Church of the Churchless

"The Atheist's Guide to Reality" -- a mind blowing book

I like books that take some of my cherished assumptions about how the world works and chew them up into tiny pieces before putting them in a Truth Blender where they're dissolved into unrecognizable thought-mush.

"The Atheist's Guide to Reality" by Alex Rosenberg is such a book. After reading it four years ago (I blogged about it here, here, and here) I've finished re-reading the second half of the book. 

And, yes, once again it has blown my mind. But in a different way from the first time, because I'm a different person now. 

Being a habitual highlighter and back-of-book note writer, I've found that what struck me the most about Rosenberg's ideas back in 2011 often isn't what hits me hardest now, in 2016. 

Basically, I'm finding that Rosenberg is the most radical writer about science and atheism I've ever encountered. He takes no prisoners when it comes to debunking myths about how the mind/brain works, whether these are tales told by religion, philosophy, or the humanities.

(Rosenberg is the Chair of the Philosophy Department at Duke University, so he's a heavy hitter.)

Below are some excerpts from a final chapter. This will give you a feel for the thesis of "The Atheist's Guide to Reality," though only that... a feel. It really takes reading the entire book to understand the subtleties of what Rosenberg is arguing for.

Which isn't so much complicated as, like I said, mind blowing. 

I need to point out that how Rosenberg uses scientism is very different from the usual definition of the word. Here's how I described this in my first post about the book.

Standing in Powell's Books, thumbing through "The Atheist's Guide to Reality," what made me decide to buy the book was a positive mention of scientism that I came across in the first chapter. 

Almost always this word is used in a perjorative manner. Meaning, scientism is considered a viewpoint that fails to recognize the legitimate limits of scientific inquiry, a reductionist philosophy which ignores aspects of reality beyond the bounds of science.

Appealingly, Rosenberg proudly appropriates this word. He stands tall for scientism, and a scientistic outlook on life. 

But we'll call the worldview that all us atheists (and even some agnostics) share "scientism." This is the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable way to secure knowledge of anything; that science's description of the world is correct in its fundamentals; and that when "complete" what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today.

We'll often use the adjective "scientistic" in referring to the approaches, theories, methods, and descriptions of the nature of reality that all the sciences share. Science provides all the significant truths about reality, and knowing such truths is what real understanding is all about.

You may not agree with Rosenberg. But if you read his book, I guarantee that he will make you think. He will challenge your assumptions about how the world, and you, are. I'm getting mini-revelations on almost every page. 

Here's the passages from a final chapter.

Fatalism is very different from determinism. Fatalism tells us that no matter what happens, the outcome is unavoidable. It claims that no matter what route life takes you down, all roads lead to the same place. Determinism is quite a different matter.

If the universe is deterministic, then where you end up depends on where you start out (plus the laws of nature). Start at different points, and almost every time you will pass through altogether different places and come to a different end.

Determinism does not dictate that you'll end up in the same place at all. 

Of course, we are all going to die. The difference between fatalism and determinism is this: If fatalism is right, you'll die of the same thing no matter what you do. If determinism is right, how you die, what you die of, depends on what you did in life. 

(Did you smoke, overeat, wear your seat belt?) That's a big difference. Some deaths are worse than others. Which we experience will be determined, but not fated.

...Everything that happens in your life is determined. That doesn't mean that reading this book can't make a difference to your happiness, well-being, or adjustment to reality. That you bought, borrowed, or otherwise acquired this book was determined. So was its effect on you, if any.

If your brain is organized in roughly the same way mine is, there are neural circuits that have produced disquiet in you, along with the illusion of thoughts about the persistent questions. 

Reading this book has rearranged a large number of neural circuits in your brain (though only a very small proportion of the millions of such circuits in your brain). If those rearranged neural circuits change their outputs in certain ways when triggered by inputs seeming to pose the daunting questions, then this book will have worked.

The process will be the same one psychotherapy employs when it works. It will have changed your neural circuitry, unconscious and conscious. You will acquire the correct information about the matters that keep you up at night. You will almost certainly undergo the conscious illusion of thinking about these questions in a new way, as finally having been answered.

Don't take narratives too seriously. That is the most obvious moral of our tour through science's version of reality. By now you can see why this advice is important and also hard to follow.

After all, the human brain has been shaped by millions of years of natural and cultural selection to be addicted to stories. They are almost the only things that give most of us relief from the feeling of curiosity. 

Scientism has nothing against stories. It just refuses to be an enabler. Stories are fun, but they're no substitute for knowledge. In fact, the insistence on packaging information into narratives is an obstacle to understanding how things really work.

Scientific findings, along with the models, laws, and theories that explain them, can't be squeezed into the procrustean bed of a good detective story, or any other kind of story for that matter. 

...This advice goes double for anyone trying to sell you on religion. But if you have read this far, you don't need to be warned off stories with spooky plots that always end well for the good guys and badly for the bad guys.

Religion and some of those who make their living from it succeed mainly because some of us are even more given to conspiracy theories than others. But none of us is entirely immune.

We need continually to fight the temptation to think that we can learn much of anything from someone else's story of how they beat an addiction, kept to a diet, improved their marriage, raised their kids, saved for their retirement, or made a fortune flipping real estate.

Even if their story is what actually happened, the storytellers are wrong about the real causes of how and why it happened. Learning their story won't help you figure out the real causal process from rags to riches, from misery to happiness.

...Once you adopt scientism, you'll be able to put lots of the strife and controversies about politics into perspective. You will also be able to cease taking seriously aesthetic and ethical judgments that offend you.

When it comes to politics, you will be able to sidestep disagreements in which other people try to force you to choose just by pointing out that the dispute is at least in part a factual one, and the facts are not in. You will be able to undercut some arguments just by pointing out that they make assumptions about reality that science has already shown to be false -- for example, that humans have souls or that there is free will or that most people are selfish.

...We can organize our own lives in the absence of real purpose and planning. We do so by reorganizing the neural circuitry that produces these very illusions of design and forethought. 

Neuroscientist David Eagleman: the brain creates our reality

Somehow my wife and I missed most of the original showing of the 6-part PBS series, "The Brain - With David Eagleman." We saw the final episode, and wanted to catch up on the rest.

So last night we streamed What is Reality?, the first episode. It's available on iTunes and Amazon Prime, with clips on the PBS web site. Here's one of the clips:

Really interesting.

The basic neuroscientific message of this episode is that reality doesn't directly stream into consciousness through our senses, or by any other means. Instead, the brain does all sorts of processing of raw sensual data (photons, sound waves, scent molecules, etc.) before it reaches awareness.

So this supports a point I make frequently on this blog: there is no such thing as "reality as it is."

Sure, this phrase, and others like it, often is found in Buddhist and nondual writings, along with other spiritual, mystical, and meditation literature.

It doesn't have any foundation in fact, though. Eagleman shows quite a few experimental examples of how the brain selectively makes sense of the world by comparing incoming information with previous experiences.  

This explains why we don't see a mysterious shape supported by round thingies. We see a car. The brain's processing of sense data occurs automatically, so usually it goes unnoticed. But Eagleman describes what happened when a man who became blind when he was three years old was able to see again late in life.

His eyes functioned perfectly, but he hasn't been able to see normally. One reason is that parts of his brain devoted to vision were converted to areas that process touch, sound, and other senses during his lengthy blindness.

Even for those of us with normal sensory inputs from birth, it doesn't matter how mindful or attentive we are to the world. We humans, along with every other sentient being, only are aware of a small fraction of reality.

And like I said, the portion we are conscious of gets heavily interpreted by the brain before we're aware of it. I recall Eagleman saying that more information flows from the cortex to a sensory area (thalamus, I believe) than the other way around.

Meaning, our awareness of reality is more dependent on previous experiences, than on what is being perceived by the senses here and now. The brain, Eagleman said, is continually updating its understanding of reality by processing mismatches between past and current experiences.

Another fascinating part of the What is Reality? episode was a description of what happened to a man imprisoned in Alcatraz who was put in a sensory deprivation "hole" part of the prison as a punishment. He was there for about three weeks, I recall.

No light. No sound. No contact with other people. 

Soon he was seeing things. His brain, Eagleman explained, dealt with the lack of sense data coming in from outside by producing it from the inside. 

And it wasn't just that he hallucinated sights and sounds. Rather, the man said, he began to experience a whole other reality. He was immersed in this new world, not just experiencing hallucinations in his jail cell. 

Or, rather, he was, but the prisoner wasn't aware of this.

Just as a dream seems real while we're sleeping, the man entered another reality of his brain's own making during much of the time he was in the "hole." This reminded me of stories about mystics who spend months or years meditating in a dark room, cave, or wherever.

Given Eagleman's explanation of what the brain does when it is deprived of sensory input, it sure seems very possible, if not likely, that when these mystics describe other realms of reality that they supposedly entered, the "realms" actually were produced by processes within their own brains.

This hypothesis is supported by the fact that no one who claims to have experienced some sort of ethereal "heaven" has come back with verifiable knowledge of some previously unknown fact about our reality -- or any other evidence that what they experienced was objectively, rather than subjectively, real.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing the other episodes of the PBS series that we missed. I've also ordered a copy of David Eagleman's companion book, "The Brain: The Story of You."

On a bike ride, I embrace natural reality and ignore a manmade rule

Philosophically-inclined guy that I am, I can find profound meanings in just about any everyday experience.

Today I rode my Streetstrider outdoor elliptical bike at Salem's Minto Brown Island Park during a (partial) break in the heavy rains that have been hitting the Pacific Northwest all week. 

I'm a big believer in the adage I expressed in a 2009 blog post, "There are no rules (including this one)."

Now, there are no rules points back at itself. Meaning, there are no rules. Unless you want to follow a rule. Feel free. There's no rule that says "never follow a rule."

We all do this: follow rules. Life would be unlivable without them. 

How could I turn on my TV if I didn't press the right button on the remote control? The important thing is to remember that rules are made to be broken when they need to be.

I saw this sign only after I'd already broken the implied rule -- having ridden my bike down the trail from the other direction, where I'm pretty sure there wasn't any Trail Closed Ahead sign posted.

Which shows the difference between natural reality and manmade rules. Because the trail wasn't closed. Not physically. Just in the mind of whoever, with the best of intentions, put up the sign.

Which did make quite a bit of sense for most people. Because the wooden bridge across a low area in the park was indeed flooded. Several inches of water covered the boards. 

However, when I rode down the slope from the other direction and saw the water, I made a quick decision: Ride through it, dude! (At my age, I like to call myself "dude"; it makes me feel younger.)

Standing on my trusty Streetstrider -- no seat on an elliptical bike -- my feet are quite a ways off the ground. The rest of me, even more. My wallet and iPhone etc. were drily packed away in the yellow waterproof pack. 

So what the heck, I thought. What's the worse that could happen?

I get stuck halfway across and have to push my bike the rest of the way. My feet get wet. I can survive that. I didn't want to reverse course and ride back the way I'd come.

Try something new! I'd never ridden the StreetStrider through standing water this deep. 

Upon reaching the other side, I felt good. Which is how I always feel when I ride my bike at the park.

After using the elliptical machines for many years at the nearby Courthouse Athletic Club on River Road, I now hate to do my aerobic exercising indoors. 

Today, like every day at Minto Brown Island Park, I encountered nature doing its natural thing: wind, rain, sun, rain-and-sun, a rainbow. Branches had fallen on the trails. Pools of water had accumulated. Per usual, it felt like whichever direction I was riding, a strong wind was pushing at me as I pedaled.

In other words, I was in a secular heaven.

Natural reality, mostly, intermixed with the asphalt trails and wooden bridges that made it possible for me to bike along through the park. 

Unless the weather is really bad, I much prefer exercising, even while cold and wet, in what I view as The Real World, rather than being warm and dry inside. I amend the fishing saying to "The worst day riding my bike in nature is better than the best day on an elliptical machine in an athletic club."

I love how nature just does what it does, uncaring of what I prefer. At Minto Brown I have to flow what with nature gives me -- heat, cold, rain, wind, whatever.  

I've got a bunch of stuff in the backseat of my car that lets me adjust to conditions.

Heavy and light jackets. Waterproof gear. Hats for all seasons. Several types of gloves. There's something deeply satisfying -- in this age of human domination over our planet -- to fully embrace what nature produces on any particular day. 

Sure, I still get irritated when I was expecting dry, and cold rain starts hitting me in the face as I ride. But it doesn't take along for me to realize that what I want natural reality to be has exactly zero effect on what it actually is. 

Similarly, I've learned that a manmade sign saying "Trail Closed Ahead - Flooding" may or may not comport with reality. It only may be closed to people on foot who don't want to get their feet wet. Or the sign may have been left up even though water has receded.

Again, natural reality is what it is. Human ideas about this reality may be right, or they may be wrong.

Experimentation, testing, observation, experience -- getting out on a park trail and seeing for myself what is there -- that's the best way to know what nature has wrought.

We have so many ideas... about so many things.

I love ideas, just as I love nature.

But there's a time and place for thinking about what is real, and there's a time and place for experiencing what is real. Riding my StreetStrider at Minto Brown Island Park reminds me of the difference between the two, thinking and experiencing. 

I can read a sign and think, "The trail is closed," when it actually isn't.

Conversely, I don't remember seeing a sign before I encountered this flooding on the south side of the dog park.

Yeah, I realized, this trail is really closed. Ducks could use it. Walkers could probably hike around it. But me and my elliptical bike weren't going to get through the water. 

So I turned around, rode to a bark path leading to the dog park, and walked my bike to an unflooded trail. Natural reality. You've got to go along with it. 

Human rules, not so much. Only when they make sense. 

Does Santa Claus exist? Depends on the nature of belief.

With Christmas coming in a few weeks, it seemed just the right time to read a book by Eric Kaplan called "Does Santa Exist? A Philosophical Investigation."

Now, I'm not quite done with the book, and I also don't want to give away what I suspect Kaplan's ending will be. So I'll focus on the existence of Santa Claus in another post.

Here I'll zero in on a thought-provoking thought experiment about beliefs and reality that Kaplan throws out in the introductory chapter. It's a good example of what I like most about the book: a pleasing blend of quirky humor and pretty darn sophisticated philosophizing. 

Which isn't surprising, since Kaplan had five years of philosophy graduate school at Columbia and UC Berkeley. He's becoming a bit irritating with his emphasis on Kabbalah near the end of the book, but I'm hoping he'll bounce back from this semi-religious detour in the final chapters.

Anyway, here's the thought experiment.

Imagine a field so big we can play the biggest game of red rover in history in it. Imagine we could open up our skull and have all the beliefs get out and stand on one side of the field, holding arms. On the other side of the field stand all the things. One by one, the beliefs call out what they are all about.

When the belief in Africa calls out his name, "I'm a belief in Africa!" the actual object -- Africa -- raises its hand, and they go off to a side field labeled TRUE BELIEFS. "Bees! I'm a belief in bees!" "Great! We are bees!" And they go off together. "I'm a belief in the planet Neptune!" "I am the planet Neptune! Let's get a drink!" And off they would go paired up.

At the end of the day, a few beliefs would be left standing on their side of the field. They raise their hands: "I'm a belief in the lost continent of Atlantis!" And nothing answers on the other side. There is no lost continent of Atlantis. "I'm a belief in pixies!" No answer. There are no pixies. "I'm a belief in Santa Claus!" No answer because there is no Santa Claus. The belief in Santa Claus is wrong because there is no Santa Claus to correspond to it.

When I got this far in Kaplan's description of the thought experiment, I almost thought that the book had reached a conclusion.

That didn't make much sense, of course, since I was on page 11 of a 255 page book. And an almost-professional philosopher like Kaplan (he also is a comedy writer) isn't going to come to a conclusion on such an important question as "Does Santa Exist?" so quickly.

But I'll admit that the notion of beliefs calling out and not getting a response from the things that actually exist appealed to me. This fit with my basic world view, as cogently summarized in one of my favorite quotations. It was written by Philip K. Dick.

        Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

In Kaplan's thought experiment, a belief without an actual thing corresponding to it ends up lonely. The thing indeed goes away when called by the belief.

Well, more accurately the thing can't go away, because it doesn't exist. The belief just stands there by itself, not getting an answer from the thing because reality doesn't contain the actuality of the thing -- just the belief in it.

Kaplan went on, though, making me realize that beliefs and things aren't related in a simplistic fashion.

The first problem is that our beliefs don't separate themselves into little bits. How would we count beliefs? Is my belief that Africa exists a super-belief made up of beliefs in all the people, countries, and animals that I believe are in Africa?

Or is it part of a larger belief that the world is divided into land masses? Or a still larger belief that there are such things as physical objects of which Africa is an instance? All and none.

My beliefs form a web or, better yet, a world. If anything corresponds to anything, it is the assemblage of beliefs, all linking arms, who correspond to the whole assemblage of facts, all linking arms. My mind corresponds to the world as a whole.

OK, a bit of pondering led me to believe that this take on beliefs made sense. The human mind does indeed operate with a world view, not a view of isolated individual things. I've read lots of neuroscience books, and they all say this in one way or another. 

Our previous experiences, memories, thoughts, emotions, and such influence how we perceive reality in the present moment. We try to fit new things into our understanding of old things. If this wasn't the case, we wouldn't have cognitive dissonance, described by Wikipedia as:

The mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas or values, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

For example, I believe in human-caused global warming.

But my belief in this is connected to many other beliefs, such as the efficacy of science, the accuracy of historical accounts of industrialization, basic principles of chemistry and physics, and so on.

If in Kaplan's thought experiment, a belief called out "Global warming! I'm a belief in global warming!" and got no answer from an actual thing, this would call into question a lot more than just the reality of global warming. A whole world view would be on shaky philosophical ground.

