Church of the Churchless

This is my favorite Rumi quotation

For several years, a few decades ago, I became obsessed with the great Sufi poet, Rumi. I devoured every English translation of his writings I could find, also buying books that weren't literal translations, but were written in the spirit of Rumi.

Eventually I donated most of my Rumi books when my obsession abated. But I kept a few, including William C. Chittick's translation of Rumi, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi.

One reason I held on to that book was that it contained my favorite Rumi quotation, from his Masnavi. 

Fear the existence in which you are now!
Your imagination is nothing, and you are nothing,
A nothing has fallen in love with a nothing,
a nothing-at-all has waylaid a nothing-at-all.
When these images have departed,
your misunderstanding will be clear to you.

I've memorized this passage. I ponder it fairly frequently.

It's become sort of a koan for me -- an intriguing bit of spiritual poetry that defies easy explanation, though it also has a seemingly clear meaning that is compatible with Zen and Buddhism in general.

I readily admit that different people will view this quotation in markedly different ways. All I can say is how it speaks to me. 

Yes, there is reason to fear the existence in which I am now. However, this is the same existence that virtually everybody on this planet inhabits: an existence filled with imaginings of things that don't actually exist, of a past that is no more, of a future that is yet to be.

My imagination, though a wellspring of creativity and mental fascination, can lead me into dead ends, dark alleys, wasted cognition, detachment from the non-imaginary here and now.

Worse, I tend to believe that the being doing the imagining, me, possesses more inherent existence than is warranted. The self that I thought for much of my life was eternal, a soul drop of a divine ocean, actually is, as Rumi says, nothing. 

Nothing, at least, that is independent, freestanding, immutable. Whoever or whatever I am, my strong suspicion is that I'm as insubstantial as the imaginings I so frequently engage in.

Yet as Rumi's poem observes, my imagination and me are in love with each other, though neither of us possesses any enduring substance. We are two nothings engaged in dancing together in a wispy ballroom of frothy existence.

Still, Rumi holds out hope for me. And for everybody in a similar situation. Who, again, is almost all of the eight billion people who cling to the dual delusions of barely-existent imagination and selfhood. 

For if I were to be able to exist without imagining what isn't there, which includes the solid self that also is a nothing rather than a something, Rumi says that my current misunderstanding of what life is all about would be cleared up.

Is this a fantasy? Perhaps. Rumi's words just seem to me like they have a ring of truth, though I have no reason to assert that they are true. I simply am attracted to this bit of tantalizing Rumi poetry.

Truth is beautiful. Which is why religion is ugly.

Truth was on my mind in various ways today.

In the morning I listened to a Chris Hayes "Why Is This Happening?" podcast interview with Kate Crawford, an Artificial Intelligence expert. Then I read an essay in my Question Everything book about the limits of free speech. In the afternoon I made a video on our back deck where I performed the Water Boxing form that I learned in my Tai Chi classes.

I'll start with the video.

I wanted to show people what the Water Boxing form looks like, but I knew that since I'd never seen myself doing the form from the objective outside, only from the subjective inside, there would be some disturbing mismatches between how I thought I looked doing the form, and how I actually did. 

But I ended up feeling good about the video because it pointed out some things that I want to change about how I "play" (in Tai Chi parlance) the Water Boxing form. And while I called our back deck a "patio," I chalked that up to a split in my mind between wondering if I was talking loud enough for my iPhone to pick up my voice, and using the right words in what I was saying.

The truth can hurt sometimes. Yet usually it doesn't, being simply the way things truly are, so far as we can tell. Without embracing truth, we can't make genuine lasting progress in any area: such as work, relationships, education, sports, and yes, spirituality.

Back in my religious days, when I was an active member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based organization headed up by a guru, I was struck by how often the word sat (truth) was used by the group.

Satguru meant true guru. Satsang meant a meeting where people heard about truth. Satsangi meant someone who associated with truth. Sat nam meant the true power of the cosmos. I bought into all this "sat" stuff.

Until I eventually decided that if I was going to pursue the truth about reality, I couldn't remain a member of an organization that -- after my thirty five years of learning about its teachings and diligently practicing the prescribed lifestyle -- didn't really possess the truth that I'd once hoped it did.

So I left Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) because I cared about truth.

Truth, after all, isn't what religions like RSSB are all about. They're into top-down control, not open-minded investigation. The RSSB guru used to be fond of saying "It's my way or the highway." Meaning, either do what I say, or leave RSSB, regardless of whether what the guru says makes sense.

On the Chris Hayes podcast, Crawford, the AI expert, spoke about the importance of grounding artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT in facts. If this doesn't occur, then sophisticated chatbots can sound like they're providing reputable information through human-sounding language.

But that information may be faulty, flawed, false.

How can we tell the difference between fact and fiction then? On his MSNBC show, recently Chris Hayes (I'm a fan of his, as you can tell) had an opening monologue where he brilliantly talked about how Republicans here in the United States, notably including Donald Trump, wage war on truth. 

They did this by aggressively, and falsely, claiming that the traditional purveyors of truth and facts can't be trusted: science, the media, academia, government. Having demolished the faith of American conservatives in these institutions with their cries of Fake News!, Republicans said that Fox News and right-wing public figures were the only repository of truth.

Which was completely backward.

For just as religions tell their devotees to ignore science and reason, and embrace religious holy books and holy people, Republicans were urged to ignore reputable sources of truth and only pay attention to the spreaders of Big Lies like the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

The essay by Stanley Fish I read today, "Transparency" is the mother of fake news, speaks about how facts are arrived at.

The insistence on the primacy of narratives and interpretations does not involve a deriding of facts but an alternative story of their emergence. 

Postmodernism sets itself against the notion of facts just lying there discrete and independent, and waiting to be described. Instead it argues that fact is the achievement of argument and debate, not a preexisting entity by whose measure argument can be assessed.

Arguments come first; when they are successful, facts follow -- at least for a while, until a new round of arguments replaces them with a new set of facts. 

...It [the world of fake news] is created by the undermining of trust in the traditional vehicles of authority and legitimation -- major newspapers, professional associations, credentialed academics, standard encyclopedias, government bureaus, federal courts, prime-time nightly news anchors.

...This wholesale distrust of authoritative mechanisms leads to the bizarre conclusion that an assertion of fact is more credible if it lacks an institutional source. In this way of thinking, a piece of news originating in a blog maintained by a teenager in a basement in Idaho would be more reliable than a piece of news announced by the anchor of a major network.

Fortunately, Fish can't be talking about me and my blogs, since I'm a senior citizen in a living room in Oregon! And I subscribe to the digital versions of the New York Times and Washington Post, plus I subscribe to TIME, Scientific American, New Scientist, and The New Yorker.

I smile, and also cringe, when commenters on this blog say that there's no such thing as objective truth or facts, so everybody's opinion about reality is just as good as everybody else's. That's bullshit. Religions want you to believe that truth lies within yourself, and they can tell you how to find it. 

Actually truth is determined through a rigorous process of investigation, argument, debate, and a ferocious dislike of dogma. Sure, personal subjective truth is open to everybody. If you like blueberries, that's your truth. No argument there.

But what I care about in addition to personal truth is objective truth. For that we need solid evidence. And that's where religions, along with today's Republican Party, fall completely short.

Religions exist because we can't grasp that the cosmos just is

For most of my life I marveled at the classic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

But with advancing age, and maybe some advancing wisdom, I came to prefer "There is something rather than nothing."

No why required. Just a factual statement. 

Because that why takes us into the realm of religion, and I'm no longer religious. Most religions, with the notable exception of Buddhism, assume there was a creator of the cosmos. 

So God is the answer to the why question. There's something rather than nothing due to God bringing the creation into being.

Of course, we then have to ask, "Why is there God?" For religions have to believe that something has always existed: God. 

While atheists like me prefer to believe that it is the cosmos that has always existed.

Sure, that's a mind-boggling notion. But only because the human mind is prone to boggle at the idea that existence has no beginning and no end. 

It just is. No creator of creation required.

The way I see it, our difficulty in wrapping our minds around that proposition is a big reason, maybe even the primary reason, why religions came into being and have such an attraction to most people.

For everything else we're familiar with has a cause that brought it into being. Even our universe, which is why I prefer to use the term "cosmos" when referring to everything in existence.

Science is confident that the big bang was how the universe came to be.

However, big bang theories don't start with absolutely nothing. They start with something: the laws of nature, and matter/energy that the laws of nature operate on.

So it seems clear that something always has existed. Those four words, something always has existed, never fail to produce a tingling sense of awe in me. 

I guess that feeling is somewhat akin to how religious people look upon God. However, there's a big difference between religious awe and secular awe.

I'm blown away by my inability to fathom how existence could have always existed. I don't have an answer for this. The question seems to be forever beyond human comprehension. 

By contrast, religious believers push this mystery away by assuming that God has always existed, and God created the cosmos.

They choose not to grapple with the notion that the cosmos just is. Always has been. Always will be. It just is.

I sympathize with that choice, though I think it leads to the false conclusion of God. 

For there's no doubt that the human mind is limited. We see beginnings everywhere in our world and the universe at large. Most people assume, then, that the cosmos must have had a beginning.

Our inability to rest easily in the blunt fact of the cosmos' "is'ness" seems to relate to a fundamental limitation of the human mind. 

We're habituated to causes and effects. So the idea of existence having no cause elicits a short-circuit in the human mind, which I believe results in awe. 

There is something rather than nothing. Wow! How freaking awesome!

But another sort of mind -- like an artificial intelligence or alien intelligence -- could look upon the simple "Is" of the cosmos as being completely natural. 

That other sort of mind wouldn't have any inclination to fashion a creator God, since that other sort of mind would see reality much differently than we do. Obviously I don't know what that vision would be like, since I have a limited human mind.

And maybe I've gone too far in even speculating about what that other sort of mind might be like.

All I'm saying is that I see a distinct possibility that religion has developed as a crutch to explain what our human minds struggle to comprehend about the cosmos. 

Being largely eludes us. We're much more comfortable with becoming, with creation. Yet what if the cosmos simply is? 

Nothing to figure out. No God stories required. Just an is with no beginning and no end.

Religion and mysticism are mostly conceptual

Reality can't be captured in concepts.

After all, it's extremely unlikely that the human brain has evolved to be able to completely capture the nature of the reality that fashioned both the human brain and everything else in existence.

But this doesn't take away the utility of concepts for making sense of the world.

"Tree" is a useful way of describing the general nature of vegetative entities that vary tremendously in size, appearance, and such, yet share common characteristics.

However, trees are part of the natural world. They are obviously real. 

Concepts that refer to entities which can't be observed by the human senses, or leave no trace via the effects they cause in the world (the quantum realm is an example of something unseen, yet decidedly real because of observable quantum effects) have less value.

Of course, I just made a value judgement about the value of concepts like "unicorn," "fairy," "devil," "god," "soul," "heaven," and other notions whose only discernible reality lies in the human mind.

Or better put, human imagination.

For many years I enjoyed a fantasy that I shared with billions of other religious believers: that the concepts of the faith I embraced at the time referred to things that were real, even though there was no evidence of them.

Karma. Astral plane. Divine light. Soul travel. Grace. God. Radiant form.

These and so many other concepts were repeated so often in books, talks, and other communications of the religion that I followed (Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB), members of RSSB come to view the concepts as something as real as gravity or earthquakes.

What helped me deconvert from this religious and mystical fantasy was a realization that I was tired of living so much in the world of abstract concepts. I longed for substance, of being grounded in here-and-now reality rather than floating in there-and-then spiritual stories.

A thoughtful comment by Ron E. on a recent blog post stimulated these reflections about concepts.

He made some good points in the comment about how religious and mystically inclined people chase after concepts that point to nothing substantial. They're merely ideas that stimulate other ideas in the minds of people who enjoy a good religious or mystical story, even if the story is almost certainly fiction.

Here's what Ron had to say.

Gillihan makes the point that “...We are constantly thinking: even if we decide to stop thinking, our minds will keep doing it anyway. It's what they are good at. If they aren't telling us stories in words, they're crafting made-up scenes or pulling up images from our memory banks. Our minds are actually so caught up in thinking that we don't realize we're thinking.”

Maybe then, we can point to thinking as being the main cause of much of our perceived problems. Leaving to one side at the moment that thinking and the abilities we have for planning and generally improving our lives are beneficial, some aspects of thinking definitely have their down sides.

I’m thinking!! how we accept certain words as truths, as being able to explain something that is purely inference. I’m thinking of terms such as spirit, mind, soul, self, ego, spiritual etc. All these terms are concepts, ideas that do not exist in the natural world unlike body, brain, sight, sound, pain, joy and so on – yes, the physical world.

It seems that we invent many words and spend the rest of our lives trying to think (or meditate) our way into experiencing the states that we believe they describe.

When it comes to mental phenomena it is of course convenient to label the cognitive processes, but perhaps we need to remember that they are just terms describing what the body and brain does naturally.

Otherwise, we can easily become slaves in believing that there is something ‘spiritual’ or ‘other worldly’ about them – and off we go chasing the myths we believe they describe.

We are the only animal that can deny our animal nature

In some regards we humans have capabilities beyond those of other species with whom we share our planet. But in this regard we are inferior to those creatures: we are the only animal that can deny our animal nature.

Not everybody does this, of course. I'm proudly animal, as is Maxim Loskutoff, who wrote "The Beast in Me" in The New York Times collection of philosophical essays published in the newspaper, Question Everything.

As you can read below, Loskutoff vividly recognized his animalness when a grizzly bear stalked him and his partner during their hike in Glacier National Park.

But it's strange that so many people are reluctant to admit that they are as much an animal as their dog or cat. Or the chicken they ate for dinner. What else could we be? We're made of flesh, blood, and bone, just like every other animal.

Sure, our brains have evolved to have the capacity to think thoughts like, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." (So said Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.)

This doesn't make such other-worldly thoughts true, though.

It simply shows that we are able to deny the reality of our human animality, covering that inescapable fact with layers of religious and metaphysical fantasy about how our true nature is ethereal soul, or some other supernatural notion with no foundation in fact.

The world would be a much better place if every person recognized that they are an animal.

This wouldn't turn everybody into vegetarians, but it would go a long way toward diminishing the sense most people have that humans are special, separate and distinct from all those animals we use, and abuse, for our pleasure.

Here's excerpts from the essay.

Obviously Loskutoff and his partner survived their grizzly bear stalking. They (literally) ran into a park ranger armed with a big gun who told them that the female bear was being tracked because she was almost twelve and having difficulty finding enough food at that age, manifesting increasingly aggressive behavior. 

Missoula, Mont. -- In the summer of 2012, the same year that scientists fully decoded the genome of the bonobo, the last great ape, my partner and I were stalked by a female grizzly bear.

...Several things happened in my mind at once. I realized the bear was following us. I realized she wanted to eat us, and I realized that I was an animal.

It was a strange epiphany. To be human today is to deny our animal nature, though it's always there, as the earth remains round beneath our feet even when it feels flat. 

I had always been an animal, and would always be one, but it wasn't until I was prey, my own fur standing on end and certain base-level decisions being made in milliseconds (in a part of my mind that often takes ten minutes to choose toothpaste in the grocery store), that the meat-and-bone reality settled over me.

I was smaller and slower than the bear. My claws were no match for hers. And almost every part of me was edible.

...I had one concern: to get us away without being eaten.

Civilization itself is an attempt to protect us from this feeling. From its earliest iterations in fire-starting and cave-dwelling to its current zenith in the construction of megalopolises, as well as the careful documentation of every birth and the methodical laying bare of each strand in every helix, civilization is a way of setting ourselves apart from the prey we once were.

Building walls, both physical and informational, to keep out the bears.

Yet even atop the highest tower in the most prestigious university we remain animals, directed by the same base-level needs and emotions that motivate living creatures from bonobos to rats.

...Of course there are aspects of our communal society -- caring for the old, the domestication of livestock, the cultivation of crops -- that link us to only a few other species, and other aspects, such as the written word, that link us to none as yet discovered, but in no place but our own minds have we truly transcended our animal brethren.

...As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously said, "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."

Most days I remain fully entangled in this web, cursing at my smartphone while rolling across the earth in four thousand pounds of steel. Yet there is something of the experience with the bear that remains inside me, a gift from my moment of pure terror.

It's the knowledge of my animal self. That instinctive, frightened, clear-eyed creature beneath my clothes. And it brought with it the reassuring sense of being part of the natural world, rather than separated from it, as we so often feel ourselves to be.

My humanity, one cell in the great, breathing locomotion spreading from sunlight to leaves to root stems to bugs to birds to bears.

All of us fragile, all of us fleeting, all of us prey.

Beyond awe, beyond mystery, there's ultimate not-knowing

There's many levels lying on the other side of ordinary knowing. I've been pondering this after writing the recent post, What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?

I hasten to point out that while I'd love to lay claim to such a marvelous title, it belongs to David Wolpert, who wrote an engrossing monograph about the limits of not only human knowledge, but the knowledge of any other species.

Wolpert lays out the foundation of his complex and subtle arguments in a single paragraph.

This question does not concern limitations on what we can know about what it is that we can never know. Many things can be conceived by us humans even if they can never be known by us. The set of what it is that we cannot even conceive of is a (strictly smaller) subset of what it is that we cannot know. The issue I am concerned with is what we can ever perceive concerning that smaller set, the set of all that we cannot conceive of.

As quoted in the first post about Wolpert's paper, he aptly observes:

A cynic might comment with heavy irony, “Gee, how lucky can you get? Humans have exactly the cognitive capabilities needed to capture all aspects of physical reality, and not a drop more!” This cynic might go on to wonder whether an ant, who is only capable of formulating the “rules of the universe” in terms of pheromone trails, would conclude that it is a great stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability of doing precisely that; or whether a phototropic plant would conclude that it is a stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability to track the sun, since that must mean that they can formulate the rules of the universe.

I think it is not only likely, but a near-certainty, that without exception, every human who has ever lived has been handicapped in knowing the nature of reality by the seemingly inescapable fact that there is much about the cosmos we can't even conceive of, must less know.

To be blunt about that "without exception," I include Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Lao Tau, Guru Nanak, and each and every mystic, saint, yogi, or whatever who has walked the earth. No one, repeat no one, is capable of knowing anything about what we can't even imagine.

Religion and mysticism embrace awe and mystery. So do I, as an atheist. But awe is what we feel when we are in the presence of something known, yet beyond our comprehension, like the vastness of the universe.

And mystery likewise requires a dividing line between what is known about something, and what lies in the darkness beyond the light of knowledge. Darkness isn't nothing. It can be conceived, as when we peer into an unlit room and say "I can't see what's there."

We don't know what's there. However, we can imagine something being there, even if it is nothing.

Obviously it's much more difficult to envision even the slightest sign of something beyond our capacity to conceive of. I'd say it's impossible, but Wolpert has been thinking about this stuff for many years, and he sees some possibilities for humans to conceive of what is now beyond our conception.

God, of course, is either fully or largely within the realm of human conception. Which is one reason why I firmly believe that God is a creation of humans. I used to resonate with the Via Negativa, negative way, where whatever could be said about God, isn't. 

(In contrast to the Via Positiva, where believers love to describe God's love, wisdom, power, goodness, and such.)

But even the Via Negativa requires the concept of "God." It's just a way of saying that whatever can be said about God, the reality is beyond those sayings. What would we be left with, though, if the very concept of God were beyond the ability of humans to imagine?

Well, it would be akin to how our dog looks upon politics or quantum mechanics. Less than nothing, since "nothing" implies the potential presence of something, and our dog just has no capacity to conceive of much that we humans take for granted.

Yet as every dog owner knows, canines inhabit a sensory world of scent and sound and sight that is impossible for we humans to conceive of in anything more than a crude sense.

Probably each of us has a favorite way of trying to grasp in even the slightest fashion the elusive concept of what is so far beyond our conception, it can't even be imagined. Mine is the classic "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Or as I prefer to put it, "There is something rather than nothing," because I don't see any possibility of answering the "why?"

When my mind tries to conceive of this primal fact, There is something rather than nothing, I'm thrown into a realm of no beginning, no end, no creator, no creation. Just the stark reality of existence that to my human mind, must always have existed.

But that's a very human conception. It fills me with awe. It fills me with mystery.

However, I strongly suspect that if an alien being arrived on earth who, against all odds, did possess the capacity to know the nature of There is something rather than nothing, neither me nor anyone else would be able to conceive anything about that knowledge.

It would be as distant from us as the Theory of Relativity is from our dog's understanding of reality. I find this exciting. Also, humbling. Because it means that no matter how much anyone believes they know about the cosmos, what they're utterly incapable of knowing is what they cannot even imagine.

What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?

I love the question that's the title of this blog post. The question didn't come from me, but from David Wolpert. I learned about a paper he wrote when it was mentioned in a recent issue of New Scientist.

