles to make a conscious being

Here's an excerpt from Sabine Hossenfelder's book, Existential Physics, that I liked a lot. In another post I'll share some subtleties about her emphasis on reductionism as being how the universe works.

Does it take anything more than particles to make a conscious being?

I have found that many people reflexively reject the possibility that human consciousness arises from interactions of the many particles in their brain. They seem wedded to the idea that somehow something must be different about consciousness.

And while the scientifically minded among them do not call it a soul, it is what they mean. They are looking for the mysterious, the unexplainable, the Extra that would make their existence special.

They find it inconceivable that their precious thoughts are "merely" consequences of a lot of particles doing whatever the laws of nature dictate. Certainly, they insist, consciousness must be more than this. 

In a 2019 survey, 75.8 percent of Americans subscribed to this idea of dualism -- that the human mind is more than a complicated biological machine. In Singapore, the percentage of dualists was even higher: 88.3 percent.

If you are among the dualist majority, we have to make a deal before we can move on. You put aside your belief that consciousness requires some Extra that physics doesn't account for and hear what I have to say. 

In return, I promise that if you, at the end of this book, still insist the human brain is exempt from the laws of nature, I'll let you get away with it. 

Having said that, as a particle physicist by training, I have to inform you that the whole is the sum of the parts, not more and not less. Countless experiments have confirmed for millennia that things are made of smaller things, and if you know what the small things do, then you can tell what the large things do.

There is not a single known exception to this rule. There is not even a consistent theory for such an exception.

Just as a country's history is a consequence of the behavior of its citizens and their interactions with the environment, so is the behavior of the citizens a consequence of the properties and interactions of the particles they are made of.

Both are hypotheses that have withstood any test they have been subjected to -- so far. As a scientist, I therefore accept them. I accept them not as ultimate truths, for they may one day be revised, but as best current knowledge.

A lot of people seem to think it is merely a philosophical stance that the behavior of a composite object (for example, you) is determined by the behavior of its constituents -- that is, subatomic particles. They call it reductionism or materialism or, sometimes, physicalism, as if giving it a name that ends in -ism will somehow make it disappear. 

But reductionism -- according to which the behavior of an object can be deduced from ("reduced to," as the philosophers would say) the properties, behavior, and interactions of the object's constituents -- is not a philosophy. It's one of the best established facts about nature.

Nevertheless, I am not a reductionist hard-liner. Our knowledge about the laws of nature is limited, much remains to be understood, and reductionism may fail in subtle ways I will discuss later. However, you have to learn the rules before you can break them.

And in science, our rules are based on facts. Fact is, we have never observed an object of many particles whose behavior falsified reductionism, though this could have happened countless times. 

We have never seen a molecule that didn't have the properties you'd expect, given what we know about the atoms it is made of. We have never encountered a drug that caused effects that its molecular composition would have ruled out. We have never produced a material whose behavior was in conflict with the physics of elementary particles.

If you say "holism," I hear "bullshit."

We certainly know of many things that we cannot currently predict, for our mathematical skills and computational tools are limited. The average human brain, for example, contains about a thousand trillion trillion atoms.

Even with today's most powerful supercomputers, no one can calculate just how all these atoms interact to create conscious thought. But we also have no reason to think it is not possible. For all we currently know, if we had a big enough computer, nothing would prevent us from simulating a brain atom by atom.

In contrast, assuming that composite systems -- brains, society, the universe as a whole -- display any kind of behavior that does not derive from the behavior of their constituents is unnecessary. No evidence calls for it.

It is as unnecessary as the hypothesis of God. Not wrong, but ascientific. 

A physicist answers the question, does the past still exist?

Here's how theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder answered one of Life's Biggest Questions in her book, Existential Physics -- which I wrote about a few days ago.  

This is the brief answer to "Does the past still exist?" (At the end of each chapter, Hossenfelder gives a one paragraph summary of her take on the Big Question tackled in the chapter.)

According to the currently established laws of nature, the future, the present, and the past all exist in the same way. That's because, regardless of what you mean by exist, there is nothing in these laws that distinguishes one moment of time from any other. The past, therefore, exists in just the same way as the present. While the situation is not entirely settled, it seems that the laws of nature preserve information entirely, so all the details that make up you and the story of your grandmother's life are immortal.

Her answer is in accord with Einstein's conception of the space-time continuum, as laid out in his special theory of relativity. 

A hundred years' worth of observation have confirmed that time has the properties Einstein conjectured at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Einstein, time is a dimension, and it joins with the three dimensions of space to one common entity: a four-dimensional space-time.

...You can advance this argument for any two events anywhere in the universe at any time and arrive at the same conclusion: the physics of Einstein's special relativity does not allow us to constrain existence to merely a moment that we call "now." Once you agree that anything exists now elsewhere, even though you see it only later, you are forced to accept that everything in the universe exists now.

This perplexing consequence of special relativity has been dubbed the block universe by physicists. In this block universe, the future, present, and past exist in the same way; it's just that we do not experience them the same way. And if all times exist similarly, then all our past selves -- and grandparents -- are alive the same way our present selves are.

They are all there, in our four-dimensional space-time, have always been there, and will always be there. To sum it up in the words of the British comedian John Lloyd, "Time is a bit like a landscape. Just because you're not in New York doesn't mean it's not there."

More than a century has passed since Einstein put forward his theories of special and general relativity. But here we are today, still struggling to understand what it really means. It sounds crazy, but the idea that the past and future exist in the same way as the present is compatible with all we currently know.

In the course of discussing how the measurement in quantum mechanics is an exception to time-reversibility (the evaporation of black holes is the other exception). Hossenfelder speaks about the role, or more accurately non-role, of consciousness in quantum measurement.

This was music to my scientifically-minded ears, since New Age types are notorious for exaggerating the role consciousness plays in creating reality through measurements of quantum phenomena.

"But what is a measurement?" you may ask. Yes, good question. This certainly bothered physicists a lot in the early days of quantum mechanics. By now this question has, luckily, largely been answered.

A measurement is any interaction that is sufficiently strong or frequent to destroy the quantum behavior of a system. Only what it takes to destroy quantum behavior can be (and, for many examples, has been) calculated.

Most important, these calculations show that a measurement in quantum mechanics does not require a conscious observer. In fact, it doesn't even require a measurement apparatus. Even tiny interactions with air molecules or light can destroy quantum effects so that we have to update the wave function.

...This is also why you shouldn't listen to anyone who claims that quantum leaps allow you to think your way out of illness or that you can improve your life by drawing energy from quantum fluctuations and so on. This isn't just off-the-mainstream science; it's incompatible with evidence. Under normal circumstances, quantum effects don't play a role beyond the size of molecules.

"Existential Physics" -- great title for a engrossing book

As soon as I saw the title of this book mentioned in a recent issue of New Scientist, I ran to my computer and ordered a copy of Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions from Amazon. 

As expected, I'm enjoying the book.

I've only read the Preface and initial chapter, "Does the Past Still Exist?", but that's enough to tell me that theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder is a gifted writer with a talent for explaining complex ideas so ordinary people can understand them.

She describes her approach in the Preface. I like how she views the relationship between physics and spirituality.

After all, I'm just a physicist. I'm not competent to speak about consciousness and human behavior and such. Nevertheless, the young man's question drove home to me that physicists do know some things, if not about consciousness itself, then about the physical laws that everything in the universe -- including you and I and your grandmother -- must respect.

Not all ideas about life and death and the origin of human existence are compatible with the foundations of physics. That's knowledge we should not hide in obscure journals using incomprehensible prose.

It's not just that this knowledge is worth sharing; keeping it to ourselves has consequences. If physicists don't step forward and explain what physics says about the human condition, others will jump at the opportunity and abuse our cryptic terminology for the promotion of pseudoscience.

It's not a coincidence that quantum entanglement and vacuum energy are go-to explanations of alternative healers, spiritual media, and snake oil sellers. Unless you have a PhD in physics, it's hard to tell our gobbledygook from any other.

However, my aim here is not merely to expose pseudoscience for what it is. I also want to convey that some spiritual ideas are perfectly compatible with modern physics, and others are, indeed, supported by it. 

And why not? That physics has something to say about our connection to the universe is not so surprising. Science and religion have the same roots, and still today they tackle some of the same questions: Where do we come from? Where do we go to? How much can we know?

When it comes to these questions, physicists have learned a lot in the past century. Their progress makes clear that the limits of science are not fixed; they move as we learn more about the world. Correspondingly, some belief-based explanations that once aided sense-making and gave comfort we now know to be just wrong.

The idea, for example, that certain objects are alive because they are endowed with a special substance (Henri Bergson's "elan vital") was entirely compatible with scientific fact two hundred years ago. But it no longer is.

In the foundations of physics today, we deal with the laws of nature that operate on the most fundamental level. Here, too, the knowledge we gained in the past hundred years is now replacing old, belief-based explanations.

One of these old explanations is the idea that consciousness requires something more than the interaction of many particles, some sort of magic fairy dust, basically, that endows certain objects with special properties. Like the elan vital, this is an outdated and useless idea that explains nothing.

I'll be sharing Hossenfelder's conclusions about the big questions in future blog posts. To whet your appetite for them, here's the preview she shared in her Preface.

I will get to this [whether consciousness needs something besides particles] in chapter 4, and in chapter 6 I'll discuss the consequences this has for the existence of free will. Another idea ready for retirement is the belief that our universe is especially suited to the presence of life, the focus of chapter 7. 

However, demarcating the current limits of science doesn't only destroy illusions; it also helps us recognize which beliefs are still compatible with scientific fact. Such beliefs should maybe not be called unscientific but rather ascientific as Tim Palmer (whom we'll meet later) aptly remarked: science says nothing about them.

One such belief is the origin of our universe. Not only can we not currently explain it, but also it is questionable whether we will ever be able to explain it. It may be one of the ways that science is fundamentally limited. At least that's what I currently believe.

The idea that the universe itself is conscious, I have found to my surprise, is difficult to rule out entirely (chapter 8). And the jury is still out on whether or not human behavior is predictable (chapter 9).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chatter is our inner voice gone rogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selves only get in the way. That's why we are persons.

I'm sharing some final excepts from Jay Garfield's book, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self, because I liked what he had to say near the end of his book so much.

What the world needs now is what the world has always needed: a recognition by people that we are interdependent, not independent. A belief in selves fosters a feeling of independence. A recognition that we are persons, not selves, fosters a feeling of interdependence.

Here's how Garfield puts it.

But there is a dark side to narrative as well. For one thing, as we saw in chapter 3, we are not the sole authors of the stories in which we participate, and some of these tales may be deeply destructive. For another, it is all too easy to take the characters in the narratives we coauthor to exist independently of the stories.

And just as we shouldn't ever think that Hamlet has any reality outside of the play, we shouldn't ever think that we as persons have any reality outside of the narratives in which we participate. 

In one sense, we are as fictional as Shakespeare's creations: we are constituted as characters through the telling of a story; we are absolutely real within the bounds of that story; we are created, not discovered; and we have no reality at all outside of the context of the stories in which we figure. 

This is why we are persons, and not selves. 

But we are real persons, and not imaginary persons. Therefore, in another sense, we are different from Hamlet and his cohort, and that difference is every bit as important as the similarity. Shakespeare's fiction is local, optional, and its roles need not be instantiated; the fiction in which we play our parts is global and mandatory.

...As we saw earlier, nobody believes that we just discover money; we create it. And we do so by interpreting various bits of paper, metal, and states of computing machinery as having monetary value. In virtue of that interpretation, those values become real.

Money, that is, gets its very existence as well as its value through our collective acts of interpretation, not through any preexisting reality on which we stumbled. It is fictional.

But this does not mean that there is no truth of the matter regarding whether a particular piece of paper is a dollar note, or what my bank balance is. There is fact within that fiction; the creation of the fiction, and its globality, mandatoriness, and use constitute its truth.