(Fortunately for science-minded folks like me, there is very little chance of this happening.)

Here's the final part of the thought experiment.

But there's a much more serious problem. When we imagine playing our game, we imagine that we ourselves are standing in the field somehow adjudicating the game. We are looking at the beliefs on one side and the things on the other. 

But when we look at a thing and see it, that is just another way of saying we believe that that thing exists. There is no way to step outside ourselves and examine the world and our beliefs from the side.

Consider this classic sketch that illustrates epistemology: [picture of a man with an apple inside his head looking at an outside apple] 

What is inside that head that looks like an apple? It's just a bunch of atoms, or if you prefer, neurons and glial cells, or if you prefer, an organ consisting of a prefrontal cortex, a cerebellum, the periaqueductal gray, the hippocampus, and so forth; but there is nothing in there that looks like an apple.

And when can we stand where the picture invites us to stand -- looking at the belief and the apple from the side? Never. We have to be within our beliefs, developing them.

We can't examine apples and beliefs separately and figure out if the beliefs match the apples, because the beliefs and the apples are part of a single phenomenon. They evolve together, much as flowers and bees' eyes do.

Yes, I was on board with this perspective also. After all, I'd written this in a 2014 post, "In a God's eye view, who does the seeing?"

I've heard the term, "God's eye view," before. But I haven't given it much thought. Maybe it was because I believed in God for so many years.

I never questioned the notion that there could be a way of looking upon reality that was godlike. After all, even scientists -- not just religious believers -- assume the cosmos can be viewed from some sort of detached objective transcendent perspective.

This is the way things are. 

OK. But says who? And where is that entity?

If inside the cosmos (which I define as everything that exists), then this being with a supposed God's eye view isn't seeing everything, since it is within everything. It is a part of reality, of existence, of the cosmos.

Thus this being not only can't see itself, it has its own perspective. It is situated within some aspect of the cosmos. For us this means time and space. Or more accurately, the space-time continuum.

This isn't nowhere. It is somewhere. 

When we imagine God being aware of everything, what does the vision consist of? For me, I either picture myself looking through God's consciousness (a fantasy, for sure) or see God as if from the outside, gazing upon everything (another fantasy).

In the latter case, I'm definitely taking a God's eye view of God.

Yet also in the first case, more subtly. Because I am picturing myself looking through God's consciousness, which is a perspective on God's perspective.

The Big Question is whether a God's eye view makes any sense.

Can any being really understand reality as it is -- detachedly objectified -- or is reality always a matter of subjective perspective?

Well, I'd answer my own question this way: it's a bit of both.

We can never detach ourselves from reality and view it as an object. There always is a strong element of subjectivity in our perspective. However, even though objectivity and subjectivity are inextricably linked, this object/subject mashup ranges from highly-subjective (dreams) to highly-objective (physics). 

It'll be interesting to see how Kaplan looks at the question, Does Santa Exist?, in his book's final chapters. Like I said, his excursion into Jewish mysticism seems like a detour to me. But it could very well be an essential foundation to his final philosophical conclusions.

Which I'll relate in a follow-up post.

Asked to say something about love, I'm pretty much speechless

Yesterday I got an email message:

Dear Mr. Hines ,

Your blog is very honest and nothing is more beautiful save love itself. Please tell us more about self-less and mutual love  and your views on the subject.

Sincerely, __________

Reading those words, I realized that I haven't written much explicitly about love during the eleven years this blog has existed.

This will be post # 2,140. When I used the search box in the right sidebar to see what popped up when I put in "love," almost all of the Google results for my two blogs were on my more personal and political HinesSight blog.

I've written about loving my iPhone, a Salem outdoor store, taxes, the "24" TV show, and other things. On this churchless blog, the most relevant post seemed to be "I'd love my self if I had one."

Which started out...

Proving, or not, that profound insights are found in the strangest places, I'll share some of the lyrics to an atonal song that I made up and love to "sing" (using that word in its absolutely loosest sense) in the shower.

I love my dog.
I love my cat.
Only problem is, 
I don't have a cat.
It's hard to love
What you don't have.

This is how I also feel about loving God. Or, my self. 

Except seemingly there's more evidence for a "self" than for "God." Buddhism, though, seizes on that seemingly and runs with it to an intriguing, reasonable, and scientifically defensible conclusion.

I don't have a self. No one does. Meaning, as agnostic Buddhist Stephen Bachelor says in his wonderful book, "Buddhism Without Beliefs":

As a human being I am more complex than a pot or a daffodil, but I have also emerged from causes and am composed of diverse, changing features and traits. There is no essential me that exists apart from this unique configuration of biological and cultural processes.

This helps to explain why I haven't written much about love. I agree with my email correspondent that love is beautiful. But I have no idea what those three words, love is beautiful, really mean. 

Nor would it help to delete "beautiful" and substitute any other word after love is...

Love, like me or you (as Stephen Bachelor said), isn't something separate and distinct from the beings who feel this ineffable emotion. Whatever love is, it is an ever-changing process, not a static entity. Especially, it isn't an other-worldly entity.

So my feeling is, the less we analyze and speak about love itself -- as contrasted with talking about what we love -- the better. Abstracting love diminishes this way of experiencing reality.

Meaning, I don't believe that love exists without a lover and an object of adoration.

How could love exist as a free floating something-or-other? This would be like being angry, yet not being angry about anything. At the least, an angry person would be angry about being angry, which counts as being angry about something.  

I'm not really a Buddhist, but I resonate with certain Buddhist principles -- such as the selflessness and mutuality mentioned in the email message I got.

As was noted in the above-linked post, we don't have to do anything to be selfless. This, it seems from both a Buddhist and neuroscientific perspective, is how we are: without an enduring changeless self. Such is the Buddhist notion of "emptiness."

Here's another quote from that post:

Emptiness is Buddhism's shorthand term for this absence of intrinsic selfness or thingness. Living and lifeless entities are equally devoid of independent, free-standing, unchanging existence.

The world is interconnected, with never-ending matrices of causes and effects stretching back to the big bang, and likely beyond. Out of this creative ferment arises...

Me. You. Religious beliefs. Scientific discoveries. Blogs. Books. Life. Death. Joy. Pain. Questions. Answers. Everything.

It isn't exactly true that we are all one, because obviously there are lots of different things that have manifested as Everything. But it's clear that the cosmos is a whole, so now I worship at the altar of scientifically defensible wholeiness rather than imaginary holiness.

Everything is interconnected. Everything is dependent on other things for its existence. No thing and no one is an island, compete unto itself. Reality is an interwoven web with no dangling threads. 

So the way I see it, love is an integral aspect of the way things are.

Meaning, reality (including us human beings) is bound together by unbreakable connections. We can't escape being attracted to this and that, because such is the way of the world, of the universe, of the cosmos.

And so is hate: lack of attraction, disengagement, disinterest. It isn't possible to have love without hate, just as there is no such thing as up without down, or hot without cold. 

We can't be equally connected or attracted to everything in existence. Neither can unconscious entities. If this were the case, reality would be a featureless blob. Life is a flux, a flow, an ever-changing dance. 

We come closer; we grow apart. We smile; we frown. We feel at peace; we feel at war.

For me, "love" points to all of this.

It is the way things are: interconnected, in relationships, yet with no fixed essence or state of being. There's no way to put words to this, because it's what reality is, was, and always will be absent human conceptions.

That said (or unsaid), maybe it makes sense to say, "love is acceptance of everything that really exists." I used the word love in the title of my post, "Respect reality, not religion, if you love the Ultimate."

At every moment, each of us is enjoying a great gift: reality.

Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches connect us with a world that exists independent of our subjective consciousness. The proof of this is that we can say to someone else, "Do you see that? Do you hear that? Doesn't this taste great?", and learn that what we consider to be real, actually is.

For me, mindfulness of the present moment has become my religion (speaking loosely; mindfulness is far removed from traditional religiosity). I try to separate my senses from my stories. Reality is different from our beliefs. 

Why we believe in things we know aren't true

It's a well-worn saying here in the United States: "Denial isn't just a river in Egypt." 

We all deny reality. We all prefer to feel good about a falsity rather than embrace a harsh truth.

But some people struggle against our human inclination to believe in things that aren't true, while others make little or no effort to resist the lure of denial. 

A piece in the New York Times, "Believing What You Don't Believe," casts light on what's going on here. 

How is it that people can believe something that they know is not true?

For example, Kansas City Royals fans, sitting in front of their television sets in Kansas City, surely know that there is no possible connection between their lucky hats (or socks, or jerseys) and the outcome of a World Series game at Citi Field in New York, 1,200 miles away. Yet it would be impossible to persuade many of them to watch the game without those lucky charms.

It’s not that people don’t understand that it’s scientifically impossible for their lucky hats to help their team hit a home run or turn a double play — all but the most superstitious would acknowledge that. It’s that they have a powerful intuition and, despite its utter implausibility, they just can’t shake it.

So our quick intuitions can lead us astray. The role of slower reason, logic, and deliberate consideration of evidence is to correct those intuitive errors. 

Psychologists who study decision making and its shortcomings often rely on the idea, popularized by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” that there are two modes of processing information.

There is a “fast system” that is intuitive and quickly generates impressions and judgments, and a “slow system” that operates in a deliberate and effortful manner, and is responsible for overriding the output of the fast system when the slow system detects an error.

However, often this doesn't happen. So people continue to believe in things they know aren't true.

Strange? Yes. Weird? Yes. But the human mind is undeniably strange and weird. If it wasn't, religions wouldn't have the fertile mental soil in which superstition and dogmatism establish such deep roots.

But as one of us, Professor Risen, discusses in a paper just published in Psychological Review, many instances of superstition and magical thinking indicate that the slow system doesn’t always behave this way.

When people pause to reflect on the fact that their superstitious intuitions are irrational, the slow system, which is supposed to fix things, very often doesn’t do so.

People can simultaneously recognize that, rationally, their superstitious belief is impossible, but persist in their belief, and their behavior, regardless. Detecting an error does not necessarily lead people to correct it.

Wow. My wife convinces me she's enlightened.

If you think I'm churchless and irreligious, you haven't met my wife, Laurel -- who is now surpassing me in skepticism about all things godly. 

She's even enlightening me about enlightenment. 

Driving home from central Oregon this afternoon, with plenty of time to converse during the two hour trip, Laurel said:

Why are so many people concerned about being enlightened? It's just about embracing reality. Which is right here, right now. So understanding there's no such thing as enlightenment, just reality, is true enlightenment. 

I couldn't add much to this bit of wisdom.

Mostly I just marveled at Laurel's evident enlightenment. Perhaps even more than me, she's come to understand that searching for an illusory SuperSized Consciousness is a recipe for wasting one's time.

Now, I realize that many people disagree with this. I would have disagreed with Laurel myself a decade or so ago, when I still believed it was possible to dissolve the illusion of everyday reality. 

Today, like my wife, I consider that the illusion is believing there is any illusion to dissolve. Sure, there's a lot to learn about the world -- both on a personal and communal level. 

But there's no convincing evidence that anything other than one's ordinary mind is needed to gain increased knowledge and understanding of what life is all about, a notion shared by John Gray in his new book, as I wrote about in my previous post.

I quoted Gray:

We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being: we do not know what, if anything, happens when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are -- though what we would like to be, we cannot say. Why try to escape from yourself?

Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by Gnostics. If you have this negative capability, you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all you need.

Today I came across a piece, "Alan Watts on What Reality Is and How to Become What You Are." Watts, of course, also was big on living an ordinary life without making it into anything other than what it naturally is.

The piece has a quote from Watts' book, Become What You Are.

Some time ago a group of people were sitting in a restaurant, and one of them asked the others to say what they meant by Reality. There was much vague discussion, much talk of metaphysics and psychology, but one of those present, when asked his opinion, simply shrugged his shoulders and pointed at the saltshaker.

He was amazed to find that no one understood him, yet he had intended to be neither clever nor obscure. His idea was just to give a commonsense answer to the question, on the ordinary assumption that Reality is whatever exists.

He was not understood because his friends, in common with many others, regarded Reality as a special kind of existence and Life (with a capital L) as a particular way of living. Thus we often meet those who talk about the difference between being a mere clod, a mere “animated stomach,” and a real person; between those who simply exist and those who really live.

Which is followed by another quote:

We have all met those who are trying very hard to be real persons, to give their lives Reality (or meaning) and to live as distinct from existing. These seekers are of many kinds, highbrow and lowbrow, ranging from students of arcane wisdom to the audiences of popular speakers on pep and personality, selling yourself and making your life a success.

I have never yet met anyone who tried to become a real person with success. The result of such attempts is invariably loss of personality, for there is an ancient paradox of the spiritual life whereby those who try to make themselves great become small.

The paradox is even a bit more complicated than this; it also means that if you try, indirectly, to make yourself great by making yourself small, you succeed only in remaining small. It is all a question of motive, of what you want. Motives may be subtly concealed, and we may not call the desire to be a real person the desire to be great; but that is just a matter of words.

John Gray's "The Soul of the Marionette" -- perplexing and persuasive

I enjoy books that present familiar ideas in a fresh way. I also enjoy books that, when I read the last page, leave me with as many questions as answers.

John Gray's "The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry Into Human Freedom" is such a book. 

I finished it last night, having read the 168 pages in just a day and a half. Once I started Gray's book, I found it so fascinating, I felt compelled to get to the end as soon as possible -- so I could grasp its conclusions.

Problem was (if it is a problem, and I suspect it isn't), I read the final pages, closed the cover, and then felt a big ???????????... settle over my mind. 

Meaning, I wasn't sure what the meaning of the book was. 

But my next thought was: Gray's lack of evident meaning was the meaning of "The Soul of the Marionette." This fit with my reading of his previous "The Silence of Animals," which I blogged about here.

I'm tempted to share some quotes from his new book and leave blog visitors to figure out what they mean.

Resisting that temptation, I'm going to share my intuitions about "The Soul of the Marionette" in my own words -- which might, or might not, reflect Gray's intentions.

Gray starts out with a compelling tale of someone who wrote a story about marionettes, puppets. Puppets can dance about with amazing grace because they aren't bound by gravity as we are. They are controlled by the puppeteer, a "higher power" so to speak.

Likewise, humans have a strong desire to surrender themselves to some force greater than themselves. Gray speaks of how theists seek to know the will of God; Taoists seek to act in harmony with Tao; scientists seek to know the Theory of Everything that explains why things are as they are.

So the most intriguing aspect of Gray's book for me is how he persuasively argues that seemingly disparate aspects of human culture, such as religion and science, actually are bowing down to the same belief: that it is possible to eradicate mystery and ignorance, revealing the nature of the cosmos through a form of Gnosticism.

The original Gnostics held a view common to many religions and mystical teachings. This world is a reflection or shadow of a much more vibrant and real higher realm.

Either some malevolent force, such as the Devil, actively prevents us from knowing that reality, or ignorance is a passive block to this knowledge, or gnosis. Regardless, both ancient and modern forms of Gnosticism hold out the promise that we can know the puppeteer, so to speak. 

This knowledge can bring us to a state where we willingly surrender our belief that we have free will, that we are independent actors on the stage of life, and accept that some power greater than ourselves is making us speak, dance, and do.

Again, this doesn't have to be a supernatural or divine power.

It can be nature as known by an all-knowing science that has revealed what lies behind the apparent reality of this world. Thus Gray argues that a form of Platonism, an assumption that it is possible to turn our gaze away from illusory shadows and see the light of Truth, pervades both theistic religiosity and secular humanism.

Scientifically-minded atheistic progressives like me, for example, consider that it will be possible to have a much better nation and world once certain political/cultural obstacles are removed. Progressives, not surprisingly, believe in progress.

So do Christians, who believe in salvation through adherence to Jesus' message. So do religious people of many other faiths, who similarly believe that following certain practices can elevate humanity to a higher level of, dare I say it, evolution. 

Gray challenges these beliefs. He does so, though, not in a philosophical way, but in more of a literary manner. In most of his book he shares erudite descriptions of writings most people (certainly me) have never heard of.

The authors of these writings either share Gray's basic skepticism that humanity is on the upswing, and will remain on that elevated cultural platform, or are used to show the folly that it ever will be possible -- or even is desirable -- to "know the puppeteer."

In his closing pages Gray returns to the puppet analogy after a long absence. He speaks of the uber-marionette, "The human being that knows it is a machine. Must it envy the graceful automatism of the puppet?"

I now feel that I should break my previously mentioned intention of not sharing quotations from Gray's book. After all, I just did. Might as well dive deeper into the Quote Pool. 

This passage is one of my favorites in the book, especially the final sentence. 

In Kleist's essay humans are caught between the graceful automatism of the puppet and the conscious freedom of a god. The jerky, stuttering quality of their actions comes from their feeling that they must determine the course of their lives. Other animals live without having to choose their path through life.

Whatever uncertainty they may feel sniffing their way through the world is not a permanent condition; once they reach a place of safety, they are at rest. In contrast, human life is spent anxiously deciding how to live.

So true: Human life is spent anxiously deciding how to live. 

We doubt ourselves. We doubt others. We doubt religion. We doubt science. We doubt government. We doubt nihilism. We doubt the wisdom of the ages. We doubt the newest knowledge. 

We're continuously trying to find the Better, if not the Best. Even if we aren't hungry for material goodies, we're ravenous for other sorts of Goods -- political, cultural, philosophical, whatever. 

Gray describes how the science fiction author, Philip K. Dick, came to believe in a paranoid form of  Gnosticism.

Though it was marked out by his own traumas, Dick trod a path that has been followed by many before him. Like human beings in every age he wanted to believe that events of his life formed part of a pattern. So he created a story in which his life was shaped by secret agencies, some of them from beyond the human world.