But there is a deeper question here: can we be sure that logic, even a reformed kind, is enough to understand the universe in all its fullness?

It is a question that David Wolpert at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico has been thinking about for decades. In a recent monograph, he spelled out his argument that it is more likely than not that there is some higher mode of logic that could be used to understand the universe, but that human minds wouldn't be able to grasp.

Just think of that humble linguistic device, the question. Wolpert says there are creatures -- things like a single-celled paramecium -- that couldn't conceive of the idea of a question. In fact, according to our standards of intelligence, every other species on Earth is limited in some regard in the way it understands the world around it.

Why should we be any different? "We are the paramecia," says Wolpert. "What is beyond us?"

Wolpert thinks there are ways we could potentially get at higher systems of thought that go beyond logic  as we know it. Perhaps it will be a super Turing machine that can transcend the normal rules of computing or an intelligent form of extraterrestrial life that shares its wisdom with us.

Perhaps it will be something different altogether. And what will this new plane of understanding be like?  "I can't conceive of it," says Wolpert. "But that's the whole point."

Wolpert's essay is 22 pages long, 30 including footnotes. I read it fairly quickly tonight. It deserves another reading. Maybe several readings. Parts are fairly dense, but most of the essay is understandable to anyone willing to make their way through some sophisticated thinking about the limits of human knowledge. 

Here's a PDF file.
Download What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?

lt's hard to disagree with Wolpert. Since every species on Earth is limited in its knowledge of what the world is all about, why would we humans be any different? 

Here's a passage from the essay that I especially liked. Note: if you're a religious believer, or an admirer of mysticism, the same limitations of the human mind apply to you also. Meaning, even if you don't embrace logic or language as a guide to reality, you embrace some other human capacity, which leaves Wolpert's argument untouched.

To gain some insight into these questions, note that the highly limited form of all of human mathematics — sequences of finite strings of symbols — just happens to be exactly the structure that we humans use to converse with one another: the structure of human language. Indeed, starting back with Wittgenstein, it has become commonplace to identify mathematics as a special case of human language, casting its structure explicitly as grammar in the same sense as grammars arise in human conversation.

Note as well that it is a poetic cliche that libraries, and in particular mathematics libraries, are places where we converse (!) with past minds. The implication is that the contents of all the mathematics textbooks in those libraries is part of a conversation; i.e., an exercise in human language. Indeed, historically, mathematics textbooks and papers developed from written correspondence, i.e., from exercises in human language.

So, the form of human mathematics, and of our SAM more generally, just happens to exactly coincide with the form of inter-human communication. Some writers have pointed this out before, that human language’s design matches that of formal logic and Turing machine theory [16]. They have taken this as a wonderful stroke of fortune, that we just so happen have a cognitive prosthesis — human language — that is capable of capturing formal logic. After all — they presume — this means we are capable of capturing all the laws of the physical universe.

A cynic might comment with heavy irony, “Gee, how lucky can you get? Humans have exactly the cognitive capabilities needed to capture all aspects of physical reality, and not a drop more!” This cynic might go on to wonder whether an ant, who is only capable of formulating the “rules of the universe” in terms of pheromone trails, would conclude that it is a great stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability of doing precisely that; or whether a phototropic plant would conclude that it is a stroke of fortune that they happen to have the cognitive capability to track the sun, since that must mean that they can formulate the rules of the universe.

Sure, it’s possible that it is just a coincidence, that for some unknown reason the deepest nature of physical reality is expressible in terms of one of our cognitive prostheses. But it certainly seems as plausible that social computation is simply the most sophisticated cognitive prosthesis we have ever developed, and that even exploiting it to the hilt only allows us to capture a sliver of physical reality.

Yes, our science and mathematics — or more precisely, what they seem to be developing into — may be a complete description of what we understand physical reality to be. They might be developing into a complete description of what is experimentally accessible to us, even if only indirectly, both now and in the future [94, 95, 108, 109].

But in an exactly parallel manner, a putative ant- level theory of reality in terms of pheromone trails and environmental chemical signals could capture all that ants “understand physical reality to be”, of all that ants can “experimentally access”. And just as there is a huge expanse of physical reality lying beyond the charmed sliver that ants can conceive of, it may be that there is a huge expanse of physical reality beyond our ability to even conceive of.

After all, social computation — human language — was developed for communal sessions of shooting the shit around the campfire after a successful mastodon hunt (plus a few other purposes). There is no reason to believe that features well- suited for such exercises in nocturnal braggadocio can also be used to glean substantial insights into the shape of the hands of the Cosmic Baker, based solely on some crumbs we have discovered, scattered on their kitchen floor.

A systems view of reality shows the hollowness of religion

It dawned on me this morning that one reason people have so much difficulty understanding why free will is an illusion, a subject I've written a lot about over the years, is that most of us are addicted to a linear hierarchical view of the world.

So when presented with a perspective that undermines the simplistic "I wanted to do X, so that's what I did," substituting a vision where influences that determine our thoughts and actions come from many sources, with our thoughts and actions then affecting the world that determines our thoughts and actions, people tend to accept a simple but wrong view.

For reality isn't like an organizational chart with a Board of Directors and CEO at the top, and boxes showing underlings laid out in a hierarchy below the Big Boss. But this is what religions would have us believe. 

God is the CEO. God is in charge of things. There's angels and other supernatural entities who are subservient to God.

Here on earth, religions mirror this organization. Some people have a closer connection to God than other people. They're given names such as Pope, Master, Guru, Swami, Reverend, Imam, Rabbi, and such. Others in the religion are supposed to acknowledge them as leaders.

To which I say, of course, to hell with that. Not just because I no longer believe in God. Also because I've always believed in reality, and reality doesn't work like a corporate structure where power flows downward and obedience flows upward.

In the 1970s I was fortunate to have an opportunity to enroll in a Systems Science Ph.D. program at Portland State University here in Oregon, soon after I got a Masters in Social Work from PSU. My first job was as a Research Associate in the Family Practice Department at the Oregon Health Sciences University Medical School. I was encouraged to take Systems Science classes, which I happily did, eventually completing the coursework for a Ph.D. but not the other requirements.

An anecdote from my Systems Science days provides a good glimpse into systems thinking. 

I was sitting in the front row of a small seminar-like class taught by Magoroh Maruyama, a professor in the program who had a bit of a Zen master in him. Another student asked whether taking another class he taught had a prerequisite.

Maruyama jumped up, dashed to the blackboard, grabbed a piece of chalk, and emphatically said (almost yelling), "No prerequisites! That is not systems science! We start here, and then we go anywhere!!" as he started with a point and drew an expanding circular maze of scribbles with no discernible pattern.

I've forgotten a lot about what I learned about Systems Science. But I sure remember that moment when Professor Maruyama demonstrated how reality tends strongly toward creative non-linearity rather than predictable straight lines.

Here's a more traditional definition in a book by Fritjoj Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (See here and here for some posts I wrote about the book.)

The ideas set forth by organismic biologists during the first half of the twentieth century helped to give birth to a new way of thinking -- thinking in terms of connectedness, relationships, patterns, and context. According to the systems view, the essential properties of an organism, or living system, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships between the parts.

...In the systems approach, the properties of the parts can be understood only from the organization of the whole. Accordingly, systems thinking does not concentrate on basic building blocks but rather on basic principles of organization. Systems thinking is "contextual," which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole.

If this sounds to you like Buddhism, or Taoism, that wouldn't be surprising.

After all, Fritjof Capra wrote the classic The Tao of Physics in 1975. When Buddhism and Taoism are stripped of their supernatural excesses, they end up being quite compatible with modern science, which is increasingly embracing a systems perspective.

This causes that is simplistic. It isn't how reality operates.

Yet religions have always used this way of thinking. God created the world. Jesus saves. The guru clears a disciple's karma. All statements like these are false. All are mired in a worldview that's so uncreative, it uses the tired metaphor of a king ruling his kingdom to describe the secrets of the cosmos.

Which is why I found more truth in The Systems View of Life than in any of the religious books I used to  read so avidly.

God, like money, is real only because of the human mind

As I noted in a previous post about Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, I'm enjoying the book more now that I'm past the introductory chapters.

One reason is that Barrett doesn't just describe how emotions are made. She embeds that description in larger issues. For example, her "Emotions As Social Reality" chapter starts off with the classic question, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound?

Even though I should know better, when I ponder this question my first intuitive reaction is to visualize a big tree falling in a forest with no one around, and it sure does make a sound. 

But that's my imagination talking, not reality. Meaning, I forget that the question says no one is present to hear it, and that includes me -- even though I'm just visualizing the tree falling, not experiencing it in physical reality.

It's easy to make this sort of mistake. After all, for each of us, the only way we know anything about the world and our surrounding universe is through the human brain. So for us, reality basically is synonymous with "how we experience reality."

This is true even on the cosmic level, though scientists likely are less prone to this thinking error. 

I wonder, how would the universe appear if there was no consciousness in it? I wrote about this back in 2007 in Consider a cosmos with no consciousness. 

I try to imagine a cosmos with no consciousness. No human awareness. No animal awareness. No plant awareness. No alien life form awareness. No angelic awareness. No awareness of any kind. None at all.

(Note: I consider “consciousness” and “awareness” to be terms pointing to the same mysterious phenomenon, as this Wikipedia article implies).

Now, this is where the thought experiment should end, because it’s already failed. For I’m aware. And awareness, or consciousness, obviously can’t envision a cosmos with no awareness, for the same reason I can’t picture what the world would be like without me in it.

Nevertheless, I keep forging ahead because the experiment is so intriguing, ignoring the impassible existential abyss that’s stopped me in my tracks.

I consider a universe with no life, no awareness, no sentience. It’s easy to do. I think: “What a marvelously simple thought experiment!” The universe appears to me just as it does now, planets, stars and galaxies filling the fabric of space, yet with nobody conscious of it.

Obvious questions then crash the party of my thought experiment: Who is doing the considering of this cosmos with no consciousness? From what perspective is this entity contemplating the universe?

It dawns on me that this entity, namely me, is equipped with eyes that translate a certain wavelength of electro-magnetic radiation into perceptions of which I’m aware. Photographs of distant galaxies, for example, from which I derive some of the raw imaginative material for my thought experiment.

Yet what if I had the body of a bat and sensed with sonar? Or that of a snake with heat-sensing capabilities? The world would look entirely different.

So my envisioning of the cosmos as illuminated by light is terribly anthropomorphic, a fact I’m reminded of every time I walk the dog and watch her spending enthralled minutes sniffing a bush that my smell-impaired brain considers to be nothing special.

So not surprisingly, Barrett's answer is:

A falling tree itself makes no sound. Its descent merely creates vibrations in the air and the ground. These vibrations become sound only if something special is present to receive and translate them: say, an ear connected to a brain...Even after the brain receives these electrical signals, its task is not complete. The wave must still be interpreted as the sound of a toppling tree. For this, the brain needs the concept of "Tree" and what trees can do, such as fall in a forest.

A tree is indisputably real, though. So is a forest. And so is the cosmos, or universe. While these things appear the way they do to us only because of how human consciousness operates, there's little or no doubt that something would be there whether or not humans or indeed any other form of awareness is.

This is similar to how Barrett views human emotions.

A third and final riddle is, "Are emotions real?" You might think this question is ridiculous, a classic example of academic indulgence. Of course emotions are real. Think about the last time you were thrilled or sad or furious. These were clearly real feelings.

But in fact, this third riddle is like the falling tree and the red apple: a dilemma about what exists in the world versus in the human brain. The riddle forces us to confront our assumptions about the nature of reality and our role in creating it. But here, the answer is a bit more complex, because it depends on what we mean by "real."

Barrett explains that some things fall in a perceiver-independent category, such as subatomic particles. If there were no humans, there would still be subatomic particles. (Such was the case for virtually every moment of the universe's 13.7 billion year existence, until very recently.)

She goes on to say that "Emotions are real, but real in the same manner of the sound of a tree falling, the experience of red, and the distinctions between flowers and weeds. They are all constructed in the mind of a perceiver."

So these are examples of social reality. Human civilization, Barrett says, is literally built with social reality. Money, to offer another example, only has value because we human give it value. Otherwise money is just a piece of paper or electronic digits.

Yet this doesn't make money less important to humans (though it is utterly meaningless to our dog and other animals, or to a person who lacked the concept of "money"). 

Likewise, I see the notion of God as akin to that of money. It has immense value to people who imbibe the concept of "God" with meaning. But for those of us who don't embrace that concept, "God" is just a word that, like "money," only has meaning to those who create that meaning in their own mind. 

Unlike a tree, there's no evidence that God exists outside of the human mind. Thus God has even less significance that a tree falling in a forest with no one present to hear it, since that tree possesses an independent reality while God doesn't.

Ultimate reality doesn't exist, says physicist Carlo Rovelli

When I was a member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an India-based religious organization, for quite a few years I gave frequent talks to the RSSB faithful.

One of my favorite topics was ultimate reality. I loved those two words. Putting ultimate before the familiar reality produced a wonderful feeling of transcendent potential wisdom in me.

Not that I really knew what ultimate reality was. It was an aspiration, a goal to be pursued through daily meditation and the other aspects of the RSSB teachings.

Now, I hardly ever think about ultimate reality. Except when it comes up in a book or magazine. Like a story about physicist Carol Rovelli in the October 15 issue of New Scientist, "Do objects exist?"

...So I ask Rovelli whether we will live to see a full description of reality's core. He takes a dim view of the question.

"I don't think that it makes sense to think there is an ultimate reality," he says. "A forest seen from a distance is just a velvety green, but then you go closer, and you see the trees. They're real. Then you see the trunk is real, and you see the atoms in the trunks are real."

"Reality is the ensemble of all these things: they're all real, it's just about understanding things better and better and better. We should get out of this mindset that ultimate reality is matter or language or God or mind or spirit."

Beautiful.

Takes the pressure off of finding the tip-top branch of reality's tree. You can examine any branch, any twig, any leaf, and if that examination is conducted in the correct way, you're coming closer to knowing reality.

Last year I wrote about Rovelli's book, Helgoland, where he lays out his persuasive thesis that reality isn't comprised of things but of relations. Here's an excerpt from my "Each of us isn't a thing, but a web of connections."

Rovelli writes that the central thesis of Nagarjuna is there is nothing that exists in itself independently from something else. Thus Buddhism fits in nicely with the relational approach to quantum physics.

Buddhism evolved in part as a reaction to Hinduism, which assumes the existence of soul, Atman, that is an aspect of God, Brahman. Buddhism denies that anything is eternal or unchanging, including ourselves, or our self. 

So from the most minute subatomic particle to the grandest expanse of galaxies, with us humans occupying a middle ground, size-wise, relations are what reality is all about, not things. 

We're alive because of our relationships with air, water, food, sunlight, other people, bacteria, cells, neurons, and everything else that makes it possible for us to be born, live, and yes, die.

The good news is, from the relational view of Rovelli's take on quantum physics and Buddhism, we never exist as a separate and distinct entity, so when we die, it is the relations that cease to exist. In a very real sense, each of us has never existed as the "I" we generally take ourselves to be.

The bad news is, there's nothing that can live on after the relations which sustain life are broken. But this is just reality speaking, and I don't see reality as dealing in good news and bad news. It simply is what it is.

This fits with what I read this morning in a chapter in neuroscientist Patrick House's book, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness. The chapter is creatively titled, "The North African Rhino of Charismatic Megaquale."

(Quale, the singular of qualia, means a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person.)

House starts off by talking about how those interested in animal conservation have a bias toward "charismatic megafauna" -- animals that are large, blunt, and beautiful. The blue whale, North African rhinoceros, and so on. Algae, viruses, beetles, and ants, he says, get short shrift.

This is akin to how I used to look upon "ultimate reality." I envisioned a megatruth at the top of the heap of lesser truths, a Truth so massive it made all those little truths appear insignificant, mere trifles. But this is a linear, dualistic, simplistic way of looking upon reality.

House then writes a paragraph where he argues a counter-perspective when it comes to consciousness.

So, too, do many theories about how a brain works focus on what could be called "charismatic megaquale" -- that is, those experiences that feel big and vibrant and can charm us into thinking that there is something it is like to be something: what it is like to be a bat, what it is like to be a North African rhino, what it is like to try to remember how many windows were on your childhood home, what it is like to remember looking through your eyes right now, and what it is like to experience large, generous emotions like fear, attraction, happiness, and sadness, which seem to take over the subjective world in one large brushstroke, coloring all its objects.

But so much more is happening to a brain in the process of acting on itself. Populating consciousness are more species of noncharismatic minor quale, which are often ignored and undetected, than any other kind. What is the point of theories of consciousness if they cannot just as easily explain the minor quale of human emotion as the megaquale?

Yes, agreed. This fits with how I've come to view mindfulness, as described in a recent post. One of my points was: 

The small things in life are just as important as the big things. One of my adages is I am a child of the present moment, who finds delight in small things. 

So I've discarded the notion of ultimate reality from my life's to-do list. Plain reality is plenty good enough for me.

Prior experiences and assumptions determine how we view reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McRaney says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McRaney summarizes this approach, called SURFPAD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's some excerpts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth. A lovely word. I wish more people loved it.

These are tough times for truth. I speak as someone old enough (73) to remember the time when there was a general consensus about what was true. 

Here in the United States, the nightly news was widely watched. If you subscribed to TIME, Life, National Geographic, Saturday Review, and a daily newspaper, you'd be able to keep up on events in the world. 

It was relatively rare for there to be a widespread disagreement about facts. Sure, after John Kennedy was assassinated conspiracy theories about the "real killer" surfaced. But they didn't infect the minds of a large proportion of Americans.

Things are different now. 

With the rise of the internet, and the decline of mainstream media, people are able to fashion their own personalized take on reality. And almost certainly they'll be able to find a likeminded online community, no matter how outlandish the belief.

Moon landings were faked. Earth is flat. Alien abductions are happening. The Second Coming of Jesus is around the corner. Robert Kennedy Jr. is still alive.

The United States always has been a home for unconventional thinkers, rebels with or without a cause. However, nowadays it's possible for anyone to cobble together a view of reality that's far outside the mainstream without doing much thinking.

All they have to do is find the right web site, Facebook page, online discussion group, or whatever, and the craziest idea, totally unhinged from reality, can be found cloaked in pretensions of truth that can draw gullible individuals in like an alcoholic attracted to a liquor bottle.

Intoxicating. Yet decidedly unhealthy.

Tomorrow the January 6 committee is holding a primetime hearing where they'll detail Donald Trump's actions (more accurately, inactions) while the nation's capitol was being attacked by insurrectionists. I've watched every minute of each hearing so far.

They've been a marvelous lesson in how to go about telling the truth. Talk to people in the know. Crosscheck what they say, especially if there are contradictions. Seek tangible evidence. Weave known facts into a reason-based narrative.

Yet...

A disturbingly large percentage of Republicans continue to believe Trump's false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. And Trump hasn't stopped with his lie that those who invaded the Capitol were peaceful protesters, not violent insurrectionists.

Such is the power of untruth.

Truth can be uncomfortable. Truth can hurt. Truth can dismantle our most cherished beliefs. Truth can be difficult to discern. So many people prefer to cling to falsehoods. Rather than modify their understanding of reality to match the facts, they use fake facts to manufacture a made-to-order reality.

We all do this to some extent. Sometimes the cold truth of reality is too difficult to endure without putting a warm blanket of fantasy around ourselves. This can be fine. Fiction is a marvelous form of literature. It also can be an effective way of helping us get through tough times.

So long as we realize what we're doing. Research shows that a placebo can make us feel better even if a doctor tells us, "This is just a sugar pill." 

That's how I've come to view religion, mysticism, and supernatural forms of spirituality. They're sugar pills, almost certainly lacking any truly effective ingredients. But they can make us feel good. And in a world where so many people feel bad, finding a way to feel better is difficult for me to argue against.

I just don't like it when feeling good is equated with truth. Know the difference.

Like I said, sometimes truth can hurt. If you're a truth seeker, you're going to feel pain at times. But it can be a sweet sort of pain, because even when truth hurts, there's satisfaction in knowing that we're in touch with something real.

Dibloggenes explains the universe in a mere 1,070 words

Here's the second comment from Dibloggenes that I've elevated to the profound status of a Church of the Churchless blog post. (I can hear the typing of Dibloggenes as he redoes his resume to include this newfound honor; the first elevated blog post is here.)

I admire any and all attempts to explain the universe, especially when they clock in at a sparse 1,070 words. The Bible, Newton's Principia, and Darwin's Origin of Species are all much longer. And, without the occasional bursts of humor that make Dibloggenes' treatise more sparkly than it would otherwise be.