And the fact that in the United States we simply decided to drive on the right does not make it any less a fact that that is the correct side on which to drive; instead, that is what makes it a fact in the first place. That is, while the whole system is created, once created it in turn creates a context in which particular statements can be true or false in virtue of the interpretations already assigned to others.

That is how it is with us, when considered not as hominids, but as persons.

...For these reasons, there can be no "problem of other minds" any more than there can be a "problem of other dollars." To be a mind is not to house inner particulars that have their character independent of how we understand them, and that we somehow discover; it is to interpret and to be interpreted; to address and to be addressed; to participate in the complex human conversation, and to share a world with others like us.

So to know that others have minds is not to know that they have mysterious inner worlds, and to know that we have minds is to know that we are like others. We each know immediately that we are minds not through introspection, but through participation. We know that others are minds not through inference and not through clairvoyance, but through co-participation. 

To allow ourselves to be addressed by, or to address, another is to take her to be a person, to have a mind; it is at the same time to take ourselves to be persons.

This phenomenon of address requires neither reflexive self-consciousness, nor qualitative experience, nor interiority, nor autonomy, nor any of the other properties associated with selves. It only requires us to recognize each other as members of the same community, sharing the same world.

But what is it to recognize ourselves and others to be members of a community of persons? It is, we shall see, to see one another as valuable, as objects of care and respect. And the deepest reason to forego the myth of the self for the recognition of the reality of the person is that it is persons, not selves, that merit respect and care.

...We care about one another, take one another's desires and welfares seriously, respect one another's rights, and treat one another with consideration -- in short, we value one another -- to the degree that we embrace one another in a moral and social community.

That is, moral valuation depends on seeing one another as together in a shared world. 

This does not require that we agree about everything, or that our projects are the same. We can respect and honor those with whom we share little in the way of beliefs, values, or way of life. But this kind of moral respect and recognition does require that we see one another as potential fellows in a larger sense: as playing analogous roles in the human world, and so as potential addressees or addressors -- more simply, as conversation partners.

And conversation requires both a broadly shared background of concerns and presuppositions, and distinct vantage points or perspectives discernible against that shared background. As we have seen, it also presupposes that each party takes the other as one who can take seriously what the other says, and who has something to tell the other.

...When we recognize each other in this sense -- a kind of recognition absolutely fundamental to our collective lives -- we recognize our interdependence, not our independence; our roles and commitments, not our subjectivity; our participation in a shared world, not our spectatorship of a world of which we are independent. 

In short, this kind of moral and political recognition is the recognition of persons, not of selves. 

...This attitude of universal care is the foundation of genuine moral concern. When we adopt this attitude, we do not see ourselves and others as isolated, independent selves who happen to find one another in proximity in a featureless abstract landscape, and then have to figure out whether and how to relate to each other.

Instead, we see one another as persons who share a world pregnant with meaning -- meaning that we collectively create, and which in turn shapes our lives. In seeing one another in this way, we come to appreciate the way we co-constitute each other, and the ways in which we are responsive and responsible to one another.

Selves could never facilitate our moral or collective lives; they could only get in the way.

That is why Dogen writes that "To study the self is to forget the self; to forget the self is to cast off body and mind; to cast off body and mind is to be affirmed by all things." This affirmation is, and can only be, the affirmation of our shared personhood.

 

How minds change. It isn't by brute force.

Since I started this blog in 2004, I've been trying to change the minds of religious believers in the direction of being less dogmatic, judgmental, and rigid.

In this endeavor I've been guided mostly by my own experience and intuition. So when I saw a book review in the July 2 issue of New Scientist about "How Minds Change: The new science of belief, opinion, and persuasion" by David McRaney, I was interested to see what the book is all about.

After all, how many of us have changed our mind about something after someone started screaming in our face that we were wrong, they were right, and we needed to start thinking like them?

In my case, exactly never. So these passages from the review rang true to me.

McRaney spends time with former members of the Westboro Baptist Church in the US, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as "arguably the most obnoxious and rabid hate group in America", learning how they came to disavow their vitriolic beliefs and become more beneficent to others.

The answer, he finds, isn't willing people to come around to your point of view, but letting them realise the folly of their ways.

...The concept -- that, with more knowledge, long-held hypotheses can be disproved -- isn't likely to be news to New Scientist readers. But it doesn't make McRaney's book any less interesting.

Indeed, his writing is a tonic for those who might scratch their head at how others could be so nonsensical as to distrust vaccines, believe the Earth is flat or subscribe to any other number of conspiracy theories.

It helps shift perceptions from the unhelpful attitude of "this person is stupid and beyond help" to "this person has a different frame of belief, and they can be encouraged to think more deeply about the issue."

Because that is the big discovery of those Californian campaigners and the neuroscientists behind them: simply shouting facts at disbelievers doesn't change their minds, rather it entrenches their belief -- as anyone who has tackled a tricky dinner table conversation will know.

Instead, to change minds, you have to not change minds at all. You have to let people come to their own conclusions -- though, of course, you can help them get there by posing the right questions.

Makes sense. 

When I got remarried in 1990, my second wife, Laurel, didn't share my belief at the time that the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) was God in Human Form. Though she made no attempt to dissuade me from belonging to this India-based religious organization, Laurel would ask good questions.

Such as, how can you be sure the guru is God in Human Form? I'd basically reiterate the RSSB teachings, which came down to an unconvincing "I have faith that this is true and by following the instructions I was given at initiation by the guru, hopefully one day I'll know for sure." 

If Laurel had been been confrontational, I would have become more defensive than I already was, hardening my religious conviction rather than softening it. 

Her questions, though, slowly seeped into my mind, along with other ways that gradually brought me to doubt that what I wanted to be true, actually was. So in the end I came to my own conclusion that I needed to distance myself from the organization that I'd been a devoted member of for 35 years.

That conclusion, though, was the result of all kinds of influences.

My meditation experiences. Books I'd read. Discussions with other RSSB members. Learning more about the guru. Giving talks on behalf of RSSB that required me to ponder which parts of the RSSB teachings seemed reasonable, and which were difficult to believe.

I think it's easier to help someone with changing their mind when you have a genuine relationship with them. This is why counseling can be effective at resolving a personal problem, while reading a book generally isn't. 

On this blog, as is the case with social media in general, most people only know each other as existing in cyberspace, not physical space. This makes it more difficult, though not impossible, to pose questions that will help the other person see things differently, and not be even more determined to look upon those things in the same way.

Appreciative Reader, a frequent commenter on this blog, is quite skilled at this. He's adept at questioning assumptions of other commenters without being excessively confrontational.

For example, recently someone claimed that consciousness has to exist after we die, because nothing existent can be destroyed. Sure, that's a tenet of matter/energy. It changes form, yet still exists. But Appreciative Reader pointed out the obvious.

Since consciousness almost certainly is a product of the brain, then when the brain and body die, changing form into the constituent atoms, consciousness, like life itself, no longer exists -- just atoms do, which become new entities. 

A few cogent questions and observations revealed the hollowness of a belief that consciousness is eternal. I'm not sure if any minds were changed, but they might have been.

I'm re-reading the book I wrote about Plotinus with a fresh eye

Recently I started re-reading the book I wrote about Plotinus' teachings, Return to the One, because someone had told me they'd ordered it, and I wanted to see if I still agreed with what I said about this Neoplatonist Greek mystic philosopher.

After all, I hadn't taken a look at the book for several years. It brings in a modest amount of Amazon royalties each month, but when I'm occasionally asked about the book, my typical response is along the line of "I still agree with much of it, but my views have changed quite a bit since I wrote it."

So the game I've been playing with myself these past few days is to find what still resonates with me in Return to the One. 

One rule of that game is this: taking the advice I offered to readers in the "Preliminaries" section of the book, I'm trying to take a Big Picture view of Plotinus and what I wrote about his teachings, rather than a literal view where every word means just what it says and nothing more.

Be more concerned with grasping the broad outlines of Plotinus's philosophy than the specifics. It is better to comprehend the treatises in the Enneads as a whole, in an almost intuitive fashion, than to try to assemble a logical understanding bit by bit.

Having finished re-reading that Preliminaries section, I was struck by some passages relating to the self, a subject I'm fascinated by, because I'm convinced that neither I nor anyone else has an enduring self or soul, in line with Buddhism and modern neuroscience.

Plotinus said this, according to his student Porphyry, quoting from my book.

In like fashion, we're told that Plotinus refused a request made by one of his students to have a portrait made of him, explaining: "Isn't it enough that I have to bear this image with which Nature has covered us? Must I also consent to leaving behind me an image of that image -- this one even longer-lasting -- as if it were an image of something worth seeing?"

Thus Plotinus viewed his genuine being as something other than his physical form. This wasn't a self, though. Here's how I put it.

The primary goal of the mystic philosopher, as Plotinus teaches in the Enneads, is to bring the movable center of his or her consciousness into alignment with the unmoving center of existence, the One. A person's illusory and shifting sense of individuality thus must be distinguished from a true sense of self. If one traces his or her I-ness back to its source, as one would trace a line (or radius) back to the center of the circle from which it emanates, then the core of one's self will be found to be identical with the core of everything.

That's a nondual sort of philosophy, which makes sense, since Plotinus viewed the One as the essence of existence. 

But it struck me that since Plotinus was writing in a pre-scientific age (the 3rd century), he had no idea of how the brain functioned. So in reclaiming Plotinus' teachings for our modern age, I took a look at what I said about the self in the initial part of Return to the One, viewing those statements as a neuroscientist or secular Buddhist might.

Here's the passages I came across.

Thus something can exist, yet barely be. And this, of course, includes one's own self.

Our goal is to be one, not many. In reality, for each of us there is only one being thinking thoughts and acting our actions. So whenever someone thinks one way and acts another a division is created that is at odds with the true nature of both the self and the cosmos. Truth is One, not multiple.

Whatever I am, I am not an object that I can look upon, separate from the consciousness doing the looking.

In the Enneads, Plotinus points us toward the only way of unmasking the deepest mysteries of life: become the mystery you wish to unmask and be nothing else. If you want to know what the essence of life is, simply be alive. If you want to know what the essence of consciousness is, simply be conscious. If you want to know what the essence of the One is, simply be the One.

Sam Harris, echoing Buddhist teachings that he is intimately familiar with, likes to say in the guided meditations on his Waking Up app, things such as:

Look at something. Be aware of that perception. Then briefly look for an entity that is doing the looking which is separate from the perception. In the moment where you don't find such an entity, that not-finding is what you're looking for.

Which sure sounds similar to the nondual Oneness at the core of Plotinus' teachings. Anyway, I'm going to continue re-reading my book, looking for more connections to my current atheist frame of mind in Return to the One.

Two big ideas about the cosmos and the self

As I frequently say here on the Church of the Churchless, and will undoubtedly be saying again and again, religions are notable for basically being stuck in the Dark Ages, with fresh theologies being very rare, while science and reason continually make strides in casting more light upon the unknown.

Recently I've been blogging about a couple of books that I've finished reading, and want to get off my active-reading bookshelf to make room for new titles.

So here's what probably are my final observations about Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe and Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self.

Well, now that I think about it, there could be more for me to say about the latter book. But that remains to be seen. Anyway, here's a Big Idea from each of the books that I found to be both fascinating and a decent chance of being correct. 

In Life is Simple, Johnjoe McFadden discusses how the universe came to be. This is the "Big Idea" approach of physicist Lee Smolin. I'm going to leave out quite a few details, focusing just on the natural selection aspect.

He proposes that our universe is the product of a cosmological evolutionary process, roughly analogous to natural selection, which he calls cosmological natural selection (CNS).

Currently, the most accepted scenario for the universe's origin starts with a random quantum fluctuation. Most likely this tiny universe was not interesting as the randomly selected values of its fundamental constants were incompatible with even the existence of matter.