But a world in which nothing happens by chance is an enclosed space that soon proves maddening. Dick found himself stuck in such a place -- not the radiant, meaning-filled cosmos he was looking for, but a dark prison.

...Dick summarized what his experiences had led him to believe:

1. the empirical world is not quite real, but only seemingly real;
2. its creator cannot be appealed to for a rectification of redress of these evils and imperfections;
3. the world is moving toward some kind of end state or goal, the nature of which is obscure, but the evolutionary aspect of the change states suggests a good and purposeful end state that has been designed by a sentient and benign photo-entity.

DIck, by Gray's account, was pretty much off his rocker psychologically when he wrote those words. But isn't this close to how most people view the world? 

As having all sorts of problems at the moment, but moving toward a much more desirable end state -- perhaps not with certainty, but with a high degree of probability. 

Again, most of us have an underlying, and largely unconscious, assumption that some "puppet master" is at work behind the scenes. Could be God. Could be Gaia. Could be self-balancing Laws of Nature that will restore equilibrium to a world gone bad.

Regardless, we like to tell ourselves stories about our own life, and the life of humanity as a whole, that make sense and have a happy ending. Underlying these stories is a belief that we know what is going on, and will steadily know more and more as time goes on.

Well, here's how Gray ends his book. Hang on for a wild ride, persuasive while perplexing.

In the story told by Herr C., human beings become free when they become fully conscious. For these godlike creatures, there can be nothing that is mysterious. Mystery fades away with ever greater conscious awareness, and true freedom means living by that inner light.

This is, of course, a very old faith -- the faith of the Gnostics, and also of Socrates. Both believed that freedom was achieved by the possession of a special kind of knowledge. Modern rationalism is another version of this religion.

Contemporary evangelists for evolution, trans-humanists and techno-futurists are also followers of this creed. All of them promote the project of expelling mystery from the mind.

The trouble with this project is that it has the effect of confining the mind within itself. In a world where there is nothing that cannot be explained, everything that happens fits into a hidden scheme. 

In Gnosticism, the world is the plaything of a demiurge. For conspiracy theorists, history is scripted by occult agencies. For secular rationalists, enlightenment is thwarted by the sinister forces of superstition and reaction. 

There is a pattern here: if you aim to exorcize mystery from your mind, you end up -- like Philip K. Dick -- locked in a paranoid universe and possessed by demons.

From being seemingly annihilated by Christianity, Gnosticism has conquered the world. Belief in the liberating power of knowledge has become the ruling illusion of modern humankind. Most want to believe that some kind of explanation or understanding will deliver them from their conflicts.

Yet being divided from yourself goes with being self-aware. This is the truth in the Genesis myth: the Fall is not an event at the beginning of history but the intrinsic condition of self-conscious beings.

Only creatures that are as flawed and ignorant as humans can be free in the way humans are free. 

We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being: we do not know what, if anything, happens when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are -- though what we would like to be, we cannot say. Why try to escape from yourself?

Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by Gnostics. If you have this negative capability, you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all you need.

Rather than trying to impose sense on your life, you will be content to let meaning come and go. Instead of becoming an unfaltering puppet, you will make your way in the stumbling human world. Uber-marionettes do not have to wait until they can fly before they can be free.

Not looking to ascend into the heavens, they can find freedom in falling to earth. 

Why religious Personal Beliefs are usually Personal Delusions

A few days ago astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted out something so-true:

If your Personal Beliefs deny what's objectively true about the world, then they're more accurately called Personal Delusions.

Beautifully said. 

This makes most religious dogma delusional. In fact, I probably should have said all religious dogma, since if something is objectively true it belongs in the realm of science and other forms of generally accepted knowledge, not the realm of religion.

Now, in a reply to someone who commented on this tweet, Tyson clarified what he meant. He was asked, "What if your personal delusions don't deny what's objectively true about the world?" Tyson's reply:

Then they're not Delusions. They're just Beliefs. My Tweet does not reference these.

This gets us to the question of what is objectively true.

If there is positive demonstrable evidence for some fact, such as that the big bang brought the universe into being some 13.7 billion years ago, then clearly a belief that the universe was created by God a few thousand years ago is delusional.

But what about accepting the existence of God? Or heaven and hell? Or eternal soul? Would this be a delusion or a belief?

I strongly lean toward Personal Delusion. After all, this is an objective truth about the world: there is no convincing demonstrable evidence that God, heaven, hell, or eternal soul exist.

Speaking more broadly, lack of evidence that something exists is a fact about the universe. Yes, a provisional fact, because evidence could always pop up in favor of that thing existing.

If clear and convincing evidence of God appeared tomorrow -- some observable cosmic event or miracle that scientists couldn't explain any other way -- then I and almost all other atheists would be pleased to admit, "We were wrong. God is real."

Until this happens, though, it is justified to call someone delusional who embraces the notion that God exists. Not delusional in most regards, as a deeply psychotic person might be -- just delusional in this regard.

Tyson's distinction between Personal Belief and Personal Delusion enters into the fervent current national discussion about what sorts of religious beliefs deserve to be accommodated in a society governed by secular laws, such as the United States.

I say, very few, if any. 

For one thing, when dug into usually these beliefs are at odds with objective truth, which make them delusions. 

Kim Davis, for example, is a county clerk who wants her religious belief that same-sex marriage is against God's will to be accommodated under a federal religious liberty law. Davis claims that she is acting under "God's authority," which supersedes the Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.

Well, this only makes sense if it is objectively true that (1) God exists, (2) God rules over human affairs, and (3) God has decreed that same-sex marriage is wrong.

Since all three statements are at odds with what is known about objective reality -- there's no evidence for 1, 2, or 3 -- Kim Davis is embracing a Personal Delusion. 

I'd argue that even if it was viewed as a Personal Belief, she still doesn't have the right to ignore the law of the land, as Jeffrey Toobin says in the above-linked piece, "Kim Davis's Cafeteria Government."

Now Davis is seeking to extend the concept of accommodation even more—to government officials, like her, who want to pick and choose which legal obligations to honor. It’s one thing to allow cafeteria citizenship; Davis wants cafeteria government.

The problem, as Scalia recognized more than two decades ago, is that there is no logical stopping point for the accommodation principle. People have sincere religious beliefs that obligate them to engage in, or refrain from, all kinds of behaviors that the law allows (like same-sex marriage) or requires (like paying taxes).

So while people are free to hold both Personal Beliefs and Personal Delusions, these shouldn't be confused with Objective Truth. As the saying goes, you're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.  

The weird interwoven world of general relativity

Let's get this straight right away: I don't really understand general relativity. 

I've read a lot of explanations about it. Briefly I'll feel like I grasp what general relativity is all about in a non-mathematical sense. 

A few days later, or even sooner, that understanding has slipped away and I'm basically as clueless as I was before. Which is strange, because usually I can conceptually grasp scientific truths much more fully. 

So there's something weird for me about general relativity. Which probably is best explained by the fact that almost everybody feels the same way. 

Spend two minutes watching this video of Neil deGrasse Tyson trying to explain gravity, which is the centerpiece of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Even Tyson starts off his explanation in a quizzical fashion.

 

Now, while Tyson says that Einstein said the following, actually it was theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler.

Spacetime tells matter how to move;
Matter tells spacetime how to curve.

It doesn't matter who was the source of this quote. As Tyson's interviewer says, that's poetic. It's my favorite explanation of general relativity, because I can grasp these two sentences even as I don't understand them.

A recent special issue of Scientific American is devoted to "100 Years of General Relativity." Here's a passage from one of the articles in the issue that says much the same thing.

Einstein's goal as he pursued his general theory of relativity was to find the mathematical equations describing two interwoven processes: how a gravitational field acts on matter, telling it how to move, and how matter generates gravitational fields in spacetime, telling spacetime how to curve.

So even though I don't begin to grasp the mathematics of general relativity, I have an, um, general conceptual feeling for it -- at least as it pertains to gravity.

It's that word, "interwoven," that seems key here. We're used to hierarchies, since human life and culture is full of them. This rules that. This causes that. This is above that. 

Yet nature rarely, if ever, works that way.

Like gravity in general relativity, this causes that and that causes this. Interwoven loops abound. Nature is much more of a circle than a straight line. Everything is interconnected, even though we humans do our best to break things apart and view them as discrete entities.

This is one reason why the concept of God no longer appeals to me. Like most religiously-minded people, I used to look upon God as The Big Man Upstairs, the cosmos' CEO who occupies the coolest office on the top floor. 

But this doesn't mesh with either common sense or scientific understanding.

For example, if God created the cosmos and now rules over it, who or what created God? If the supposed answer is no one, because God has always existed, then why can't the cosmos always have existed without a God?

An interwoven cosmos, or universe, seems considerably more likely than a hierarchical one. I've talked about this sort of thing before in posts such as:

"No beginning, no end. The universe simply is."
"Enlightenment made simple: it's reality."
"Relationship is the essential nature of reality."

I'm obviously not capable of capturing the essence of the cosmos in a few pithy sentences, as Wheeler did with gravity. About the best I can do is...

The universe causes me to do things; the things I do change the universe.

Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates

Below is an essay that I wrote for the Spiritual Naturalist Society (I'm a contributing writer), but which struck them as too political for their tastes -- politics and policy-making apparently not being part of what they consider to be a "spiritual practice." 

So, boo-hoo, it was rejected for their site.

I'm going to present some arguments to the Spiritual Naturalist Society folks about why no bounds should be placed around a naturalistic worldview. If there is no supernatural realm, it doesn't make sense to me to consider some aspects of a naturalistic person's life to be spiritual, and some aspects non-spiritual.

I meditate every morning. I go for a walk in nature every day. I do Tai Chi almost every day.

If these activities are "spiritual," then why isn't writing elected officials to advocate for some policy position, such as signing the deal with Iran or doing more to avert global climate change, or testifying at a city council meeting?

And also, fighting the interjection of faith-based supernatural religious beliefs into public policy debates, which, as you'll read below, was a big part of what our nation's revolutionary deistically-inclined founders strongly held to be true and good.

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Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates

There’s no place for supernatural religious beliefs in discussions of public policy.

So, please, believers, leave out all mentions of God, soul, spirit, divine will, and such when you want to weigh in on abortion, embryonic stem cell research, LBGTQ rights, or other morally-fraught issues.

Being a political activist, my Christian friends (whether liberal or conservative) recoil when I speak like this. They feel it is fine to express their religious views in debates about how government should deal with matters of public policy.

I disagree.

After reading Matthew Stewart’s marvelously written and researched book, “Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic,” I’ve got fresh argumentative ammunition to bolster my long-held contention that religious views founded on supernaturalism shouldn’t be brought into the public sphere.

(See my 2004 blog post, Religious values have no place in politics.)

The founders of our nation intended the United States to be an Empire of Reason. Stewart writes:

Human beings achieved self-government only after they learned how to discard the politically dangerous delusions that arise from the common religious consciousness. At least, that is more or less how America’s founders saw the matter.

…The cultivation of the sciences and the development of culture and the arts become not just the route to advancing the other interests of the state but the end of the state itself.

The enlightenment of the people becomes their own true religion, while the shell of tradition vanishes into empty symbols of the life of individual and collective self-realization.

True piety in a reasonable world is the pursuit of happiness through the improvement of the understanding. Call it the religion of freedom.

Stewart dives into some deep historical and philosophical waters in “Nature’s God.” Its 435 pages aren’t the easiest to read or summarize succinctly.

So here’s a couple of metaphors that, to me, do a good job of showing why Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, Thomas Young, and other leaders during revolutionary times worked so hard to make reason, not faith, the foundation of our nation’s governance.

Imagine that you’re part of a residents’ committee charged with managing the common property of a housing development. The group is looking at a grove of trees, some of which may need to be removed to restore views.

A member of the committee interrupts the discussion. “I’m not in favor of taking down any trees,” she says. “I believe there are tree sprites, invisible fairies, living in them. The sprites would be harmed if any tree was removed.”

How could you respond to that? You want to tell the woman, “What you’re saying is crazy,” but that would sound impolite.

So you reply with, “Well, you’re welcome to your beliefs, but this committee is responsible for doing what’s best for our community. We have to base our tree removal decisions on what everybody knows to be real, not on the supposed desires of supernatural tree sprites.”

This is closely akin to how many religious people approach the question of abortion.

They believe that an immaterial soul enters the embryo at the moment of conception, or soon thereafter. Other people look upon abortion as a secular matter, a decision to be reached between a woman and her doctor based on personal moral and health concerns.

Once fervently-held religious supernaturalism enters a public policy discussion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to engage in an open debate where reasoned arguments are put forth, factual evidence carefully considered, and a fairly-arrived at decision determined.

Consider this second metaphorical example.

A group is playing poker. A hand has been dealt. The cards have been played. Everything is on the table for examination. A player with four aces prepares to pull in the chips she has won. Until she hears…

“Stop. I won this hand. I’ve got a straight flush, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 of clubs.”
“No, you don’t. We can all see your cards. You’ve got nothing.”
“Ah, those aren’t my real cards. My real cards are invisible. Only I can see them — give me the chips I’ve won.”

Who would do that?

The game has been played fairly. The only cards that count are the physical ones handed out by the dealer. There are rules for deciding which combinations of cards win out over other combinations. If someone brings in supernatural invisible cards, this makes playing a fair game of poker impossible.

Though I’ve used simple examples of tree cutting and poker playing, the same principles were at the root of why the American Republic was founded as a naturalistic Empire of Reason rather than a supernatural Empire of Faith.

Here’s another passage from “Nature’s God” where Stewart speaks of how our nation’s founders viewed private and public religiosity.

The separation of church and state that emerges from the early modern revolutions in philosophy and politics does not in fact imply that the modern secular state is or ought to be neutral with respect to religion in every sense of that term. Rather, this separation at least implicitly involves the creation of a certain kind of public religion.

This new public religion is indeed tolerant of every religious belief -- but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief. It also does not and ought not tolerate any attempt to shield the doctrines and practices of any religion from critical scrutiny.

…In short, the state may adopt as a part of its public religion only whatever may be safely dissolved back into reason.

In the context of the American Revolution, Stewart’s mention of a sovereign doesn't refer to a king, queen, president, parliament, or congress. Rather, it means the people of the newly formed United States.

Thus it is the power of the people that isn’t obliged to answer to any private religious belief.

If someone tries to interject a faith-based doctrine that isn’t answerable to reason into a public policy question, this is as inappropriate as someone arguing that a tree can’t be cut down because of supernatural sprites, or claiming to have won a hand of poker because of invisible cards.

Here’s a succinct explanation of what Stewart means by “public religion.” Basically, it is deism, which in his conception isn’t far removed from atheism, being a naturalistic view of the universe.

The popular deism or natural religion that America's revolutionaries hoped to promote was distinguished above all by its commitment to the defining value of the Empire of Reason: the improvement of the understanding.

Thus the goal of these radical nation-building philosophers wasn’t so much to exclude God from the American Republic, as to include all of reality. This is the only way genuine understanding of what is true and good can be achieved.

In keeping with the guiding principle, it [an immanent rather than transcendent view of morality] says that whatever moves us, like whatever moves anything in the infinite universe, must be explicable. So the good always comes with reasons for its goodness; those reasons must refer to those motives that we generically identify as pleasure and pain; and those reflections on the affections can always be the subject of further reflection, elaboration, and qualification.

Given the diversity of these United States, our Constitution — as serious as it is — reminds me of a joke that begins with “A Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Atheist, Wiccan, Muslim, Taoist, and Rastafarian walk into a bar…”

Except, the bar is our nation. And there are many more types of citizens than the nine I mentioned. One could argue, as many types as there are individuals living in this country, since every person is unique.

What is the common ground on which we all can stand during our debates and discussions about what is best for us?

What evidence and facts can be brought into attempts to reason our way to some sort of consensus on complex controversial issues?

The answer to both questions is Nature and Nature’s Laws. Everybody lives in the same natural world. We all breathe the same air, drink the same water, walk on the same Earth, gaze into the same sky.

Yes, humans also hold a wide variety of ideas about what, if anything, might lie beyond the physicality of this universe.

But those hypothesized supernatural conceptions divide us, while the actuality of science, and the understanding that flows from reasoned consideration of what is known to be real — that unites us.

Such was the unparalleled vision of our nation’s founders. Near the end of his book, Matthew Stewart speaks of what remains for this vision to be fulfilled.

In our tolerant age, we like to say that everybody is entitled their own worldview, that every worldview comes with its own “narrative” of the history, and that all such narratives are created equal.

So, according to the wisdom of polite society today, it’s a matter of personal preference whether the modern world emerged out of humankind’s emancipation from the shackles of religious superstition or whether instead it sprang directly from the head of Zeus, or was delivered in the form of a bountiful continent to this or that group of sectarian zealots.

But the only choice we really have is whether to be conscious or to persist in destructive delusions. Of course, it remains just as fashionable now as it was in Jonathan Edward’s day to lament the nihilism that supposedly grips us when we shed the false certainty of ignorance, and to bemoan the doom that will surely befall us when we depart from the simple faith of our fathers.

But the fact remains that the common power of humanity — the capability for cooperative action that is really just another word for our moral well-being — was never greater than after we lost our religion.

…The founding of the American Republic did not bring freedom to the slaves. It did not give justice to Native Americans. It did nothing to liberate women. And it still hasn’t prevented malefactors of great wealth from twisting the political process to their advantage. 

All of these struggles fell to subsequent generations, and the provisional victories obtained thus far have been the work of those who have understood in one way or another that the American Revolution remains an ongoing concern.

The main thing we can learn now from the persistence in modern America of supernatural religion and the reactionary nationalism with which it is so regularly accompanied is that there is still work to be done. For too long we have relied on silence to speak a certain truth. The noise tells us the time has come for some candor. It points to a piece of unfinished business of the American Revolution.