One reason I like what follows is that it mentions the One so often. If your interest in the One is stimulated by Dibloggenes, clearly your best move is to buy my book, "Return to the One: Plotinus's Guide to God-Realization." I can't guarantee that the One will be pleased with this, but I sure will be.

Enjoy...

And now, as previously threatened: The Universe Explained for Dummies. These are my own conclusions to date, subject to revision at any time. They have been abbreviated to allow the reader less of a commitment to follow along. I have placed these under four topic headings to make it easier to dismiss large chunks of my thinking at one fell swoop.

THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM
1) In a universe that requires material (or attenuated material) bodies to manifest the limitless creative urge of the One, by necessity this involves conflict, i.e., the introduction of the no longer unitary awareness. This is a concomitant of the polarities we see everywhere, and that have been philosophized about for 3000 years, give or take.

2) We are steeped in the appearance of “individuation.” This is prior to individuality, which is a showing forth of those tendencies we associate with personality. Individuation is simply the atomizing of everyone and everything into constituent parts. Our senses report at a level in normal consciousness that what we perceive is real, but actually it is an abstraction. If we could see at the energetic level ( more than a few claim this ability) we would understand foreground and background, player and play are really all just one.

3) Human beings have truly made God in man’s own image. Believers are so wedded to the idea of a personal God that they are horrified at the suggestion this may not be true. Test it yourself: you’ll find folks are more gracious to quiet atheism than they are to a quiet belief in an impersonal deity. And what is that, but no more than the One, the unitary consciousness, that which precedes any individuation at any level, conceivable or not.

FROM THAT FLOWS
A personal God is a god...

1) Who is free to pick winners and losers; 2) to have chosen people and nations as His main squeeze; 3) to appeal to as if He were deaf and dumb to our needs; 4) who will remain forever an enigma to us as the problem of the origin of evil is one that monotheism never has been able to satisfactorily scrape from the bottom of its shoe.

Instead, think Universal/Unchangeable/Immutable Law. This Law subsumes all lesser laws, known and unknown, on all levels of manifested existence. Magic is the conscious or unconscious understanding and application of the Law, either in white (selfless) or black (selfish) flavors. The vast majority of humankind practice gray magic throughout their life, alternating between white and black as their lower faculties buffet them.

The One IS the Law; the One is A collective dynamic, for lack of a better term, that is inexorable in its workings. All justice, all mercy, all vengeance, all indifference are contained within it in exquisite balance. Appealing to It is pointless, as it already has done the math and set in motion the sequence of events most conducive to the ends of the One. When miracles happen after prayers are made, it is because the faithful harnessed the Law, albeit without their knowing it.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF EARTH LIFE?
Assuming there IS a purpose, I propose it is the conscious re-integration of the faux individual personality into a unfettered experience of unity with the One, an oceanic immersion that overwhelms our sense of isolated individuality. Sound familiar? Sure it does; it’s been preached by esoteric schools and natural mystics for thousands of years. It also dovetails nicely with the idea if we are looking for the anchor that keeps us in the world’s harbor, look to individuation. Examine it, turn it to and fro and really understand what it is...and what it is not.

Our individuality, from life to life, seems to be as substantial as leaves, twigs and grass that are swirled together in a stream by the various eddies and vortexes. This flotsam comes together due to obeying certain laws of fluid dynamics, but there is no substantial reality to this observed instance. It may drift downstream, or break up before our eyes.

Was it real? Yes. What was the purpose? None we may discern. What happened to the wreckage when it dissolved? Went their separate ways, perhaps to reunite, perhaps never to be in contact again. Why would we care if “we” don’t continue since the vast majority of humanity have no recollection of anything more than early childhood. The cases of seeming recall of a previous life is more interesting as it brings into focus the question, “What is doing the remembering here?”

TORA! TORA! TORA! DERA! DERA! DERA!
How do the above conclusions pertain to the value of participating in Sant Mat, and RSS Beas flavor? I believe the Audible Lifestream is an authentic account of how humans may experience a direct connection with the Law, that foundation and organizing principle of all creation.

For anyone who cares to spend the time assaying the world’s esoteric literature and reports of mystics, it appears to me to be a foregone conclusion that concept is a more or less accurate representation of a phenomenon foreign to all but a relative few.

However, for those few, I do not doubt the authenticity of that experience. In fact, how we choose to engage with this Word—when once we are made aware of it—is the crux of the question of participation in the most important activity we will ever undertake in this life.

Do we need a guru to connect us to it? Some gurus say yes, some gurus say no. What is the appropriate response if we believe our Contact may not be of the caliber we assumed was required? The truth is, each one of us by necessity must own our beliefs. Who calls us, who is worthy, what sect or branch do we trust, why am I feeling shaky on this path?

We can’t escape the need to erect a superstructure of beliefs, whether they originate within ourselves, are influenced by the thinking of others, or blindly follow someone who claims insights that we don’t possess. Those who claim no religious beliefs have expressed their own beliefs. This is an unavoidable and inevitable outcome. The question is, what will be our response to it?

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Space may be created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity

If you're at a party, talking to someone, and the conversation is lagging, consider saying the title of this blog post: Space may be created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity. 

One of two things could happen, the first being most likely. Either the person will look at you like you're crazy and make an excuse to leave your company, or they'll reply, "That's so interesting. Tell me more."

Having read physicist Carlo Rovelli's book, "Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity," I could talk some more about quantum gravity, but only a little bit. It's an esoteric subject, not to mention it isn't scientifically proven, just conjectured for some good reasons.

One reason is that something seems to be more fundamental than the two pillars of modern physics, relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Rovelli writes:

A university student attending lectures on general relativity in the morning, and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon, might be forgiven for concluding that his professors are fools, or they haven't talked to each other for at least a century.

In the morning, the world is a curved spacetime where everything is continuous; in the afternoon, the world is a flat one where discrete quanta of energy leap and interact. 

The paradox resides in the fact that both theories work remarkably well. With every experiment and every test, nature continues to say "you are right" to general relativity, and continues to say "you are right" to quantum mechanics as well, despite the seemingly opposite assumptions on which the two theories are founded.

It is clear that something still eludes us. 

That something, in this way-cool chart Rovelli shares in a What Is The World Made Of? section, is covariant quantum fields -- the one ingredient he and other fans of quantum gravity believe constitutes reality.


In his book, Rovelli fills out this chart line by line, starting with Newton and ending with quantum gravity. Along the way, he discusses how science keeps refining that core question, what is the world made of?

The Big Idea of quantum gravity is that, as shown in the chart, unlike other quantum fields like electromagnetism that exist in spacetime, the covariant quantum field of quantum gravity is spacetime. Here Rovelli explains what "covariant" means.

Fields that live on themselves without the need of a spacetime to serve as a substratum, as a support, and which are capable by themselves of generating spacetime are called "covariant quantum fields."

The substance of which the world is made has been radically simplified in recent years. The world, particles, light, energy, space, and time -- all of this is nothing but the manifestation of a single type of entity: covariant quantum fields.

Don't worry about the mention of "nodes of the graph" in the passages below. Basically it just means a web of relations.

The crucial difference between photons, the quanta of the electromagnetic field, and the nodes of the graph, the "quanta of gravity," is that photons exist in space, whereas the quanta of gravity constitute space itself.

Photons are characterized by "where they are." Quanta of space have no place to be in, because they are themselves that place. 

...Physical space is the fabric resulting from the ceaseless swarming of this web of relations. The lines themselves are nowhere -- they are not in a place but rather create places through their interactions. Space is created by the interaction of individual quanta of gravity.

Another cool thing about quantum gravity is that it does away with infinity. Or at least, certain types of infinity.

When we take quantum gravity into account, the infinite compression of the universe into a single infinitely small point, predicted by general relativity at the Big Bang, disappears. Quantum gravity is the discovery that no infinitely small point exists.

There is a lower limit to divisibility of space. The universe cannot be smaller than the Planck scale, because nothing exists that is smaller than the Planck scale.

"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.

I aspire to a radical embrace of reality

There's quite a bit to unpack in the title of this blog post, but I'll try to keep it fairly simple. 

"Aspire" obviously means that a radical embrace of reality is something that I'd like to be able to do, but often this is more of a hope than an actuality for me.

"Radical" refers to the fact that I, along with just about everybody else in the world, chooses to not embrace reality much of the time. Too disturbing. Too painful. Too whatever. So we cling to a form of unreality instead. If we always turned toward reality, that would be really radical, being so unusual.

"Embrace" is another word for acceptance. I prefer embrace, because it conjures up an image of actively reaching out to reality, rather than grudgingly accepting it.

"Reality" is, not surprisingly, what's real. Of course, a lie also is real, as is a fantasy, or dream, or hope, or imagination. But those things, being subjective, aren't real in the sense that a mountain is, or a cancer diagnosis, or a missile striking an apartment building. 

(The Ukraine war is on my mind.)

I was planning to illustrate this saying, "I aspire to a radical embrace of reality," by sharing some anecdotes from my life that I've written about in other blog posts.

However, some Googling of my blogs via the search box in the right sidebar led me to a 2oo5 Church of the Churchless post, Why bad tsunamis happen to good people. I was both pleased and, in a way, dismayed, by the fact that over seventeen years ago, I was aspiring to the same embrace of reality.

I liked what I said then. Not being able to improve much on it now, I'll share a portion of the 2005 post that most closely relates to the theme of embracing reality.

A believer in karma will consider that those affected by the tsunami are reaping the effects of actions committed in previous incarnations. So even though the ocean may seem to have meted out life and death arbitrarily, on a deeper level destiny was in control of who lived and who died, who needed rescuing and who became a rescuer.

Still, I don’t know if karma is true. In the past my belief in karma has helped me get through some difficult times, such as a car accident on the Santiam Pass where I walked away unscratched and a woman in the other car was killed. The accident wasn’t my fault, but I was one of the drivers. Why her and not me? Further, the accident wouldn’t have happened at all but for some amazingly precise timing and positioning of the two vehicles. Was this accident truly accidental, or were the five of us involved in it brought together by some unseen hand of providence?

I have no idea. I used to think that I did. But now I’m willing to admit my ignorance about the answer to the hidden “why?” that may or may not underly the obvious “why?” (ice on the road’s shoulder; rear-wheel drive; loss of traction by one tire that led to my car lunging into the other lane).

I understand the desire of religious believers to make things that happen in their lives—especially the dramatically “good” and “bad” things—part of a greater spiritual design. I’ve done this myself, a lot. I’ve found comfort in believing either that a benevolent higher power was guiding the course of my life, or (less comfortably) that whatever I’m getting I deserve, because I’ve penned destiny’s invitation in my own hand.

More and more, though, I’m inclined to just take events at their face value. The tsunami occurred because of an earthquake. People died because they lived near the ocean. Why make life more complicated or mysterious than it already is? At the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfeld: what we know we know, and what we don’t know we don’t know; if we think we know what we don’t know, we know less than we would if we simply don’t know.

(Actually, Socrates expressed ideas like that way before Rumsfeld, and I prefer to associate my not-knowing with a true philosopher rather than a Defense Department poseur.)

If we want comfort, I believe there is much comfort in simply accepting reality as it is. Not as we imagine it to be, or as we wish it would be, but just as it is. If what happens comes from God—great. We have accepted God’s will. If what happens comes from some other source, such as the mechanical workings of nature or man’s free will, then this also is great. We have accepted what is, regardless of how it came to be.

Whether we live just this life or many lives, life is too precious to be denied. To deny any part of life that is real is to rob ourselves of something that will never come our way again. This includes the good as well as the bad.

Eyes wide open is how I aspire to live. Seeing what is real, not seeing what isn’t. Pretty simple to say. Very hard to do.

To expand on that last thought, saying or thinking "I wish this wasn't happening to me" (or to someone else) is a statement in line with reality if that is how you really feel. But that wish presupposes a clear-eyed view of what is actually happening.

Today I was talking with a friend about how I follow Ukraine war news closely. She said, "I can't do that, because it is so disturbing."

I understand her reluctance, and I don't spend as much time reading about the atrocities being committed by Russian forces as I do reading positive stories about the bravery and skill of the Ukrainian military. 

But I'm a news junkie in part because I consider it my duty to stay informed about what is happening in the world, even when the news is dismal, bleak, depressing. Job #1 is to know what's going on. Job #2 is to handle that knowledge as productively as possible. 

Same applies to the news of our own life.

Calm acceptance of what is -- my newest adage

I enjoy coming up with new pieces of advice that I can tell myself. They become temporary mantras, something I can repeat in my mind now and then to keep myself as centered as possible in an unpredictable world.

Calm acceptance of what is. This is my newest adage. 

I've always been impressed by people who can stay calm in stressful circumstances. Soldiers fighting in war. Emergency room doctors and nurses. Parents of a two year old having a temper tantrum. So many other examples of humans handling difficult situations with poise and competence.

That requires a certain detachment from a natural impulse of fear, anxiety, freaking out. "Calm" doesn't mean Buddha-like serenity. The way I see it, calm is founded on an ability to stand back a bit from whatever storm is raging around us, sort of like a lighthouse on a rock in the middle of the ocean.

The massive waves break upon the rock, but the lighthouse keeps on shining a light all around itself, illuminating what is there. That's the "what is" part of my adage.

It doesn't do any good to be calm if we're not in touch with reality.

For example, even though the United States intelligence services were warning that Russia was poised to invade Ukraine, in the period before the invasion President Zelensky and other top officials in his country were discounting the possibility of an invasion.

They didn't prepare the Ukrainian people for this. They didn't move military assets in preparation for war. The calm being preached by Zelensky was a false calm that wasn't based on the what is known to American intelligence, but on an attitude of I hope this turns out to be based on wishful thinking.

Another example is the raid of Seal Team Six into Pakistan that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden. This mission succeeded because the highly trained special forces operatives kept their calm in the face of serious problems, such as one of their helicopters being disabled, and were completely in touch with the reality of what they faced in bin Laden's compound. 

Regarding "acceptance," I don't see this as being content with a bad situation.

That's the way I used to view the word, perhaps because one of the stages of coming to grips with grief, or one's impending death, is acceptance -- which connotes a sort of grudging realization that nothing can be done about what either has happened, or will happen.

Instead, acceptance is better thought of as an embracing of reality. It doesn't mean we don't want to change reality, to alter what is into what could be. But before we can make things better, we need to understand how things are now -- both within and without us.

Yesterday our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, had a nice piece by Leah Burkhart, a Salem Health educator. Here's part of what she said in "When it comes to stress, begin with acceptance." 

Fun Fact: April is Stress Awareness month (as if any of us needed help being aware of our stress).

Search any wellness book, online video or social media outlet and you’ll see all sorts of techniques for combatting stress, reducing stress, or even numbing it. You’ve seen the headlines: “Feeling stressed? We have the answer!” All you have to do is drink more of this, eat more of that, practice more of this, or give more of that. Easy peasy. Right?

We are bombarded with images of smiling faces — people who have found “the way” and are now liberated from the shackles of anxiety, fear and frustration. They are either peaceful and serene or blissed out, giggling with joy.

Naturally, then, we are left wondering why we aren’t stress-free, too. What are we doing wrong?

The answer is … nothing. You are doing absolutely nothing wrong. Stress, loneliness, frustration, sadness — these things are hardwired into the human body. Stress doesn’t have to be the enemy. At the very least, it can be considered a messenger. It can even be a powerful ally.

The key to making friends with stress is to first incorporate the practice of acceptance.

What is acceptance?

To be clear, acceptance does not mean saying, “Oh, well. There is nothing to be done. I guess I’ll just be miserable.”

Acceptance is being able to simply look at how something is without immediately seeking to change it.

In your mind, acceptance sounds like:

“Huh, I’m feeling really lonely right now.”

“I am feeling overwhelmed. There is a lot to do, and I don’t think I can get it all done as quickly as I would like. No wonder I am so tense.”

“I am really tired right now.”

“Yikes! I’m angry right now. I mean really, REALLY angry. I’m enraged.”

Why on earth might this be helpful? Because acknowledging where we are is the first step to understanding what needs to come next. Trying to reduce stress without first accepting it is like trying to read a map in a theme park without having a “you are here” dot. Acceptance represents the place to start.

Once you see, clearly, that you are overwhelmed or tired, it’s easier to ask questions like, “Okay, I’m exhausted. What is the next right thing I can do (or not do) now?” The answer might be to recruit support from people around you, get up and take a walk or go home early. But the answer is not the important piece. The important piece was being clearheaded enough to ask the question.

What can help you reach acceptance and identify what needs to come next? Often the best answer is to learn the art of slowing down and engaging in a moment of mindfulness. That might look like:

Practicing a few moments of slow, deep breathing.
Taking a moment to pull up a guided meditation practice.
Going outside and sitting still for a few moments and simply observing your surroundings.

In other words, the best way to learn acceptance is to practice slowing down.

Enjoying religious stories is fine. Just realize they're fiction.

As I've noted before on this blog, I'm a big believer in good stories. I enjoy reading fiction. I enjoy watching fiction. 

It never fails to amaze me that I can be sitting in our bathtub every evening, nestled in hot water with a vaporizer full of quality Oregon marijuana, holding an escapist thriller book (I love Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp novels; he's a CIA operative), getting excited about whether Rapp is going to succeed in his latest exploit -- while I know full well that Mitch Rapp is a creation of Flynn's imagination, or in the case of the Mitch Rapp book I'm reading now, the imagination of the author, Kyle Mills, who took over writing the series after Flynn died.

It seems clear that one reason religions are so successful in drawing people into their fold is that they're skilled at telling compelling stories. About the religion's founder, such as Jesus. About the religion's divinity, such as God. About what the divinity has done, such as creating the universe.

Those stories wouldn't be nearly so captivating if the human mind wasn't capable of what I effortlessly accomplish each night in a bathtub: look upon fiction as being real, even as we understand that it is made up.

OK, in the case of religions, the stories are usually officially considered to be non-fiction, being based in reality. But I'm confident that many, if not most, religious people recognize that the stories told in their church, temple, mosque, gurdwara, or wherever, probably aren't real. 

Doesn't matter.

A good story grabs us and inserts our mind into a made-up reality that bears a lot of resemblance to actual reality. We get excited. We get sad. We can't wait to find out what is going to happen. We worry about the fate of characters we like. We rejoice in the downfall of characters we don't like.

It'd be interesting to know if highly religious people are more prone to embrace fictional stories than less religious people. This strikes me as a distinct possibility.

Here's an observation based on a sample of two: my wife, Laurel, and myself. Laurel is even more avidly atheist than I am. She's also less into reading fiction and watching certain types of fictional TV shows than I am.

Currently we're making our way through the streaming series, Yellowstone. We've just begun Season 3 of what I believe are four seasons.

Laurel likes what she watches to make sense. Not complete sense, but fairly close to what typical people would do in reality. Me, my attitude is that if I want to see reality, I just have to look around at the world. 

When I watch a fictional TV show, I want to be drawn into a different sort of world than the one I'm familiar with. I want the writers and actors to captivate me with a story that's so intriguing, I forget that the story is made-up.

So my wife and I have some gentle disagreements about Yellowstone.

She'll point out why it is so unlikely that this or that would have happened the way it did. Even though I agree with her, I'll reply that when I'm watching this show, I want to relax and let what the writers and actors have created wash over me with minimal commentary or criticism from my mind.

Of course, I know that what I'm watching is fiction. Like I said, the human mind, naturally including my mind, has an amazing ability to simultaneously feel like something fictional is real, while knowing that it isn't real.

Preserve that feeling when you're exposed to religious stories. It's fine to enjoy them. Just don't forget that the story almost certainly isn't true. That way you can find enjoyment in fiction while realizing it's unreality.

We live in a world of imperfect realism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes and no.

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

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

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

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

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

Chalmers ends his chapter this way.

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

Eden is a kind of hypothetical ideal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They did. Chalmers says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or even, almost certainly is true. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think these claims are wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does spacetime emerge from a more fundamental reality?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's how the story starts out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best spiritual practice could be...nothing

Here's some thoughts about the value of basing your spiritual practice on... drumroll please... absolutely nothing. But I'll introduce this topic by sharing an anecdote.

Yesterday I took our dog for a walk around the community lake near our rural property. A house is for sale that overlooks the lake. A woman and two children were walking down from the house toward the lake, seemingly because the family was looking into buying the house.

A young boy came up to the fence that our dog and me were on the other side of. He pointed and said, "nice lake." Then he crawled through the fence with no problem.

His mother, I assume it was, came over to him. "Look," she said, "there's some barbed wire on this fence. You could have gotten caught on it. There's a gate over there. I'll show you the proper way to get through the fence." 

The gate, with a kayak peeking from the side

I said, looking at the boy, "Proper? That's no fun." As dog and I continued on our walk, I thought about my own boyhood days growing up in a rural area in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. 

Barbed wire was used in all the fences on the land where my friends and I played and cattle roamed. Rarely were there gates. Early on I learned various tricks to get through a barbed wire fence.