As quickly as it popped into existence, the positive and negative energy of this matter-infeasible universe wold have recombined to vanish into nothingness. Yet further quantum fluctuations would have continued to generate universes out of the cosmological nothingness until, after maybe many trillions of searches through parameter space, a universe was born with values that promoted the formation of matter, stars, planets and, at least a few, black holes. 

The formation of black holes is, in Smolin's scenario, the cosmological equivalent of the origin of life: it made universes self-replicative. The early primordial universes would probably have generated few black holes and thereby produced only a handful of descendants. 

However, so long as that handful was greater than one, then the number of universes would increase.

...However, all universes would not be created equal. Some would be more fecund than others. Those that inherited parameter values that led to the greatest concentration of matter inside stars that collapsed into black holes would leave many descendants. Conversely, any universe that failed to produce stars or black holes would eventually blink out of existence to become extinct.

...Just as natural selection guided the evolution of life towards improbable creatures like dinosaurs, elephants or humans, so that same process, cosmological natural selection, fine-tuned the fundamental constants of physics towards the highly improbable values needed to make stars, planets, black holes, and us.

...Smolin's theory, with or without its Occamist tweak [which I haven't mentioned], has one final and startling implication. It suggests that the fundamental law of the universe is not quantum mechanics, or general relativity or even the laws of mathematics. 

It is the law of natural selection discovered by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett insisted, it is 'The single best idea that anyone has ever had.' It may also be the simplest idea that any universe has ever had.

Jay Garfield's "Big Idea" in Losing Ourselves is related to the seeming fact that our self actually isn't an internal subjective fact, but an interdependent construction involving us and the world. Here's how he ends his book. I'll keep this fairly brief, since likely I'll be writing another blog post about Losing Ourselves. 

We are not isolated individuals who happen to choose to live together; we are social animals who only become the individuals we do in social contexts that scaffold our flourishing. We can only make sense of our lives and see them as meaningful when we understand our personhood and when we give up the fantasy of independence encoded in the idea of a self.

When people hear about the idea of selflessness, they often find it disturbing. They think that this is the nihilistic idea that we don't really exist. But that only makes sense if you think that to exist is to be a self. Once we see that the self is illusory, we see that that can't be right.

The fact that a dollar is not a piece of paper does not mean that dollars don't exist, and the fact that we are not selves doesn't mean that we do not exist. 

Instead, for beings like us, to exist is to be a person -- a socially constituted being embedded in a rich and meaningful world -- just as for things like dollars, to exist is to be a unit of currency embedded in an economic system. 

To deny that we are persons would be to deny that we exist. So, the self illusion, although it seems to confer a greater reality on us than would mere conventional personhood, in fact undermines the very reality that makes us who we are.

To accept that you have no self is not to reject your identity; it is to reclaim your humanity. 

Self comes and goes in our lives, though we don't have one

"Self" and "soul" are closely related. Both words point to the notion of something within us, or that is us, which stands apart from the world in a transcendent sense.

What I just wrote points to the absurdity of believing that it is possible or necessary to cultivate our self or soul. 

If self/soul is something within us, then it isn't actually a core reality, since the us it is within encompasses  a lesser self/soul. If self/soul is us, we're already that which we are, so nothing needs to be done.

By contrast Buddhism and Taoism, along with modern neuroscience and certain philosophies, say that our sense of self is an illusion, even though it seems real to us. So does a mirage, but that illusion can be dispelled by coming closer to it.

The problem with the self illusion is that it is tied into our sense of being someone who is aware of objects that are separate from our subjectivity. I wrote about this in a previous post about Jay Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self."

(First post about the book is here.)

Garfield speaks about the times our self illusion drops away in a chapter called Immersion -- Selfless spontaneity and skillful living. Some excerpts:

So far, we have been emphasizing the degree to which the illusion of self is natural and almost unavoidable. But this does not mean that we succumb to that illusion at every waking moment. There are times -- perhaps more than we realize -- when we don't represent ourselves as selves at all, when we spontaneously engage with the world in ways that implicate no sense of self.

And indeed, these may be the most pleasant and rewarding moments of our lives.

...In order to get our minds around the experience of selflessness, it is useful to recall the deep connection between the sense of self, the understanding of experience in terms of subject-object duality, and of action in terms of free agency. 

To take ourselves to be selves, as we saw in chapter 1, is to take ourselves to be subjects with a very different mode of existence than that we assign to our objects. It is to regard ourselves as standing against the world rather than as being embedded in it. And it is to take our self-knowledge to be immediate, as opposed to the mediated knowledge we have of our objects.

Each of these modes of self-awareness is an aspect of subject-object duality, of taking experience to be a relation between these two entities of entirely different kinds. That polarity of subject and object in our experience is tantamount to the reification of a self. So, to the extent that we have experiences that are nondual in character, we are experiencing ourselves without positing a self.

We can make the same point about agency. To see ourselves as selves is to see ourselves as free agents acting upon the world, capable of agent causation that initiates actions on motives, actions whose causes lie entirely within us. 

...This is how subject-object duality looks in the domain of action. In perceptual experience the subject is divorced from the world and located as a spectator of it. By analogy, in action the agent is divorced from the casual nexus and acts freely upon it.

Once again, then, to the extent that we experience ourselves as fully immersed, and not as freely initiating actions directed upon objects, our agency is nondual in character: we act without superimposing the self or the duality between self and other implicated by the sense of causally independent agency.

Garfield then relates the Taoist story of Butcher Ding. He was so skilled at cutting up an ox, his knife slices through the animal, dismembering it, without ever needing to be sharpened. Garfield says:

This reminds us of another aspect of the nonduality of our experience. We do not exist outside of our environment, perceiving it as subject, acting upon it as agent; we are nondually immersed in it, with no clear boundary between ourselves and everything else.

This tale might appear to be anti-intellectual, or to suggest a complete abandonment of self-awareness. But that would be to read it incorrectly. The Zhuangzi does not mean to say that in achieving spontaneity, or selflessness, one gives up entirely on the ability to think and to calculate.

As Ding says, "whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I'm doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety..."

I think that this is the most important moment in this parable, although it is easy to overlook. Careful, calculating thought can also, the Zhuangzi suggests, be spontaneous, and can be conducted without positing a self.

We can become absorbed in thought, in solving a problem, or in a complex conversation or debate just as easily as we can become absorbed in carving an ox.

...We hence see that it is not the presence of explicit thought that distinguishes ego-involved experience from ego-less experience. Instead, this distinction reflects the degree of immersion in activity and so the degree to which explicit awareness of oneself as standing outside that activity is diminished.

...When we are completely immersed in activity -- whether the physical activity of carving an ox or the cognitive activity of thinking about how best to carve that ox -- our sense of self, and with it, the experience of the duality of subject and object in experience, vanish. 

There is only the experience of a flow of activity.

Awareness doesn't require a subject who is aware

A few days ago I wrote about how there's no need to find your self, because you don't have one. That's the central message of Jay Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self."

Sounds good to me. One of my favorite humorous pieces from The Onion is Search For Self Called Off After 38 Years.

Here's how it starts off.

CHICAGO—The longtime search for self conducted by area man Andrew Speth was called off this week, the 38-year-old said Monday.

"I always thought that if I kept searching and exploring, I'd discover who I truly was," said Speth from his Wrigleyville efficiency. "Well, I looked deep into the innermost recesses of my soul, I plumbed the depths of my subconscious, and you know what I found? An empty, windowless room the size of an aircraft hangar. From now on, if anybody needs me, I'll be sprawled out on this couch drinking black-cherry soda and watching Law & Order like everybody else."

"Fuck it," he added.

My sentiments exactly, though I don't like black-cherry soda or Law & Order. 

The passages below from Garfield's book are considerably more philosophical than The Onion piece, but they share the same message. Stop looking for your self. It's an illusion. 

Here Garfield is talking about a minimal approach to the self. By minimal, he means something that isn't a full-blown transcendent self/soul such as the Atman in Hinduism, the whole ground of being thing where the self/soul is a drop of the ocean of Brahman/God.

Instead, the minimal self is essentially the subject of experience, a view held by Galen Strawson, Evan Thompson, and Dan Zahavi. Strawson puts it this way.

I propose to take the unchallengeable, ontologically non-committal notion of the subject of experience in a minimal or 'thin' way... I mean the subject considered specifically as something 'inner', something mental, the 'self', if you like, the inner 'locus' of consciousness considered just as such.

Well, Garfield finds that notion eminently challengeable. Here's how he describes his challenge, which makes a lot of sense to me. Simply put, there can be thoughts without a thinker, perceptions without a perceiver, and awareness without a singular self that is aware.

To say that awareness is necessarily a property of a subject of awareness, while perhaps seeming to be an innocent grammatical point, in fact commits the very fallacy of reification that we addressed in chapter 2. That is the fallacy of going from the mere fact of awareness to the existence of a subject of awareness. 

To draw this inference is kind of like going from the claim that it is raining to the claim that there is something that is the agent of raining, that is doing the raining. To presume that the very fact of awareness entails the existence of a subject -- in the strong sense that Strawson and other friends of the self have in mind -- is to assume that which is to be proven, viz., that awareness presupposes a self. 

The parallel to the failure of Descartes's cogito argument in which he goes from the mere fact of thinking to the existence of a substantial subject of thought is striking.

...Awareness is most plausibly an umbrella property that reflects an extremely complex set of underlying properties and relations. If this is the case, awareness can be present -- a person can be aware -- without there being any single thing that is aware, just as a nation or corporation can act without there being a singular entity that performs that action.

Now, we might say that if there is awareness, something is aware, e.g., a person, just as we can say that when a corporation sells a product, something, e.g., the corporation, is the seller. But it is plain in that case that we do not thereby implicate a localizable single thing that is a subject or an agent, only a broad set of processes and events.

So even if we grant that awareness always has a subject-object structure, the defender of the reality of the self is not entitled to the premise that the subject is singular, and so cannot presume that it is a self.

But there is also a second, deeper problem with this argument.

The first premise, as we have just noted, presupposes that awareness must have a subject-object structure. We granted that premise for the sake of argument, and we saw that even then we do not get a good argument for the reality of a self. But we can also question the presupposition.

The idea that awareness always has a subject-object structure -- with a subject characterized by a kind of interiority, as opposed to the exterior object that is somehow brought into awareness in that interior space -- might well be an illusion of consciousness.

That is, it might be a fabrication, not a basic reality.

To put the point more precisely, the conviction that awareness is fundamentally a relation between an independent subject and a substantially distinct object may be the result of a cognitive illusion, just as the conviction that we are selves is not the consequence of looking inside and simply finding a self, but of cognitive illusion.

...It makes a great deal of biological, psychological, and ecological sense instead to think of awareness as a constant modulation of the open interaction between an organism and its environment, of the adjustment of the state of the organism and attunement of the posture and goals of the organism as its senses and movements interact with the world it inhabits.

In other words, we can think of awareness as a mode of embedding of the organism in its world, instead of the relation between an interior subject and an exterior object, even if that is how it appears to us in introspection.

To think of awareness in this way is to take seriously the idea that we don't stand against the world as subjects that detect its properties or agents that act on it, but instead are part of the world, and that awareness is more an attunement to our environment than a recording in our minds of what is going on outside.

This approach to cognition, which is called the "embedded, embodied, enactive" model of cognition, is gaining wide acceptance among philosophers and cognitive scientists.

The view that introspection may be wildly deceptive, called "illusionism," is also gaining currency in the philosophy of mind today, inspired in part by the analysis of human existence developed by twentieth- and twenty-first-century existential phenomenologists.

But it is very old in India, and underlies the idea of the nonduality of consciousness articulated both in the Vedanta school and in Buddhism. Philosophers in each of these traditions argued that we are subject to pervasive confusion not only regarding the external world, but also regarding our own nature and regarding the structure of our experience.