Aliens test the faith of Earth's religious believers

So here's a thought experiment to ponder, religious believers...

Aliens have come to Earth. They're from an advanced civilization in a galaxy far far away. Their spaceship is way beyond anything our scientists have even imagined. 

Technologically, it's immediately apparent that we are as sophisticated in their eyes as a chimpanzee with a termite-removing twig is to us. 

Fortunately, the aliens haven't come to destroy humanity. Well, let's rephrase that: they're fine with destroying us Homo sapiens one at a time. It's part of a game they like to play with denizens of the planets they visit.

The rules are simple. They ask intelligent beings (though, obviously, nowhere near as intelligent as they are) questions about reality. 

Not super-tough questions. The aliens understand that few, if any, cultures on the worlds they visit possess knowledge about the cosmos that's anywhere near as complete as what they know. 

So their game is to quiz members of the most advanced species on this planet, Earth, about things we should know. The aliens are expert at gauging the overall planetary I.Q. of the worlds they visit.

What they like to do is test individuals on their knowledge base -- sort of like an educator with a Ph.D. quizzing pre-schoolers on what they should have learned about the world. 

Except, in this game a wrong answer has a nasty consequence: death. These aliens are like planetary ant farmers. Aside from simply being fun to them, their game ends up with a planet inhabited by the beings most knowledgeable about reality.

Which to them is an open book.

There's a few nooks and crannies of the cosmos they don't totally understand, but not many. So they play a fair game -- especially since they only ask questions of humans that people should know the answers to.

Called to play the game (naturally you don't have a choice), you're pleased to see that the first questions you're asked are easy to answer. 

Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. Photons move at the speed of light. Our planet is spherical, not flat. You're beginning to feel pretty confident about winning this game and staying alive.

Until you hear the final question: "Does the God you believe in actually exist?" 

The aliens know your religious beliefs. After all, they know virtually everything. It won't work to respond with "I don't believe in God." They know that you do. 

Your problem with this question, compared to the others, is that you had good reasons for answering the aliens' previous queries the way you did. Facts are facts. A religious belief though... that's very different. 

The aliens are waiting for your answer.

You're tongue-tied, but your mind is racing. After all, for as long as you can remember you've been sure that God exists. Your faith is super strong. You've had no doubt, none at all, that the God of your religion is the most real entity in the cosmos.

Yet here you are, faced with aliens who know the truth about God in the same way they know the truth about every other significant fact about reality. There's no way to argue with them. They know if the God you believe in exists. 

What's your answer? Yes or No. Choose the wrong answer and your life is over. (The only upside is that you've learned whether your God is real before you die; the downside is that you're dead.)

Of course, the aliens could ask a similar question of human atheists: "Does any God actually exist?" We'd find it easier to answer, though, since the evidence points to "No." Religious believers are the ones who will have a much tougher time with "Does the God you believe in actually exist?"

So how would you respond deeply religious person? Are you willing to stake your life on your belief, knowing that the aliens possess the factual answer? 

Boundless Existence is grander than anything, even a God

l enjoy marveling at a primal marvelousness: That the cosmos exists. Recently I wrote a piece for the Spiritual Naturalist Society about this -- "Wow! Existence has always existed."

I boldfaced That because there's a unbridgeable gap between the What and That of existence. We can talk about What existent things are. It is impossible to talk about the That'ness of existence: That existence exists.

Recently on a bookshelf I came across Milton Munitz' "Does Life Have a Meaning?", one of my favorite books. For the third time, I read it.

Munitz  also was fascinated by the brute fact of existence.

Being a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, in this book, his last, Munitz was able to ponder the difference between things that exist, which can be described with all sorts of What's, and Boundless Existence. 

Few people, he says, have an awareness of Boundless Existence. I can't be sure that I have the same sense of it as Munitz did, since it is very difficult, if not impossible, to put this awareness into words that begin to capture the intuitive experience of it.

Here's a quote from "Does Life Have a Meaning?"

If one accepts the distinction between the existent universe and Boundless Existence as drawn by the world picture I have sketched, then it is part of that acceptance to recognize that Boundless Existence is neither an existent, a collection of existents, nor even the supposed totality of existents.

Since it is not an existent, Boundless Existence cannot act on us, nor can a human existent interact with it. Since, too, it is not an existent in the way in which the observable universe or any of its parts is, it cannot be explained, modified, perceived, investigated, or understood.

Moreover, it is a fundamental dimension of Reality, and as such is not only to be accorded equal status with other fundamental principles on an ontological level of the world picture we are exploring, but should also receive full and equal attention in a philosophy of life that purports to serve as a schema for envisioning our place in Reality, i.e., as a guide for our actions and as a way of judging the possible values of life.

As far as we know, it is exclusively given to human existents not only to interact with and progressively understand other existents, but to become increasingly aware of Boundless Existence. 

To bring Boundless Existence into intensified awareness and to let its presence permeate and affect all our interactions with other existents, is, however, for the vast majority of human existents, a relatively rare achievement and practice. Whatever benefits such awareness could bring is, therefore, absent from the lives of most human existents or the dominant philosophies by which they are guided.

In other words, most people are only concerned with existent things, not Boundless Existence. Yet even if a God were proven to exist who created everything in existence, this divinity would "only" be another existent thing. The mystery of Boundless Existence that makes existents possible remains.

Munitz writes:

The capitalized expression Boundless Existence represents the basic ontological and epistemological fact that the very Existence of the observable universe (as distinguished form the type of potentially intelligible existence exhibited by any interactive existent) is transcendent both to any form of conceptual understanding -- to the use of any scheme of conceptual bounds -- and of course beyond even the slightest degree of human intervention or control.

Boundless Existence is everywhere associated with the observable universe and its contents as an irreducible and uneliminable aspect of it, though it defeats and transcends all ordinary cognitive modes of access relying on observation or understanding.

The notion of Boundless Existence, as I employ it, is to be distinguished from the way the term "God" is employed in most theistic religions. Boundless Existence does not stand to the universe in the relation of a creative source to its created product. Nor does Boundless Existence stand to human life in the way this is construed in most theistic religions and philosophies.

As viewed under the aspect of the omnipresent "emptiness" of Boundless Existence, the lives of human existents cannot find any preassigned purpose or intelligibility in the Boundless Existence of the observable universe. 

In contrast with theistic conceptions of God as the source for the existence of human life and the ultimate focus for a person's worship, obedience, or love (theism's standard view of the basic goals and standards for a spiritually meaningful human life, a deep awareness of the dimension of Boundless Existence enforces the conclusion that such meanings as humans can find in their lives are not generated by, or selectively, supported and controlled by, Boundless Existence.

Instead, they largely emerge from the choices and responses that human existents, as autonomous agents, make in their interactions with other existents. 

Well, I don't agree that we humans are "autonomous" agents. Unfettered free will seems impossible in this lawfully interconnected cosmos. 

Otherwise, though, I resonate with Munitz' central thesis. Along with him, I accept the fact of Boundless Existence.

More... as noted above, I marvel at Boundless Existence. Here's a quote from one of my earliest posts on this blog, which I included in a 2010 post, "The Beauty of Boundless Existence."

My head hurts when I think too much about existence. But I get an enjoyable chill up my spiritual spine when I simply try to wrap my psyche around existence. Not in a wordy way. In, well, an existential way. This happens when I try to let the stark reality of existence blow the roof off all my notions about what exists, when I try to strip away thoughts about all that is until the skeleton of a bare is remains.

For me, existence pure and simple is absolutely real, though I’ve never seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted it. I have no idea what it is, this essence of everything that can’t be a thing itself and certainly isn’t nothing either. I feel it much more than I think it. Not emotionally, but like sensing an invisible presence in a dark room that you know you’ll never be able to put your finger on.

Here's other posts I've written about Munitz' book and Boundless Existence.

Boundless Existence -- the backdrop to life's meaning
Meaningful meaningless meditation
Boundless Existence -- meaningless backdrop to a meaningful life

 

Imagined orders -- like religions -- depend on shaky myths

Today I hit a sweet spot in my reading of Yuval Noah Harari's book, "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind." Harari is a historian who has a knack for explaining the past and present in some wonderfully fresh ways.

In his Building Pyramids chapter Harari describes the Code of Hammurabi, circa 1776 BC, and the United States Declaration of Independence, which was created in 1776 AD. Each claimed to be founded on sacred principles.

So how do we know which is right? Or more right? Harari says:

The two texts present us with an obvious dilemma. Both the Code of Hammurabi and the American Declaration of Independence claim to outline universal and eternal principles of justice, but according to the Americans all people are equal, whereas according to the Babylonians people are decidedly unequal.

The Americans would, of course, say that they are right, and that Hammurabi is wrong. Hammurabi, naturally, would retort that he is right, and that the Americans are wrong. In fact, they are both wrong.

Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens [human beings], and in the myths they invent and tell one another. 

These principles have no objective validity.

Harari then shares the most famous sentence in the Declaration of Independence, explains why it is factually wrong, and suggests a more biologically accurate alternative wording -- boldfacing crucial words in the original.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

------------------

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

So what makes us prefer one way of looking at things over another way? Here's Harari's answer regarding why most Americans prefer the Declaration of Independence statement instead of his.

Advocates of equality and human rights may be outraged by this line of reasoning. Their response is likely to be, "We know that people are not equal biologically! But if we believe that we are equal in essence, it will enable us to create a stable of prosperous society."

I have no argument with this. This is exactly what I mean by "imagined order." We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. 

Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies and useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. 

Bear in mind, though, that Hammurabi might have defended his principle of hierarchy using the same logic: "I know that superiors, commoners and slaves are not inherently different kinds of people. But if we believe that they are, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society."

The cultural trick, then, is getting most people in a society to accept various imagined orders that aren't objectively true, but inter-subjectively true. Harari defines these terms.

An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth. Radioactive emissions occurred long before people discovered them, and they are dangerous even when people do not believe in them.

...The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that particular individual changes his or her beliefs.

...The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. If a single individual changes his or her beliefs, or even dies, it is of little importance. However, if most individuals in the network die or change their beliefs, the inter-subjective phenomenon will mutate or disappear... Many of history's most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.

Since imagined orders are inter-subjective, their survival depends on people continuing to believe in them. This obviously is way different from the existence of entities that are objectively real.

A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends on myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. 

This can be done through violence, but forcing people to believe is difficult, costly, and often not effective. Societies have evolved better ways, as Harari explains.

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature. 

People are unequal, not because Hammurabi said so, but because Enlil and Marduk declared it so. People are equal, not because Thomas Jefferson said so, but because God created them that way. Free markets are the best economic system, not because Adam Smith said so, but because these are the immutable laws of nature.

You also educate people thoroughly. From the moment they are born, you constantly remind them of the principles of the imagined order, which are incorporated into anything and everything. They are incorporated into fairy tales, dramas, paintings, songs, etiquette, political propaganda, architecture, recipes and fashions.

Now, here's my favorite part of Harari's argument: there is no way to escape the web of imagined orders. Whenever you try to do this, you're just following some strands of a different imagined order. So good luck on trying to live in an unimagined order that isn't the objectively real natural world.

Can't be done. There simply are more-preferred and less-preferred imagined orders. Here's quotes from the last page of Harari's Building Pyramids chapter.

If I alone were to stop believing in the dollar, in human rights, or in the United States, it wouldn't much matter. These imagined orders are inter-subjective, so in order to change them we must simultaneously change the consciousness of billions of people, which is not easy.

A change of such magnitude can be accomplished only with the help of a complex organization, such as a political party, an ideological movement, or a religious cult. 

However, in order to establish such complex organizations, it's necessary to convince many strangers to cooperate with one another. And this will happen only if these strangers believe in some shared myths. It follows that to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.

...There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run toward freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.

Beautiful! Lovely! Excellent news!

Since there's no escaping human inter-subjectivity -- it is impossible for anyone to exist completely isolated from other people -- we're always embracing some sort of imagined orders.

Choose the ones you like best, so far as you're able. That's all we can do. Live as happily as possible, in line with Harari's alternative wording of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

Wow! Existence has always existed.

I've done a lot of pondering about the primal mystery of existence.

As noted in the essay I wrote this month for the Spiritual Naturalist Society, I've gone from being blown away by the classic question Why is there something rather than nothing? to being awestruck at the amazing affirmation, There is something rather than nothing.

Read on...

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Wow! Existence has always existed.

Awe-inspiring. Spine-tingling. Vertigo-inducing. Something frequently produces these feelings in me.

It isn’t a theme park ride. In fact, it isn’t even a thing. It is everything.

Existence. Just typing that word produced a chill up my spine — a familiar sensation, because I’ve done a lot of grokking about existence.

The usual way of approaching this primal enigma is with a question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I used to resonate with the why.

I thought that just as the things in the world we’re familiar with can be traced to a cause, so can the everything of existence. But this doesn’t make sense to me now.

There’s a difference between things that come into being, and being itself, a.k.a. existence. Positing a cause for a specific entity entails no philosophical quandary, even if that thing is the entire universe.

This caused that. No problem.

Science says, “The Big Bang created the universe.” Religion says, “God created the universe.” We can argue about the plausibility of rival explanations, but not with the logic of seeking a why for a what.

At some point, though, the chain of why reaches an end. Why the Big Bang? Why God? Why, why, why.

We can come up with possible explanations until… we can’t. Then we’re into mind-blowing territory. Terra firma not only turns into terra incognita, seemingly the very possibility of cognizing an answer vanishes.

In “The Mystery of Existence: Why is There Anything At All?,” a collection of essays edited by John Leslie and Robert-Lawrence Kuhn, Kuhn speaks to this in his own contribution, Why Not Nothing?

The question would become my life partner, and even as I learned the rich philosophical legacy of Nothing, I do not pass a day without its disquieting presence.

I am haunted. Here we are, human beings, conscious and abruptly self-aware, with lives fleetingly short, engulfed by a vast, seemingly oblivious cosmos of unimaginable enormousness.

…Now for my secret. No matter how sensible and controlled I may seem to be, Why Not Nothing still drives me nuts. Every time I revisit the stupefying question, I want to scream. Why this Universe? Does God Exist? In comparison, both questions are small beer. Why is there anything at all? That’s the magisterial Question.

…Why is there Something Rather than Nothing? Why Not Nothing? If you don’t get dizzy, you really don’t get it.

I agree. However, I feel equally dizzy pondering a statement rather than a question: There is something rather than nothing.

Wow. The cosmos is. Always has been. Always will be. Probably.

I need that caveat, “probably,” because there’s no way to know whether the human mind is capable of coming to grips with the is’ness of existence. Most of us visualize existence as, well, existing.

In space and time, as a sort of thing. But how could existence be a thing? It’s what makes things possible. No existence, no things.

In Kuhn’s essay, he lists nine levels of Nothings. Which, in reverse, implies nine levels of Somethings. Here’s #1 and #9, the alpha and omega of nothingness.

(1) Nothing as existing space and time that just happens to be totally empty of all visible objects (particles and energy are permitted — an utterly simplistic view).

(9) Nothing where not only there are none of the above (so that, as in Nothing 8, there are no abstract objects), but also there are no possibilities of any kind (recognizing that possibilities and abstract objects overlap, though allowing that they can be distinguished).

No possibilities of any kind. Now, that is really nothing. So much so, I can’t imagine this ultimate Nothing could exist.

Of course, that’s an absurd word to use for it: exist. Level 9 Nothing is the absolute absence of existence. There is no way it (of course, it isn’t an “it”) could have preceded existence, since that Nothing has no possibility of being other than what it is.

Or rather, isn’t.

Thus I’ve lost interest in the why of existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? is a meaningless question. As Kuhn points out, absolute nothing contains no way for existence to exist.

So while religious believers are awestruck at the supposed existence of God, I find an equal or greater measure of awe in the fact of existence itself.

This isn’t a feeling of being in the presence of something greater than myself. After all, I exist. A grain of sand exists. A subatomic particle exists. We all are on the same basic ontological level; we exist.

For me it’s more like looking into a bottomless pit. I feel like I’ve reached the end of my knowing. And not only that: anyone’s knowing.

I could be wrong, an ever-present possibility.

Perhaps some human with a consciousness far different than mine, or an alien being with abilities beyond my capacity to fathom, would be able to look upon the mystery of existence and see it as…

Words fail me. Unsurprisingly.

I simply am open to the idea that however dizzying I find the notion of ever-existing existence, the necessity of existence having always existed, the blunt facticity of the cosmos that is at odds with my experience of everything else having a why, a cause — my mind could be as incapable of grasping the essence of reality as a chimpanzee’s is incapable of grasping calculus.

There’s another possibility: the mystery of existence is a non-existent problem.

“It is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.”
— Bertrand Russell

Well, it’s hard to argue with these perspectives. But being more wonder-filled than Wittgenstein, I’ll end by quoting myself (one of my favorite activities):

My mind gets boggled when I try to envision existence existing eternally, outside of time. This is the far side of the mystery of existence. Endlessness. Eternity. Being without becoming. Effect absent cause. Yet I’m equally boggled by the near side of the mystery of existence.

This present moment. What’s right here, right now. The fact that I’m experiencing what I am, given how much is’ness there is in the cosmos.

Mystery doesn’t only lie beyond the horizon of my consciousness. Mystery is immediately before me. In fact, is me. Because I exist, and no one knows why anything exists, nor if “why?” is even a valid question when asked of the entirety of existence.

In between the near and far sides of the mystery of existence, knowledge can be known. Science guides us. Explorations of causes and effects can steadily enlighten the darkness of what it is possible to know, yet presently isn’t. This illuminating has no end.

Except at the near side and far side of the mystery of existence.

Here, I believe, all we can do is WOW! And that one word is, for me, all the religion, spirituality, and mysticism I need in my current churchlessness.