If the wire was tight, stand on the strands next to a post and hop over the fence. If the wire was loose, put your foot on the bottom strand and crawl through the fence. Or have a friend pull up on a strand while you step on the bottom strand while you crawl through.

Telling the boy that only a gate is the proper way to cross a barbed wire fence not only isn't true, it prevents the boy from learning other ways. The mother could have said, "Let's think of some ways to get through the fence safely without using a gate."

I was right when I said Proper is no fun. Often we have to act properly to fulfill a societal expectation. But I've found that improper behavior tends to be more enjoyable, because it flows from our natural inclination, not someone else's view of how life should be lived.

Anyway, back to the best spiritual practice being nothing. I can relate this to what I wrote above with just a little cramming of the fence/gate metaphor into the subject at hand. 

Religions are fond of gates. They like to control who passes through their gate that supposedly leads to God, heaven, enlightenment, or some other elevated state. So there are requirements to approach the gate.

For example, the Eastern religion I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, required initiates to be vegetarian, meditate 2 1/2 hours a day, not use alcohol or recreational drugs, abstain from having sex outside of marriage, and follow a vaguely stated pure and moral life.

Members of other religions follow other sorts of rules. The underlying rationale is that the spiritual seeker is different from what is sought. So the gap between seeker and sought has to be bridged by a gate that leads between what a person is now and what they hope to be.

Thus almost all religions have a dualistic philosophy. Humans are on one side of a cosmic fence -- the worldly, physical, limited, time-bound side where suffering is commonplace. Religions promise a way to get through that fence into a very different supernatural, spiritual, expansive, eternal side of the cosmos.

But what if that side doesn't exist? After all, there's no proof that it does. Then we're left with two basic approaches to spirituality, one that isn't based in reality, and one that is.

(1) There's much to do and become (non-reality based)
(2) There's nothing to do and become (reality based)

Yet here's why (2) still exists in the form of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Advaita, and similar non-dual approaches to spirituality. Religions who preach (1) are so ubiquitous, and have been so for thousands of years, currently billions of people are lined up in front of gates that don't lead anywhere.

So they need to be told, "Hey, guys, wanted to point out that there's no need for those gates that you wrongly believe lead to divinity. Actually, you can just walk right around them, since there's no fence either."

Meaning, reality isn't divided into a natural world and supernatural world. There's just one world, and it isn't supernatural. It's right here, right now.

Thus nothing needs to be done to be "spiritual," viewed as being in touch with how you and the world really is, other than giving up the erroneous belief that you're separate from reality.

This is akin to someone being afflicted by a psychosis of sorts where they imagine being judged by an outside power, told by that power that they lack something without which they can't live a meaningful life, and instructed how to search for it under the guidance of people in tune with that power. 

What that person needs is the ability to recognize that what they imagine to be true, actually is false. They don't need to do anything. They need to stop believing in a fantasy.

Sam Harris likes to say in the guided meditations on his Waking Up app, "Rest in the condition in which everything is appearing." That condition is awareness, or if you like, consciousness. Without awareness/consciousness, there is no reality capable of being known.

So in that non-dual sense, the observer isn't separate from what's observed; the thinker isn't separate from what is thought; the hearer isn't separate from what is being heard. Alan Watts speaks of this when  he says, "We don't come into the world; we come out of the world."

In other words, we aren't separate from the world.

I'm reading Stephen Bodian's book, "Wake Up Now: A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening." There's many places in the parts of the book I've read so far that echo the notion that the best spiritual practice is nothing.

Here's an example:

From a direct intuition of the imminent availability of the truth of your being, you've been lured into the spiritual marketplace, where well-intentioned vendors hawk their wares, promising enlightenment somewhere in the distant future as the result of years of effort if you're willing to buy their product, take their course, join their community, and invest thousands of hours of your time.

The innocent initial impulse to orient, listen, and move toward truth the way a child naturally returns to its mother or a bird to its nesting ground has been co-opted by an established tradition and turned into a circuitous path to spiritual realization. Welcome to the progressive approach!

Progressive paths are extraordinarily appealing because they've been so carefully elaborated, often over many centuries. Bearing the imprimatur of an established tradition, they suggest that if you just follow the instructions wholeheartedly, the results will take care of themselves. 

If you listen to enough teachings, spend enough hours in meditation, attend enough retreats, cultivate enough of the right attitudes and qualities, you'll one day discover the truth of who you really are. As inspiration, the progressive scriptures are filled with exhortatory tales of masters who began as seekers just like you and me and eventually achieved enlightenment through prolonged and concerted effort.

...Eventually, after giving up the effort and the formal practice of meditation, I met a teacher who told me, "The seeker is the sought, the looker is what he or she is looking for." My mind couldn't wrap itself around these words, but one day soon after, in a moment out of time, the seeker and the sought collapsed into one another, and I knew who I was once and for all.

The one who had been looking so hard for true nature was the very true nature I had been looking for. Truth had been playing hide and seek with itself. As long as I continued focusing so much on searching, I couldn't possibly stumble backward into the silent presence that was the source of all searching.

...In fact, the prolonged practice of a particular technique may have the opposite effect, deadening and habituating the mind, rather than making it more open and accessible to truth. If you want to know how a progressive path might affect you, spend some time at one of the tradition's residential meditation centers or ashrams.

Do the longtime practitioners appear happier, freer, more peaceful, more enlightened? Or do they seem rigid in their adherence to structures and rules, lacking in spontaneity, proud of their spiritual progress or stature, addicted to control?

Every center, tradition, and practitioner is different, of course, but many of the ashrams and monasteries I've visited lack the joy and aliveness one would expect to find there; instead, they exude a quality of emotional repression and subservience to form.

Which is why I started off this post by saying, Proper is no fun.

 

Respect for facts is a great virtue

I'm a lover of facts. That's why I'm a hater of religion.

Ah, but don't religions seek the truth? Not really. They claim to, but only in the sense that QAnon followers believe they're truth-seekers. 

In each case, religion and QAnon, truth is viewed much more as a belief, as something they hope is the case, rather than as an aspect of objective reality.

So facts are different from truth. There's lots of ways people define those two terms, as I learned by doing some Googling. 

This article describes the difference quite clearly.

A Fact and a Truth walk into a bar and ask for a drink.

The bartender says to the Fact, “What can I get you?” clearly ignoring the Truth.

The Truth complains to the Manager that the bartender didn’t offer Truth a drink. The Manager responds, “the Bartender didn’t see you because he doesn’t believe in you”.

I have been pondering the difference for quite some time. How can multiple people look at the same situation but have vastly differing opinions on what is fact? What I have learned so far is that the difference between a fact and a truth is that a fact cannot be disputed – it is real, quantified, qualified, and measured as fact – it’s real.

A truth is not the same – it is based on belief and/or an interpretation of a fact, “You believe that something is true”.

It may NOT be true, but you believe it to be true. It could be because of where you were brought up, how your parents raised you, or the external influences during critical time periods during your life. Your belief system is borne out of those influences. Is this the reason why positions vary so wildly as it relates to the pandemic or even global warming?

Facts should be the foundation of truth. But often they're not.

This is what allows a Christian to say, "I speak the truth when I say Jesus is the Son of God," or a devotee of a guru to say, "The plain truth is that my guru is God in human form."

Those aren't facts. They're beliefs. 

I stopped being religious when I realized that facts were more important to me than beliefs. For thirty-five years I diligently sought facts to support my beliefs. Not finding those facts, I chose to give up my belief.

The most recent issue of TIME magazine features a cover story of TIME's Person of the Year, Elon Musk. Following that story is a profile of the Heroes of the Year -- four people who were instrumental in the development of COVID-19 vaccines.

Here's an excerpt that mentions facts. I've boldfaced the part about fealty to facts.

Progress flows from the gradual accretion of knowledge. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, it started with the initially painstaking process of decoding the genomes of all living things; then folded in the development of sequencing machines that reduced that genetic reading time to hours; and finally weaved in the insights -- "Put it in a fat bubble!" -- that seemed to come in brilliant flashes but were actually the result of wisdom developed over decades working on how to manipulate a finicky genetic material called mRNA.

What drives it all might, in less divisive times, seem too obvious to mention: fealty to facts. It's the basis of the scientific method and the structure of our world. Without trust in objective reality, the lights don't turn on, the computer doesn't boot up, the streets stay empty.

...The miracle workers behind the COVID-19 vaccines are the TIME Heroes of the Year not only because they gave the world a defense against a pathogen, but also because the manner of that astonishing achievement guards more than our health: they channeled their ambitions to the common good, talked to one another, and trusted in facts.

What alternative do we have, really? Assuming we care about objective reality, and not just what subjectively feels good. 

Facts are what bind us together. They are the common denominator of human experience. Opinions are important also, of course. But opinions, like beliefs, are personal and subjective. In contrast, facts are a treasure that everybody can partake of.

There are many virtues. Respect for facts is one of them. These days, more than ever, we need people who do their best to honor facts. 

This doesn't mean never being wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Science progresses because recognizing when you're wrong is a big part of the scientific method. This allows false facts to be discarded and genuine facts to be embraced. 

So it's a virtue to have a shaky belief punctured by solid facts. That can be uncomfortable, because our beliefs are comforting. But if they're not factual, it's better to give them up.

Christmas is a good time to debunk all religious belief

Naturally Christianity comes to mind in December, since Christmas includes the word "Christ." But I view this time of year as an opportunity to remind myself, and others through this blog, of the absurdity of all religious belief. 

Of course, it is only us atheists who look upon all religions as absurd. Since most people are religious, they view their faith as making good sense. It's those other religions that are absurd.

To offer a few examples:

-- Christians have no problem believing that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, and came back from the dead. But the notion that an angel dictated the Koran to Mohammed -- that's absurd!

-- The India-based faith I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, teaches that at the time of initiation the guru places a copy of himself, the "radiant form," in the consciousness of every disciple. But the idea that peyote or mescaline can lead to spiritual visions -- that's absurd!

Many other instances of religious hypocrisy exist, of course. So many, they're uncountable.

Those who hold any form of religious or supernatural belief consider that they are on the straight road to cosmic truth, while those other believers are on a twisting path of illusion. In 2010 I wrote about this in Believers need to take the "Outsider Test for Faith." 

Why and how do religious believers choose to accept a particular faith out of the many choices available to them? (4200 is one estimate)

Great question. Here's an ever better one: What makes someone confident that the religion they've chosen is true, while all the other religions are false?

John W. Loftus examines these issues in a book he edited, "The Christian Delusion." The first chapter I read was by Loftus, "The Outsider Test for Faith Revisited." He used to be a minister, until his deconversion.

I loved the chapter.

It lays out problems with religious belief that I've been aware of for a long time, but had never considered so clearly and cogently. The first version of Loftus' Outsider Test for Faith (OTF) can be read here. What I perused this morning includes some responses to objections true believers raised to OTF version 1.0.

...It's been observed that every religious believer rejects countless gods and/or other metaphysical entities, accepting just one: what he or she believes in. An atheist just goes one small step further: rejecting that one as well.

So Loftus makes the entirely reasonable argument that people should test their chosen faith in the same way they test other (rejected) religious, spiritual, mystical, or metaphysical belief systems.

...People will reject unsubstantiated claims in holy books... except the book they believe in. People will reject miracle stories... except miracles related by their own faith. People will reject the divinity of living prophets or messengers of God... except the person they accept as a genuine spiritual teacher.

Every religious believer, aside from the few who are genuinely open-minded, considers that he or she has found the One True Faith among the 4,199 or so false faiths. Yet how is this possible, logically or realistically?

It's like Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon, where all the children are above average.

Laurel, my wife, and I got married in 1990. Back then Laurel believed in a New Age channeler who supposedly could communicate with spiritual beings when he went into a trance state. Laurel got tape recordings of those sessions on a monthly basis. 

I thought this channeler guy was ridiculous.

Meanwhile, I was an avid devotee of a guru who was considered to be God in human form, which Laurel found equally ridiculous. We had lengthy conversations where Laurel would try to convince me that her belief was valid, while I did the same about my belief.

Eventually the realization hit us that we were both right: meaning, each of our beliefs had no basis in reality. Those beliefs had given us comfort, but we gave them up in favor of truth -- which we consider means demonstrable evidence founded on facts, not a feeling that something is true.

In 2017 I wrote Jesus and Mohammed talk about truth vs. facts. That post included a right-on cartoon.

Reason rules with God's will, karma, and laws of nature

Having written about reason and rationality recently, here's some thoughts that came to mind (weird phrase, since where else would thoughts appear?) as I was musing about how people believe in God's will and karma as other-worldly explanations for why things happen as they do.

It struck me that God's will and karma are appealing notions for many because they provide reasons for happenings that often aren't pleasant. Or are surprising.

For example, I know someone who got stage 4 lung cancer even though she never smoked. Thankfully, she's doing quite well, even after several years have passed since the diagnosis. She isn't at all religious. But if she was, probably the idea that her cancer is in accord with God's will would comfort her.

"Will" implies a reason behind it.

Otherwise we'd speak of "God's caprice" or "God's random choice." When someone wills that something happen, even if that someone is a supernatural being, seemingly there's a purpose that will is intended to achieve -- even if that purpose is unknown to us.

Likewise, karma definitely entails reason. Typically karma is viewed as encompassing more than one lifetime, though the word also can be limited to causes and effects occurring within a single life. Good karma is the result of positive actions; bad karma is the result of negative actions. 

You know, the whole as you sow, so shall you reap thing. 

Thus karma is nothing but reasons. Those reasons for why something is happening to us may be lost in deep time, if we believe in rebirth/reincarnation, but they exist nonetheless. At least, that's the way karma is conceptualized. 

( I wrote a book about karma, "Life is Fair," so I'm familiar with the term.)

Obviously there's another way to look upon the reason something is happening: as being in accord with the laws of nature. The benefit of this perspective is that it is scientific, not religious; factual, not fantasized; coherent, not confusing.

As with God's will and karma, often it is very difficult, if not impossible, to discern the precise reasons that produce a happening. In part this is because chaos theory, though deterministic, says that initial conditions can play a big role in an event.

Often this is called the "butterfly effect." A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can theoretically create an atmospheric instability that, over time, is magnified into a hurricane striking the United States.

Even so, the beauty of embracing laws of nature as the reason things happen as they do is that no outside concepts are required. No need to believe in the unseen will of an unseen God. No need to believe in the unseen force of karma extending across multiple unseen lifetimes.

We know about the laws of nature through science and everyday life. They are the manifestation of nature's reason. Sometimes they even can be described in mathematical terms. 

So if you're looking for a way to understand why life here on Earth is as it is, there's no need to look beyond three simple words: laws of nature.

Why people with religious delusions do fine in everyday life

I've finished Steven Pinker's book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. I enjoyed it, though some chapters were a bit tedious.

The final chapters, though, held my interest. Here's what I liked most in the next to last chapter, "What's Wrong With People?" Meaning, why do so many people believe such crazy irrational stuff?

It starts off with a great George Carlin quote.

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.

Pinker then describes some reasons that prevent people from reasoning correctly. The first is motivated reasoning. 

The obvious reason that people avoid getting on a train of reasoning is that they don't like where it takes them... The mustering of rhetorical resources to drive an argument toward a favored conclusion is called motivated reasoning.

The motive may be to end at a congenial conclusion, but it may also be to flaunt the arguer's wisdom, knowledge, or virtue. We all know the barroom blowhard, the debating champ, the legal eagle, the mansplainer, the competitive distance urinator, the intellectual pugilist who would rather be right than get it right. 

Another is myside bias.

Politically motivated numeracy and other forms of biased evaluation show that people reason their way into or out of a conclusion even when it offers them no personal advantage.

It's enough that the conclusion enhances the correctness or nobility of their political, religious, ethnic, or cultural tribe. It's called, obviously enough, the myside bias, and it commandeers every kind of reasoning, even logic.

...The myside bias is not an across-the-board personality trait, but presses on whatever trigger or hot button is connected to the reasoner's identity.

This gives us a big clue about why people with religious delusions -- which in my view includes everybody who is religious, as I was for 35 years -- function just fine in everyday life. 

Defects like motivated reasoning and the myside bias only come into play when someone has to provide reasons for why they believe something that means a lot to them, yet isn't grounded in reality.

Your crazy Uncle Joe, who embraces every wacko conspiracy theory he sees on Fox News or hears from Donald Trump, is a great mechanic who can diagnose car problems with ease. His ability to reason is fine in that area, yet it sucks when he's asked to defend a bizarre notion like Pizzagate.

Pinker says that what you mean by "believe" is key to understanding how this can be.

Mercier notes that holders of weird beliefs often don't have the courage of their convictions. Though millions of people endorsed the rumor that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington (the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, a predecessor of QAnon), virtually none took steps commensurate with such an atrocity such as calling the police. 

...At least Edgar Welch, the man who burst into the pizzeria with his gun blazing in a heroic effort to rescue the children, took his beliefs seriously. The millions of others must have believed the rumor in a very different sense of "believe."

That sense points to mythology, the domain of religion, conspiracy theories, and other areas of life that aren't meant to be taken as literally true -- though believers often claim they are. This is why Christians and other believers in a heavenly realm that's much better than our world don't kill themselves to enter it right away.

They believe in this as mythology, not as reality. Pinker explains:

People divide their worlds into two zones. One consists of the physical objects around them, the other people they deal with face to face, the memory of their interactions, and the rules and norms that regulate their lives.

People have mostly accurate beliefs about this zone, and they reason rationally within it. Within this zone, they believe there's a real world and that beliefs about it are true or false. They have no choice: that's the only way to keep gas in the car, money in the bank, and the kids clothed and fed.

Call it the reality mindset.

The other zone is the world beyond immediate experience: the distant past, the unknowable future, faraway people and places, remote corridors of power, the microscopic, the cosmic, the counterfactual, the metaphysical.

People may entertain notions about what happens in these zones, but they have no way of finding out, and anyway it makes no discernible difference in their lives. Beliefs in these zones are narratives which be entertaining or inspiring or morally edifying.

Whether they are literally "true" or "false" is the wrong question. The function of these beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose. 

Call it the mythology mindset. 

...And for all the conquests of the reality mindset, the mythology mindset still occupies swaths of territory in the landscape of mainstream belief. The obvious example is religion. More than two billion people believe that if one doesn't accept Jesus as one's savior one will be damned to eternal torment in hell.

Fortunately, they don't take the next logical step and try to convert people to Christianity at swordpoint for their own good, or torture heretics who might lure others into damnation.

Yet in past centuries, when Christian belief fell into the reality zone, many Crusaders, Inquisitors, conquistadors, and soldiers in the Wars of Religion did exactly that. Like the Comet Ping Pong redeemer, they treated their beliefs as literally true.

For that matter, though many people profess to believe in an afterlife, they seem to be in no hurry to leave this vale of tears for eternal bliss in paradise.

The chance that you know something others don't is very small

After over fifty years of pursuing spirituality in one form or another, I've come to one firm conclusion. I'm nothing special.

And neither are you. Nor is anybody else.

Now, I'm not saying that everybody is the same. Obviously every person is different. We all have different thoughts, emotions, talents, likes and dislikes, appearance, and so on.

What I mean is that we're all material beings living in this material world, to sort of quote Madonna. 

So whatever we know about the world, almost certainly other people possess the same knowledge. Most of us like to think that in some way we're special when it comes to what we know. 

But the truth is that we're not. 

Some would say that our beliefs can be unique, shared by no one else. But a belief is different from knowledge. Knowledge is a true statement about reality, while a belief isn't.

Sure, we often say things like "I believe the Earth goes around the Sun." Actually that is something we know. It's a fact. 

Whereas "I believe in God" is a genuine belief. It isn't grounded in reality. There's no demonstrable evidence for that statement. 

Beliefs are limited only by our imagination. Knowledge is limited by what is true. 

Of course, a belief can be transformed into knowledge through evidence. And evidence can transform knowledge into belief if what once was thought to be true turns out to be untrue.

For example, almost everybody used to know that the Earth was flat. Now we know it is round, so that confident initial knowledge actually was a shaky belief.

Yet there's still a Flat Earth Society. Untrue beliefs take a long time to completely die, if they ever do.

A few days ago I wrote "A Bayesian argument against miracles." The takeaway quote by Steven Pinker in that post was Which is more likely -- that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?

This relates to the notion that no one possesses special knowledge. Over thousands of years, humanity has built up a store of shared knowledge.

It is ever-changing, which is the nature of knowledge. The more we know, the more there is left to know. Sometimes this is described as the Island of Knowledge having a vaster shoreline as the island expands in size.

Science is by far our best means of arriving at a shared understanding of what is real and true. Sure, scientific knowledge is constantly changing, just as our individual knowledge does. 