So we shold treat Strawson's first premise with suspicion. This suspicion, we have seen, is justified for two reasons: first, our existence may well be that of a complex set of subjective processes as opposed to that of a single self; second, the subject-object structure of awareness that he takes for granted may well be illusory.

Relax: no need to find your self, because you don't have one

I've become a fan of easygoing approaches to spirituality. That's one reason I enjoy Taoism so much. The Taoists I've known don't look upon life very seriously. Neither do many Buddhists.

A common denominator of Taoism and Buddhism is that neither philosophy assumes that we have a self or soul. Meaning, they're selfless. 

This takes the pressure off of goals such as self-realization, self-awareness, knowing one's self, and so on. Those sorts of practices still can be pursued, but with the understanding that there's no such thing as an unchanging self or soul lurking within us. Just substitute "person" for "self."

No-self philosophies, or religions if you like, are very different from self-centered philosophies/religions such as Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. The latter are seriously concerned with what happens to one's immortal soul.

The former say, "What soul? What self? We humans are like everything else that's alive in the world -- ever-changing, interdependent, part and parcel of all that surrounds us, and indeed is us."

Having been a believer for 35 years in an Eastern philosophy that taught we have, or are, a soul, and that the goal of life was to merge one's soul with God insofar as this is possible, I'm able to contrast that point of view with my current embrace of Taoism and non-religious Buddhism.

I'm a lot more relaxed now in my meditation. I no longer try to leave this world behind in hopes of finding a better supernatural reality, but instead simply try to be more aware of what is right here, right now, both inside and outside of me.

This image comes to mind. 

No-self meditators are akin to people lounging on a beach, cool drink in hand, lounging under an umbrella, idly feeling the sand move beneath their toes, watching the sun go down over the ocean. Self-centered meditators are akin to people who make sure they complete an intense workout every day in the hotel exercise room even though they're supposedly on a vacation.

After hearing Jay Garfield converse with Sam Harris for 90 minutes or so on Harris' Waking Up iPhone app, I bought Garfield's book, "Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self." It's an enjoyable read, though a bit philosophically dense in places.

(Garfield is a Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and Buddhist Studies at Smith College and a visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School.)

I've read four of the ten chapters, so have a way to go in the book. Garfield's Big Idea is that while we are not selves, we are persons. OK, that may seem obvious to those who, like me, embrace science, dislike religion, and don't believe in a soul. But the notion of a self is tough to break away from entirely.

Garfield writes:

In order to be successful, these no-self positions must show both that the idea of the self is incoherent and that everything that the self is meant to explain can be explained in its absence. That is, the proponent of the no-self view must show that everything that the self is meant to explain can actually be accomplished by a person, a socially embedded human being with no self.

In an early chapter, the writings of Candrakirti, a Buddhist who lived in 600-650 CE, are discussed. Garfield says:

Candrakirti was writing in an Indian context. So, the view of the self that he took as the object of negation in his argument (an argument we will explore in chapter 2) is the view that to be a sentient being is to be an atman. This term is usually and appropriately translated into English as self or soul. The idea that the atman lies at the core of our being is ubiquitous in orthodox Indian philosophy, and it was a principal target of Buddhist critique.

In the Vedas, and in particular, the Upanisads -- the texts that ground many of the orthodox Indian philosophical schools -- it is characterized as unitary, as the witness of all that we perceive, as the agent of our actions, and as the enjoyer of our aesthetic experience. It is regarded as that which is always the subject, never the object; and as that which persists through life despite changes in body and mind, and which even persists beyond death and in transmigration.

Sounds good, right? I certainly thought so for 35 years.

But gradually I came to realize that almost certainly I didn't have a self or soul, and that was perfectly fine with me. This realization came about through a variety of means: daily meditation, Buddhist literature, a whole lot of books about modern neuroscience, and simply being mindful of my everyday experience. 

Garfield also uses Western philosophers to buttress the contention of no-self found in Buddhism. This quote from David Hume was familiar to me, but a pleasure to re-read.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without perception, and I never can observe anything but the perception.

A comment from Garfield follows that quote.

Moreover, he [Hume] points out, the collection that we find is not constant, but is always changing. There is nothing permanent in our experience.

If this is so, Hume argues, when we use the word self, there is nothing to which it refers: we are nothing more than bundles of psychophysical processes -- changing from moment to moment -- who imagine ourselves to be more than that.

Note, once again, this is not the absurd claim that we don't exist, but rather the claim that the way we exist -- as persons -- is not the way that we normally take ourselves to exist -- as selves. 

I'll have more to say about this illusion of the self as I read more of "Losing Ourselves."

Science delivers accurate predictions. Religion doesn't.

Yay, me! I finally finished reading Johnjoe McFadden's book, "Life is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe." 

It took me longer than expected, because I didn't find McFadden's lengthy descriptions of the life and times of historical figures in science, starting with the ancient Greeks, to be all that interesting. I guess he felt he needed to do that in order to buttress his case for how science came to embrace the adage of William of Occam: "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity."

This doesn't mean that the world is simple, just that in attempting to understand the world, our models of reality should be as simple as possible -- which in some cases, could mean being quite complex, if reality is complex.

I liked the end of the book more than the rest of it. That's where McFadden discusses modern science such as relativity theory and quantum mechanics. I'll probably write another blog post or two on those subjects.

Here's excerpts from a section called The simple truth? 

I like McFadden's skepticism about ever knowing ultimate truth. "Ultimate reality" has always been a term that appealed to me. But his argument below about the apparent impossiblity of ever being able to know that we've contacted ultimate truth makes sense to me.

According to postmodernists, science merely takes its place alongside other belief systems such as religion, mysticism, witchcraft, folk beliefs, astrology, homeopathy or the paranormal. Each has, they claim, its own truths and none can claim any monopoly on the truth.

...William of Occam would surely have disagreed. He insisted that there was a stark difference between science and religion, as science is based on reason, religion is based on faith. Yet the postmodernists disagree.

Many of their arguments are heavily influenced by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951).

...In 1921, Wittgenstein published his hugely influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in which he examined the relationship between language and reality and, at this stage of his career, appears to accept (philosophers still argue about the meaning of much of Wittgenstein's philosophical statements) that science can make statements about the world that are verifiably true.

Thirty years later, in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein seems to abandon the quest to discover how language represents the world and instead argues that there are only different ways of using language or 'language games', whose meaning is derived solely from their use.

This argument seems to have much in common with William of Occam's nominalist insistence that words refer to ideas in our heads, rather than universals or essences that exist in the world.

...There is, however, another postmodernist insight that is both true and crucial to the role of Occam's razor, though it does not lead down the path taken by the postmodernists. Truth really is, as they argue, unknowable. 

This is something that is shocking even to scientists who are generally taught that science is an inexorable march towards the truth.

Imagine that science were one day to attain the blissful state of knowing everything, i.e. 'the truth'. How would we know? Knowledge of ultimate truth presupposes some means of peeking behind the curtain of evidence provided by our senses or scientific instruments to see the 'real' world rather than the one viewed through our senses or scientific instruments.

It supposes that there is some knowable, complete, and perfect world, a world of idealised Platonic forms, the very view of the world Occam disproved so many centuries ago. 

If like Occam we reject this view of the world we have to rely instead on our sensory inputs and a potentially infinite variety of models of the cosmos that could fit that data and explain our place in it. Yet that does not mean, as the postmodernists argue, that all models are equal.

When drawing up a horoscope, today's astrologers do not consult accounts of the moodiness of the god Mars or the lustful habits of Jupiter. They instead turn to planetary tables based on Kepler's simple model of the solar system.

Believers in the paranormal organise their meetings by phone and email, not telepathy; and, if the meetings are overseas, they fly by plane, not levitation.

Science may be a language game or model but, unlike the vast majority of models, from alchemy to feng shui, homeopathy and the indecipherable postmodernist tracts that dismiss science, its models actually work because they are simple and thereby deliver accurate predictions. 

"Reality is Not What It Seems," a book by Carlo Rovelli

My new favorite book, until a fresh one arrives from Amazon, is Carlo Rovelli's Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity.

Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who, not surprisingly given the title of his book, is focused on resolving the mismatch between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The key to doing this is to find a theory of gravity that is more fundamental than Einstein's general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time and isn't compatible with quantum mechanics.

That's a fascinating subject, made more fascinating by Rovelli's impressive writing ability, albeit in an English translation.

I've only just begun the book but am already liking it a lot. Rovelli starts off with a chapter about the atomic theory of ancient Greek thinkers such as Democritus. They broke away from the superstitions and religions of their time by extolling the ability of reason and observation to lay bare the secrets of the universe, which is still the basic scientific approach.

I found Rovelli's description of how Democritus concluded that reality had to be composed of discrete parts enlightening, having never heard it put this way before.

Democritus observed that matter could not be a continuous whole, because there is something contradictory in the proposition that it should be so. We know of Democritus's reasoning because Aristotle reports it.

Imagine, says Democritus, that matter is infinitely divisible, that is to say, that it may be broken down an infinite number of times. Imagine then that you break up a piece of matter ad infinitum. What would be left?

Could small particles of extended dimension remain? No, because if this were the case, the piece of matter would not yet be broken up to infinity. Therefore, only points without extension would remain. 

But now let us try to put together the piece of matter starting from these points: by putting together two points without extension, you cannot obtain a thing with extension, nor can you with three, or even with four. No matter how many points you put together, in fact, you never have extension, because points have no extension.

Therefore we cannot think that matter is made of points without extension, because no matter how many of these we manage to put together, we never obtain something with an extended dimension.

The only possibility, Democritus concludes, is that any piece of matter is made up of a finite number of discrete pieces that are indivisible, each one having a finite size: the atoms. 

Pretty damn brilliant. Just through clear thinking, around 450 BCE Democritus was able to come up with an atomic theory of what matter consists of that has stood the test of time. Sadly, all of Democritus' writings were destroyed by Christian emperors who didn't like that his ideas conflicted with Christian dogma.

So we're left with indirect mentions of Democritus' teachings. A Latin poet, Lucretius, says Rovelli, "adheres to the philosophy of Epicurus, a pupil of a pupil of Democritus." Here's how Rovelli describes how Lucretius viewed reality, comparing it to medieval notions that were much farther removed from modern science,

The medieval cosmos so marvelously sung by Dante was interpreted on the basis of a hierarchical organization of the universe that reflected the hierarchical organization of European society: a spherical cosmic structure with Earth at its center; the irreducible separation between Earth and heavens; finalistic and metaphorical explanations of natural phenomena; fear of God, fear of death; little attention to nature; the idea that forms preceding things determine the structure of the world; the idea that the source of knowledge could only be the past, in revelation and tradition.

There is none of this in the world of Democritus as sung by Lucretius. There is no fear of the gods; no ends or purposes in the world; no cosmic hierarchy; no distinction between Earth and heavens. There is a deep love of nature, a serene immersion within it; a recognition that we are profoundly part of it; that men, women, animals, plants, and clouds are organic threads of a marvelous whole, without hierarchies. There is a feeling of deep universalism, in the wake of the splendid words of Democritus: "To a wise man, the whole earth is one, because the true country of a virtuous soul is the entire universe."

There is, too, the ambition of being able to think about the world in simple terms. Of being able to investigate and understand the secrets of nature. To know more than our parents. And there are extraordinary conceptual tools on which Galileo, Kepler, and Newton will build: the idea of free and rectilinear motion in space; the idea of elementary bodies and their interactions, out of which the world is constructed; the idea of space as a container of the world.

And there is the simple idea of the finite divisibility of things. The granular quality of the world The idea that stops the infinite between our fingers. This idea is at the root of the atomic hypothesis, but it will also return with augmented force with quantum mechanics, and today is revealing itself to be powerful again -- as the keystone of quantum gravity.

Life is Simple, a fascinating book about Occam's razor

I've been making my way through Johnjoe McFadden's book Life is Simple:How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe. It traces the history of science through the lens of Occam's razor.