There's no need for a "theology of atheism"

At one time I probably would have agreed with a call for a theology of atheism. But now this strikes me as both absurd and unneeded.

Sure, I've got a blog called Church of the Churchless. That sort of sounds like the same thing. Aren't I trying to foster a belief system for people who don't believe in God or the supernatural?

Not really. 

This might have been part of my motivation when I started this blog back in 2004. Hard for me to say. I'm a considerably different person now than I was back then, just as I'm a slightly different person today than I was yesterday.

Now, I view knowledge and experience of the natural world -- the one we're born in, live in, and die in -- as all that's needed to get through life successfully, happily, wisely.

Atheism simply is the absence of a belief in the existence of a god or gods. This word is needed because most people do believe in a god or gods, and their beliefs strongly shape human cultures and societies.

There isn't such a term for people who don't play golf.

They simply are people who don't play golf. For avid golfers, that game is really important to them. However, non-golfers don't feel a need to come up with a coherent explanation for why they don't play golf. 

They just don't play golf. Instead, they do other things.

So the notion of a theology of atheism strikes me as being similar: unnecessary. Atheists are just people who don't believe in the existence in god or gods. Instead, they believe in other things. Like the obvious reality of the natural world.

Molly Worthen, though, has a piece in the New York Times called "Wanted: A Theology of Atheism."

As nonbelievers tangle with traditional Christians over same-sex marriage and navigate conflicts between conservative Muslims and liberal democracy, they will need a confident humanist moral philosophy. The secular humanist liberation movement, in its zeal to win over religious America, should not encourage nonbelievers to turn away from their own intellectual heritage at the time when they will want it most.

OK. This makes pretty good sense to me. What bothers me about Worthen's essay is the attitude reflected in this passage:

Atheism, like any ideological position, has political and moral consequences. As nonbelievers become a more self-conscious subculture, as they seek to elect their own to high office and refute the fear that a post-Christian America will slide into moral anarchy, they will need every idea their tradition offers them.

In line with how I started out this post, I don't see atheism as being an "ideological position." Rather, it is the absence of one. 

The "idea their tradition offers them" is simply knowledge and experience of the natural world. In other words, reality.

Why is there a need to justify a belief in reality rather than illusion, in truth rather than falsehood? 

Replace beliefs with working hypotheses

Here's a great letter to the editor that I came across in the May 9, 2015 issue of New Scientist.

From Ray Norris
According to Graham Lawton, "Beliefs, more than anything else, are what make us human" (4 April, p 28). I guess I'm not human, then, since I decided as a geeky astrophysics student many years ago to live in an evidence-based world in which beliefs are replaced by working hypotheses.

At least, I think I did, unless somebody produces strong evidence to the contrary. Once you renounce beliefs, life seems very straightforward, and totally self-consistent. I don't believe in global warming, but I think there's strong evidence to support it. I don't believe in the scientific method, but it seems to work remarkably well, so far. I don't believe in god, but wouldn't it be awesome if somebody produced evidence for a god? (I invite gods to try their hand at this).

A world without rigid intolerant belief is probably a gentler, kinder, more fault-tolerant world, with less persecution of those who don't share our beliefs. Whether you have (irrational) beliefs or (evidence-based) working hypotheses probably makes little difference to daily life, but an enormous difference to the way you view the world. I am always aware of the possibility that anything I say, including this sentence, is wrong.

Racism, sexism and all the other nasty-isms could probably not survive without belief. Unless I believe I'm superior to you, it's very difficult to justify killing you, or discriminating against you.
Baulkham Hills, New South Wales, Australia

Even God can't explain the mystery of existence

Re-reading the first chapter of Luther Askeland's "Ways in Mystery" this morning (one of my favorite meaning-of-life books), I liked how Askeland addressed The Seemingly Really Big Question of Existence.

The Way of Unknowing chapter starts off with a Wittgenstein quote:

Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.

Now, I've come to doubt that this that mystery is really as mystically mysterious as it appears to be.

Maybe the classic question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" simply should be rephrased as a statement: "There is something rather than nothing."

Offering support to  this way of looking at existence, Askeland says:

Whenever we try to account for the existence of someone or something, we do so by referring to some other being... our explanations for the existence of things involve the prior existence of other things. Since there were other things, however, there clearly must already have been a "world"... But if we are looking for an explanation of the world's existence, we obviously cannot make that assumption.

It is becoming evident that the question "Why does the world exist?" is radically different from the question "Why does A exist?"

The latter question assumes that something that is not A and that existed before A led to A. But what existed before the world? Only "nothingness." The latter question wants to find the something that leads to something else. The former asks how we get from nothing to something... It is looking for something in a place where it is simultaneously assuming there is nothing at all.

This is why I have an intuitive -- hey, why not call it mystical -- understanding that as New Agey as this may sound, the "is'ness" of the cosmos needs to be accepted as our best current knowledge of why existence exists. 

And by current, I'm being overly optimistic, since there is good reason to argue that "It just is" always will be the foundational truth about existence. 

I've written a lot of blog posts about the mystery of existence. It fascinates me more than any other question about the cosmos. It's most intriguing quality is the lack of ability to answer it, as noted in my "Mystery of existence eludes both religion and science."

God, whether viewed as a personal or impersonal power, fills precisely the same role in theology as do the laws of physics in science.

That is, a given. Something for which no cause is offered. A brute fact, wihout which no other facts are possible.

OK. To me, it's a tie. Both religion and science are clueless about the ultimate question: why is there something rather than nothing? Each offers up an answer that doesn't satisfy.

"God created the universe." Fine. So tell me, what created God?

"The universe was created by a quantum fluctuation." Fine. So tell me, what created the quantum fluctuation?

What is simply is. There is something rather than nothing. I find this eminently satisfying. More than that, actually, much more. It's awesome. Mindblowing. Astoundingly meaningful.

Why? LIke existence itself, there's no why.

Askeland addresses the issue in this way.

It is important to note that if we explain the world's existence by reference to a divine Creator, we are only postponing and complicating the dilemma. For then we can account for why the world exists, but how are we to account for the fact that God does?

...The question here is not whether God exists. Rather, even assuming that God exists, the question here is how this is possible. How do gods "happen"? How are we to explain the fact that there is an eternal God instead of no eternal God? Further, along what lines might we even try to imagine a conceivable answer? 

If we again postulate a prior being or higher divinity, we are only postponing the dilemma once more. But if we don't posit another being -- if we posit nothingness as the alternative -- we find ourselves once again hopelessly looking for some kind of explanation or cause within that very nothingnesss.

...Apparently we have raised a question that has no possible, plausible, or even conceivable answer. All the intellect can do is repeat the question, "Why does the world exist?" while recognizing that nothing coherent accompanies the sound and that no toehold seems possible anywhere.

What we and our intellects have run up against is the absolutely unique, irreducible, impenetrable, astonishing fact of being. The central fact of existence, the wholly unintelligible fact that the world is, that, we can now say with Wittgenstein is "the mystical."

In the rest of his book, Askeland elaborates upon the implications of this.

In previous blog posts (type "Askeland" in the Google search box in the right sidebar to find them) I've tried to describe his subtle, sensitive, honest approach to spirituality. One attempt is a 2013 post, "In this moment, be the mystery of existence."

It ends with...

This is one of Askeland's creative insights. Religiosity, mysticism, spirituality -- these are just other ways we use to pretend to ourselves that we've got some sort of grasp on the mystery that can't be grasped. We expand our repertoire of illusory mystery-penetrating mechanisms to include supposedly metaphysical ways.

Same difference. 

We still imagine, in other words, that we can name and describe the world, ourselves, and our spiritual lives, only we now add to our repertoire world by adding to it images of a perfect condition contrasting sharply with our present state... we imagine that this perfected condition as one that will someday be ours.

In all this, however, we are just like a chick that, still enclosed in the egg, thinks it knows what the world is like, for we have at that point no more knowledge of other "worlds" than does the chick in the egg or the butterfly still working free of its cocoon. 

Here's the thing: there's no outside of the egg, no freedom from the cocoon. 

How could there be? How is it possible to get outside of existence, to be free of "God" -- whatever you want to call the mystery of the source?

Give it up, dudes and dudettes. In this moment, says Askeland, is all there ever was and ever shall be. Mystery. The mystery of us is identical with the mystery of the cosmos. 

Accept that you will never know either. Because it isn't possible to get outside of either yourself or the cosmos and know it as an object. Best approach, no, the only approach, says Askeland, is to open up a hole of mystery within, or as, yourself.

Then the mystery within and the mystery without are realized as a single mystery. Which doesn't make it less mysterious. Just a much more intimate mystery.

Which brings me to closing time. And a final sip of coffee. Now.

Best statement about reality, in just thirteen words

Back in 2006, I called my post about it "The best one-sentence metaphysics ever written." I still feel that way. But if anyone has another contender for this honor, share it in a comment.

Dick's adage came to mind today when I gave some thought to another quotation by Gregory Bateson that I see mentioned fairly often in science books.

Information is a difference which makes a difference.

So let's ponder the notion of "God" a bit from the perspectives of what Dick and Bateson said. Or, if you like, of supernatural religiosity in general.

What difference does the divinity so many people believe in make in their lives? I'm not talking about their belief in God/divinity, but the reality that "when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

I talked about this in my original post about Dick's quote.

Out of the corner of my eye I can see a white hold-the-newspaper-down rock on the patio table where my laptop sits. Whether or not I believe in the rock, it’s there. My wife senses it too. So does everyone else who walks onto our deck. The rock is real, no doubt about it.

On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve thought once about God today. Certainly not this evening. I was focused on playing ball with our dog, eating dinner, and then watching a recording of the Oregon State—Boise State football game. 

God hasn’t been in evidence, unlike the rock. Ditto for Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Krishna, Holy Spirit, Tao, Big Foot, Godzilla, King Kong, and every other entity that requires a thought to bring it into existence. Beliefs are sustained by thoughts. No thoughts, no beliefs. (Or so I believe; I could be wrong; but even if there is such a thing as a thoughtless belief, I’ll bet that it was born through thought).

Religious believers sustain their faith through (duh...) believing. Without concepts, thoughts, ideas, emotions, and such, God or some other form of divinity fails to exist.

So when religious people talk about God making a difference in their lives, that actually isn't true. Their believing brain is what makes the difference. No beliefs, no difference.

Sure, religious believers feel good when they worship; they are uplifted by their rituals; they get consolation from the words in holy books. And so on, and so on. All of these positive feelings arise from thoroughly worldly experiences.

Being in a church. Taking part in a ritualistic action. Reading books. Sensing a supposedly sacred object or person. 

These are part of the reality Dick speaks of which doesn't require belief to exist. These things don't go away when belief does (though the inner experience associated with them likely will change). God, though, does go away when believing in divinity disappears.

There's nothing wrong with believing. We all believe in things that aren't objectively true, because doing this makes us feel subjectively good. Believing is part of being human.

However, we should keep in mind that everything within our mind isn't part of objective reality. That's the beauty of Philip K. Dick's one-sentence metaphysics -- perhaps better termed ontology.

It reminds us that not believing in something is the best way to determine whether it is part of the reality outside our own head. 

For example, stand on a first-floor balcony and get yourself to believe that an invisible floor extends beyond the railing. Which is equivalent to not believing in falling through empty space. Then jump off the railing. See what happens.

If you fall to the ground, hopefully without breaking any bones, you've learned something about the reality that doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. 

You can do the same with God, of course.

Stop believing in God. I've done this, as have many others. What I've found is that nothing changes. Nothing went away, other than my belief in God. Because, I'm quite sure, there is no God outside of human belief.

Timeless naturalism vs. temporal naturalism? I like temporal.

I'm still making my way through a thick, serious, thoughtful, well-written science/philosophy book, "The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time." 

(Previous posts about the book are here and here.)

The authors, Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin, wrote different parts of the book. I've just started reading Smolin's chapters. He's a philosophically minded physicist, while Unger is a scientifically minded philosopher.

A couple of topics particularly interested me in Smolin's opening Cosmology in Crisis chapter. 

First, the notion of naturalism -- which he says comes in two flavors, timeless and temporal. Smolin defines naturalism this way:

Naturalism is the view that all that exists is the natural world that is perceived with, but exists independently of, our senses or tools which extend them; naturalists also hold that science is the most reliable route to knowledge about nature.

He adds that "my definition doesn't claim that science is the only path to knowledge, nor does it call on nor require that there be a scientific method."

A central theme of this book is that time is the most real thing in the universe, a view that is at odds with the basic philosophical perspective of a majority of modern scientists (for example, in relativity theory time usually is considered a "fourth dimension," which puts it in the realm of space).

Here's how Smolin describes two ways of looking upon naturalism. This was a fresh insight for me, sort of a merging of science and spirituality.

One way to frame the project this book advances is to emphasize how fundamentally our conception of nature is shaped by our understanding of time. The notion of a law of nature is much changed if one thinks that the present moment and its passage are real or are illusions hiding a timeless reality.

If one holds the latter view, then laws are part of the timeless substance of nature, whereas on the former view this is impossible, as nothing can exist outside of time. Even the creed of naturalism, i.e. that the natural world is all that exists, can mean two very different things, depending on whether you think existence is only real in each moment or only applies to timeless entities such as the history of the universe taken as one.

To make this distinction clear I propose to call the view we set out in this book temporal naturalism, and to distinguish it from its opposite, timeless naturalism.

Temporal naturalism holds that all that is real (i.e. the natural world) is real at a moment of time, which is one of a succession of moments. The future is not real and there are no facts of the matter about it. The past consists of events or moments which have been real, and there is evidence of such moments in presently observable facts such as fossils, structures, records, etc. Hence there are statements about the past that can have truth values, even if they refer to nothing presently real.

Timeless naturalism, on the other hand, holds that the experience of moments of time and their passage or flow are illusions. What really exists is the entire history of the universe taken as a timeless whole. Now is as subjective as here and both are descriptions of the perspective of an individual observer. There are, similarly, no objective facts of the matter corresponding to distinctions between past, present, and future.

There's a lot to mentally digest here. Just these two contrasting sentences encapsulate a heck of a lot of scientific and spiritual/religious/mystical philosophizing.

(1) Temporal naturalism holds that all that is real (i.e. the natural world) is real at a moment of time, which is one of a succession of moments.
(2) Timeless naturalism, on the other hand, holds that the experience of moments of time and their passage or flow are illusions.

I'm reminded of the similarly different cosmic perspectives of Buddhism/Zen, which is in line with (1), and Hinduism/Vedanta, which is in line with (2). 

Many spiritual people subscribe to a Be Here Now outlook. Others, to a Flee This Illusion viewpoint.

For many years, thirty-five or so, I believed that it was possible to achieve a change in consciousness through meditation and other means that led to an experience of a timeless transcendent reality. This wasn't naturalism, of course, but supernaturalism.

It bore a lot of resemblance, though, to Smolin's timeless naturalism -- with a "super" added to the last word.

Smolin spends the rest of his chapters arguing for the scientific relevancy of temporal naturalism, as Unger did in a more philosophical manner in the first part of their book.

Emotionally and intuitively, I can tell that I'm already on board with temporal naturalism. It provides answers to some questions that have perplexed me. Like, where are the laws of nature? And why is there something rather than nothing?

More accurately, temporal naturalism dissolves such questions. 

From what I've read so far, Unger and Smolin say that the laws of nature aren't separate from natural phenomena. They appear to be unchanging and outside the bounds of time, but this is only because of the nature of our cooled-down world. 

At the moment of the big bang, and in other extreme parts of the present-day universe (like black holes), the laws of nature were/are different from how we typically see them now. Unger writes:

In these very early moments of the history of the universe, as the earlier discussions of the second cosmological fallacy suggested, causal connections may not have assumed law-like form and the division of nature into enduring natural kinds may not yet have taken shape.

More simply put, Unger and Smolin direct our attention to the now of the present moment which is, as noted in the passage quoted above, all that is real. 

Meaning, in temporal naturalism there is no search for the eternal, the infinite, timeless laws of existence beyond what exists in this one and only natural world.

There is a search of a different kind: for an understanding of how the universe is put together and functions now, which entails a concomitant understanding of the causal connections between previous states of nature and what is evident now.

Makes sense to me. Both scientifically and as a guide to everyday life. 

Humanism is way better than religion. Yet mystery remains.

On the whole, I'm pleased to call myself a humanist. As noted in this post about a humanist book, someone called me this during my sophomore year in college --  before I even knew what humanism was.

This is one of the points made in an interesting You Tube video a regular Church of the Churchless visitor told me about today: "Christian man says humanists are debauched. Andrew Copson explains what Humanism is really all about." 

 

If you're like me, you'll find the preachy Christian guy who speaks at the start of the video to be irritating. But here's the thing: his basic worldview isn't at all unusual. In fact, it's the norm for religious believers.

This man says, with complete confidence, that God instituted marriage, bringing Adam and Eve together.

Which is, of course, ridiculous. There's absolutely zero demonstrable evidence that God exists, and thus less than a zero chance (if such is possible) that God decreed marriage should be between one man and one woman.

Yet he can sit there in an audience of intelligent people, spouting his dogmatic absurdist crap, and his listeners absorb what he is saying (albeit often with bemused expressions on their faces). 

Religions have such a hold on most of humanity that statements which would be viewed as indefensible craziness in a different context are tolerated, because cultures have come to accept collective craziness in the name of religion as being socially acceptable. 

When individuals claim that they're getting instructions about what to do from invisible beings no one else can see, there's a good chance they are having a psychotic episode, not a religious revelation.

The man who responds to the dogmatic religious guy does a good job explaining humanism. He observes that while many people subscribe to a humanist philosophy, only a few percent self-identify as "humanists."