But science has ways of correcting errors that individuals don't. It may take a while for an untrue theory to be overturned. However, there's no doubt that science steadily progresses toward a more accurate picture of reality.

This accomplishment means, in Carl Sagan's words, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

During the seventeen years this blog has existed, I've debunked a great many religious supernatural claims. This doesn't stop people from continuing to believe in them.

Almost every day someone leaves a comment on one of my posts that amounts to an extraordinary claim about the nature of reality. If true, it would overturn much of modern science, since the claims people make go against the well-proven laws of nature.

But those extraordinary claims always lack extraordinary evidence. Or even ordinary evidence. 

The big question is, why do people continue to believe things that lack demonstrable evidence? There are plenty of reasons. Here's a few of them.

-- They want to believe in the supernatural so badly, they ignore the lack of evidence for it.
-- They enjoy the attention other people give them when they make supernatural claims.
-- They like to feel they possess knowledge no one else has.
-- They are out to make money from followers who revere them.
-- They have deluded themselves into mistaking belief for knowledge.

Having been a religious believer for thirty-five years, I understand the appeal of considering that God, spirit, heaven, angels, and such are as real as rocks, goldfish, iPhones, and clouds.

But eventually I grew out of my unfounded religiosity, because solid truth was more important to me that flimsy belief. This is why I put so much emphasis on being honest about what we actually know, versus what we would prefer to be true.

Wishes are one thing. Reality is another. 

Interesting Why Evolution is True blog post

Here's an interesting post from the Why Evolution is True blog. I like how Jerry Coyne thinks and writes.

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/08/21/john-horgan-a-proud-agnostic/

Presumptions are necessary for reasoning to work

Almost everybody who has had a child -- that includes me -- knows how annoying it can be when they learn how to make "Why?" into a way to drive a parent crazy.

You need to turn the TV off and go to bed.
Why?
Because it's late and you need to go to school tomorrow.
Why do I need to go to school?
So you can learn things.
Why should I learn things?

And so it goes, until the parent gets fed up and ends the discussion with "Because I said so! Go brush your teeth!"

Andy Norman uses this sort of Why? reasoning (or pseudo-reasoning) to illustrate a philosophical point in his book, "Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think."

(See here and here for my previous posts about the book.)

Many people consider that the essence of sound thinking is supplying reasons for something you consider to be true. That's basically correct, but two extremes need to be avoided.

One is requiring that every reason be backed up with evidence.

That leads to a infinite regress where every claim needs an evidential foundation, which itself needs an evidential foundation. This lays the groundwork for extreme skepticism where nothing is viewed as proven since every claim of truth depends on another claim of truth, and so on, and so on.

The other extreme is faith, a natural result of that sort of extreme skepticism about our ability to know reality.

If nothing can be known for sure, then why not have blind faith in this or that? This eliminates the need for reasons, and hence the infinite regress of reasons leading to the need for more reasons to support those reasons.

Norman concludes, persuasively, that the way out of these extremes is to recognize that presumptions form the basis for collaborative dialog aimed at gaining an understanding of some issue. This is the way of science, he writes.

Practicing scientists don't wipe the belief-slate clean, then painstakingly populate it only with evidence-based conclusions. Like all of us, they take many things to be presumptively true, and reason from them. (Without these presumptions, they wouldn't get very far.)

Science isn't special because it starts from scratch and builds everything from evidence and logic alone; it's special because it's resolutely committed to countenancing cogent challenges and making necessary revisions.

...Practicing scientists, in other words, give evidentialism a Socratic rather than a Platonic spin. They grow into a community of inquiry that takes many things as presumptively true, and for the most part, they accept those presumptions. That's part of the process of becoming a scientist. 

Sometimes, a scientist will challenge elements of the scientific consensus and succeed in overturning one or several of them. But they never discard all their discipline's presumptions, and start from scratch. If they did, they'd be doing something like Cartesian epistemology, not science.

...The New Socratic picture of reason, then, doesn't require us to abandon the sufficient evidence standard. Instead, it urges us to enrich our picture of how reasoning and inquiry work. Inquiry yields findings, which are then presumed, for the most part, to be true.

These presumptions become available for premising, and a spur to new inquiries. Often, these presumptions summarize accumulated evidence or otherwise encode hard-won insights. In this way, the evidence and insight they contain become the "basis" of new knowledge.

...So in a sense, presumptions are repositories of evidence.

This discussion of presumptions, along with my reading of the rest of Mental Immunity (I'm almost finished with the book) helped me realize why comment conversations on this blog so often go awry. Religious believers tend to ignore the implied presumptions that I and others who accept the scientific worldview make in our arguments.

Here's examples of what I presume:

-- Our universe is real, not an illusion.
-- Objective reality exists independent of the human brain.
-- Consciousness arises in the brain.
-- The human mind is subject to errors about reality.
-- Science is the best way to correct those mental errors.
-- Nothing is 100% certain, but some things are more certain than others.
-- Most of what science knows can be relied upon as true, until proven false.

These presumptions aren't wild or crazy. They are founded on a massive amount of study, research, and experiments aimed at understanding reality. When I refer to these presumptions, either implicitly or explicitly, anyone who disagrees with one or more of them has the burden of providing persuasive reasons why a presumption shouldn't be accepted.

That person probably has their own presumptions. They might include:

-- Our universe is illusory; reality lies elsewhere.
-- God is the creator and sustainer of reality.
-- Consciousness can exist apart from the brain or body.
-- Some humans have perfect knowledge of reality.
-- Religion or mysticism is the best way to know reality.
-- Perfect mystics or prophets have 100% certain knowledge. 
-- Science can't be relied upon, so it is fine to ignore it.

Problem is, those religiously-based presumptions aren't founded on solid evidence. So they aren't really valid presumptions at all. They're beliefs. If someone puts them forward as reasons for an argument being made, it makes sense to ask "Why do you say that?" 

This is a valid use of Why? because the so-called presumptions are anything but. They're the sort of reasons that may make sense to a religious believer, and can be fashioned into a mutually reinforcing set of beliefs, but they are very weak philosophically and scientifically. 

They're akin to the delusions of a psychotic who has a worldview that makes sense to them, yet lacks a grounding in the reality almost everybody else lives in. Sure, it's possible that the psychotic has an insight into reality that the rest of us lack, just as it's possible that a religious mindset is true.

The odds are just very high that such isn't the case, because the presumptions of both the psychotic person and a religious person aren't based on demonstrable evidence.

"Moon" movie points to shocking non-supernatural realization

A year or so ago I watched "Moon" via Netflix. I guess at this point I need to enter an obligatory spoiler alert, in case anyone hasn't seen this 2009 movie and thinks they might want to see it without knowing a crucial plot element.

This was an intriguing movie, though not super-entertaining. The acting was good, but not exceptional. What I distinctly remember was a shocking twist.

There Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is, at a base on the moon where a mining operation is taking place. He's looking forward to returning home after a three-year solitary tour of duty on the moon. 

Sam gets pleasure in recorded messages from his wife on Earth, who was pregnant when he left for the moon. Communication difficulties prevent live back-and-forth communication with his wife.

All this seems completely normal. However, through a series of events that I've mostly forgotten, Sam eventually discovers a shocking secret the mining company has been hiding.

Sam is a clone.

The memories he has of his wife and previous time on Earth were implanted in his brain. None of that is real. Sam isn't who he thinks he is, a human being like everybody else back on Earth. Though his body is human, his mind is artificial.

How Sam deals with this occupies the rest of the movie. 

What galvanized me as I watched "Moon" was that moment when Sam realizes that everything he relied upon to help  get him through his stint on the Moon was false. The foundation of his existence was shaken to the core.

Not only wasn't his Earth life what he'd thought it was, he himself wasn't who he thought he was. 

And this wasn't a shift in consciousness like, say, someone finding their more genuine self after psychotherapy, climbing Mt. Everest, or whatever. It was a total reversal of how Sam had looked upon the world. 

Well, even more than that, since a reversal implies that the thing being reversed is simply the flip side of what the reversal reveals -- like someone realizing they aren't heterosexual but homosexual. A big change, yet they're still sexual. 

Rather, Sam went from seeing himself as a normal human being to seeing himself as not at all human, but a manufactured clone, no different from hundreds or thousands of clones exactly like him that he discovers in a hidden section of the moon base.

What struck me about this aspect of the movie is how Sam's shocking realization could be viewed as a metaphor, or reflection, of another sort of shocking realization that could be possible for any of us. Not that we're a clone, but that we're not who we have always viewed ourselves as being.

Now, I don't know what that shocking realization might consist of. Or if it really would be shocking. Maybe it would feel entirely natural, as if we'd woken up from a dream that had been going on for our entire life.

I'm not talking about a religious realization, such as "God loves me" or "Jesus is my savior." These are additions to a mind that don't overturn a mind's  basic assumptions. Nor am I talking about something supernatural.

Rather, I see this realization as being along the line of "The world as I've known it is an illusion, but there is no world more real than this one." In other words, it is the perception of the everyday world that is turned upside down in some fashion, not the world itself, which remains just as it is.

My best bet as to what this sort of shocking realization could consist of -- which arguably is very much in line with Buddhist enlightenment or nirvana -- is an experience that the self we take ourselves to be actually doesn't exist. 

This is akin to what Sam experiences in "Moon," aside from the fact that Sam was distressed by the fact that he wasn't who he always thought he was, while the experience of selflessness would be much more pleasant, blissful even. Or at least no less pleasant or blissful than our previous existence as a self, just different in a difficult-to-describe way.

Along with this would be a realization that the free will we always thought we possessed also was an illusion.

I see this as a massive relief. I've had glimpses of such a state of being in which I see that who I am at any given moment is the result of causes and effects extending back to my birth -- and even far beyond that, to the moment of the big bang 14 billion years ago.

My view, which isn't at all original, is that evolution adapted us to an illusion of ego/self because this aided in our survival as early humans.

We continue to buy into this story of individual separateness because every human culture teaches it is true, even though some cultures (Chinese and Indigenous, for example) buy into it less than other cultures (American and European, for example).

Anyway, I like the idea that our view of ourselves could be upended in a dramatic fashion.

I'm not sure how this could come about. It simply seems like a real possibility that fits with experiences I had with psychedelics in my college days, and other experiences I've had with meditation/mindfulness since.

Thoughts are not facts -- great thing to keep in mind

Over on my other blog, HinesSight, yesterday I wrote "Covid reality: thoughts are not facts." It starts this way:

Driving into Salem today, listening to a news channel on satellite radio, I heard a public health expert say something that made me grab a piece of paper and write it down as soon as I came to a stop:

Thoughts are not facts. 

She was referring to wearing masks in schools as they reopen after a summer break. Like when a student or parent says, "But I thought that wasn't going to be necessary since Covid cases were declining so much a few months ago."

OK. You thought that. But thoughts aren't facts, they're just thoughts. The only way a thought can be a fact is -- no big surprise -- if the thought is factual.

This isn't an astounding new notion, that thoughts are not facts. I just hadn't heard those particular four words before. Now that I have, I really like them. 

I've started saying to myself, "Thoughts are not facts," when I catch myself worrying about something that might happen, but so far hasn't. Where's the facts that match up to my worry? Usually nowhere, because my worrying isn't connected to factual reality.

Often it isn't a big deal if people mistake a thought for a fact. But sometimes it is. 

Trump actually won the election, not Biden. 
Vaccines and mask-wearing aren't effective in preventing COVID-19.
Global warming isn't happening. 

These thoughts are in the heads of many millions of Americans. They aren't facts. They're false. Yet because those people mistake their thoughts for facts, tremendous harm is being done. 

So ask yourself: what thoughts do I have that are being mistaken for facts? Probably quite a few, if you're like me. I suspect that you'll be happier if you're able to do a better job of telling the difference between thoughts and facts. I'm finding that's true for me.

You might be thinking, "Aren't all facts expressed as thoughts?"

Yes, of course. But facts are grounded in our shared, observable, external reality. They refer to something objectively true that transcends the thought of any particular person. Other sorts of thoughts, by contrast, are subjective, even if they're shared by millions of people. 

Thus it is a fact that I enjoyed the taste of a bowl of popcorn I just shared with our dog -- a nightly human/canine ritual. However, this isn't a fact capable of being held by others, since I'm the only one able to experience how popcorn tastes to me.

If you want to believe that Brian Hines enjoys the taste of popcorn, great. But it isn't a fact that can be confirmed in any way other than believing the words I just wrote. Objective facts can be confirmed by others, which is why we can be so confident that Biden won the election, vaccines and mask-wearing are effective against Covid, and global warming is happening.

Capitol police are speaking the truth right now

As I write this I'm listening to televised testimony of four police officers who are appearing at the first meeting of the Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol.

Watch it, Church of the Churchless commenters who think truth is relative, that what experts and professionals say can't be trusted, that everyone is free to create their own reality, that this physical realm is an illusion, that objectivity isn't possible, and other blather spewed from your religious sensibilities.

Watch it, because the truth is being spoken by four brave men who put their lives on the line. One truthful sentence from them is worth more than a thousand bullshit comments about the relativity of truth.

Truth isn't relative. Truth is truth. It is the most important thing in life, because without truth we're living a lie. Me, I choose not to do that. Those four police officers also have chosen not to do that. 

Take some time to watch this testimony. I'm sure it will be available on You Tube.

Those commenters who consider that truth is something to play word games with, that it doesn't matter if people embrace falsehoods -- watch the four police officers talk about how a dangerous mob of thousands of Trump supporters invaded the capitol because they believed a lie, that the election was stolen from Trump.

Lies matter. Falsehoods matter.

They lead to assaults on law enforcement officers who are still recovering from their many injuries. So think about this, commenters on this blog, next time you want to defend a "everyone creates their own reality" bullshit philosophy. That's an insult to the truth-telling police officers.

None of you would have had the courage to defend the capitol. You don't even have the courage to defend the truth, which requires no physical bravery, just moral strength. So learn from the four police officers. They have a lot to teach you.

Truth isn't personal, but institutional

This morning I finished reading The Constitution of Knowledge, a book by Jonathan Rauch whose subtitle is "In Defense of Truth." 

As noted in a previous blog post about this book, Rauch persuasively argues that truth isn't personal, but institutional. Or social, if you have a dislike of institutions and prefer another word.

Here's a quote from the second to last page of the book that ends with a reflection of this point: "...and outsource reality to a global network of strangers."

As I wrote in chapter 1, the Constitution of Knowledge is the most successful social design in human history, but also the most counterintuitive.

In exchange for knowledge, freedom, and peace, it asks us to mistrust our senses and our tribes, question our sacred beliefs, and relinquish the comfort of certitude. 

It insists that we embrace our fallibility, subject ourselves to criticism, tolerate the reprehensible, and outsource reality to a global network of strangers.

For me, this was a fresh idea. Not that I wasn't aware of it. I just hadn't thought of how we humans go about arriving at a shared conception of reality in the clear way that Rauch speaks of. 

Understand: he isn't talking about subjective reality, personal experience. It doesn't take a global network of strangers for me to know that I like raspberries. That's a personal truth of mine which requires no one other than me and my taste buds to confirm.

But otherwise, I agree with Rauch that truth has to be social/institutional in order for it to be objective rather than subjective. 

Yesterday I went into the south Salem Ace Hardware store to buy some polycarbonate cutting blades for my Stihl trimmer. (I've found they work much better than the usual cutting line for tall grass and brush.) 

I told the Stihl specialist that in using the trimmer a few days ago, the poly blades got trashed when I was cutting thin brush. He was surprised. "Have you been storing the blades in water?" he asked. "No, I've seen reviews of the blades that say this is a good idea, but other users say it isn't necessary."

He was adamant that storing the blades in water would harden them. Indeed, when I got home and looked at the back of an old package of blades that I had lying around, I read that Stihl advises just that: storing them in water.

Institutional knowledge. When I looked at comments from people like me who simply use the poly blades, there was a diversity of opinion about storing them in water. But experts, and the Stihl company itself, said to do this. So now I've got a bunch of poly blades soaking in a plastic container. 

When you think about it, this is how knowledge passes from a potential truth to a very likely or certain truth. There has to be a community of truth-seekers who assess the validity of a potential truth. An individual can't do this on their own. 

Hillary Clinton correctly said that it takes a village to raise a child. And it takes institutions to arrive at shared truths.

Consider the 2020 presidential election in the United States. Even though Trump and much of the Republican Party did their best to overturn Joe Biden's victory, they didn't succeed. As was repeated often, "the institutions held."

County and state election officials. Secretaries of State in swing states. Courts, including the Supreme Court. Congress. Journalists.

These institutions stood up for the truth that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. If individuals had to argue about who won, we'd still be debating this question. (Indeed, Trump and his cronies continue to refuse to admit that he lost.)

Here's a few more passages from the final pages of the book.

The young Lincoln held that reverence for the law is the true north of America's constitutional culture. Reverence for facts is the true north of the reality-based community. 

Sometimes we get facts wrong. Of course. But we do not cheat. We do not cut corners. We hold ourselves accountable -- to others, to our community -- for rejecting convenient fictions and half-truths.

Because factuality anchors our integrity and defines our community, we renounce propaganda and truthiness even if we are the only person in the vicinity who is doing so. And just by doing that, we make a difference. 

As the great Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, "You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world."

...My biggest worry is Lincoln's biggest worry: "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher."

By themselves, the forces of chaos and coercion lack the strength to unseat the Constitution of Knowledge, and if they did unseat it, they would have nothing to replace it with except a Hobbesian war of each of millions of personal and tribal realities against all the others.

What propagandists and social-media bullies and emotional safetyists and subjectivists and all the rest might succeed in doing, however, is to demoralize and confuse and intimidate, so that the reality-based community will lose heart and give ground.

...Yet the reality-based community has withstood much worse. It beat back the inquisitors who imprisoned Galileo, the dictators whose gulags spanned continents, and the racists and homophobes who sought to silence voices of freedom.

"Tomorrow morning," said Socrates, "let us meet here again." The conversation he and his young protege began 2,500 years ago continues, now spanning the world instead of just Athens, despite countless efforts to squash it.

Thanks to Appreciative Reader for defending the scientific worldview

There are three thousand word comments that deserve trashing. Then there are comments of the same length that deserve fervent applause from those of us who respect reality, truth, evidence, reason, and the scientific worldview.

That's why I'm sharing another lengthy comment from "Appreciative Reader" below. 

As you'll see if you read the following comment published on my Why neither unicorns nor God are to be believed in post, Appreciative Reader absolutely demolishes the religious perspective of another commenter, Spence Tepper.

If this were a boxing fight, it'd be called after the second or third round because too much damage is being done to the weaker opponent. 

Or, as Appreciative Reader points out below, the referee would warn Tepper to stop constantly retreating and refusing to engage in a fair fight. I share the frustration of Appreciative Reader, because I frequently encounter the same tactic by religious believers.

You point out the absurdity of a belief. You ask for evidence in support of it. You question why anyone should take that belief seriously when there's no reason to do this. You say that if this religious tenet is to be accepted, then why not accept every other unproven notion offered up by the thousands of world religions.

And the response is... ducking and weaving. Running away. Failing to engage. Spouting nonsense words that mean nothing but are filled with the fire and fury of a threatened religious believer.

So I'm grateful for what Appreciative Reader has done in his repeated attempts to get Tepper, and others, to respond in a reasonable fashion to the nonsensical world view of those who cling to beliefs that have no foundation in reality, yet comfort the believer and so are very difficult for the religious person to give up.

Hey, I've been there and done that. I spent many years, decades actually, clinging to a religious worldview. It met needs that I had at the time, so my mind wouldn't allow me to see the many contradictions, absurdities, and plain weird ideas promulgated by the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas.

It's a lonely task, doing what Appreciative Reader has done in his comment exchanges with Spence Tepper. Religiosity is the dominant worldview of most people in the world. Science, reason, open debate -- these are under challenge. 

Recently I read that about 50% of people in the United States either believe that President Biden wasn't elected in a free and fair election, and/or believe that Covid vaccines aren't effective. Both beliefs are false. The evidence is overwhelming that Biden won fairly and that Covid vaccines are effective.

Thus the Appreciative Reader - Spence Tepper debate isn't just about religious belief. It also is about the danger of large numbers of people believing stuff that clearly isn't true, going so far as to stage an insurrection at our nation's capitol in an effort to keep Trump as president, and Republicans urging people to not get a Covid vaccine, thereby causing needless illness and death.

Reality is too important to discard. Thank you, Appreciative Reader, for standing up for truth and the scientific worldview. I've been inspired by your comments and I know that others have been also, even if you mostly get responses from religious believers.

Here's the comment from Appreciative Reader.

Spence, I’m sorry to say our discussion has devolved to bizarre levels now. I really hadn’t expected you of all people to descend to desperately clutching at straws in this manner.