William of Occam, who was born in the late 13th century, is famous for favoring the simplest solutions in theology, science, and other areas of life.

The book says, "Three centuries after his death, the French theologian Libert Froidmont coined the term "Occam's razor" to refer to William's preference for shaving away excess complexity."

But contrary to how many people look upon Occam's razor, this doesn't mean that reality is simple. McFadden says:

Kepler's next step was, albeit reluctantly, to add more complexity. This is of course perfectly compatible with Occam's razor, which, contrary to many of its detractors, does not insist that the world is simple, only that in reasoning about it we should not multiply entities beyond necessity.

If the existing entities cannot do the job then the razor gives you free rein to add as many entities as needed, so long as they are not 'beyond necessity'.

...'Entities' refers to the parts of an hypothesis, explanation or model of any particular system.

Models come in for a lot of attention in the book.

The most familiar example is the numerous epicycles in the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, which assumed Earth sits at the center of it. In order to match observations of the sun and planets, smaller circles had to keep being added on to the large circles that was wrongly assumed to be how the planets moved. 

(Now we know it is an ellipse, and the sun is the center of the universe.)

What's interesting is that very different models can each be a reasonable-sounding explanation for some aspect of reality. Thus a good model is one that can be used to steadily improve our knowledge of reality, something that religious models, theologies, are utterly incapable of doing.

Our scientific model remains, not in the world, as Aristotle insisted, or in some mystical realm, as Plato proposed, but, according to Occam, in our head. The ultimate reality of what is really out there in the world will always be beyond our reach, as unknowable as Occam's omnipotent God.

...Models instantiate knowledge. They model the structure, dynamics and function of machines [among other things], usually in the language of geometry and mathematics. They can be as simple as the drawing of a steam engine, such as Newcomen's in 1712 that refers to Boyle's 'weight of air' to account for the motion of the piston.

The feature that makes them so useful is that improvements can be fed back into the model as a positive feedback loop that leads to exponential increases in performance. Yet models are useless without Occam's razor.

Imagine trying to build a steam engine if your model of how it works was based on More's 'knowing spirit'. How would you improve it? Perhaps you might pray to its spirit?

When this approach failed, your only recourse would have been the geologically slow process of trial and error that has been responsible for most innovations on our planet, including life itself, since the dawn of time. 

This all changed when scientists and engineers shifted to using models that instantiated their knowledge and their scientific laws and, as Boyle had urged, were 'the Simplest it must be: at least from all that is superfluous, free'.

With razored models in hand, scientists and engineers could predict modifications that would improve performance. If their prediction was realised, then the engineer knew their model was good; if not, the engineer would modify their model until their predictions held true and they obtained the desired improvement.

Their improved model would then be a starting point for further advances. With this positive feedback loop in place, technological development went from the linear rate of improvement delivered by trial and error to the exponential advances that characterise the modern age.

Well, religious and mystical beliefs don't even improve at a linear rate. They never improve at all, at least not in regard to explaining the nature of reality. 

One big reason for this is that dogmatism and blind faith prevail in religions.

So a religion isn't even capable of proving itself wrong -- with logically must be the case for nearly every religion given that religions contradict each other (or indeed every religion) -- because theological models don't include a capacity to test how well they match up against reality, with feedback providing a way to improve the theology.

Such as by discarding it as totally false. 

Instead, the same old dogmas are preached year after year, decade after decade, century after century. This is why science constantly progresses and religions remain the same insofar as their capacity to explain reality.

"Nature versus nurture" is just wrong

This morning I noticed a book in my office languishing under a pile of papers. I'd read most of it quite a while ago, except for a few pages at the end. 

Having finally finished "Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality" by neuroscientist David J. Linden, I wanted to mark the occasion by sharing some excerpts on subjects that I found particularly interesting.

First up is the familiar "nature versus nurture" phrase that I remember from my schooling. The idea is that who we are is a function of just two things, heredity and upbringing. Linden makes clear that this way too simplistic. In fact, wrong.

The oppositional construction of "nature versus nurture" is just wrong. But the part of this horrid expression that really chaps my ass is "nurture." The word means how your parents raised you -- how they cared for and protected you (or failed to do so), when you were a child. 

But of course, that's only one small part of the non-hereditary determination of traits. As we will explore in this chapter, a more correct term would be "experience," which I mean in the broadest sense.

Not just social experience and not just the experience of events that you have stored as memories, but rather every single factor that impinges upon you, from the moment that the sperm fertilizes the egg to your last breath.

These experiences start even before the embryo implants in the womb and encompass everything from the foods your mother ate while she was carrying you in utero to the waves of stress hormones you secreted on the first day of your first real job.

And there's another important factor that is neither heredity nor experience. That's the random nature of development, particularly the self-assembly of the brain and its five hundred trillion connections. 

As I mentioned earlier, developmental randomness is a large part of what we measure in twin studies in the category of non-shared environment. This self-assembly is guided by the genome, but it is not precisely specified at the finest levels of anatomy and function.

The genome is not a detailed cell-by-cell blueprint for the development of the body and brain, but rather a vague recipe jotted down on the back of an envelope. 

The genome doesn't say, "Hey you, glutamate-using neuron #12,345,763! Grow your axon in the dorsal direction for 123 microns and then make a sharp left turn to cross to the other side of the brain." Rather, the instruction is more like, "Hey, you bunch of glutamate-using neurons over there! Grow your axons in the dorsal direction for a bit and then about 50 percent of you make a sharp left to cross the midline to reach the other side of the brain. The rest of you, turn your axons to the right."

The key point is that the genetic instructions for development are not precise. In one growing identical twin, 40 percent of the axons in this area will make the left turn; in an another, 60 percent will. The example here is from the brain, but the principle applies to all the organs.

That's the main reason why identical twins, who share the same DNA sequence and nearly the same uterine environment, are not born with wholly identical bodies, brains, or temperaments. 

This means that your individuality is not a matter of "nature versus nurture" but rather "heredity interacting with experience, filtered through the inherent randomness of development." It's not nearly as fun to say but, unlike the former expression, it's true.

Then there's the question of how our memories are altered to some extent every time we recall them. Meaning, memories aren't like photographic images. They're more like Photoshop, which allows images to be edited, changed, altered. I've always thought this was a defect of human memory, but Linden says otherwise.

Another answer to the question of what memory is for is that the particular features of autobiographical memory are actually features rather than bugs. For memory to be useful, it must be updated and integrated with subsequent experience, even if it alters the memory of the original event.

In that way, it's helpful for recollection to render the memory of an event malleable, so that it may be integrated with the present.

In most situations, a generic memory compiled from many trips to the beach is more useful in guiding future decisions and behavior that fifty stand-alone, detailed, and accurate beach trip memories. The repetition-driven loss of detail allows for the efficient use of the brain's limited memory resources.

In other words, it's not surprising that our memories for events are often inaccurate, because the particular way in which memories are compromised is often useful. What's surprising is that we mostly fail to recognize this in our daily lives.

We humans all have an inborn tendency to create a plausible story out of memory fragments. Because of this ongoing narrative construction, we are often confident about the veracity of blurred memories and allow them to form the basis of our core beliefs about ourselves.

Free will fascinates me, for reasons outside of my control. Here's part of what Linden says about free will.

We like to imagine that we are fundamentally creatures of free will. We reliably call certain facts, events, and concepts to mind. We make conscious decisions and act volitionally. Our individuality is inextricably bound up with a deep sense of agency and autonomy.

To a large degree, this is a trick our brain plays on us. Most of our behavior is subconscious and automatic. In the words of neuroscientist Adrian Haith: "Almost everything you do is a habit."

A habit is not just a behavioral routine that is formed and then performed at a subconscious level, it must become divorced from an ultimate goal. Your goal might be to stop off at the Thai restaurant for takeout after work, but instead you habitually drive straight home.

...As Haith writes, "Atop this massive conglomeration of habits sits a thin sliver of cognitive deliberation that steers only the highest-level decisions that we need to make." Without habits, our brain would be instantly overwhelmed with a multitude of tiny decisions better left to rapid, automatic processes.

The extent to which traits are inherited/genetic is a topic of great interest, since this gets at the extent to which we can control those traits (assuming we have free will).

Overall, adults in the United States are pretty good at estimating the heritable components of traits. In one recent online survey, most people guessed more or less correctly that, for example, political beliefs have a very small heritable component, height is strongly heritable, and musical talent falls in the middle.

There are a few traits for which people's estimates tend to be inaccurate. For example, most people think that variation in sexual orientation is about 60 percent heritable, whereas it's really only about 30 percent (about 40 percent in men and 20 percent in women).

On the other side, most people think that variation in BMI [Body Mass Index] is about 40 percent heritable, when it's really about 65 percent. It's interesting to imagine the ways in which cultural ideas inform these mismatches.

In the case of BMI, I imagine that many people want to believe that food consumption is more a matter of personal willpower than it really is. This is a frequent, if mysterious, theme.

In most cases -- from the accuracy of memory to the heritability of personality traits -- people imagine that they (and others) have a greater degree of autonomy and personal agency than they really do.

Bullshit: "What you dislike in others is what you dislike in yourself"

There's a lot of New Age absurdities that irritate me. One of them is the ridiculous notion that if I dislike something about someone else, it's because I actually dislike that something in myself.

Oh, really? That's absurd. Sure, perhaps it is true in a few cases, but almost always we have a good reason for our dislikes.

I dislike Donald Trump because he lies incessantly, has a monstrous ego, lacks any genuine sense of morality, and exhibits an almost total lack of self-awareness and self-criticism. 

(Those are the dislikes that come most readily to mind. I could come up with more after a bit of additional thought.)

What I dislike about Trump isn't a reflection of my own mind, as a couple of annoying web pages I found say: "What You Dislike in Others is What You Dislike in Yourself" and "Introspection: Why You Hate in Others What You Hate in Yourself."

That makes no sense. Are we to believe that everybody who dislikes Trump, mostly liberals, share the qualities that they believe Trump possesses, while everybody who likes Trump, mostly conservatives, have none of those qualities?

It's a fact that what I dislike about Trump is part of Trump's personality. No doubt about it. Fact checkers have proven that he lies all the time. Most of us lie occasionally, but we feel bad when we're caught in a lie. Trump revels in lying, and he never admits he was wrong.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as projection. Sometimes people do indeed project their own disliked qualities onto others. There's been some notable instances of Republican politicians who were vehemently anti-LGBTQ, then were discovered to have engaged in homosexual behavior themselves.

In general, though, I agree with the thrust of what Jeff Foster says below in his book, "The Joy of True Meditation." His emphasis is a bit different from what I've been speaking about, but the theme of Foster's short chapter is in line with it.

The Path of the Broken Heart

"Clear up our vibration and you'll stop attracting bad things to yourself."

"If you have fears, if you have resistance, if you have anger, doubts and shame, then you must be in your ego, and totally unenlightened."

"If you think there's a problem with someone's words or actions, you are always the one who's confused."

"Everything is just your projection. Everything is in your mind. Everything is unreal."

"You attracted your pain because you desired and deserved it."

"You are too attached to the body. Go beyond the body. It's not who you are."

"The past is an illusion. Let it go immediately."

No, it's not always your projection. Sometimes you are seeing very clearly indeed.

No, everything isn't always "only in your mind." Sometimes you need to trust your gut instinct more, not less.

No, your doubts and fears are not a sign of your lack of spiritual evolution.

No, you do not attract abuse through a faulty "vibrational frequency."

No, you do not deserve to be violated in any way, in the name of truth, in the name of God, in the name of love, or in any other name. Your boundaries deserve to be respected, your "yes" and your "no" equally.

No, it's not okay for spiritual teachers to shame people "for their own good" (to shock them into awakening, to enlighten them, to help them drop their "ego").

I cannot support any spirituality that dismisses our tender, vulnerable, fragile humanity, that shames us for our precious human thoughts and feelings, that divides self from no self, sacred from human, holy from profane, absolute from relative, heaven from earth, duality from nonduality.