(Just like me, when I was in college.)

Well, I wonder why there is a need for the term "humanism." Why not just call this way of looking at the world, natural? Or maybe, normal. 

This seems to be along the line of John Nagel's criticism of humanism that I quoted in another post on this subject. Nagel wrote a book review where he said:

John Gray’s “Silence of Animals” is an attack on humanism. He condemns this widely accepted secular faith as a form of delusional self-flattery.

“In the most general terms,” he tells us, “humanism is the idea that the human animal is the site of some kind of unique value in the world.” “A related aspect of humanism is the idea that the human mind reflects the order of the cosmos.” “A third aspect of humanism is the idea that history is a story of human advance, with rationality increasing over time.”

Gray rejects all three of these beliefs, along with the pretension of humanism to offer a scientifically respectable replacement for religion: “In a strictly naturalistic view — one in which the world is taken on its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm — there is no hierarchy of value with humans somewhere near the top. There are simply multifarious animals, each with its own needs. Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science.”

There might be some truth to this. I don't know enough about humanism to be sure. Probably humanists come in all varieties, just as people of every sort do.

I can say with confidence, though, that dogs playing in a dog park don't subscribe to either religion or humanism, and they do just fine -- usually getting along with each other, and having a good time. In fact, often the biggest problems at a dog park are between other people, not between the canines.

Still, being humans, we have no choice but to look upon the world in a human way. So in this sense we are all humanists, just as all dogs are canineists. 

Given this fact, absolutism of any sort in regards to the "true" nature of the cosmos is unwarranted, a point made in my post, "Beyond humanism and absolutism... mystery."

Science deals in what can be talked about. Not everything. And even the something that can be talked about necessarily is described in human terms. To believe otherwise is to fall into an unwarranted scientific absolutism.

However, religion, mysticism, and other forms of spirituality also suffer from their own variety of absolutism: the claim that it is not only possible for us humans to know ultimate reality, but that this reality can be described by holy people.

And that, to use an apt non-philosophical term, is bullshit. 

...Cooper reminds us that true humility is saying "I don't know" when faced with the question of what lies at the heart of the awesome mystery of the cosmos. 

I agree with him that there is some heart independent of human consciousness. But what it is... no one knows.

Religion is a failed paradigm deserving of ridicule

Even after more than ten years of blogging on this here Church of the Churchless, I continue to be surprised by how often visitors to this site believe that religious belief shouldn't be subject to ridicule.

Um, didn't they notice the word "churchless" in the blog name? Or the tag line, Preaching the gospel of spiritual independence?

Today a comment interchange on a recent post pointed to this inability of true believers to recognize that their worldview lacks a solid foundation. Here's what "x," a religious skeptic, said:

I don't preach anything...I just comment on preachiness...like yours. You think you're right because you believe you know what's right. But I don't believe, so for me, right and wrong have meaning only with regard to realities, not religious fantasies.

This got a response from someone who has a very loose view of reality.

You say you "don't believe" but you certainly do believe in what you call "realities". These realities are according to your own belief system. I won't be exchanging words with you again. There is no point. You "know" everything.

Pretty typical.

When pushed to defend an indefensible world view, religious people often run away, aggrieved and irritated that someone has asked the excellent question, "What proof do you have for a supposed supernatural reality?"

I've got plenty of experience with being asked that question.

In 1990, after a divorce, I married a woman who, though we had a lot else in common, didn't share my spiritual/religious beliefs. She supported me in mine, yet kept asking me what evidence I had for certain assumptions.

Such as, that the Indian guru I followed really was "God in human form," or that only those who practiced a certain form of meditation would be able to achieve God-realization. Which implied, of course, that some entity known as God actually existed.

At the time, my wife's questioning was irritating.

Looking back, I'm thankful for her challenges to my belief system. After several years of not being able to respond with convincing answers -- convincing either to her or myself -- I began to recognize the flaws in the general philosophy of Sant Mat, particularized in the Radha Soami Satsang Beas teachings.

That's one reason I started this blog a decade or so ago: to support people who have started to free themselves from indefensible belief systems, and to challenge the assumptions of religious dogma.

Last Thursday my now-atheist wife (she used to have some New Age'y beliefs of her own) and now-atheist me went to a Salem brew pub's Science Night. A chemistry professor talked about Thomas Kuhn's famous book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."  

His PowerPoint presentation naturally simplified this dense book, making it accessible to his beer-drinking, burger-eating audience. When he finished his entertaining talk, I asked the first question.

Which pertained, without my mentioning it, to my experience on this blog. I said something like:

It bothers me that people will use the notion of a "paradigm shift" in science to justify weird religious ideas at odds with our scientific understanding of reality. Sure, sometimes large changes in understanding supplant previous theories, as quantum mechanics did with Newtonian physics. But doesn't this all take place within science, not outside it?

After all, there never has been a scientific revolution that undermined the foundation of science itself, as seemingly would be the case if solid evidence existed for a God who intervened in worldly goings-on. So it doesn't seem to me that Kuhn's notion of "paradigm shifts" in any way supports those who consider that science is a flawed way of understanding reality.

The speaker agreed with me. Later I went over to his table and talked with him for a while longer. I thanked him for giving me insights into Kuhn's book, which I've never read. 

This diagram from a web site that talks about The Kuhn Cycle looks pretty accurate to me, based on what I've learned about Kuhn's book. If you go to that link, then click on the "live" diagram, you can read descriptions of each part of the cycle.

What's striking is how religious belief, as contrasted with scientific understanding, never goes through the sort of cyclical paradigm changes that occur in science.

(Again, all of science doesn't go through a paradigm change, just part of science. I spoke with the brew-pub speaker about this. For example, when the earth-centered solar system paradigm was overthrown by the sun-centered paradigm, the biology, chemistry, and such of the time remained intact, by and large.)

In The Kuhn Cycle, factual anomalies in a model of understanding accumulate that can't be adequately explained. This creates a crisis where people begin to question the current model. If a new model of understanding is demonstrably better than the old one, a paradigm change/shift occurs -- which then becomes the normal science, and thus subject to model drift/crisis/revolution itself.

When does this occur in religious thought? Never, in my opinion.

Sure, theologies evolve. The Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism of today isn't the same as it was when the religions came to be. But the basic tenets of a religion never are overthrown by anomalies accumulating that can't be explained by the religion's teachings.

The reason is this: Religions aren't concerned with explaining reality. If they were, we'd call them "science." Instead, religious belief is an exercise in making up supernatural stories that will appeal to people. 

Like, we live after we die. God loves us and is looking after us. There is a cosmic purpose to suffering. Etc. etc.

There's no possibility of a religion's belief system being overturned by conflicting evidence, since the system is founded on faith, not facts. Thus whereas scientists welcome intense debate, discussion, questioning, skepticism, and such, religious believers shy away from it.

They just want to keep on repeating what they already believe, being unwilling to consider that they could be wrong. 

As "x" said above, those of us who don't subscribe to a supernatural belief system can't be accused of being dogmatic. We are open to understanding reality as it is, not as how we would like it to be. I'd be overjoyed to learn that God, life after death, heaven, soul, and spirit actually exist.

However, I've gone through my own personal "paradigm change" after having observed how anomalies in the model of reality I used to believe in couldn't be adequately explained. So I overturned that model, choosing a better one. 

Thus even though religions don't go through The Kuhn Cycle like science does, religious believers certainly can. Meaning, deconversions are common. People come to realize how shallow and out of touch with reality previously accepted dogmas are.

My hope is that this blog has helped some people to do this. I'm pretty sure that it has. So let's keep on questioning religious belief systems, even though people who believe in them don't like to be challenged. 

This is the scientific way, the way reality is revealed. 

Is life absurd? Or maybe asking that question is.

For something completely different... and really well written... and either marvelously meaningful or completely meaningless... yet fun to read, nonetheless...

Check out Rivka Weinberg's New York Times piece, "Why life is absurd." 

I liked it a lot. While understanding it hardly at all. Which could be Weinberg's point. With modern philosophy, often it's hard to tell the difference between satire and seriousness.

Here's a few excerpts to whet your reading appetite.

In a famous 1971 paper, “The Absurd,” Thomas Nagel argues that life’s absurdity has nothing to do with its length.

If a short life is absurd, he says, a longer life would be even more absurd: “Our lives are mere instants even on a geological time scale, let alone a cosmic one; we will all be dead any minute. But of course none of these evident facts can be what makes life absurd, if it is absurd. For suppose we lived forever; would not a life that is absurd if it lasts 70 years be infinitely absurd if it lasted through eternity?”

This line of reasoning has a nice ring to it but whether lengthening an absurd thing will relieve it of its absurdity depends on why the thing is absurd and how much you lengthen it. A longer life might be less absurd even if an infinite life would not be. A short poem that is absurd because it is written in gibberish would be even more absurd if it prattled on for longer. But, say I decided to wear a skirt so short it could be mistaken for a belt. On my way to teach my class, a colleague intercepts me:

“Your skirt,” she says, “is absurd.”

“Absurd? Why?” I ask.

“Because it is so short!” she replies.

“If a short skirt is absurd, a longer skirt would be even more absurd,” I retort.

Now who’s being absurd? The skirt is absurd because it is so short. A longer skirt would be less absurd. Why? Because it does not suffer from the feature that makes the short skirt absurd, namely, a ridiculously short length.

The same goes for a one-hour hunger strike. The point of a hunger strike is to show that one feels so strongly about something that one is willing to suffer a lack of nourishment for a long time in order to make a point. If you only “starve” for an hour, you have not made your point.

Your one-hour hunger strike is absurd because it is too short. If you lengthened it to one month or one year, you might be taken more seriously. If life is absurd because it’s short, it might be less absurd if it were suitably longer.

Absurdity occurs when things are so ill-fitting or ill-suited to their purpose or situation as to be ridiculous, like wearing a clown costume to a (non-circus) job interview or demanding that your dog tell you what time it is.

Is the lifespan of a relatively healthy and well-preserved human, say somewhere between 75 and 85, so short as to render it absurd, ill-suited to reasonable human purposes?

...The absurdity of human life poses a challenge to its meaning. Absurdity and meaningfulness don’t go together. This, however, does not mean that if life were not absurd then it would have meaning. Removing the obstacle of absurdity does not entail that meaning rushes in.

But if we cannot remove the obstacle of absurdity then it will be hard to conclude that life has meaning or determine what that meaning might be. The clown suit is standing in our way.

There are lots of comments on the piece. I only looked at a few. This is one that resonated with me.

lindy tucker

Yikes. What a lot of words. I am older, and have discovered for myself, that over-thinking, over-analyzing, trying to ascribe meaning to this brief existence of mine, have done nothing but cause me to not be present and subsequently fuel neurotic behaviors.

Late in life, I am finally learning to curb my need to analyze and now try to only apply that important skill to problems that are solvable. (like how to figure out a stress-free password solution or purchase a used car).

At some point I decided that the experience of being alive was so full of things that engendered a sense of wonder and awe, that I let go of the need to make sense of it all.

Thinking about how the optic nerve works, or how my body sustains itself, watching the play of dolphins in the ocean, for the most part, brings me to a resounding "yes" . In spite of the hardships, the struggles and the mistakes, I am grateful for the trip and do not want to spend a lot of calories anymore deciding whether it is absurd or not.

Imagination permeates waking, as well as dreaming

Imagination.

We tend to think of this as something special, an activity we engage in when, say, we're trying to do something creative like paint a picture, write a novel, or compose a song.

Or as what the brain does when it dreams -- which seemingly is markedly different from the clear perception of reality in our waking state.

But Evan Thompson's book, "Waking, Dreaming, Being," has given me a different perspective on imagination. From both a Buddhist and neuroscientific perspective, he sees imagination as permeating every form of consciousness.

Here's a passage from his Imagining: Are we real? chapter.

These ancient Indian and modern neuroscience views share a deep insight: sense impressions don't produce consciousness; they modulate it in the waking state. Sense impressions change the tone, pitch, or volume of consciousness, as do memories and emotions in the waking and dream states, but they don't create the vibration of consciousness itself.

We perceive the world thanks to our senses and our ability to move around, but sensing and moving don't fashion consciousness anew each time we wake up; they affect an already existing consciousness present also when we dream.

To get these ancient and modern ideas right, however, we need to understand dreaming as imagination, not false perception. Wakefulness isn't a hallucinatory state constrained by sensory inputs; it's an imaginative state fed by sense perception. Dreaming isn't a hallucinatory state cut off from sensory inputs; it's an imaginative state fed by memory and emotion.

As we've seen, imagination permeates waking and dreaming consciousness; in both states it underlies how we experience the ego or the "I-Me-Mine."

The religiously- and supernatural-minded shouldn't jump to the conclusion that Thompson believes there is any alternative to imagination being part and parcel of consciousness.

Meaning, he doesn't consider that consciousness is fundamental, immaterial, or capable of observing reality "as it is" (whatever that might mean). He writes:

The upshot is that there's no way to stand outside consciousness and look at it, in order to see how it fits into the rest of reality. Science always moves within the field of what consciousness reveals; it can enlarge this field and open up new vistas, but it can never get beyond the horizon set by consciousness. In this way, direct experience is primary and science secondary.

The primacy of direct experience requires that we reevaluate how we think about the project of relating consciousness and the brain. We can never step outside consciousness to see how it measures up to something else, and consciousness never appears or shows up apart from some context of embodiment.

...Consciousness is something we live, not something we have. We don't have consciousness in any sense that would allow us to lose it without ceasing to be what we are. Consciousness is our way of being, and it cannot be objectified, that is, treated as just another kind of object out there in the world, because it is that by which any object shows up for us at all.

Hard to argue with.

Science is a way of confirming direct experience, which on its own can be decidedly faulty, in the sense of mistakenly taking an act of imagination to reflect something that is actually there in an objective sense, observable and knowable by others.

Much of our everyday life, of course, is marked by states of consciousness which we don't usually take to be imaginative. Memories and anticipations, for example. We imagine what the past has been like, and what the future will be. 

Neither of which reflects reality. (For example, here's a New York Times piece, "Why Our Memory Fails Us.")

So imagination is everpresent in human consciousness. It's just a matter of degree, and how it is expressed.

Here's what you actually know...

Hey, I can find quasi-philosophical churchless inspiration in all kinds of places. Yesterday it was in Carolyn Hax's advice column that appeared in the Sunday Oregonian. 

Hax responded to a woman who was "feeling shaken in my own marriage" after learning that the husband of a friend of hers has been having an affair.

The woman said, "My husband has never given me a reason to suspect he is anything less than a loving and devoted spouse and father, but I feel myself looking at our relationship with a more critical eye."

I thought Hax's advice was well spoken and made a lot of sense. Here's an excerpt. I've boldfaced the part I like most.

The natural response is to reassure yourself out of this existential crisis, but I suggest you do the opposite and push yourself into it even more broadly. 

Since you've already questioned what, exactly, you can know for sure about a spouse, I suggest you keep going and finish off the whole concept of certainty. With a (hypothetical) baseball bat.

Here's what you actually know, at any given time, more or less: who and what surrounds you, what you're doing, and how you feel. The rest is speculation that ranges from highly informed to completely beyond your reach.

You can also know for sure that change is a constant and plans are not guarantees.

"Speculation" may sound like like a tenuous word to describe what we know about the vast reality that isn't within our immediate sphere of knowledge.

But Hax reminds us that speculation ranges from highly informed (proven facts, well-established scientific laws of nature) to completely beyond one's reach (why existence exists, universes beyond our own).

In the latter category I'd also add knowledge of God and what happens after death. Religious believers would want to say these things are usually beyond our reach, but some holy people/books have revealed the truth about them.

Highly doubtful. Regardless, Hax's central point is indisputable.

Once we get away from direct sensory perceptions and intuitive experiencing of our subjective inner state, imagining "what if's" can lead us anywhere. Which usually isn't in a truthful direction. 

There's nothing wrong with engaging in speculating, imagining, fantasizing, and such. We just need to keep in mind the knowledge spectrum between "highly informed" and "completely beyond your reach."

"Spiritual oneness" is embracing your bodily being

Having written a well-received book called "Return to the One," I've obviously thought a lot about oneness. My views have changed considerably since I wrote the book.

I used to believe that the goal of a spiritual or self-realized life was to merge the soul's immaterial consciousness with universal consciousness, which often is termed God or The One. 

Now, I've got another view of oneness. A simpler one. A more easily achieved one. A considerably more scientific one.

What I am, what we all are, what everything in the universe is -- its the stuff of physics. Julian Baggini puts it this way in his book that I'm re-reading, "The Ego Trick." (See my previous blog post.)

To these we can add the third truth: that there is no stuff in the universe other than the stuff of physics. Not so long ago, you could have put that same basic thought in simpler terms and it would probably have been more perusasive: there is nothing in the universe apart from matter.

That formulation has become both less persuasive and less accurate, since developments in physics have changed the way we think about the fundamental constituents of the universe. The best simplification we can now come up with is that the universe is at root comprised of energy, but at the smallest, quantum level, this energy is so weird and mysterious it's difficult to know how to describe it in ways that aren't contentious and question-begging.

...So we have these three facts: thoughts and feelings are real, they are not describable in purely physical terms, but the universe has within it only the physical things described by the equations of physicists. It seems the only way to make sense of this is that mental events emerge from physical ones, without being strictly identical with them.

As the neurologist Todd E. Feinberg puts it, "your life is not a pack of cells; your life is what yuor particular pack of cells collectively do, though I cannot observe such a thing as your life, touch it, put it under a microscope, or keep it on a bottle on a shelf."

Thought and feeling are what matter does, when it is arranged in the remarkably complex ways that brains are. Matter is all that is needed for them to exist, but they are not themselves lumps of matter. In this sense, "I" is a verb dressed as a noun. 