You keep ignoring the points I raise, and insist on straddling your soapbox instead. You keep conflating the actual conduct of scientific experiments with a scientific worldview. You keep ignoring the implications of the burden of proof. You betray (or at least, you project) zero understanding of the entire discussion around the functional equivalence of “accepting” and “not-rejecting”.

In discussing the dragon/unicorn thought experiment, you keep repeating you will try to find out more about the beast, despite having been told at the outset that it is impervious to all means of detection available to today’s science and technology; and you keep veering off into non sequiturs, like saying you’ll try to test whether the person making the (dragon/unicorn/religious/mystical) claim is of sound mind.

I don’t see this discussion really going anywhere, what it is doing is lurchingly retracing its own already trod steps, but still, I’ll try to address here, in one single post, the issues you raise in your last three or four posts that you addressed to me. The result is likely to be a lengthy post, I’m afraid, and so as not to make it even longer I’ll simply title out the main themes that you’ve written on (and that I’ll respond to), rather than actually quoting your words.

DISPROVING SPECIFIC GOD IDEAS : YOUR CHALLENGE

This is the part that I find truly bizarre. The part where you keep insisting, in the face of all rationality and reason, that no god ideas have ever been disproved by science, despite clear instances of such having been promptly presented.

Recall two of the most conspicuous contortions you had to resort to in the course of your last few comments.

First, when in response to your challenge I presented you with two specific examples of God ideas having been disproven, you turned around to demand of me how I know those are real Gods. Can you really, even now, not see the absurdity of even asking that question?

Some theist has presented very specific God ideas, and I have shown how a scientific worldview clearly refutes those ideas; whereupon what do you do? You demand of ME how I can be sure those are valid God ideas!! (And, when the entirely bizarre nature of the thought process that can think up this objection is pointed out to you, what do you do? You simply ignore it, and move on to talk of other things.)

And second, you then do the typical goalpost-shifting thing that theists seem to specialize in.

I’m going to address your “challenge” one more time now. Despite the fact that I’ve done it twice already, and despite having little real hope of piercing through any better this time. (And all we have on wager is your clear admission that your challenge has been met.)

ONE: The thurder-and-lightning producing Gods, Thor, and Odin, and Zeus, and Indra, and Varun, and whoever and whatever else that specializes in this superpower. Modern science has shown us the exact mechanism of these phenomena, and that mechanism has no need at all for any God entities.

(That is, to spell it out, we have no need to resort to hypothesize Gods in order to understand those phenomena as well as we do, ergo following Occam's Razor we have no need to posit any Gods, and we can safely not accept, or reject, the God hypothesis as superfluous and unnecessary in respect of those specific phenomena, and therefore those specific Gods.)

Further, we do have a means of directly falsifying the god claim as well. Believers in these Gods claimed that propitiating them by praying to them and sacrificing to them can help turn these elements in one’s favor, and angering them attracts their wrath.

No one does that these days, and yet we are not visited by some terrible wrath of these Gods, as represented by these elements wreaking some terrible disaster on us. To not see this as debunking is, I’m sorry to say, to harbor, despite an education in science, a decidedly irrational and anti-scientific worldview.

TWO: The God of the Bible, that people did believe in literally in vast numbers in times past, and in not negligible numbers even today. Showing that the creation myth presented in the Bible is erroneous, by showing that the mechanism of how the universe arose has no need of invoking a God, is enough to debunk this claim. Directly showing that the age of the universe is far older than claimed by the alleged Word of God, as recorded in the Bible, is direct falsification as well.

THREE: The sun-god in Norse legends that is driven in a chariot by two horses (or, in other versions, by one horse, whatever). As well as the sun-god of the Aztecs, that, unless propitiated with human sacrifice, will not appear to us again and will abandon us to eternal darkness and death. The "how" of the sun apparently going around the earth has been explained clearly enough by science, and none of that has need to invoke either Gods or chariots or horses.

And the claim has been directly falsified as well, because no one sacrifices human hearts to the sun-god any more, and yet the sun rises in the east every single day..

Spence, you aren’t by any chance spoofing me, are you? Pulling my leg, playing a trick on me, by putting me in the distinctly ridiculous position of solemnly holding forth on these elementary things in all earnest like this? If that is the case, then I applaud you, because you did take me in completely so far, and even now I have no more than a very tentative suspicion that your arguments might be no more than a practical joke. So that if the idea was to play a practical joke on me, you’ve been entirely successful.

To claim in all seriousness that your challenge hasn’t been met, despite these clear examples having been presented (and plenty more can easily be thought of), is to either be completely oblivious of the implications of a scientific worldview, or, if that is not the case, then it is to be literally delusional. Unless of course this is all a joke.

In claiming that your challenge hasn't been met satisfactorily, the arguments you employ are the equivalent of asserting that science cannot debunk the claim that the moon is made of cheese. Sure, you won’t find actual peer-reviewed papers, describing elaborate experiments conducted, that clearly tell you that the moon isn’t made of cheese.

But to latch on to that as some kind of justification for a worldview that claims that science does not directly refute clearly and DEMONSTRABLY absurd claims like that the moon is made of cheese (or that the sun is drawn around the earth by horses, and will abandon us unless we sacrifice to it; or that lightning and storms are caused by gods who will wreak destruction on us unless they are propitiated; or that the world was created six thousand years ago by a psychotic but immensely powerful god that will annihilate us and/or consign us to hell if we don’t abide by his commandments and his prophets’ and son’s instructions) is to have simply seen and maybe even to have participated in science, but to have come away with no more than a cargo-cult impression of what science actually is and what a scientific worldview actually entails.

WHAT YOU SEE AS THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS IN ATHEISM (OR AT LEAST, IN THIS PARTICULAR VERSION OF ATHEISM)

Let me quote you first on this, before likewise enumerating my response :

“Here is the fundamental flaw. I'll state it in three ways.
1. What science hasn't tested science cannot comment upon.
2. Evidence that has not been gathered is not non-existent.
3. The unknown is not non - existent. It is the basis of scientific inquiry.”

(1.) “Science” does not comment on anything. People do.

The scientific method is a tool that people use to suss out what is reasonable to believe, and what not. Thereafter, it is people who arrive at positions on different claims and issues.

We’ve been through this already, the difference between the scientific method and a scientific worldview. You’ve ignored that last discussion, and gone on with your inner monologue without referencing our past discussion on this.

To imagine that a scientific worldview entails referencing the scientific method only in such instances where there has been some formal scientific study, and in everything else either believing any random thing that one likes, or else not taking any position at all, is to arrive at some cargo-cult version of “science”.

The core of the scientific method is that one will not accept any hypothesis that one cannot back up with evidence. Any position --- and that includes the God question as well (or at least, some versions of it, that is to say, some specific abstract God-ideas) --- that cannot admit of direct evidence, it is simply not “scientific” to believe at all.

It is not that no evidence equals we have carte blanche to believe whatever we want, or that we must necessarily suspend any conclusion at all (which suspension of all conclusion is in practice sometimes/often simply not even feasible, in any case). It is that no evidence equals we have no reason to hold that position as true, no reason to accept it.

(2) “Evidence” refers to some support for some proposition or some hypothesis. Therefore, if evidence has not been “gathered”, it is literally not evidence at all.

Sure, whether we self-important humans catalog something or cogitate on something does not in any way impact the underlying reality. That is understood, obviously. Not once have I suggested otherwise.

The point is, in as much as evidence has not been “gathered”, it may perhaps exist, but in as much as we do not yet know of it, it is entirely and wholly fallacious to base any conclusion on such evidence. In as much as some conclusion that you seek to support via such not-yet-gathered evidence is fallacious, such conclusion we are constrained to not accept, that is to say, we reject such conclusion.

This is entirely straightforward. And your views on this are entirely mistaken.

(3) Similar to above. Agreed, the unknown is not non-existent, and, rather than saying “it is the basis of scientific enquiry”, I think it may be more precise to phrase it thus, “It can be the basis of scientific enquiry if we should choose to make it so.”

Anyway, minor nitpicking aside, I have not once suggested otherwise. But the question isn’t what does exist; the question is what do we believe, what belief or claim do we accept. If something is unknown then we can’t go around believing random things about it.

(Which, mind you, is what you are doing. You’re claiming there are no grounds to do science on God. And you take that as carte blanche to go ahead and believe in God --- which you have every right to --- but where you err is in claiming that such an attitude comports with a scientific worldview. The fact is it doesn’t.)

Nor is it that what is technically unknown, as far as formal science, we will necessarily suspend all judgment on. That science hasn’t explicitly considered and tested whether the moon is made of cheese, or whether the sun is drawn by horses around the earth, or whether the sun will not rise unless propitiated with sacrifice, does not mean that we will necessarily suspend all judgment on such.

(And I don’t mean idiosyncratic personal judgment, I mean a conclusion that comports with a scientific worldview.)

We know the approximate composition of the moon, so we can certainly conclude that it isn’t made of cheese. And what is more such conclusion will be fully in agreement with a scientific worldview, even though there are no papers published specifically on the subject, “Is the moon made of cheese?” Ditto questions about whether the sun is a God that is drawn by horses around the sun, or whether the universe was created by a psychotic and decidedly unpleasant God six thousand years ago.

Those aren’t flaws in atheism, as you claim they are. They are flaws in your reasoning and your own POV.

YOUR POST ON THE FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENCE OF “NOT ACCEPTING” VIS-À-VIS REJECTING A CLAIM

What you argue here is no more than yet more contortions, Spence.

That the hypothesis is not accepted (and, for that matter, not rejected either) by the people carrying on the experiment and for the duration of the experiment and analysis, that hardly needs pointing out. In any case, it *has* already been pointed out, more than once, in a separate context, which would be the context of distinguishing between the POV appropriate to the scientist researching some specific hypothesis, vis-à-vis the POV appropriate for everyone else. That is an out and out non sequitur as far as this particular discussion.

Should the experiment not bear the results the hypothesis predicts, then in the setting aside of the hypothesis there is no universal distinction between “not accepting” and “rejecting”, as you suggest. To speak of this in the context that you do is to not understand what was said at all, not even a little bit (hint, repeated for the third or fourth time already: refer back to Osho Robbins’s analogy of “Not guilty” vis-à-vis “Innocent”); or else it is to resort to deliberate disingenuity.

Here’s a concrete example that will make the distinction clear, using the overtly formal scientific setting that you seem to imagine imparts some especial sanctity that everyday examples don’t.

(It doesn’t, actually, and everyday examples are equally as effective, provided you grok the actual underlying implications of the scientific method. Nevertheless, I’ll try to accommodate your apparent fetish for examples from formal science.)

Contrast the Ether theory with the String Theory. The former is an example of a hypothesis rejected, while the latter is an example of a hypothesis not (yet) accepted. The experimental results in the case of the former clearly refuted the prediction that the ether theory had thrown up. It clearly showed that, rather than there showing up a difference in the speed of light, instead the speed of light remained the same.

That is direct refutation, leading to rejection. As far as the latter, there has been no direct refutation, at all, so far. But nor has there been any evidence that bears it out, no evidence that justifies bypassing Occam’s Razor. In as much as no evidence has been found, the theory is not accepted.

(Disclaimer: This example focuses only on the difference between “not accepting” and “rejecting”, and not on the actual promise that string theory holds out, or the fact that people are still working on string theory while no one works on ether theory. Don’t focus on that part of it, I clearly recognize that in that specific respect this analogy/example is imperfect. That string theory is not, as a result of yielding no evidence, tossed right out the window as the ether theory has been, is because it is early days still, and because it otherwise explains our observations so very completely. No doubt if in another fifty or seventy years string theory still does not bear out any evidence [that isn’t explained equally well by other, simpler hypotheses], so as to justify its far more complex structure, then it might be relegated to the museum or the trashcan as well, conceivably.)

Come on, man. Do I really need to spell this out like this all over again in words of one syllable? Have my many posts on this, already presented in this thread, as well as the many discussions elsewhere (including one whole thread we’d both participated in that was on this very subject) not made the distinction between the two amply clear, that you should compose the post you did just preceding, that betrays zero understanding of the difference between the two (and indeed between soft atheism and hard atheism)?

You know what it looks like to me? You’re not actually reading my posts. You’re basically focused on your soapboxing, while going through the motions of responding to my posts, all with the aim of somehow passing off your theistic worldview as somehow not anti-scientific.

Otherwise you wouldn’t so blatantly misread and/or misrepresent this part so completely so late into this discussion; and you wouldn’t keep on repeatedly and totally missing the point of the unicorn/dragon thought experiment (and keep raising tangential non sequiturs around it rather than actually addressing the meat of the argument presented via that construct); and you wouldn’t keep raising these wild objections to these very obvious and simplistic God-ideas having been clearly debunked by science (even as some more subtle God-ideas admittedly remain beyond the reach of such easy and direct debunking).

Apologies, Spence, if some of what I’ve said here seems rude. I really truly hope this thread will not sour the general regard we have for each other.

But … how do you even begin to hold a coherent conversation with someone who insists, in the teeth of all reasonable argument, that such blatant irrationalities like the Olympian Gods and the Aztec Sun God and Biblical God and the Norse Gods as literally depicted --- as well as, presumably, the moon made of cheese --- are not ruled out by a scientific worldview?

With someone who, at the end of a detailed discussion (indeed, more than one detailed discussion) around “rejecting” and “not accepting” (and soft atheism and hard atheism) comes out with an elaborate post that betrays either zero understanding of what was being said all along, either that or else it deliberately seeks to misdirect?

I’m going to walk away now from this discussion, but without the hope that I’d held yesterday of arriving in future at closer agreement and better understanding, because how on earth do you even address this bizarre state of affairs, where on one hand there is familiarity with (some of) the techniques of science, but on the other hand there is complete cluelessness as to its implications?

And I’m going to walk away more resolutely this time than I was able to yesterday, because although it started out promisingly enough, what this discussion has now devolved into is an apparently endless exchange of comments that is neither illuminating nor, at this point, particularly pleasurable. Again, my apologies.

Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Well, the responses I got to my previous post, "Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community," were underwhelming. 

Not really surprising, since I said:

The question I'd pose to those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive view of reality is this: what alternative to Rauch's approach below do you suggest for determining the nature of objective reality?

Meaning, it is easy to criticize reason, rationality, facts, science, open discussion, criticism of propositions about reality, and such. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a better approach than the Constitution of Knowledge.

Read what follows.

Then, if you disagree with some of what Rausch says below, leave a comment on this post describing the nature of your disagreement. Others can then submit their own ideas. This is how knowledge is gained: by a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

No one could suggest a better approach for gaining knowledge than a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

So in this post I'm going to take a different approach, with the goal of convincing those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive perspective that there isn't any other valid means of gaining knowledge of objective reality.

Note that I said "objective reality." Obviously we all gain knowledge of subjective reality just by being ourselves. Every experience each of us has is subjective, since it isn't evident to other people.

There's no way anyone can put a thought, emotion, perception, or any other content of consciousness on a table and say, See, this is my experience.

Thus a basic assumption here is that there are almost eight billion subjective human realities, one for each person on Earth. Yet there is only one objective shared reality. Rausch writes:

The main idea of the Constitution of Knowledge, as we have seen, is that reality is what we know, not what you or I know. No purely personal belief can be knowledge, no matter how much merit you or I might think it possesses.

...A corollary is that members of the reality-based community accept that, despite their diversity, they are all exploring aspects of one reality. The Constitution of Knowledge does not require them to see the world the same way or to agree on facts.

In fact, it only works where people see the world differently and disagree on facts, so that they can test their ideas and surmount their biases.

Its unique capacity, however, is to force individual differences toward social convergence. It does so by requiring persuasion, which in turn requires that we try to account for our differences by comparing them.

Science has made astounding progress in the past several hundred years by doing just that. By and large, scientists the world over agree on the knowledge gained from the scientific aspect of the reality-based community.

By contrast, religious believers and mystics have made essentially zero progress in arriving at a common spiritual knowledge. The same questions are being debated today as were being debated hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Why? One obvious reason is that there's no persuasive evidence that a supernatural realm exists. Thus there's no way to test propositions about what that realm consists of, since almost certainly it exists only in the subjective minds of individuals.

Consider the religious belief system that I used to accept, that of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a form of Sant Mat, an India-based religiosity that claims Perfect Living Masters can guide their disciples back to God by connecting them to the shabd, or Sound Current, the power that activates the cosmos.

That'd be amazing if it was true. But how would it be possible to determine the truth of RSSB or Sant Mat?

It can't be by accepting someone's claim that they're experienced divine light and sound. Hallucinations of that sort are commonplace. Psychedelic drugs can produce those phenomena. People can be mistaken. People can lie. People can fool themselves.

No matter how strongly someone believes in a religious, mystical, or supernatural tenet -- whether this belief is held by a small number or billions -- the question remains, Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Christians believe Jesus is the Son of God. Muslims believe there is no God but God and Muhammed is His prophet. Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, plus adherents of thousands of other religions all have their own unique beliefs.

Atheists and agnostics are skeptical about all of those beliefs. For good reason, because there is no reality-based community in the realm of the supernatural. Again, almost certainly this is because that reality doesn't exist.

Yet suppose you're someone who has had such a profound experience of a supernatural reality that you feel the need to speak your truth to others? (A number of those someone's leave comments on this blog.)

Again, why should I or anyone else believe you? 

It can't be because you've done the experiment of meditation, or whatever you want to call it, and the rest of us haven't. I haven't done any quantum mechanics experiments nor genetics experiments, but I accept the scientific knowledge in these areas.

I do so because there is a reality-based community -- researchers, journals, conferences, peer review, universities, government agencies, science writers, etc. -- that's skilled at assessing the validity of scientific propositions.

If a single scientist claims this or that is true, no one should believe them. Yet if their claim survives careful scrutiny by the reality-based community, there's good reason to believe them. At least until the claim is debunked.

With religious and mystical claims about the supernatural, so far none have become validated knowledge. 

Not miracles. Not ESP. Not life after death. Not astral projection. After thousands of years of attempts by humans to find proof of the supernatural, there's so little to show for this search, we might as well round it off to zero. 

The reason is that what Rausch says in his book is correct. 

By extension, the empirical rule also dictates what does not account as checking: claims to authority by dint of a personally or tribally privileged perspective. In principle, persons and groups are interchangeable. 

If I claim access to divine revelation, or if I claim the support of miracles which only believers can witness, or if I claim that my class or race or historically dominant status or historically oppressed status allows me to know and say things which others cannot, then I am breaking the empirical rule by exempting my views from contestability by others

...You have to check your own claims and subject them to contestation from others; you have to tolerate the competing claims of others; you have to accept that your own certainty counts for nothing; you have to forswear claiming that your god, your experience, your intuition, or your group is epistemically privileged; you have to defend the exclusive legitimacy of liberal science even (in fact, especially) when you think it is wrong or unfair.

Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community

I figured that I needed to share another excerpt from Jonathan Rauch's book, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," that comes just before the passages I included in a previous post about this intriguing book.

Those Rules for Reality in the previous post have to be implemented by someone. That someone is the reality-based community. In another post I'll share what Rausch considers that community to be. 

Basically its people who are willing to act in accord with the Constitution of Knowledge, in much the same way patriotic Americans are willing to abide by the United States Constitution. Of course, there are strong disagreements about what is constitutional and unconstitutional. 

Likewise, there are strong disagreements about what is validated knowledge and what is unvalidated knowledge. But in both cases disagreements take place within the bounds of a Constitution that provides a framework and a process for arriving at agreement.

The question I'd pose to those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive view of reality is this: what alternative to Rauch's approach below do you suggest for determining the nature of objective reality?

Meaning, it is easy to criticize reason, rationality, facts, science, open discussion, criticism of propositions about reality, and such. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a better approach than the Constitution of Knowledge.

Read what follows.

Then, if you disagree with some of what Rausch says below, leave a comment on this post describing the nature of your disagreement. Others can then submit their own ideas. This is how knowledge is gained: by a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

What reality really is

So far, I have referred to reality and objective reality and the reality-based community without quite specifying what I mean. Now is the time to fill in that gap.

The question "What is reality?" may seem either too metaphysical to answer meaningfully or too obvious to need answering. 

When most people speak colloquially of reality, they mean the world as it really is, the world "out there," the world independent of human perception and cognition, the world as we would perceive it if we perceived correctly.

Surely that is what we feel reality to be, subjectively. Colloquially, people also use the terms "real" and "reality" to convey certainty or confidence that things are the way they are.

Reality, in common parlance, is that which is reliable and intractable and cannot be wished away: the rock we stub our toe on, the abrupt encounter with the ground when we fall. As Theaetetus and Socrates pointed out, however, such colloquial definitions are not very helpful.

The whole problem is that humans have no direct access to an objective world independent of our minds and senses, and subjective certainty is no guarantee of truth. (More like the opposite, because certitude is so often misleading.)