I once saw a popular spiritual teacher addressing a recently bereaved woman. He said, "Your heartbreak is totally unreal and only the activity of the separate self. You are pure Awareness, and nothing more. Your son, and his death, are just a convincing illusion of mind. One day the separate self will vanish, along with all suffering."

And in that moment, I saw a deep sickness and inhumanity at the heart of contemporary spirituality. The invalidation of trauma, the false promises, the power games, the suppression of the divine feminine.

And I vowed to bow to that broken heart as if it were God Herself.

Until the end of time.

Don't repress your feelings because you think that's "spiritual"

I'm coming to dislike that word, spiritual. It conjures up an image of something ethereal, other-worldly, supernatural, divorced from the messy reality of this physical world.

Which, of course, is the only world there is -- because there's precisely zero demonstrable evidence that any other realm exists. No heaven. No hell. No divine regions of reality. 

This is it. So rather than say something like "I'm a spiritual person," how about simply "I'm s person." Just as we all are. Doing our best to live a good life in a world that's filled with challenges.

That includes dealing with challenging emotions, such as anger. 

I've continued reading a book I mentioned in my previous post, "The Joy of True Meditation" by Jeff Foster. Below I'll share some wise words he has to say about anger, and by implication, any sort of supposedly negative emotion.

I say supposedly, since there is no such thing as a negative emotion. Or, a positive emotion. There's just emotions. How we label them is up to us. Emotions don't come with labels attached. That's a human invention. So I"m not saying that Foster's view of anger is objectively correct. It's just his perspective. 

I enjoy reading books like "The Joy of True Meditation" not because I think they point to some cosmic truth.

For many years I did do that, in my religious phase -- which lasted about 35 years. I'd consider that writers about meditation or spirituality might have achieved a vision of something true about a realm that transcended the physical world.

Now, I look upon people like Jeff Foster as I do novelists or movie makers.

They are communicating creative insights that mean a lot to them, and can be entertaining for other people. If I find something in their vision that resonates with me, great. I can learn about what I find interesting and valuable by noting what I find attractive in someone else's perceptions.

Keep that in mind as you read what Foster has to say about anger. He makes some good points. It fits with observations I've made of so-called "spiritual" people who are so afraid of normal human emotions, they become almost robotic in how they talk and act, not natural at all.

But this is just one person's point of view. If you find something useful in what Foster says, wonderful. If you don't, that's fine also.

Spiritual teachings that tell us to extinguish our anger completely, that judge anger to be a categorically 'negative' and 'destructive' emotion, or call it 'unhealthy' or even 'unspiritual', can be very misleading teachings indeed.

Anger is life, a powerful expression of the vital life force that infuses and flows through and animates all things, and must be honoured as such.

Of course, we don't want to be ruled by our anger! We don't want anger to speak for us, put words in our mouths or control our bodies and behaviours. We want to have space around our anger, be able to use it consciously, as a tool, when necessary and appropriate and kind.

We don't want to be consumed by it, identified with it, blocked by it, or lose ourselves to it. We want a healthy -- and even loving -- relationship with this most powerful and fiery of friends.

When we try to be 'spiritual' and suppress our anger, when we push it deep down into our bodies and into the waiting room of the unconscious, it festers there and wreaks havoc with our immune systems. We no longer 'have' anger. Anger 'has' us.

Anger is no longer a feeling that comes and goes. We are angry now; anger is in our bones, we are identified with it. We find ourselves perhaps exploding in aggression and rage in our search for relief from the pressure within.

Or maybe we become passive-aggressive, simmering quietly with resentment and hostility towards the world and others -- the neighbours, politicians, family members, our partners. We find other unconscious ways to express or deflect from the anger: lying, blaming, sarcasm, complaining, or simply giving others 'the silent treatment'.

All ways to avoid ourselves. We are still angry inside.

Even if we think we are "spiritual" and "beyond anger". There are stories of the most "peaceful" and "enlightened" and "spiritually evolved" gurus and self-help teachers exploding with rage behind the scenes at students or shaming and blaming staff members or participants. 

The anger never really goes away, you see, it just finds new and creative ways to move.

There is a healthy, sacred middle between numbing out anger on the one hand, and habitually acting it out and hurting others on the other hand. Between repression, pushing the anger down, and unconscious reactive expression, pushing the anger out in search of relief.

In the middle, which is the sacred realm of meditation, we can breathe, and we can begin to actually feel our anger deep inside our bodies. We can come out of our minds -- out of the drama in our head, the blame and the attack on others and the revenge fantasies -- and go right into our own bellies, chests, throats, solar plexus, head.

Go right to the core of the aliveness, to the raw fiery sensations of the present moment... We can slow down and respond lovingly to our anger instead of unconsciously reacting to it. 

Embrace everything about yourself, including the good, bad, and the ugly

I'm cured!

But before I get too excited over this news, I need to remind myself that what happened yesterday was, after three counseling sessions, Wayne, the counselor I was seeing, agreeing with me that there wasn't any need for me to continue seeing him.

What caused my therapeutic breakthrough is interesting, because it fits with the blog post I wrote about a week ago, "Zen'ish adage: when you're sad, be sad; when you're happy, be happy."

I mentioned that post to Wayne in the course of explaining my Big Realization. Namely, that the goal I'd written down at Wayne's request after our first session, which I brought to our second session, no longer made sense to me.

The details don't matter, which relate to a couple of nagging health problems I have. The broad goal is what's important, as this pertains to just about everyone. It was that I wanted to not feel upset when a health problem was going badly for me. Or at least, only minimally upset.

I told Wayne that I realized this didn't make sense. After all, it's natural to feel better when my life is going smoothly, and to feel worse when my life has some annoying problems. 

It struck me that what really had been bothering me wasn't so much feeling bad now and then when a health problem was more active, but a sense that I shouldn't be feeling that way. So I'd fallen into the common trap of being sad that I was sad, or angry that I was angry, or upset that I was upset.

Instead of just having a simple emotion -- sadness, anger, upsetness -- I now had a double dose of emotion: the original feeling, plus a secondary feeling caused by my reaction to the original. 

Wayne agreed with my take on this. It's better to accept unpleasant emotions, he said, rather than try to pretend that you're not feeling them, or otherwise submerge them under a fake facade of positivity.

I told Wayne that in his guided meditations, Sam Harris frequently observes that when an emotion like sadness, fear, or anger arises, the "half life" of the emotion is much briefer when it is felt intensely rather than pushing it away. Embracing the feeling burns it up quite quickly, instead of letting it smolder under a covering of repression.

This also is the message of a book I've just started reading, The Joy of True Meditation by Jeff Foster. I ordered it after seeing that Foster had created the cartoon You Tube video that makes fun of those who take nonduality and Advaita too seriously.

Checking out Foster's web site, I saw that he'd written a book about nonduality, so I ordered it. He starts off by talking about how he felt as a youth that he didn't belong anywhere and contemplated suicide in his darker moments even though he'd been admitted to Cambridge and was a star student.

He writes:

And then, one ordinary day, all my defences against life, all my resistance to being alive, all my conditioned protection against the pain and pleasure of raw experience, started to break down.

All the repressed unconscious material, all the thoughts and feelings and desires I had held down in order to appear 'normal' and 'civilised' started leaking, then pouring, then gushing into conscious awareness.

Pandora's Box had broken open inside of me. I could no longer run from the darkness within, no longer push life away and seek refuge in the conceptual mind; there was no longer any safe haven to be found there.

I was being called to face life. The joy, the terror, the rage, searing feelings of abandonment suppressed since childhood, waves of unspeakable grief -- I could no longer escape them now. Raw trauma had been unleashed inside, everything held back was now rushing into me, like an unstoppable torrent of life!

I thought I was going to die, convinced that I would not be able to tolerate the intensity of it all for another moment. 

But I did not die. In fact, I was beginning to heal. The old unhappy 'me' was beginning to break down. My no to life was burning up and my true self was coming alive. Something deep inside me was starting to say yes -- yes to being alive, yes to not knowing, yes to the joy and the sorrow of existence, yes to the mess of being an imperfect human being, yes to the darkness and the light, yes to all of it!

...This sense of being alive was so intense sometimes, I thought it would kill or damage or at least overwhelm me, or perhaps send me spiraling into a void I would never escape from.

But feelings are always safe. It is our defences that hurt so much. 

I will say that again. Our feelings are safe, no matter how intense they are. It is our tensing-up around our human feelings, our rejection and refusal of them, our unconscious efforts to destroy and annihilate and purify them inside of us, our shaming of our vulnerable inner life and the smothering of the inner child, which causes so much pain and suffering. Not the feelings themselves.

Nonduality says nothing about how the world really is

Following up on my previous post about David Loy's book, Nonduality, here's some additional thoughts on a subject that both intrigues me and irritates me.

The intrigue part stems from a desire most of us have, me certainly included, to look upon the world without feeling so separate from it. That separateness is inherent in a central fact about we humans.

Each of us views things from an inescapable subjective perspective.

Meaning, we are subjective beings in an objective world. Or at least, what sure appears to be an objective world.

No one knows what it is like to be us other than ourselves. I can do my best to describe how I feel about something, but in the end, all that describing can't encompass my direct subjective experience of that feeling.

Same is true for you. Same is true for everybody.

We are subjects to ourselves, and objects to other people. Each of us assumes that other people also have a subjective life, but their subjectivity is off limits to us, as our subjectivity is off limits to them.

As Loy notes in his book, Western philosophy has pretty much accepted that reality is dualistic.

Even though it has moved beyond the dualism of Descartes, where mind and body are distinct entities, there's still an assumption that the subjective inner side of us is qualitatively different from the objective outer world.

Eastern philosophy, though, has explored ways we humans could attain a nondual way of experiencing reality. 

Basically, Indian philosophy (Vedanta, notably) holds out the idea that soul, or atman, can merge with God, Brahman. You know, the whole drop becoming the ocean thing. So nonduality is achieved by consciousness expanding to become the entire cosmos.

The emphasis here is on an experience of an ethereal universal force/energy/power that lurks behind everyday reality yet is distinct from it. So closed-eye meditation is viewed as a means of achieving a state of being one with everything.

Chinese and Japanese philosophy, Loy points out, is quite different. Here the emphasis is on experiencing the physical world. Instead of expanding to become everything, the goal is to shrink one's personal perspective as much as possible so only the world remains.

Bingo! Nonduality, but approached from the opposite direction favored by Indian/Vedanta philosophy. Nature is revered. Making tea is revered. Chopping wood and carrying water is revered. 

I've over-simplified Loy's arguments here, which are considerably more sophisticated. Check out this 2015 blog post for a more expansive description of how Loy analyzed how various Eastern philosophies view the relation between dualism and nonduality. 

He concludes that an experience of nonduality can be interpreted in various ways. Thus experience can't tell us how reality actually is. A nondual experience can be compatible with the soul merging with God thing, or compatible with the consciousness being absorbed in the world thing.

Loy also shows that for Taoism and Yoga, both nonduality and duality can be "real." That word is in quotation remarks, because the reality being spoken of in a consistence with those philosophies, not with how things really are in an objective sense.

Which gets me to the irritating part of nonduality. 

I'm fine with viewing nonduality as a word game, or as philosophical speculation. I'm also fine with the notion that nonduality and duality aren't incompatible opposites but the extremes of a continuum. Meaning, we humans can look upon the world as more or less nondual or dual. 

There isn't a right or wrong way to do this. Just different ways. At times we can feel separate and distinct from the world; at times we can feel that we're an integral aspect of the world.

But all those feelings say nothing about how the world actually is in an objective sense. So when people have some sort of experience that leads them to claim nonduality -- basically, oneness -- is an inherent feature of reality, that's irritatingly absurd.