...There is nothing about the very concept of the psychological that requires us to think of it as being separate or separable from the physical.

In one sense, what Baggini says is so obvious, it hardly needs saying. But actually, it does.

Because what he calls the "ego trick" is so strong, so compelling, so intuitively attractive, we humans find it easy to believe that our essential being is some sort of immaterial consciousness floating somewhere behind our eyes, inside our head.

In reality, says Baggini:

This helps us to understand how the Ego Trick works. It is able to create something which has a strong sense of unity and singleness from what is actually a messy, fragmented sequence of experiences and memories, because all mental experience emerges from a messy, fragmented and hugely complicated set of processes in the brain.

We do not yet fully understand how this trick works, but we know that it does. Those who hold on to the idea that something other than a functioning brain is required to create persons with a sense of self are simply not looking the evidence in the face. 

Just because some mysteries remain, that does not mean that everthing is a mystery, and it certainly doesn't mean we are justified in appealing to other mysteries, like souls, to plug the gaps in our understanding. On the question of whether we are physical beings or not, the case should be closed.

OK. I agree. The case is closed. We are physical beings. 

So if we want to continue to use the word "spiritual" to mean a pursuit of the most refined nature of our humanity, this search will be pursued through the physical. Namely, the body. Our bodies. My body. Your body. The body every living entity is.

Note: I didn't say "The body every living entity inhabits." I'll admit that this word popped into my mind as I was composing the last sentence in the preceding paragraph, because old habits die hard. 

For me, they die happily. 

The more I'm able to not only intellectually realize that I am physical body (not immaterial soul or spirit), but to feel this in the depth of my being as an intuitive truth about my true nature, the more joyous I feel.

Most of my life I've been searching for The One, for unity, for the single reality behind appearances. After looking in the wrong place -- somewhere distant from the here-and-now of this world -- I've come to understand that the one I've been looking for is what I've always been.

Matter. Energy. The stuff of physics. The body that is me. I'm no different from everything else in the universe. It and me, we're one. Always have been. Always will be. 

Yes, the material form called "me" will pass away, change form, disintegrate, be reconstituted into other material forms. I never was separate from everything. Everything just temporarily came together into a form with the capacity for consciousness -- me. 

I hope you can see how beautiful this is. If not, that's fine. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 

Embrace "Binocularity." We are both subjective and objective.

In one of my periodic fits of grandiosity (assuming I'm ever doing anything else), last month I popped out a blog post titled, "Subjective and objective: the key to understanding everything!"

However, even non-humble me understood that, duh, between the poles of subjective and objective must lie everything. What else is there in the cosmos that can't be classified as objectively or subjectively real? 

Meaning, it either exists within, or as, some form of consciousness, or it is present whether or not some form of consciousness is aware of it. 

Back in 2009 I swam in these deep philosophical waters in another post, "Subjectivity is the experience of objectivity." There I talked about Owen Flanagan's book, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World.

Our experiencing is an objective state of affairs, along with coffee cups and laptops. Experience simply is a feeling state, according to Flanagan, which makes a lot of sense to me. 

There aren't two worlds, one subjective and one objective. Our experiencing is part of the objective world, albeit a unique part -- one which does not exist apart from the experiencer.

Today I came across a New York Times piece, "The Benefits of 'Binocularity'" that casts more light on the nature of subjectivity and objectivity. 
Download The Benefits of 'Binocularity' - NYTimes.com

It isn't very long. Well worth a read. Here's some excerpts.

To see what is right — and wrong — with the notion that neuroscience will transform our idea of just deserts, and, more generally, our idea of what it means to be human, it can help to step back and consider a strange-sounding metaphor that I encountered first in the work of the British philosopher Jonathan Glover. He said that if we want to understand what sorts of beings we are in depth, we need to achieve a sort of intellectual “binocularity.”

With the metaphor of binocularity, Glover was saying that, just as we need two eyes that integrate slightly different information about one scene to achieve visual depth perception, being able see ourselves though two fundamentally different lenses, and integrate those two sources of information, can give us a greater depth of understanding of ourselves.

Through one lens we see that we are “subjects” (we act) who have minds and can have the experience of making free choices. Through the other we see that we are “objects” or bodies (we are acted upon), and that our experiences or movements are determined by an infinitely long chain of natural and social forces.

Consider one mundane example. As I sit at my computer writing these words, I am having an experience of choosing words to express what I am thinking. When they are published, you and I can both judge my choices. Because I am the subject who has made them, I will enjoy your praise or be stung by your derision. Whether it is praise or blame, you and I will agree that it is I who deserve it. This experience I have as a subject with a mind is as real a feature of the world as is the body that is the necessary condition for that experience.

...The more difficult — and, I would argue, better — way to go about trying to understand what sorts of beings we are is to see ourselves as both free subjects and as determined objects, and to accept that we aren’t wired for seeing ourselves in both ways at once. Using either lens alone can lead to pernicious mistakes.

When we use only the subject lens, we are prone to a sort of inhumanity where we ignore the reality of the natural and social forces that bear down on all of us to make our choices. It would be hard to exaggerate, for example, the inhumanity of locking up huge numbers of people who are clearly mentally ill. When we use only the object lens, however, we are prone to a different, but equally noxious sort of inhumanity, where we fail to appreciate the reality of the experience of making choices freely and of knowing that we can deserve punishment — or praise.

Our conceptual lives would be tidier if we could see ourselves only as subjects or only as objects, but our understanding would be shallower. If we want to understand persons in deeper ways than either lens alone can offer, we need to practice a more binocular habit of thinking. Such a way of thinking would accept the necessity of oscillating between seeing ourselves as beings who can — and can’t — deserve punishment. Neuroscience can help us grind one of those lenses, but it can’t obviate the need for the other.

No need to choose between Wonder and Science

For about a week I've been reading two books during my morning pre-meditation time. To most people they'd seem incompatible. Or at least, pointers in divergent directions of reality. 

But I happily read some of each, using a highlighter and pen (thanks for blank back pages, publishers) to note what I like, and sometimes don't like, about "The Way of Wonder" and "The Systems View of LIfe." 

Here's a blog post that includes links to other posts I've written about Haas' books; I haven't finished The Systems View of Life, which is a fascinating, but quite technical, undergraduate textbook that covers a lot of different topics -- as befits its title.

As I put one of the books down and pick up the other, sometimes I do wonder about how I can like the very poetic and mystical "The Way of Wonder" while also enjoying Fritjof Capra's and Pier Luigi Luisi's scientific exploration of the meaning of it all.

Well, for me it relates to what knowing means. 

Superficially, Haas is really down on knowing. His book is filled with paeans to wonder, not-knowing, mystery, darkness, giving up words, concepts, abstractions. That stuff can get annoying, especially since Haas is using well-written words and sophisticated concepts to get across his point.

One would think that if he really meant what he says, he'd just do a dance, grunt a lot, or otherwise communicate his message non-verbally and non-conceptually. 

But I see Haas as downplaying the ordinary sense of knowing in two ways that are compatible with some central themes in "The Systems View of Life." I'll know more about this, of course, after I finish that book.

First, wonder is an entirely appropriate -- inescapable, even -- response when we ponder the limits of existence. The very small of the quantum world. The very large of the cosmos. The beginning and end of the universe. Where everything in reality came from and where it is going.

Nobody knows the answers to these enigmas.

Not science, not spirituality, not religion, not mysticism, not philosophy. So I read Haas as mainly denigrating false knowing such as religions thrust upon us, the offering up of answers which please us, even though they are untrue, because not-knowing is uncomfortable. 

For example, Haas writes:

What generally happens, however, is that when finally we begin to courageously divorce ourselves from the habit of interpretation, and we stick our heads out of our limited understanding, we suddenly see what we should have been seeing all along -- the great Enigma waiting to engulf us.

And because we have hidden behind the cowardly walls of interpretation for so long, we cannot now bear the vision of infinite mystery, and therefore we quickly spin about on our heels and crawl back into understanding.

...Interpretation, then, is a covering over the great bewildering immensity; a shell the turtle constructs around itself, to hide and blind within; a blanket, pulled between the child and darkness, blocking out the ubiquitous unknown.

These words are a much more powerful indictment of conceptualizing than a passage in "The Systems View of Life," but connections can be drawn between them.

As human beings, we not only experience the transient states of primary consciousness; we also think and reflect, communicate with symbolic language, make value judgments, hold beliefs, and act intentionally with self-awareness and an experience of personal freedom.

...The "inner world" of our reflective consciousness emerged in evolution together with the evolution of language and of organized social relations. This means that human consciousness is inextricably linked to language and to our social world of interpersonal relationships and culture. In other words, our consciousness is not only a biological but also a social phenomenon.

So not only are we unable to look into the mystery of what lies beyond our capacity to know, our view of what we can comprehend occurs through the limited lens of human language and consciousness. This is just how things are, not a problem.

Thus a love of Wonder and Science both support a realization that what we know is not all there is, or exactly how reality is. Human knowledge is in part a human invention, while also in part an accurate reflection of the world that is not us.

I'm reminded of Ken Wilber's pre-trans fallacy. 

There is a difference between an infantile pre-rational, pre-language state, and a trans-rational, trans-language state. Meaning, as I said in a recent semi-serious post, I can instantly and intuitively marvel at a dark small shape zooming just above a creek bed and also soon after think "duck." 

The wonder of the experience, which I'd never had before in my 24 years of living on our rural Oregon property, wasn't at all diminished by the subsequent cognition that what our dog had startled out of a muddly pool of water was, indeed, a duck.

So when Haas decries "knowing," I take this to mean a certain kind of knowing to the exclusion of all other kinds. I can know all kinds of things about the world, while also knowing that I don't know about a whole lot of other things.

My knowing and not-knowing are two sides of the same experiential coin of consicousness. I can appreciate what I know through science, reason, experience, and language, while embracing the mysteries that lie beyond both my ability to know, and the ability of every other human being.

I'll briefly mention another commonality between these two books. Each stresses that knowing in isolation isn't genuine knowledge. Nothing in existence stands alone, separate unto itself. A duck would be nothing without the world in which it is born, lives, and dies.

Neither would we. This is the essence of a systems approach to life, according to Capra and Luisi.

Systems thinking means a shift from material objects and structures to the nonmaterial processes and patterns of organization that represent the very essence of life. We should also add that the emphasis on relationships, qualities, and processes does not mean that objects, quantities, and structures are no longer important.

When we talk of shifts of perspective, we do not imply that systems thinking completely eliminates one perspective in favor of the other, but rather that there is a complementary interplay between the two perspectives, a figure/ground shift.

...The first, and most general, characteristic of systems thinking is the shift of perspective from the parts to the whole. Living systems are integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts.

...The systemic conception of reality as an inescapable network of relationships has important implications not only for our view of nature, but also for our understanding of scientific knowledge. In Cartesian science, scientific descriptions were believed to be objective -- that is, independent of the human observer and the process of knowing. 

Systems science, by contrast, implies that epistemology -- the understanding of the process of knowing -- has to be included in the description of natural phenomena.

Which isn't all that different from what Haas says in a different way in his book.

Which is to say -- what happens to 'what is,' when we tangle our multifarious verse into the uni-verse, creating a multi-verse, and then attempt to collate our manifold symbols (which are not reality) into a 'way' of seeing -- what happens is that we end up with a version of life 'veiled' through lifeless symbols; life becomes a collage of dead, separate, 'things,' instead of a singular, flowing, living, wholeness.

This is why our term 'cata-logue' ('cata-': destruction, and 'logos': the 'word) literally refers to the disaster that arises from collecting and organizing symbols, which is what happens when we compart-mentalize our understandings, and make closed, separate boxes, and so destroy the natural whole.

What if reality is completely different from how you think it is?

I'm not sure whether ultimate reality can be known. Heck, I'm not even sure whether limited reality can be known. 

Meaning, there may be no such thing as reality.

This might just be a word we humans use for our way of looking upon the world, a subjective viewpoint which has no resemblance to the way the world really is, because there is no really beyond the subjective viewpoint. 

Alternatively, perhaps reality really exists, but it is nothing like our thoughts about it.

Religious dogmas have it wrong. Mystical teachings have it wrong. Philosophical notions have it wrong. Scientific theories have it wrong. This is what I was thinking of when I wrote one of my first Church of the Churchless posts ten years ago, "Just have faith."

Here's how to tell the difference between true faith and false faith: Imagine that you are standing in the middle of a bare windowless room. Two doors lead out of the room. Both are closed, but can be opened with a turn of the doorknob. The doors are marked with signs that describe what awaits on the other side: (A) Reality, (B) Belief

After you open a door, you have to walk through it. The door then will shut and you never will be able to leave the place you have entered. Choose Reality and you will know things as they really are, from top to bottom of the cosmos. You will know whether or not God exists and, if so, the nature of this ultimate divinity. You will know whether death is the final end of your existence or if it is the beginning of another form of life. You will know whether there is a meaning to the universe beyond what human beings ascribe to it.

Or, choose Belief and you will know only what lies within the confines of your current suppositions about the nature of the cosmos. For the rest of your life you will be confident that what you believe to be true, really is. Any evidence to the contrary will not make an impact on your mind. You will remain doubt-free, faithful to the beliefs you now hold about God, creation, life, death, and the purpose of human existence.

Which door would you choose to walk through?

Before answering, consider carefully the potential ramifications of your choice. Reality is an unknown, a mystery. It could be frightening or fabulous, painful or pleasurable, warmly loving or coldly uncaring. Do you want to embrace absolutely real reality? Or would you rather hold on to your beliefs about what is real?

Great questions. I'm not sure how I'd answer them if the doors I described actually existed. I like to think I'd choose Reality, but this might be so mind-blowing, my brain would never recover from the shock of it. 

Last night I was reading a recent issue of New Scientist. A lead piece by the editors caught my eye, "The beautiful, ugly truth. Better to see the cosmos as it is, rather than how we'd like it to be." It began with:

"The great tragedy of science," as Victorian biologist Thomas Huxley observed, is "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

The piece went on to talk about a story in the issue that describes the possibility of the universe not being symmetrical or homogeneous at very large scales.

Symmetry is pleasing to scientists. Much of modern cosmology is founded on the assumption that there is no special place in the universe. For example, if the expansion of the universe is accelerating, this is occurring everywhere. 

Such may not be the case. Which leads to the editor's final paragraph:

A less-ordered universe might be less pleasing to the mind's eye, and in some cases less tractable. But perhaps it's time we stopped trying so hard to find the truth through beauty, and instead try a bit harder to find beauty in the truth of ugly facts.

Religions prosper by preying on the human propensity to shy away from ugly facts.

Like the inevitabilty of death, consciousness being dependent on the physical brain, the absence of demonstrable evidence for God, a dearth of reasons to believe in miracles or the effectiveness of prayer, our insignificance in an unimaginably vast and ancient universe.

We make up stories about how the world is because this comforts us. This is obvious in religiosity.

Yet scientifically-minded people also cling to explanations that attempt to bridge the unbridgable gap between the little we know and the vast amount that remains unknown to humanity -- possibly forever. Our natural tendency is to shy away from uncertainty, not-knowing, cluelessness.

We believe we're making progress toward fathoming the mystery of the cosmos. Perhaps personally; certainly as a species. Rarely do we seriously consider that questioning the Meaning of It All without finding answers might be our fate.

Both individually and collectively. Is this so distressing, though?

Consider: if the nature of reality (ultimate or otherwise) is beyond the ability of we Homo sapiens' to comprehend, then embracing a gigantic existential question mark is the closest we'll be able to come to any sort of final knowledge.

"I don't know" would be the wisest understanding; "I have no idea," the most profound thought.

A quotation in Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost has some attribution problems. Regardless, along with Don Anderson I love the quote.

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”

-– Rebecca Solnit, reinterpreting someone else, who was misquoting Plato, who was quoting Meno, who was losing an argument to Socrates 

Modern science demolishes archaic "as it is" views

Whenever I read a book about Buddhism or mindfulness, I've got my highlighter poised to make a skeptical marginal question mark when (usually not if) I come across mention of perceiving reality "as it is."

This is an absurd pre-scientific notion, as I've discussed here and here.

With so many interesting ideas to choose from, I'll take the easy way out in this post and share some of what I read this morning about how humans attribute what actually is within to without -- the world outside our craniums. 

Frequently I take issue with those who claim it is possible to know reality "as it is."

Huh?

First, we Homo sapiens' know reality as it is possible to be known by the unique capabilities of the human brain/body. Second, every person experiences reality in his or her own unique fashion.

My "first" is evident to anyone who goes on a walk with a dog, which posseses a vastly different sense of smell. My "second" is evident to anyone who is married or otherwise knows another person intimately.

Vive la différence, as they say. 

It isn't possible to view something without the brain doing a lot of unconscious processing before the perception pops into awareness. Just because a person isn't consciously thinking doesn't mean that his or her brain isn't chugging away on an unconscious level, bringing in personal past experiences and such.

Even though mindfulness advocates claim to bring a scientific perspective to this trendy meditation approach, rarely do I find them addressing the neuroscientific facts that undermine the notion of it being possible to perceive the world "as it is."

The best we can do, seemingly, is reduce obvious distractions and prejudices that prevent us from accurately perceiving what is happening in the present moment.

For example, if I'm daydreaming while driving, or rocking along to a song I like on the radio, I'm going to be less aware of what is happening on and along the road I'm on. I may not notice a bicyclist on a side street or a ball rolling onto the pavement.

Likewise, if I detest the politics of an elected official, my emotional distaste for them may make it impossible for me to understand their policy positions in a speech they're making. My mental screaming at the television screen drowns out the coherence of their message.

So there is a continuum of "as it is." It is possible to be more, or less, in touch with the reality of what is happening in the world. 