Faced with those problems and others, philosophers and practitioners changed their approach. Instead of thinking about reality metaphysically, as an external if unknowable "world out there," they think of it epistemically, as that of which we have objective knowledge.

More specifically, they think of reality as a set of propositions (or claims, or statements) which have been validated in some way, and which have thereby been shown to be at least conditionally true -- true, that is, unless debunked.

Some propositions reflect reality as we perceive it in everyday life ("The sky is blue"). Others, like the equations on a quantum physicist's blackboard, are incomprehensible to intuition. Many fall somewhere in between.

Propositions turn out to have some interesting properties. They are infinite in number and so never scarce, but true propositions are precious and comparatively rare.

Even so, the quantity of validated propositions -- of statements considered to be part of the canon of knowledge -- far exceeds the grasp of any human individual or even any large group of individuals. Propositions are not material objects, but neither are they purely ephemeral, especially if they are true.

Karl Popper claimed they exist neither in the realm of material things nor the realm of subjective feelings and perceptions, but in a third realm of their own, "the world of objective contents of thoughts."

Popper compared human knowledge to the webs spun by spiders or the honey produced by bees: "exosomatic organs" which animals build outside their bodies. 

In a similar fashion, humans create knowledge -- validated propositions -- and store their knowledge in  books and equations and libraries and databases, where it exists independently of our minds and bodies and could be discovered and used by an alien species millions of years from now even if humanity were extinct.

Propositions have no volition and can do nothing on their own. Yet once they are acquired by the reality-based network, they can interact with each other across the network: the modification, acceptance, or rejection of one proposition can force adjustments to many others.

Although the network is a human creation and all its participants are people, it far surpasses the comprehension of its creators, and it undergoes a version of natural selection, driven by its own dynamics.

The reality-based network behaves like an ecosystem, producing a body of validated propositions whose composition humans can influence but not control.

That is objective reality, insofar as we can know reality. The totality of those propositions is as close as we come to objective truth.

Now, you must have noticed that a phrase I used a few paragraphs ago, "validated in some way," hides a cheat. In epistemology, the whole question is, validated in what way? As we have seen, the epistemic and social consequences of validation using, say, a tribal oracle versus an authoritarian government versus social error-seeking are different.

And the systems are in many ways incompatible with each other. If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science -- open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network -- is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, al least in the reality-based community.

Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality.

That is a very bold, very broad, very tough claim, and it goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions.

It also sits uncomfortably with the populist and dogmatic tempers of our time.

But like the U.S. Constitution's claim to exclusivity in governing ("unconstitutional" means "illegal," period), the Constitution of Knowledge's claim to exclusivity is its sine qua non. Defending that claim is no small task, and so we need to understand the logic which supports it.

Rules for Reality -- which religious believers ignore

I'm a proud member of the reality-based community. This is a big reason why I no longer believe in God or supernatural phenomena. 

It'd be nice if these things actually existed. But "nice" is irrelevant when it comes to learning the truth about reality. Reality is what it is, not what individuals want it to be.

When I learned about Jonathan Rauch's book, "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," the title alone made me want to buy it.

I've only read two of the eight chapters, but I skipped ahead and read the passages that I've shared below. I like these Rules for Reality. They fit with my personal philosophy, though naturally Rauch states them more clearly than I'd be capable of.

The first sentence below echoes something I say often in my blog posts. 

Everyone is entitled to believe whatever they want, even if it isn't true. But if you want other people to accept your belief, then you need to submit that belief to the reality-based community for examination and criticism. Meaning, to people who embrace truth-seeking.

Religious believers, mystics, and such typically aren't willing to do this. They expect others to take their statements about reality seriously, even though they don't comply with the Rules for Reality below.

Rules for Reality

Say you believe something (X) to be true, and you believe that its acceptance as true by others is important or at least warranted.

X might be that the earth revolves around the sun, that God is a trinity, that an embryo is a human being, that human activity is causing climate change, that vaccination saves lives, that Joe Biden was lawfully elected president, or some other consequential proposition.

The specific proposition does not matter. What does matter is that the only way to validate it is to submit it to the reality-based community. 

Otherwise, you could win dominance for your proposition by, say, brute force, threatening and jailing and torturing and killing those who see things differently -- as we have seen, a standard method down through history.

Or you and your like-minded friends could go off and talk only to each other, in which case you would have founded a cult -- which is lawful but socially divisive and epistemically worthless.

Or you could engage in a social-media campaign to shame and intimidate those who disagree with you -- a very common method these days, but one which stifles debate and throttles knowledge (and harms a lot of people).

What the reality-based community does is something else again. In my book Kindly Inquisitors, I argue that liberal science's distinctive qualities derive from two core rules, and that any public conversation which obeys those two rules will display the distinguishing characteristics of liberal science. The rules are:

The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and 0nly insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.

That is, you are entitled to claim a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. 

In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it.

But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else's fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others' errors, even if you are confident that you are right. 

Otherwise, you are not reality-based.

The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.

Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to.

Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based.

Mystery of existence is a chill up the spine, not a concept

For many years I've gotten a thrill out of the mystery of existence. 

This has nothing to do with what exists. It's all about the brute fact that something exists. Now, that something might well be infinite.

For sure it's huge -- countless billions of light years huge. And it's old -- at least 13.8 billion years old and possibly infinitely old.

All that is irrelevant when talking about the mystery of existence. 

What blows my mind with marvelous regularity is the chill-up-the-spine realization that all this, no matter what it consists of -- is equally present at the tips of my fingers typing these words and a galaxy at the farthest reaches of the universe.

There's no why at question here.

Why's have to do with stuff that exists. Why won't my car start? The answer is found in a chain of causes and effects. 

But existence must always have existed. At least, this is the inescapable conclusion of a human consciousness. Maybe a different form of consciousness would see things differently.

We humans have no acquaintance with existence. All we understand are things that exist. (Arguably, existence doesn't actually exist, but it makes sense to speak as if it does.)

Each of those things comes and goes. Even the universe, which arose in a big bang, according to modern science, and may depart at some point, according to some theories.

However, existence stands apart from comings and goings.

If existence hadn't always existed, nothing could have arisen within existence. Positing a god doesn't help, since an eternal god is just another way of saying eternal existence. Anyway, there's no proof of any god, while there's plenty of evidence for existence.

Whenever I write about this, it doesn't take long for me to feel like words are a very poor substitute for the feeling that leads me to search for those words.

Which basically can be expressed as simply Wow. Though those three letters -- W...o...w -- don't capture the feeling either.

Here's some of the blog posts I've written that attempt to describe that Wow in a much greater number of words.

Grappling with the fact that existence has always existed
Wow. Existence has always existed.
Existence exists. Amazing!
"Existence exists" -- the cosmic lock to which humans have no key
Existence is the only unchanging thing. If it exists.
Robert Kuhn's nine levels of nothing: mind-blowing
The beauty of boundless existence
Boundless existence--the backdrop to life's meaning

Is a mechanism required for realizing Oneness?

Below I've shared a lengthy comment from "Appreciative Reader" that deserved to be made into a blog post. Why?

Because the comment is nicely thought out and well written.

It addresses an interesting question: whether someone's experience of Oneness just happened, and can't be described in a step-by-step fashion, or whether a mechanism that leads to an experience like this can be communicated to others.

I tend to agree with Appreciative Reader that in general, someone's spiritual realization is capable of being analyzed and critiqued to a significant degree.

As I've noted before, dreams are highly personal and unlike everyday experiences. Yet if I remember my dream, I can describe it to another person -- albeit with that description including language like "It was sort of like this" and "Hard to describe, but this is the best I can do." 

Of course, dreams aren't considered to be a reflection of a reality existing outside of the mind of the dreamer, while many, if not most, people view their spiritual experiences as reflecting something true about the world/universe/cosmos.

I'm assuming that an experience of Oneness is more like that, and less like a dream.

So while it doesn't make sense to challenge the veracity of a dream -- this is just what the brain does while we sleep -- it does make sense to question the nature of a spiritual experience, if the person who had the experience claims that it points to a truth about our shared reality.

As a final observation, I agree with Appreciative Reader that Oneness isn't what the Buddhist notion of emptiness is all about. Emptiness concerns the lack of a lasting essence or permanence in objects, including us.

The emptiness of existence is characterized by interdependence, interrelationships, dependent arising based on causes and conditions. Superficially this has to do with unity or oneness, but not in a deeper sense. 

Oneness implies a foundation to reality. Buddhism teaches that actually there is no such thing. Even emptiness is empty, not standing by itself as an independent metaphysical principle.

Here's what Appreciative Reader said in the comment. I've corrected a few typos and broken up some paragraphs to make them easier to read.

=========================================

Osho Robbins, I just read the seven posts you’ve addressed to me. Thanks for the detailed response.

I’ll compose this response to you in two parts. In the first part, I’ll touch on all of the points you raise, in those six posts of yours, in the order you’ve raised them ; but I’ll do that very briefly. I’ll number these out, and if you wish me to expand on any of these, then I’ll be happy to if you ask. And in the second part, I’ll concentrate on one specific part of your comment ; and I’ll do that at some length, because I think this might be crucial to our discussion, and will, or at least I hope it will, settle this might-there-or-might-there-not-be-a-specific-mechanism-for-Oneness issue once and for all.

------------------------------

(1) I’m afraid your Oneness is nothing at all like Nothingness, nor Buddha’s Emptiness. Do you remember, in our original discussion I’d clearly demonstrated exactly this to you, beyond all doubt, by quoting your own words back to you? I can do that here as well, if you want me to.

No, it isn’t, at all, a matter of semantics. Your Oneness, or Non-Duality, is very different from Nothingness, and no, it does not comport with the Buddha’s teachings.

(2) Your invoking the Buddha at that point was exactly and entirely a case of fallacious appeal to authority. We refer to Einstein or Newton as authorities when speaking of reality, because it is established that what they published, within their core field, is descriptive of reality.

That isn’t something we can say about the Buddha’s teachings, any more than we can say that about the Bible or the Quran. The only thing that the Buddha is a bona fide authority on, are his own teachings (just like the only thing that Tolkien is a bona fide authority on, is Middle Earth).

To invoke the Buddha’s words as an argument on actual reality is as fallacious as invoking LotR as an argument on actual reality : to do that you’d first have to show that what you’re referring does comport with reality in the first place.

(3) You’ve gone into great detail discussing your experiences. Despite not buying into the core arguments you present, nevertheless I do find your core experience fascinating, and your account of your broader experiences very appealing.

Please do not let my repeated refutation of such of your arguments as I find fallacious stand in the way of your sharing more of these, because I find them both enjoyable and instructive; and, like I’d said, in some odd way I find myself empathizing very closely.

(4) You’ve discussed at some length, across three posts, why you believe your Oneness is neither perception nor knowledge, and why asking for a mechanism is meaningless. I intend to focus on one particular example you’ve presented to illustrate your point, and address that particular example at some length ; and hopefully show you thereby, once and for all, what exactly I mean when I keep demanding that you discuss the mechanism of this knowledge, and why your claim that such demands are pointless is mistaken. I’ll do that in the next section of this post of mine.

(5) The video you’ve referenced, on the Multiverses, seems fascinating. (Watched a short portion of it for now.) As with the earlier one of Brian Greene’s that you’d linked, I’ve bookmarked it. Bears listening to, absolutely. One keeps putting these things off, time constraints I’m afraid, but thanks for posting the link. I’ll get to watching all of it when I can.

(6) You’ve asked me about the origin of thoughts, et cetera. That question is actually very much like that other question you’d asked me (Who am I?). Both questions are seemingly very deep, and people of earlier ages clearly had a blast faffing around with those questions, but modern neuroscience has very clearly and simply answered both questions.

The answer to the earlier question I’ve already given you. And the answer to the latter question is, apparently our thoughts arise in our brain before we even become aware of it. So that we are, in effect, no more than witnesses of our consciousness.

(Mind you, the above does not present you with a get-out-of-jail-free card. To answer the question you’d asked of Spence in a subsequent post : Even if, as it appears, the narrative we build around our actions and our lives is a post-facto construct, nevertheless that construct is still a fact, so that for all practical purposes that makes no difference.

Although sure, knowledge of this mechanism might nudge us to be more consequential in our evaluation rather than purely judgmental, but that’s about it, as far as what difference this makes.

You still need to produce the narrative explaining your thoughts and your actions, or else admit to ignorance of it. This last won’t help you in this particular discussion we’re having, because this is simply a broad outlay underlying all of our thoughts and actions, not just that particular realization of yours.)

---------------------------

And now, here’s the portion I wanted to focus on in some detail in this comment of mine.

In discussing why you think asking for a mechanism isn’t really applicable to your realization of Oneness / Non-duality, you present this example, that I’ll first quote here in full :

This is my answer. There is no mechanism because the thing you are asking about (How the oneness communicated) didn't happen.
It is like this:
Person A - sitting at home.
He does not realise he is at home.
He thinks he is somewhere else.
He now decides it is time to go home. He puts on his coat to leave the house to go home.
"where are you going?" asks his friend.
"I am going home" he replies.
His friend takes him outside the house.
"Take a good look: is that your house?
Look at the garden - it's your garden.
Look at the front door and the door number and the street name"
"Oh yes - you are right - I am already at home.
I was just mistaken for a while when I was sitting the settee" he says
He then re-enters his house and sits on the same settee.
Nothing has changed. He is sitting in the same place.
He has not gone anywhere.
His mistaken idea that he is not at home has been corrected,
He now KNOWS he is at home and does not seek to go home anymore.
What is the mechanism by which the home communicated to him that
this is his home? How does he know he is not mistaken again?
There has been no communication and no mechanism is needed.
He simply was mistaken when he thought he was not at home.
That mistake has been corrected and he can now see clearly that in fact he was ALWAYS at home.
He didn't go anywhere, and nothing has changed.
Only his mistaken notion (that he is far away from home) has been removed.
This is what it is like. ONENESS is already the case - always was and always will be. ONENESS did not suddenly happen. It always was. no mechanism is needed.”

In that example of yours, here’s how I’d describe the mechanism of how Person A, who had hitherto believed he was not at home, has now come to believe (or has come to know, if you prefer that latter word) that he is at home after all and in fact has been at home all along.

I think we can split up that process, or that mechanism if you will, into four distinct parts:

Step 1 : Person A, on being directed by friend, clearly sees his house and garden and neighborhood and door number and street name. Direct perception, if you will.

Step 2 : Person A then brings up the conception that he has of his own home.

(And what does that conception comprise of? We don’t know, in this case, because you haven’t detailed that. It’s probably his own memory, And it might, possibly, also include other ideas he’s gleaned about his home from other sources, including his friend’s words. If we are to study Person A’s identification of his present locale as his original home, then it becomes imperative that we do find out what exactly this conception of his own home comprises of, that is, how exactly he’s come by this conception.)

Step 3 : Person A then compares his direct perception of what he’s seen just now, with the conception that he has of his own home.

Step 4 : Having compared his immediate perception with his conception of his home, Person A then decides that his perception coincides with his conception of home (that is, his perception is either exactly identical to his conception, or else it is sufficiently close).

Therefore, he concludes that he is, indeed, sitting in his own home. As a result, he replaces his old belief (or old knowledge, if you will), that he’s NOT in his home, with this new belief (or new knowledge, if you will) that he IS, indeed, in his own home.

As you say, this is indeed a paradigm shift. That is, it is an outright overhauling of Person A’s worldview.

However, to say that no mechanism is applicable here is clearly entirely erroneous. There is a very definite mechanism at play here, that you yourself have not been aware of, because you hadn’t been watching out for it.

Now that I’ve clearly spelt this out, using your own detailed example that you yourself had presented to explain your POV, I hope you do understand what I’m asking for? I hope you now get what I mean by “mechanism”? And I hope you see how a demand that you clearly discuss that mechanism is entirely reasonable in a discussion on how Person A came to believe (or know, if you prefer the word “know”) he’s now at home?

And also, why I’m insisting that you discuss this mechanism also is probably obvious now. First, in order to clearly understand your POV — because any discussion of your Oneness is incomplete without a discussion of this mechanism, and because a clear understanding of your POV is simply impossible without a clear discussion of this mechanism.

And second, once you clearly describe that mechanism, then we can suss out to what degree we can rely on different portions of this mechanism. That is the only way to reasonably arrive at an opinion on how reliable is your realization.

(And forget me, even if I did not exist at all, even then I should think even for you this exercise would be essential, for you to clearly understand your Realization, and to then clearly evaluate if your Realization holds up to scrutiny. To simply gloss over those steps and to focus on the paradigm shift itself, while ignoring the underlying mechanism of that paradigm shift, and what is more to directly assume that that paradigm shift is bona fide, is clearly fallacious.)

(Mind you, I’m not saying here that your paradigm shift is fallacious. But I AM saying that your directly assuming that your paradigm shift is beyond examination, and your assuming without examination that it is bona fide, is what is fallacious. It is only after carrying out this examination, and this evaluation, that one can arrive at a reasonable conclusion as to whether that paradigm shift is bona fide or not. Because, as you can see, and as I can further elucidate at greater detail if you ask me to, each of those steps, in your particular example, can admit of error. Which is not to say there is necessarily any error there ; but absolutely, at every step there is the possibility of error.)

The point of clearly identifying this mechanism is twofold : first, it facilitates a clear understanding of your paradigm shift ; and second, it gives us a clear basis to evaluate how reliable is your paradigm shift.

I realize you might need to introspect, to go back to clearly recalling and visualizing that experience of yours, in order for you to clearly identify and to describe this mechanism of your realization of Oneness. Take your time, Osho Robbins. Identify the steps involved.

(Probably it will mirror the four steps that I myself identified in your example, but feel free to structure it out as you think might best capture the process.)

As and when you’re done with identifying this in your mind, and at such time as you’re comfortable doing this, let’s now, finally, have a clear description of the mechanism of your having arrived at your paradigm-shifting understanding of Oneness or Non-duality.

Be born again through science

Frank Wilczek, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004, has written a compelling book about the universe: Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

Here's a passage from his Afterword chapter that I like a lot. It is indeed strange that we make such a division between internal and external worlds, when in truth there is only one thing going on.

The child of our introduction, now an adult, may come to understand the fundamental conclusions that science, following its radically conservative method, reaches about the physical world. 

Then she is prepared to revisit the starting point of her adventure with reality, and to view it afresh, in the light of her knowledge. 

She can choose, in this sense, to be born again.

It is not a trouble-free choice. It is disruptive. But the choice is unavoidable, as a matter of integrity. You've seen in this book a small sampling of the evidence for the scientific fundamentals. That evidence is overwhelming and indisputable. 

To deny it is dishonest. To ignore it is foolish.

And so our heroine comes to reconsider the division of experience into internal and external worlds. The fundamentals of science have taught her a lot about what matter is. She knows that matter is built up from a few kinds of building blocks, whose properties and behavior we understand in detail.

And she knows, from direct experience, that scientists and engineers can use such knowledge to make impressive creations. 

Her iPhone allows her to communicate instantly with friends around the globe, to tap into humanity's accumulated knowledge at will, and, though pictures and recordings, to snatch her sensory world from time's devouring flow.

She has learned, too, that the special objects she recognizes as other people, and herself, are made from the same sort of matter as the rest of the world 

Many once-mysterious aspects of living things such as how they derive their energy (metabolism), how they reproduce (heredity), and how they sense their environment (perception), she can now understand from the bottom up.

For we now understand, in considerable detail, how molecules -- and ultimately, quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons -- manage to accomplish those feats. They are complicated things that matter can do, by following the laws of physics. No more, and no less.

These understandings do not subtract from the glory of life. Rather, they magnify the glory of matter. 

In light of all this, it is radically conservative to adopt what the great biologist Francis Crick has called "the astonishing hypothesis": that mind in all its aspects, is "no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

Indeed, this amounts to extending Newton's method of analysis and synthesis to brains. Experiments in neurobiology have been following that strategy aggressively.

And although our understanding of how minds work is still incomplete, so far, in thousands of sensitive experiments, the strategy has never failed. No one has ever stumbled upon a power of mind in biological organisms that is separate from conventional physical events in their bodies and brains.

Even in their most delicate experiments, physicists and biologists never had to make allowances fo what people nearby were thinking. By now, any failure of Crick's "astonishing hypothesis" would be astonishing. 

Upon that realization, the division of experience into internal and external worlds comes to seem superficial. For babies, that division is a useful discovery, and for adults, it is a convenient rule of thumb. But our best understanding suggests that there is just one world, after all.

Matter, deeply understood, has ample room for minds. And so, also, it can be home to the internal worlds that minds house. 

There is both majestic simplicity and strange beauty in this unified view of the world. Within it, we must consider ourselves not as unique objects ("souls"), outside of the physical world, but rather as coherent, dynamic patterns in matter. It is an unfamiliar perspective.