Their experience is simply an experience. They're entitled to speak about it, obviously. However, a subjective experience of nonduality in which the difference between us and the world narrows markedly shouldn't be mistaken for a groundbreaking discovery about the nature of reality.

We've all had those kinds of experiences.

Maybe in deep meditation. Maybe in a breathtaking connection with nature. Maybe in a psychedelic drug trip. Maybe in an intense sexual orgasm. There's no end to the ways people feel closer to other people, to the world, to the cosmos.

Yesterday I mowed part of our property, plus our lawn, on a dry Saturday that was a break from an unusually rainy April here in western Oregon. About a month ago I wrote a blog post about how much I'm liking the John Deere X394 lawn tractor that I bought last year.

Now that I'm familiar with what the X394 can do, and am comfortable with the controls, mostly I can sit back and enjoy the power, the four-wheel steering, the power steering, and yes, the cup holder. 

I can't say that yesterday afternoon I became one with my lawn tractor. But I definitely felt a pleasing harmony where the mowing flowed harmoniously, in part because mowing on the challenging non-lawn parts of our property requires constant attention.

Branches fall in high winds. I have to look out for them. There's rocks and tree stumps I don't want to mow over, so I have to remember where they are. I have to miss trees and shrubs. All in all, it was a nondual'ish experience, since I felt that the mower and the mowing and the person controlling the mower (me) weren't really separate.

But in no way can I claim this says anything about reality. It was just an experience that I had.

What hitting a fastball tells us about the brain

I'm not sure what to make of this seemingly correct fact, but I find it so interesting, I feel that it must have some deep significance to those of us who aren't professional baseball players.

In the course of rereading a chapter in Robert Burton's book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, I came across his analysis of baseball pitchers and hitters in the "When Does a Thought Begin?" chapter.

Here's the crux of the issue:

Professional baseball pitchers throw with velocities in the range of 80 to 100 miles per hour. Elapsed time from the moment of release to the ball crossing home plate ranges from approximately 380 to 460 milliseconds.

Minimum reaction time -- from the instant the image of the ball's release reaches the retina to the initiation of the swing -- is approximately 200 milliseconds. The swing takes another 160 to 190 milliseconds.

The combination of reaction and swing time approximately equals the time it takes for a fastball to travel from the pitcher's mound to home plate.

So how is a batter ever able to hit the baseball?

It can't be by following the path of the ball with their eyes, deciding it is a hittable pitch, and then swinging their bat at the ball. Physics and human biology don't allow for that. Burton explains what actually happens.

Once the ball is in flight, it is too late for detailed deliberation. The batter sees the release and the beginning of its path, and then goes on automatic pilot. Sounds suspiciously like an inner machine at the helm, some robotic neuronal clumps that are responsible for a hitter like Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds.

Yet we all know that a hitter's skill, beyond mere athleticism, is dependent upon prior practice and extensive study of the game. Great hitters keep extensive notes on the tendencies of opposing pitchers, including what type of pitch and where it will be thrown in various conditions.

A 3-0 pitch with the bases loaded is more likely to be down the middle than a 0-2 pitch with the bases empty. The combination of circumstances is infinite, yet each hitter develops a probabilistic profile of the speed, trajectory, and location of the next pitch. It is in this realm that great players have a greater accuracy than novice players.

The act of hitting the ball involves two fundamentally different strategies inextricably linked together -- conscious analysis prior to the event, and reliance upon nearly instantaneous subconscious calculations at the onset of the event.

The cortex sets out general guidelines for when to swing and where, then hands the controls over to quicker subcortical mechanisms. 

A simplified schema provided by a computer scientist-engineer after extensive study of the physics of a pitch:

"We divide the pitch into thirds. During the first third the batter gathers sensory data; during the middle third he does computations (predicting where and when the ball will collide with his bat); during the last third he is swinging. During the swing he could close his eyes and it would not make any difference. He can't alter the swing. The most he can do is check the swing." (Italics mine.)

Lastly, Burton explains why an onlooker thinks the batter should have been able to do better with a pitch, and how conversation is a lot like pitching a fastball and trying to hit a fastball.

To further complicate the problem of the timing of perception, consider how different the approaching baseball looks to the batter and to you, an observer sitting behind home plate. The pitcher fires three successive ninety-five-miles-per-hour blazers.

The batter whiffs the first and fouls off the next two. He prepares himself for another smoker. Instead, the pitcher lobs a deceptive sixty-five-miles-per-hour change-up. The batter swings far too early and strikes out. You watch in amusement and ask yourself how the batter can make five million a year and so misjudge a ball that, to your uninvolved eye, a Little Leaguer could hit.

The difference is that while the batter's decision to swing begins prior to his full conscious appreciation that the pitcher has thrown a slow pitch, you have the luxury to see the ball's entire path toward the plate. By not being forced to immediately decide whether or not to swing, you see a batter being badly fooled by a pitch that doesn't fool you.

The basic neurobiological principle is that the need for an immediate response time reduces the accuracy of perception of incoming information. Though most of aren't involved in high-speed sports, we all experience these limitations in the most crucial of daily activities -- normal conversation.

In fact, conversation is as much a high-speed competition as a top-flight table tennis match. 

First, consider the act of listening. We are bombarded with the rapid presentation of individual phonemes strung together to make words, phrases, and sentences. Processing takes time. A word may not be initially decipherable; only with further speech is it clarified.

...Now visualize conversation as a means for the exchange of complex ideas with each participant's response dependent on whether or not he believes the idea is correct. Instead of throwing a fastball, each discussant is throwing an idea at the other. 

If the listener judges the idea as correct, he will not swing (he will accept the idea as is). If he thinks the approaching idea is incorrect, he will swing (formulate an immediate rebuttal and/or interrupt the speaker to interject his correction).

Here's the windup, and here's the thought. The listener's decision as to the thought's correctness will be based upon a quick glimpse of the idea leaving the other's lips, snap judgements of body language, sighs, gestures, facial expressions, and all the various verbal and nonverbal contributions to interpretation of the spoken word. 

If the listener is forced to make a quick response, the decision as to the thought's correctness will be subject to the same physiological restraints as a batter's assessment of an incoming pitch.

...How different conversation sounds when we don't feel obliged to respond. As uninvolved spectators luxuriating in our more leisurely processing time, we easily see the shallowness, evasiveness, and lack of real exchange of ideas in most dialogue.

...Sadly, the problem is at least in part a matter of the physiology of conversation. As we move from silent observer to active discussant, we become mired in the very processing problem we're trying to overcome.

How neural networks operate in the hidden layer of our brain

ln my previous post, I referred to the hidden depths of the brain without including much of a description of what goes on in those depths.

Neuroscience is still working on that problem. But even though Robert Burton, a neurologist and neuroscientist, wrote the book I spoke about in the blog post (On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not) in 2008, the basic points he makes are still valid.

(Neuroscience doesn't evolve that fast.)

Here's passages from his chapter on Neural Networks that will give you a good feel for how the hidden layer of the brain operates. Fascinating stuff. 

As you can read below, the brain operates very differently from how most people believe it does -- as a reliable instrument for knowing reality as it is, a phrase that often pops up in spiritual books that aren't grounded in neuroscience.

Yes, in large part we humans agree on the basics of how the world is. If that wasn't the case, traffic signals would be useless. Most of us see red as red, green as green, and know that red means stop and green means go.

But as Burton says in these excerpts, there's a tremendous amount of personal subjectivity in what our brain presents to us as reflective of reality. And this isn't a bad thing, not that we can do anything about it. Life would be boring if we all experienced the world in the same way.

In the human brain, a typical neuron receives incoming information from approximately ten thousand other neurons. Each bit of information either stimulates (positive input) or inhibits (negative input) cell firing. 

The neuron acts like a small calculator.

If the sum of the inputs reaches a critical threshold level, an electrical charge travels down the nerve fiber (axon) to the region where neurotransmitters are stored. The transmitters are released into the synaptic cleft -- a tiny gap between adjacent neurons. If a neurotransmitter finds  a receptive site (receptor) on the adjacent neuron, the process will be repeated on this adjacent neuron.

...Despite a veritable symphony of interacting mechanisms, the neuron ultimately has only two options -- it either fires or it doesn't. At this most basic level, the brain might appear like a massive compilation of on-off switches. But the connections between neurons are not fixed entities.

Rather they are in constant flux -- being strengthened or diminished by ongoing stimuli.

Connections are enhanced with use, weakened with neglect, and are themselves affected by other connections to the same neurons. Once we leave the individual synapse between two neurons, the complexity skyrockets -- from individual neurons to a hundred billion brain cells each with thousands of connections.

Although unraveling how individual neurons collectively create thought remains the Holy Grail of neuroscience, the artificial intelligence (AI) community has given us some intriguing clues as to how this might occur.

Using the biological neuron and its connections as the model, AI scientists have been able to build artificial neural networks (ANN) that can play chess and poker, read faces, recognize speech, and recommend books on Amazon.com.

While standard computer programs work line by line, yes or no, all eventualities programmed in advance, the ANN takes an entirely different approach. The ANN is based upon mathematical programs that are initially devoid of any specific values. The programmers only provide the equations; incoming information determines how connections are formed and how strong each connection will be in relationship with all the other connections (or weightings).

There is no predictable solution to a problem -- rather as one connection changes, so do all the others. These shifting interrelationships are the basis for "learning." The AI community has labeled this virtual space where the weightings take place as the hidden layer. 

...In the human brain, the hidden layer doesn't exist as a discrete interface of specific anatomic structure; rather it resides within the connections between all neurons involved in any neural network.

...The hidden layer, a term normally considered AI jargon, offers a powerful metaphor for the brain's processing of information. It is in the hidden layer that all elements of biology (from genetic predispositions to neurotransmitter variations and fluctuations) and all past experience, whether remembered or long forgotten, affect the processing of incoming information.

It is the interface between incoming sensory data and a final perception, the anatomic crossroad where nature and nurture intersect. It is why your red is not my red, your idea of beauty isn't mine, why eyewitnesses offer differing accounts of an accident, or why we don't put all our money on the same roulette number.

...Now let's up the ante and watch a human neural network in action. A bright light is briefly flashed into your eyes. The retina turns the flash of light into electrical data that travel along the optic nerves and into the brain (input).

But instead of a direct route to consciousness with a precise and unaltered duplication of the flash, the data first goes to a subconscious holding station where it is scrutinized, evaluated, and discussed by a screening committee representing all of your biological tendencies and past experiences. This committee meets behind closed doors, operating outside of consciousness in the hidden layer.

Consider each committee member as being one set of neural connections. 

One might represent a childhood memory of having seen a similar flash of light when a toaster shorted out and started an electrical fire; the second is a general alarm system that has recently become highly sensitive and vigilant to the possibility of terrorism; the third is composite memory of rock concerts; the fourth is a genetically based predisposition for a heightened startle reflex for bright lights.

Each member has his own opinion and each gets one vote.

After hearing all the arguments, each committee member casts his vote and they are tallied (weighted). At the most elemental level, a decision is made -- either to entirely suppress the flash or send it on to consciousness (output). The degree of awareness generated is yet another function of this decision -- ranging from a barely noticed flash at the periphery of vision to a bright flash, front and center.

The childhood memory votes yes: Send the flash into awareness. The terrorist alarm network, fearing that the flash could indicate an explosion, votes yes. The rock concert memory is blasé, has seen the same flashes a zillion times at rock concerts, and feels the flash should be ignored. It votes no. The genetic predisposition reflexively votes yes.

The third member is outvoted, and the flash is sent on high priority into consciousness. You look around, heart pounding, on high alert for everything from a gunshot to a terrorist bomb exploding. But you are at a wedding, and everyone is taking pictures of the bride. You sigh and tell yourself not to be so anxious.

...To get an idea of the magnitude of this process, imagine billions of committee members, each with at least ten thousand hands reaching out to shake hands, prod, poke, seduce, or fend off the other members. Miraculously, this orgy of utter chaos is transformed into a relatively seamless and focused stream of consciousness.

...The schema of the hidden layer provides a conceptual model of a massive web of neuronal connections microscopically interwoven throughout the brain. Such neural networks are the brain's real power brokers, the influence peddlers and decision makers hard at work behind the closed doors of darkened white matter. How consciousness occurs remains an utter mystery, but conceptually, it must arise out of these hidden layers.

The concept of neural networks also helps explain why established habits, beliefs, and judgments are so difficult to change. 

Imagine the gradual formation of a riverbed. The initial flow of water might be completely random -- there are no preferred routes in the beginning. But once a creek has been formed, water is more likely to follow the newly created path of least resistance. As the water continues, the creek deepens and a river develops.

...The brain is only human; it, too, relies on established ways.

As interneuronal connections increase, they become more difficult to overcome. A hitch in your golf swing, biting your nails, persisting with a faulty idea, not dumping your dot.com stocks in late 1999 -- habits, whether mental or physical, are exasperating examples of the power of these microscopic linkages.

Our sense of knowing flows from hidden depths of the brain

The human brain remains largely mysterious, even though modern neuroscience has learned a lot about it. It's unclear to what extent computer artificial intelligence will come to mimic our brains.

But at the moment this much seems clear. Just as "deep learning" takes place in artificial intelligence in a manner that even AI programmers can't figure out, our own sense of knowing arises from hidden depths of the brain that we can't figure out.

Meaning, when you've been trying to figure out what to do about some problem -- like whether you should take a new job that's been offered to you, even though you aren't unhappy in your old job -- and suddenly you have a feeling, This is what I need to do, there's no way you can tell how your mind, the brain in action, came up with that conclusion.

This is a key theme in Robert Burton's fascinating book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. 

Burton, a neurologist and neuroscientist, says that a sense of knowing is closely tied to our feeling of having a life purpose. I wrote about this in a 2009 blog post based on his book, "Science and religion share a sense of purpose." 

Scientifically-minded people have a sense of purpose and meaning just as much as religiously-minded people do.

Burton talks about how Richard Dawkins, a noted atheist scientist, is ferociously dedicated to debunking mythologies and irrationality -- such as a denial of how evolution has guided the course of life on Earth.

Dawkins lives for this, just as the Pope lives to serve the cause of Catholicism, or a woman lives to raise her children, or a man lives to become the best at some sport.

So a felt sense of meaning and purpose is the root out of which grow stalks of action and commitment. Scientists do science because it is meaningful to them. Religious people do religion for the same reason.

Different strokes for different folks. Whatever turns you on.

We should force ourselves to distinguish between separate physiological categories of faith -- the basic visceral drive for meaning that has real purpose versus the unsubstantiated cognitive acceptance of an idea. Compassion, empathy, and humility can only arise out of recognizing that our common desires are differently expressed.

Nicely said, Dr. Burton. Both science and religion need to recognize that their common ground is a sense of meaning and purpose.

Fairly frequently a commenter on this blog will argue, "science is a form of religion." That's wrong. He or she says that because scientists are deeply devoted to the pursuit of truth about the physical universe.

But devotion grows from a sense of meaning. It doesn't need religion. People can be devoted to all sorts of non-religious things, such as improving one's golf game.

So religious believers should differentiate between the cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of their faith. Meaning, the feeling they have toward divinity, the meaning they derive from religiosity, is shared by scientists (and everyone else on Earth aside from the deeply clinically depressed).

However, the cognitive side of their faith is something different. These are the concepts that accompany the feelings. "Jesus is the Son of God." Well, you think so. But where is the proof?

I'm not justified in questioning the meaning someone gets from his or her religion. I am justified, though, in questioning their purported facts about the cosmos.

Facts can be challenged. Meaning can't.

If you wrongly believe that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election, even though there is no evidence that the election wasn't fairly decided, I have some hope of convincing you otherwise by correcting your facts. 

However, I've got very little chance of getting you to give up your conservative political views, or your fervent allegiance to Trump. Your political persuasion, like your religion, is a source of profound meaning to you that isn't given up lightly.

In large part because you aren't capable of altering what gives your life meaning. Neither am I. Nor is anybody else. Yes, what we find meaningful can change over time. But not through our conscious efforts. 

Burton writes in a final chapter about an exercise earlier in the book in which he shared a paragraph about a mysterious object that had various qualities. Spoiler alert: the object was a kite. He says:

Once imbedded within the conclusion that this paragraph refers to a kite, the feeling of correctness cannot be consciously dislodged or diminished. We can consciously input new contrary information; only the hidden layer of the neural networks can reweight the values.

The message at the heart of this book is that the feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction, and certainty aren't deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. They are mental sensations that happen to us. 

I've written a few other blog posts about Burton's book:

Knowing that you know: impossible
The three wisest words in the world: "I don't know"

 

Bruce Lee's Six Diseases of a competitive attitude

I'm prone toward feeling competitive. That was obvious when I was playing competitive tennis. I didn't like to lose. It's been less obvious now.

But today when I started reading Be Water, My Friend, a book written by Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee's daughter, after putting it aside for a while, I came across her description of how Bruce Lee viewed a competitive attitude in everyday relationships and situations.

I saw myself in these Six Diseases. Maybe you will also. Shannon Lee says: (the indented passages are from Bruce Lee)

If we want to look at how we practice all forms of rivalry, there are six diseases my father wrote about, all of which stem from the desire we have to win at all costs. These diseases rely on being in competition, which is typically where we go in a relationship the moment any discord pops up.

When we relate to others in these ways, we are disconnecting from them and disconnecting from our true selves in order to access some form of outside validation. In other words, there is no relationship, no collaboration, no cocreation. There is only the victor and the loser.

The Six Diseases are:

The desire for victory
I have to be the winner. If I don't win, I'm a loser. If I win, everybody else is a loser.

The desire to resort to technical cunning
I rely on the power of my wits to show you how great I am. Who cares about people or their feelings as long as everyone can see how clever I am?

The desire to display all that has been learned
Check me out. I know lots of things. I can speak at length about anything. It doesn't matter what anyone else has to say (especially if it's dumb).

The desire to awe the enemy
I am a force to be reckoned with. Look out! I will wow you to get your approval even if I have to do something shocking and wild to get your attention.

The desire to play the passive role
I am so easy to get along with. Who wouldn't like me? I am so unobtrusive and sweet. I will put anything that's important to me aside to make sure that you see how likeable and wonderful I am. How could you not like me when I sacrifice everything just for you?

The desire to rid oneself of whatever disease one is affected by
I am not okay as I am. I will perform constant self-work and read as many books as I can and take so many classes to make myself good that you will see that I am always trying to be a good person even if I continue to do lots of shitty things. I know I'm not okay as I am. And I know you know that I know I'm not okay as I am, which makes it okay not to get truly better as long as it looks like I'm trying.

With all of these pitfalls, there's an attachment to an outside outcome, which ultimately disconnects us from people and situations. There is only the desire to manipulate or shock and awe the "opponent." Even in the noble desire to be rid of the disease, there is a characterization of oneself as "the afflicted one" and therefore a denial of your own power.

I offer you these six diseases to consider as possible avenues of self-exploration because we have all participated in them when relating to another person or a situation. Can you recognize any of these in yourself?

If you were to dig a little deeper, where would you find the wounding perception that motivates the disease and where could the healing begin? Allow yourself the awareness to notice your tactics and the freedom to feel your pain points. Realize that the diseases are just a delusion of the mind and the ego.

You complain about how judgmental people are? Guess what you're being -- judgmental. You give someone the cold shoulder for not being nicer to you? Guess what -- you're not being nice. You gossip about what a gossip someone is? You're a gossip yourself. You get mad at someone for not loving you the "right" way -- that's not very loving.

Take a look in the mirror and see how you are extending the life of the disease rather than finding the cure and, ultimately, the healing.

These diseases are traps. They will keep you locked in isolation and stagnate your growth. They will keep your success always outside of yourself and out of your hands as you chase victory and validation through the eyes of someone else.

And what's more, they will keep you from being fully yourself. Attachment to outcome is denial of one's true commitment to self.

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of an engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or in defeat. See that there is no one to fight, only an illusion to see through.

Our reactions are a "second dart" that can cause a lot of distress

I'm certainly no Buddha, nor even much of a Buddhist, since while I enjoy non-religious Buddhist teachings, in no way do I consider myself a Buddhist.

But occasionally i have some moments that are in line with Buddhist wisdom, such as what's espoused in an excellent book, "Buddha's Brain: The practical neuroscience of happiness, love, and wisdom."

Last night my wife, Laurel, and I started watching the fourth season of Yellowstone, a streaming series that I like more than Laurel. (Often we alternate in our nightly TV watching between a series she likes more than me, like Bridgerton, and a series I like more than her, like Yellowstone.)

Laurel places much more of an emphasis on realism in movies and television than I do. So yesterday she spoke up several times in the first few minutes of Episode 1 of Season 4, pointing out how this or that couldn't really have happened the way it did in Yellowstone.

I was tempted to argue with her. But after 32 years of marriage, I've learned that some things are worth arguing about with Laurel, and some aren't. Like this one. So I basically kept saying things like, "OK, I see what you mean," which acknowledged her claim of unreality without endorsing it.

(Me, I figure that if I want reality, I just need to look at everyday life. What I want from television or movies is entertainment, getting away from everyday reality into an alternative view of the world.)

What I did, in terminology used by the Buddha's Brain authors, was keep the First Dart of Laurel's criticisms of Yellowstone from becoming a Second Dart caused by my reaction to her comments. Here's how Hanson and Mendius describe the two darts.

Some physical discomfort is unavoidable; it's a crucial signal to take action to protect life and limb, like the pain that makes you pull your hand back from a hot stove. Some mental discomfort is inevitable, too.

For example, as we evolved, growing emotional investments in children and other members of the band motivated our ancestors to keep those carriers of their genes alive; understandably, then, we feel distress when dear ones are threatened and sorrow when they are harmed.

We also evolved to care deeply about our place in the band and in the hearts of others, so it's normal to feel hurt if you're rejected or scorned.

To borrow an expression from the Buddha, inescapable physical or mental discomfort is the "first dart" of existence. As long as you live and love, some of those darts will come your way.

First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are "second darts" -- the ones we throw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts. 

Suppose you're walking through a dark room at night and stub your toe on a chair; right after the first dart of pain comes a second dart of anger: "Who moved that darn chair?!" Or maybe a loved one is cold to you when you're hoping for some caring; in addition to the natural drop in the pit of your stomach (first dart), you might feel unwanted (second dart) as a result of having been ignored as a child.

Second darts often trigger more second darts through associative neural networks: you might feel guilt about your anger that someone moved the chair, or sadness that you feel hurt yet again by someone you love. 

In relationships, second darts create vicious cycles: your second-dart reactions trigger reactions from the other person, which set off more second darts from you, and so on.

Remarkably, most of our second-dart reactions occur when there is in fact no first dart anywhere to be found -- when there's no pain inherent in the conditions we're reacting to. We add suffering to them. For example, sometimes I'll come home from work and the house will be a mess, with the kid's stuff all over.

That's the condition. Is there a first dart in the coats and shoes on the sofa or the clutter covering the counter? No, there isn't; no one dropped a brick on me or hurt my children. Do I have to get upset? Not really. I could ignore the stuff, pick it up calmly, or talk with them about it.

Sometimes I manage to handle it that way. But if I don't, then the second darts start landing, tipped with the Three Poisons: greed makes me rigid about how I want things to be, hatred gets me all bothered and angry, and delusion tricks me into taking the situation personally.

Saddest of all, some second-dart reactions are to conditions that are actually positive. If someone pays you a compliment, that's a positive situation. But then you might start thinking, with some nervousness and even a little shame: Oh, I'm not really that good a person. Maybe they'll find out I'm a fraud.

Right there, needless second-dart suffering begins.