Were it not so strongly supported by the fundamentals of science, it would seem far-fetched. But it has the virtue of truth. And once embraced, it can come to seem liberating. Albert Einstein spoke to this, in a kind of credo:

A human being is a part of a whole, called the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us.

Radical embrace of reality

I like the sound of it: radical embrace of reality. 

I'm not entirely sure what those words mean to me. They just popped into my head recently, and I've given them a home in my cranium until they decide to pop out and head somewhere else.

As long as this notion is rumbling around in my mind, I figure I might as well try to describe why I find it so appealing. 

Reality is a close relative of truth. I admire both -- reality and truth. When I used to give talks to fellow devotees of the Eastern form of spirituality I was a member of for thirty-five years, "ultimate reality" was an oft-repeated concept.

Now I'm not so enamored of ultimate. It conjures up an image of something so far off, it's really hard to get there. 

Which isn't the case with reality. At least, not the everyday sort of reality that I'm speaking of in radical embrace of reality. I'm not talking about discovering the essence of quantum phenomena or how the big bang brought our universe into being.

The reality I want to embrace is right here, right now. 

It's the Zen sort of chop wood, carry water reality, minus any esoteric B.S. that often comes along with Zen teachings. I simply want to be in touch with what really is to the fullest extent possible. 

At my age, 72, might be, could be, and maybe, though fine ideas, aren't as appealing as the inescapable reality that I'm living moment to moment.

So if I want to radically embrace something, it's not a possibility around a bend in the road of life but the scenery clearly visible from my current vantage point.

Why, then, do I view this as a radical embrace of reality? What's radical about being aware of what's right in front of me?

In one sense, nothing. In another sense, everything. I speak this way as someone who has meditated every day for over fifty years.

No matter how I've meditated, and I've experimented with quite a few approaches, it's devilishly difficult to keep my focus on what is actually happening in the present moment, rather than what was or could be. 

Now that I've centered my meditation on mindfulness practices, I'm getting better at simply being aware of my breathing, the feeling of sitting in a chair, sounds of the washer or dryer in an adjoining laundry room.

However, I'm continually amazed -- yet not surprised -- at how my mind would prefer to recall the past or imagine the future instead of embracing the here-and-now present. 

Or... comment on how the present moment would be oh-so-much-better if ______ was happening rather than ______. (My mind is adept at filling in the blanks)

So it really is radical to want to embrace reality. 

We humans are highly skilled at weaving layers of mental coverings, such as beliefs and desires, that we toss over the reality in which we find ourselves because we think this will be more fulfilling than plain naked reality.

And often it seems like those coverings really do make us feel better about our circumstances.

I'm not saying that fantasies about what could have been or might be should be discarded from our psyche entirely. Life is difficult. Whatever makes it less difficult is hard for me to argue against. 

Yet in the end, reality always has the last word.

Why? Because our best efforts to deny reality are almost certainly going to fail at some point. We can disguise reality with the mental coverings we're so fond of placing over it, but eventually reality will burst out and yell, "I'm back! Did you miss me?"

I guess I like the idea of welcoming reality since it going to be my companion regardless.

Pushing it away may seem like a good idea, especially when reality appears in the form of pain, suffering, anxiety, worries, and all the other nasty stuff that life brings along in addition to the good stuff.

However, we can do our best to improve our situation, along with that of others, while also pursuing a radical embrace of reality. In fact, being clear-eyed about what is probably is the best foundation for fashioning a desired will be.

Wear your identity lightly if you value truth

This morning I finished reading Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, the subject of three previous posts (here, here, and here).

Her final chapters were great. Two had to do with how we sometimes hold on to beliefs so tightly, they become part of our identity. This is especially true of religious and political beliefs. Here's an excerpt  from the "How Beliefs Become Identities" chapter.

The problem with our tendency to turn beliefs into identities isn't that it pits us against each other. At least, that's not the problem I'm concerned with here. (Getting along with each other is important, too -- it's just outside the scope of this book.)

The problem with identity is that it wrecks your ability to think clearly. Identifying with a belief makes you feel like you have to be ready to defend it, which motivates you to focus your attention on collecting evidence in its favor. Identity makes you reflexively reject arguments that feel like attacks on you or the status of your group.

So the best thing to do is to hold our identity lightly.

Holding an identity lightly means thinking of it in a matter-of-fact way, rather than as a central source of pride and meaning in your life. It's a description, not a flag to be waved proudly.

...Holding an identity lightly means treating that identity as contingent, saying to yourself, "I'm a liberal, for as long as it continues to seem to me that liberalism is just." Or "I'm a feminist, but I would abandon the movement if for some reason I came to believe it was causing net harm."

It means maintaining a sense of your own beliefs and values, independent of the tribe's beliefs and values, and acknowledging -- at least in the privacy of your own head -- the places where those two things diverge.

Nicely said. 

But it can be difficult to let go of a religious or political identity that's been an important part of our life. I experienced this when, after 35 years of being an active member of an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), I realized that the RSSB teachings no longer made sense to me.

That realization wasn't a big blow to my identity because I valued truth more than my connections to RSSB. Thus I felt good about myself because I knew that the reason I left RSSB was that the teachings I'd followed for so long didn't strike me as being true any more.

This commitment to truth is the key to embracing a scout mindset aimed at knowing reality as it is rather than as we'd like it to be -- which leads to a soldier mindset aimed at defending our beliefs at all costs. Here's how Galef ends her "A Scout Identity" chapter.

I found the concluding anecdote very appealing.

Personally, I find all those facets of scout mindset inspiring -- the willingness to prioritize impact over identity; the confidence to be unconfident; the courage to face reality. 

But if I were to name one single facet I find most inspiring, it's the idea of being intellectually honorable: wanting the truth to win out, and putting that principle above your own ego.

The example of intellectual honor I find myself thinking about most often is a story related by Richard Dawkins from his years as a student in the geology department at Oxford. At the time, there was a major controversy in biology over a cellular structure called the Golgi apparatus -- was it real or an illusion created by our observational methods?

One day, a young visiting scholar from the United States came to the department and gave a talk in which he presented new and compelling evidence that the Golgi apparatus was, in fact, real. 

Sitting in the audience of that talk was one of Oxford's most respected zoologists, an elderly professor who was known for his position that the Golgi apparatus was illusory. So of course, throughout the talk, everyone was stealing glances at the professor, wondering: How's he taking this? What's he going to say?

At the end of the talk, the elderly Oxford professor rose from his seat, walked up to the front of the lecture hall, and reached out to shake hands with the visiting scholar, saying, "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years."

The lecture hall burst into applause.

Dawkins says, "The memory of this incident still brings a lump to my throat." It brings a lump to my throat, too, every time I retell that story. That's the kind of person I want to be -- and that's often enough to inspire me to choose scout mindset, even when the temptations of solider mindset are strong.

Update your beliefs often as new information comes in

Every morning I read another chapter of Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, the subject of two previous posts (here and here).

I really liked her "How to Be Wrong" chapter.

Along with most people, I don't enjoy finding out I was wrong about something. But it's a heck of a lot better than continuing on in my wrongness, which keeps me from learning a more complete truth about that thing.

Below you can read excerpts from that chapter.

They're in three sections, dealing with changing your mind frequently, the ease of saying "I was wrong," and viewing beliefs as needing updating rather than being proven wrong or right.

After each section I'll provide an example of how I changed from being a firm believer in an India-based religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), to becoming an open-minded atheist.

(1) Changing your mind frequently.
Changing your mind frequently, especially about important beliefs, might sound mentally and emotionally taxing. But, in a way, it's less stressful than the alternative.

If you see the world in binary black-and-white terms, then what happens when you encounter evidence against one of your beliefs? 

The stakes are high: you have to find a way to dismiss the evidence, because if you can't, your entire belief is in jeopardy.

If instead you see the world in shades of gray, and you think of "changing your mind" as an incremental shift, then the experience of encountering evidence against one of your beliefs is very different.

If you're 80% sure that immigration is good for the economy, and a study comes out showing that immigration lowers wages, you can adjust your confidence in your belief down to 70 percent.

It may later turn out that study was flawed, or further evidence may come out showing that immigration boosts the economy in other ways, and your confidence in your belief may go back up to 80 percent or even higher.

Or you may find additional evidence about the downsides of immigration, which could gradually lower your confidence even further below 70 percent. Either way, each adjustment is comparatively low stakes.

This is pretty much how I gradually came to have increasing doubts about whether the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas were true.

I always had taken a scientific approach to meditation and spirituality. I liked how RSSB also was termed the "science of the soul." So I never considered that this religion was absolutely, positively, 100% true because scientific truths always are open to being modified or proven wrong.

I viewed the RSSB teachings as a hypothesis, an experiment to be conducted within the laboratory of my consciousness. As years, and then decades, went by, I revised my estimate of how likely it was that the RSSB teachings were true.

Because I hadn't started at 100%, but more like 90%, it felt comfortable to reduce that probability downward as I learned more and more about RSSB and had meditation experiences that failed to confirm the science of the soul hypothesis. 

(2) The ease of saying "I was wrong."
A friend of mine named Andrew was surprised when one of his colleagues accused him of never admitting he was wrong. In response, Andrew pointed out two recent occasions on which he had been wrong and readily acknowledged it -- in the company of that very same colleague.

The colleague, whom I'll call Mark, was surprised in turn. He replied, "I guess that's right. Why did I have the opposite impression?" Mark was silent for a minute, reflecting.

Then he said, "You know... I think it's because you never seem embarrassed about it. You're so matter-of-fact, it almost doesn't register to me that you're admitting you were wrong."

It's true. I've seen Andrew acknowledge he was wrong many times, and it usually sounds something like this: "Ah, yup, you're correct. Scratch what I said earlier. I don't believe it anymore." It's cheerful, straightforward, nonchalant.

Mark's implicit assumption was that changing your mind is humbling. That saying "I was wrong" is equivalent to saying "I screwed up" -- something you confess with contrition or sheepishness. Indeed, that's the standard way of thinking about being wrong.

...Scouts reject that premise. You've learned new information and come to a new conclusion, but that doesn't mean you were wrong to believe differently in the past.

I can't say that my shift from embracing RSSB teachings to viewing them as likely being wrong went as smoothly as Andrew's nonchalant manner of acknowledging being wrong.

However, I've never viewed this change as being anything to be ashamed or regretful about. As I've pointed out on this blog many times since I started it in 2004, I've experienced many other shifts in my beliefs.

To offer an example, for eighteen years I was married to a woman who I loved a lot at first, and then not so much. After our divorce, I remarried. Now I've been married for thirty-one years to a woman I loved soon after I met her, and continue to love now.

Similarly, I worked as a health services researcher and planner for quite a few years. Then I realized that I just didn't care anymore about the field that once was so important to me, and moved in a different direction.

Changing our beliefs isn't always easy. But it's less difficult if we hold on to those beliefs lightly enough that we aren't devastated when our beliefs change.

(3) Updating beliefs.
Even the language scouts use to describe being wrong reflects this attitude. Instead of "admitting a mistake" scouts will sometimes talk about "updating." 

That's a reference to Bayesian updating, a technical term from probability theory for the correct way to revise a probability after learning new information.

The way people use the word updating colloquially isn't nearly so precise, but it still gestures at the spirit of revising one's beliefs in response to new evidence and arguments.

...If you at least start to think in terms of "updating" instead of "admitting you were wrong," you may find that it takes a lot of friction out of the process.

An update is routine. Low-key. It's the opposite of an overwrought  confession of sin. An update makes something better or more current without implying that its previous form was a failure. 

This is a nice way of looking upon mistakes. Rather than thinking "I was wrong," we can say to ourselves "I've updated how I look upon this."

Over the years I've been asked by many RSSB devotees how I could possibly have been so wrong about the religion that meant so much to me for such a long tine. I don't understand this perspective.

As noted above, it wasn't that I went from 100% certainty to 100% doubt. I started at maybe 90% certainty that the RSSB teachings were true and steadily updated that probability, mostly downward. So I feel no need to admit "I was wrong" because I never considered myself to be absolutely right.

My iPhone has lots of apps. Almost every day one or more of them get an update. I don't view the maker of the app as having screwed-up when they release an update. Rather, I appreciate that now the app should work better than before.

In much the same way, every day I learn something. I assume this is true for you also. My wife and I enjoy our Apple TV device. We stream a show with it most evenings. 

Until today I was pleased with the device, which I bought five or so years ago, can't remember exactly when. Then I read a review of the updated Apple TV device with an improved remote.

That made me better realize the drawbacks of the device we have now. So this afternoon I ordered the new Apple TV.

I wasn't wrong to have bought the one we have now. I just updated my belief about how good that one was.

You have options. In religions. In everything else.

I'm continuing to enjoy my reading of Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, the subject of my previous post. 

Her core idea is that motivated reasoning, where we ignore what's true because our motivation is to preserve our current belief structure, leads to a soldier mindset aimed at defending our beliefs from that unwelcome intruder, reality. 

By contrast, a scout mindset values truth-seeking through accuracy motivated reasoning. Our goal is know what is really there, not what we hope is there, what we'd like to be there, or what others want us to believe is there.

One of the appealing things about a scout mindset is how it provides us with way more options than a defensive, protect-my-beliefs at all costs soldier mindset. 

In her "Why Truth is More Valuable Than We Realize" chapter, Galef speaks of tradeoffs.

We trade off between judgement and belonging. If you live in a tight-knit community, it might be easier to fit in if you use soldier mindset to fight off any doubts you have about your community's core beliefs and values.

On the other hand, if you do allow yourself to entertain those doubts, you might realize you're better off rejecting your community's views on morality, religion, or gender roles, and deciding to live a less traditional life.

Easy to say. Often not so easy to do. 

I regularly get emails from people who are encountering resistance from their family when they express doubts about the religion they were brought up in.

For example, the organization I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a guru-centered religious group headquartered in India. Traditional Indian families tend to be close-knit and hierarchical.

If a child decides to head off in a different religious direction after becoming an adult, they can be made to feel guilty, like they're doing something wrong and letting down their parents. 

This is unfortunate.

Family bonds are important, but not if it means someone has to live a lie, pretending to believe in something that no longer appeals to them. Wise loving parents understand that their children, along with everyone else, have to find their own way in life.

Feeling like you have no options is an indication that you've fallen into a soldier mindset dominated by motivated reasoning.

It's difficult to imagine doing something different when you're encased behind a high thick wall of firmly held beliefs. Questioning their validity would entail peering over that wall and trying to determine how true those beliefs really are.

If they're found to be deficient in truth, you might need to find a way to get over the wall of your beliefs and explore new territory that reflects reality more fully. 

There's no reason why you can't remain close to family and friends who choose to remain within the belief structure you've left behind. But sometimes there's a price to be paid for being independent: ostracism, criticism, shunning.

Everybody has to decide whether truth is more important than getting along.

But the way I see it, if someone is willing to ditch you for going your own way, they were never really your friend. Genuine friendships, genuine family relationships -- they're based on something much deeper than shallow beliefs. 

Notably, love. 

Embrace the Scout mindset, not the Soldier mindset

My new favorite book -- the latest in a countless (almost) series of favorites -- is Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't.

Galef's key concept is the distinction between a Solider and Scout mindset. This chart shows basic differences between them.

In an initial chapter, Galef talks about motivated reasoning, the basis for a Soldier mindset.

The tricky thing about motivated reasoning is that even though it's easy to spot in other people, it doesn't feel like motivated reasoning from the inside. When we reason, it feels like we're being objective. Fair-minded. Dispassionately evaluating the facts.

Beneath the surface of our conscious awareness, however, it's as if we're soldiers, defending our beliefs against threatening evidence. 

In fact, the metaphor of of reasoning as a kind of defensive combat is baked right into the English language, so much so that it's difficult to speak about reasoning at all without using militaristic language.

We talk about our beliefs as if they're military positions, or even fortresses, built to resist attack. Beliefs can be deep-rooted, well-grounded, built on fact, and backed up by arguments. They rest on solid foundations. 

We might hold a firm conviction or a strong opinion, be secure in our beliefs or have unshakeable faith in something. 

Arguments are either forms of attack or forms of defense. If we're not careful, someone might poke holes in our logic or shoot down our ideas. We might encounter a knock-down argument against something we believe.

...And if we do change our minds? That's surrender. If a fact is inescapable, we might admit, grant, or allow it, as if we're letting it inside our walls. 

If we realize our position is indefensible, we might abandon it, give it up, or concede a point, as if we're ceding ground in a battle.

The Scout mindset is much more appealing to those who value truth.

If directionally motivated reasoning is like being a soldier fighting off threatening evidence, accuracy motivated reasoning is like being a scout forming a map of the strategic landscape. 

What's beyond that next hill? Is that a bridge over the river or are my eyes deceiving me? Where are the dangers, the shortcuts, the opportunities? What areas do I need more information about? How reliable is my intel?

The scout isn't indifferent. A scout might hope to learn that the path is safe, that the other side is weak, or that there's a bridge conveniently located where his forces need to cross the river.

But above all, he wants to learn what's really there, not fool himself into drawing a bridge on his map where there isn't one in real life. Being in scout mindset means wanting your "map" -- your perception of yourself and the world -- to be as accurate as possible.

Of course, all maps are imperfect simplifications of reality, as a scout well knows. Striving for an accurate map means being aware of the limits of your understanding, keeping track of the regions of your map that are especially sketchy or possibly wrong.

And it means always being open to changing your mind in response to new information. In scout mindset, there's no such thing as a "threat" to your beliefs. 

If you find out you were wrong about something, great -- you've improved your map, and that can only help you.

Obviously we here at the Church of the Churchless (OK, me, since I'm the only one writing this) favor the Scout mindset.

Changing your mind about religion or spirituality is a great thing to do. Being skeptical of beliefs lacking demonstrable evidence is the way to go. Choosing the solitary way of truth over communal falsehoods is what should be done.

Here's a video of Julia Galef delivering a TEDx talk on this subject. 

Have faith in the mystery of what we don't know

Today Spence Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog who, pleasingly, uses his real name when commenting, left a marvelous comment on a recent post of mine. 

You can read it below. 

What Tepper said reminds me a lot of what Alan Watts wrote about faith in one of my favorite books, The Wisdom of Insecurity. 

Here's part of the Watts quotation from that book that I included in a 2008 post, "Real and false faith."

We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use it here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be.

The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.

Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Tepper isn't Watts, obviously. But his attitude toward faith is very much in line with what Watts said above. 

Enjoy. I corrected one apparent typo and broke up some paragraphs for easier reading.

Belief and faith rest on qualities of personality. They do not depend upon proof. If you prove anything, there is no need of faith. Your proof ends the necessity, and possibly the romance of faith.

But it also ends the grounds for opinion.

Both faith and opinion thrive in the absence of information. They are the ways in which the human brain tries to bridge the gaps to create a clear picture.

Just as the brain fills in the blind spots in your visual field as best it can, just as it turns the image on your retina upside down, and takes curved lines and makes them straight before you see them, so too the brain fills in gaps of knowledge with its best guess and presents them to you as ideas that pop into your head.

It's a healthy process if you are going to test those ideas, and a harmful process if you are not.

The kinds of things your brain comes up with as explanations for what it doesn't know are opinion. And faith is largely in your own opinion.

But there is another kind of faith. Faith in the mystery of what we don't know.

Not faith in your version of God, science, or politics, or your certainty of a leader's strength or corruption on the basis of limited information, or their own claims, or even faith in your opinions about what is going on, or even your faith in someone else's opinion.

Because that isn't actually faith. It's just opinion.

And opinion is not only a poor substitute for Truth, it gets in the way of seeing Truth. And then we can confuse opinion for Truth. And that makes letting go of a favored opinion difficult when facts prove otherwise. Then we just reject the facts as someone else's opinion.

Real Faith is not knowing. It's loving confidently in that place where we know we don't know everything.

And what we experience, we understand is just from our point in space. Faith that new information is actually there but we don't see it yet. Living that way, because it is the truth. Faith that the invisible truth yet to be discovered is greater than any opinion.

Faith enough in what is there that you don't know, to give up opinion and say, confidently, honestly, "I don't know, and I don't think having an opinion about something I haven't experienced, something I have no actual knowledge of, is of any help in learning about that, in finding what I don't yet know."

Real Faith is no faith if it is faith in a preconceived opinion.

Faith is valuing the unknown Truth higher than any opinion, with the maturity to know from experience the dangers of holding onto opinion.

If there is a God, they would like you to put aside your opinions as a first step to seeing them. Even about God. And when you see them, you won't say "I see God", because that is just your label, your opinion, for what you are seeing.

You will just enjoy seeing what you are seeing. That's a higher value than trying to fill in the gaps of what can never be known, but fully experienced. The cost? Faith in your opinion.

     -- Spence Tepper