However, there is no absolutely objective reality, no perspective from above, no God's eye view. No as-it-is.

What's interesting is that traditional religious perspectives have switched philosophical places with the view of modern science in this regard. Usually we think of religions and spiritual practices as championing subjectivity, while scientists are hooked on objectivity.

To some extent this is true. But not when it comes to "as it is." Observer-dependent reality is a central concept in modern physics, as blogged about here and here. It also is a core tenet of a systems view of life, as discussed by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi in a book with that title. 

To quote Heisenberg once more, "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Thus systems thinking involves a shift from objective to "epistemic" science, to a framework in which epistemology -- "the method of questioning" -- becomes a central part of scientific theories. 

The realization that the subjective dimension is always implicit in the practice of science does not mean that we have to give up scientific rigor. When we speak of an "objective" description in science, we mean first and foremost a body of knowledge that is shaped, constrained, and regulated by the collective scientific enterprise, rather than being merely a collection of individual accounts. Such intersubjective validation is standard practice in science and need not be abandoned.

In the epistemic approach to science, nature is seen as an interconnected web of relationships, in which the identification of specific patterns as "objects" depends on the human observer and the process of knowing.

...What makes it possible to turn the systems approach into a proper science is the discovery that there is approximate knowledge. This insight is crucial to all of contemporary science. The mechanistic paradigm is based on the Cartesian belief in the certainty of scientific knowledge. 

In the systems paradigm it is recognized that all scientific concepts and theories are limited and approximate. Science can never provide any complete and definitive understanding. In science, to put it bluntly, we never deal with truth, in the sense of a precise correspondence between our description and the described phenomenon. We always deal with limited and approximate knowledge.

Fascinating. 

Religious believers often talk about the arrogance of science, of scientists supposedly considering they have all the answers.

Not at all.

As Capra says, modern science recognizes that knowledge of reality always is from a certain point of view. There is no such thing as an exact match between a description of something, and the nature of that thing.

So it is those who hold to the possibility of an "as it is" understanding of reality -- via enlightenment, elevated consciousness, high level of mindfulness, whatever -- who are being arrogant.

Humility is the hallmark of science, not of religions and other practices which claim to possess a special knowledge of the true nature of reality.

A desire for something, infinity, doesn't prove it exists

I used to think that my intense longing for God, heaven, divinity, higher regions of reality -- whatever you want to call it -- meant that such existed.

After all, I feel thirsty because water exists; desirous because sexuality exists; hungry because food exists; sleepy because sleep exists.

So if I have a craving for the supernatural, doesn't this prove (or at least strongly imply) that something beyond the physical exists?

Actually, no. Alan Watts does a good job of explaining why in his marvelous book, "The Wisdom of Insecurity." 

Under these circumstances we feel in conflict with our own bodies and the world around them, and it is consoling to be able to think that in this contradictory world we are but "strangers and pilgrims."

For if our desires are out of accord with anything that the finite world can offer, it might seem that our nature is not of this world, that our hearts are made, not for the finite, but for infinity. The discontent of our souls would appear to be the sign and seal of their divinity.

But does the desire for something prove that the thing exists? We know that it does not necessarily do so at all.

It may be consoling to think that we are citizens of another world than this, and that after our exile upon earth we may return to the true home of our heart's desire. But if we are citizens of this world, and if there can be no final satisfaction of the soul's discontent, has not nature, in bringing forth man, made a serious mistake?

For it would seem that, in man, life is in hopeless conflict with itself. To be happy, we must have what we cannot have. In man, nature has conceived desires which it is impossible to satisfy.

Sounds dismal. Thankfully, in the rest of the book Watts persuasively explains how it is possible to be satisfied with what the world has to offer without substituting religious fantasies for reality. (See here.)

My own view of the situation, which is similar to Watts', is that our highly evolved human capacity for conceptualization is a double-edged sword. It enables us to envision and accomplish amazing things beyond the ability of other animals, yet also sets us up for disappointment when we conceive of entities that are marvelously appealing, yet don't exist.

Like a loving God who will take care of us for eternity in a heaven where nothing is lacking. Like eternal life. Like being reunited with loved ones after we die. Like having all of the mysteries of the cosmos revealed to us once we achieve a state of divine consciousness.

Last night my wife and I attended a benefit screening of "OR7 - The Journey" here in Salem. The movie is about a famous Oregon wolf, OR7, who acquired the name Journey in a contest organized by Oregon Wild.

Journey/OR7 (who had a radio collar that made it possible to track him) made an amazing trek from northeast Oregon, near the Idaho border, into western Oregon, then into northern California and back to Oregon.

By most accounts he was looking for a mate. Pretty damn strong desire, which took him two thousand miles. Amazingly, it appears that he found one. This wasn't a miracle, because female wolves exist -- though it wasn't known that any were in western Oregon.

Rare events do happen. However, impossible events don't.

Wisdom is knowing what, to the best of our knowledge, is possible, and what isn't. Spending what almost certainly is our one and only life chasing a fantasy... is that wise?

Here's the OR7 movie trailer. Oregon is beautiful, for real. Last night the movie maker, who was at the screening, pointed out the obvious: the wolf shown in his film isn't actually OR7/Journey, but a stand-in. 

 

In a God's eye view, who does the seeing?

I've heard the term, "God's eye view," before. But I haven't given it much thought. Maybe it was because I believed in God for so many years.

I never questioned the notion that there could be a way of looking upon reality that was godlike. After all, even scientists -- not just religious believers -- assume the cosmos can be viewed from some sort of detached objective transcendent perspective.

This is the way things are. 

OK. But says who? And where is that entity?

If inside the cosmos (which I define as everything that exists), then this being with a supposed God's eye view isn't seeing everything, since it is within everything. It is a part of reality, of existence, of the cosmos.

Thus this being not only can't see itself, it has its own perspective. It is situated within some aspect of the cosmos. For us this means time and space. Or more accurately, the space-time continuum.

This isn't nowhere. It is somewhere. 

When we imagine God being aware of everything, what does the vision consist of? For me, I either picture myself looking through God's consciousness (a fantasy, for sure) or see God as if from the outside, gazing upon everything (another fantasy).

In the latter case, I'm definitely taking a God's eye view of God.

Yet also in the first case, more subtly. Because I am picturing myself looking through God's consciousness, which is a perspective on God's perspective.

The Big Question is whether a God's eye view makes any sense.

Can any being really understand reality as it is -- detachedly objectified -- or is reality always a matter of subjective perspective? This subject-object problem is a key theme in Amanda Gefter's fascinating book, "Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn."

As I blogged about before, the notion of observer-dependent reality is brought up early and often in the book. Today I passed the halfway point in my reading, coming across these passages:

My mind was officially blown. Top-down cosmology had suggested that you violate the law of causality when you try to take a God's-eye view of the universe, leaving me to wonder if you would violate other laws too. Laws of physics intact only when viewed inside a single light cone?

Now horizon complementarity answered with a resounding yes. All the laws of physics --both relativity and quantum mechanics -- only hold true within a single light cone, finite and limited as it may be.

For years my father and I had talked about the impossibility of a God's-eye view. After all, that was Einstein's lesson: you can't talk about the universe without asking, from whose point of view? Reference frames make all the difference. There is nothing outside the universe.

Thanks to the finite speed of light, any given observer can see only a piece of it. But we had been talking about it as a philosophical point: if no one can ever see the universe from a God's-eye view, it makes good pragmatic sense to avoid using that view in your description of the universe.

...Horizon complementarity's message was clear: physics makes sense only within the reference frame of a single observer. 

The idea was so radical it was hard to wrap my head around it. The situation with the elephant seemed so weird because intuition tells us that even if we can't be inside and outside the [black hole] horizon simultaneously, there's still some ultimate answer to where the elephant really is. 

But "really" assumes a reality that can be described from a God's-eye view. There is no single "really." There's Safe's "really" and Screwed's "really." Nothing more.

Nothing is another recurring theme in Gefter's book. She and her father start off their search for ultimate reality in this fashion (page 7):

My father continued, his excitement mounting. "Usually people think that to get to nothing, you have to remove everything. But if nothing is defined as an infinite, unbounded homogeneous state, you don't have to remove everything to get to it -- you just have to put everything into a specific configuration.

"Think about it this way. You take a blender to the world -- you blend up every object, every chair and table and fortune cookie in this place, you blend it all until everything is just atoms and then you keep blending the atoms until any remaining structure is gone, until everything in the universe is spread out infinitely without bound.

"Everything will have disappeared into sameness. Everything becomes nothing. But in some sense it's still everything, because everything you started with is still in there. Nothing is just everything in a different configuration."

"Okay, that's pretty cool," I said. "Something and nothing aren't really opposites, they're just different patterns of the same thing."

I like this idea a lot.

But reading Gefter's words, I couldn't help thinking... 

Who the heck is taking a blender to the world? Is this being able to blend itself into a state of nothingness after it does this to everything except itself and the blender? If so, who knows this has happened? 

Once God is gone, the world shines more brightly

I've flown both ways.

For many years I Iooked upon the world through a conceptual prism where my belief in God, a being unseen and unknown, altered the perspective from which I saw things.

Now, I do my best to cast off the filter of spiritual imaginings, desiring to view reality as clearly as possible as it is rather than how I'd like it to be.

I've discovered something interesting: when I don't try to fashion the world into a place that it isn't, full of illusory ideas about salvation, divinity, soul, eternal existence, and such, what is turns out to be wonderfuly satisfying.

Not nirvana. Not perfection. Not an idealized Platonic realm. But a glorious fully natural godless corner of our vast mysterious cosmos.

Sure, it's easier to feel this way in beautiful locations.

Recently I walked along the Metolius River in central Oregon, where I took the photo above. The sun was setting. I wasn't aware of the beam of light making its way through the tall Lodgepole pines until I transferred the iPhone image to my laptop.

What should we call such moments? Spiritual? Elevating? Transcendent? 

Or just... experiencing how the world is.

I fully understand the lure of adding fantasized extras on to existence as it is known to be. Death is scary. Suffering sucks. Disappointments abound. The gap between is and should be begs to be bridged by theological consolations.

All I can say is that I've tried both ways of living: with and without religious beliefs.

I've enjoyed the feeling of having a special relationship with God, one that promised me both eternal life after my stay here on Earth and a way of looking upon happenings as having cosmic significance because of God's plan for me.

I'll admit that sometimes I miss the warm spiritual blanket, woven of pleasing beliefs, that sheltered me from the cold winds of reality for about 35 years. Well, I really should say "seemed to shelter me."

Because now that I'm committed to looking upon life naturally, rather than supernaturally, I realize that reality offers me a much firmer foundation than the fantasies I used to embrace so enthusiastically. Quaffing one ounce of "what is" is more satisfying than a pound of "what might be."

Even when I'm experiencing something painful, disturbing, distasteful. I'd rather feel the honest touch of life, even if it hurts, than shut myself away in an antispetic conceptual room where, I believed, I was protected from the world's dark side.

LIke I said before, dark and light appear to me as one now. The world seems to shine more brightly when I don't try to bring an illusory spiritual radiance into it. 

About ten years ago I blogged about corn on the cob. Specifically, about not pulling back the husk when choosing corn. This isn't necessary. Seemingly not a super-important subject to be concerned about. But I quoted Thoreau's "Walden" approvingly.

Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors," said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch." His companion’s prayer is forgotten. 

Try to have your philosophy disturbed every day

Driving home this evening, on my car radio I heard the end of an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who hosts the new Cosmos series. Tyson said:

I try to have my philosophy disturbed every day. 

Beautiful.

That's obviously an open-minded scientist speaking, not a fundamentalist religious believer. People of faith don't want to have their philosophy disturbed, because its foundation is so shaky.

They don't know. They aren't sure of the facts. They don't possess demonstrable evidence.

No, they just have faith that maybe, perhaps, possibly, what they want to be true really is: salvation, eternal life, God's love for them, a special place reserved in the cosmic scheme of things.

Tyson, on the other hand, is committed to learning the truth about reality, no matter where that search leads. Naturally it isn't necessary to be a scientist to have this sort of commitment to truth-seeking. It simply takes a willingness to have one's cherished assumptions challenged -- over and over again.

I don't know if I remember the exact words Tyson said next, but this is pretty close.

The essence of science is making sure that our biases don't make us turn away what is true, or embrace what is not true.

Biases. We all have them. Scientists included. 

Like most people, I have a bias toward living rather than dying; being happy rather than sad; wisdom rather than ignorance; pleasure rather than pain; love rather than hate.

So, sure, I found it really easy to follow a religious path (for over thirty years) that promised me everything I was biased toward: life after death, eternal bliss, revelation of the secrets of the cosmos. For a long time I resisted both my own doubts that all this was true, along with the skepticism of my wife and other people.

Eventually, though, I took a more scientific attitude toward the spiritual philosophy that appealed to me so much. I became more concerned with truth, and less with how comfortable my religion made me feel. 

Like Tyson advised, I was willing to have my belief system disturbed.

I figured that if it can't withstand close inspection and tough questions, it damn sure wasn't capable of sustaining me in this life and, possibly, beyond. Better to do my best to learn the truth now. After all, I knew that I had at least this one life to live. That might be it for me: one lifetime.

Seemed senseless to dilute and diminish it by living a one and only life that was founded on falsehoods. 

Near the end of the portion of the interview with Tyson, he said something like:

Science enables us to gain knowledge of the objective outside world which is apart from what is only inside our heads.

Yes. Yes. Yes. 

I used to believe in "going within" via closed-eye (and closed-minded) meditation. Meaning, I had faith that there were realms of reality beyond the physical, and it was possible to enter them by raising my consciousness to a higher state of awareness.

Who knows? This might be possible. But now I'm in a "I'll believe it when I see it" frame of mind, as contrasted with my previous "I'll see it when I believe it" attitude.

My focus is on enjoying and learning about the world outside of me.

I know that this exists. I love its otherness, its not-me'ness, its grandeur, mystery, and beauty. Residing inside my head is fine from time to time; I'm just no longer interested in making it a permanent habitation.

The truth is out there, said The X-Files show. Science agrees. It just isn't what we want truth to be, but what it truly is.

Churchless challenge: What supernatural fact are you sure about?

Today, here at the Church of the Churchless, we've got a short and simple question for believers in some extra-physical reality:

What supernatural fact are you sure about?

I was tempted to say 100% sure, or absolutely sure.

But I'm an admirer of science, and science isn't 100% sure about anything (every seeming fact about physical reality might be falsified one day, though the chances are miniscule for extensively verified facts).

So let's just leave it at "sure."

Meaning, the supernatural fact you're sure about isn't just a matter of belief, hope, faith, or tentative conclusion that it is true. Rather, you know that the supernatural fact is true. You're sure of it. 

Leave a description of this fact in a comment on this post, along with an explanation of why you are sure it is true. 

In a 2006 post I wrote about how a "Million dollars says there is no evidence of the supernatural."

Sorry, there's no cash prize for the most believable purported supernatural fact. But if you have a way of demonstrating that it is true, check out the Randi Paranormal Challenge. That million bucks could be yours.

Is the cosmos, including us, made of mathematics?

For several weeks I've been reading some of Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe" each morning. It's been a mind-bending journey, one which I'm about to complete -- just 26 pages left.

Tegmark argues that rather than mathematics just being able to describe the universe, mathematics actually is the universe. Along with everything else in existence, which includes four levels of the multiverse.

I'm enjoying the book. To me, Tegmark makes a lot of sense.

I've always wondered, Where are the laws of nature? Meaning, physicists can precisely model many of these laws via mathematical equations. But why should the universe be so orderly, so mathematical, so open to understanding by human minds capable of comprehending mathematics?

Some people argue that math is a human invention.

Well, if it is, how is it that this invention can be used by Einstein to reveal the mysteries of space and time with such precision? Or by Newton to come up with the laws that govern the motion of planets and everything else on a certain scale of reality?

I want to wait until I finish Tegmark's book before writing about what it means to me.

For now I'll just say that it is one of the most intriguing books I've ever read. Also, one of the most difficult to understand.

Not because Tegmark writes poorly or complexly. Quite the opposite. His book is very clearly written. It's some of the ideas that are diffcult to comprehend, because they are so far removed from everyday experience.

You can get a bite-sized taste of Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) in a Scientific American article he wrote: "Is the Universe Made of Math?"  Excerpt:

Modern mathematics is the formal study of structures that can be defined in a purely abstract way, without any human baggage. Think of mathematical symbols as mere labels without intrinsic meaning. It doesn't matter whether you write “two plus two equals four”, “2 + 2 = 4” or “dos mas dos igual a cuatro”.

The notation used to denote the entities and the relations is irrelevant; the only properties of integers are those embodied by the relations between them. That is, we don't invent mathematical structures – we discover them, and invent only the notation for describing them.

In summary, there are two key points to take away: The External Reality Hypothesis implies that a “theory of everything” (a complete description of our external physical reality) has no baggage, and something that has a complete baggage-free description is precisely a mathematical structure.

Taken together, this implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, i.e., that the external physical reality described by the theory of everything is a mathematical structure. So the bottom line is that if you believe in an external reality independent of humans, then you must also believe that our physical reality is a mathematical structure. Everything in our world is purely mathematical – including you.

I also searched my own blog for mentions of Tegmark, since it seemed like I'd heard of this mathematical universe notion before I started reading "Our Mathematical Universe." Google led me to a 2007 Church of the Churchless post, "What reality is really made of." 

(Answer: mathematical structures)

Tegmark has been working away on his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis for many years. He talks in his book about how other physicists have told him that he should give up this obsession for the sake of his career, since the MUH is just so damn weird. 

Well, I agree with Tegmark: scientists shouldn't shy away from entertaining really strange ideas, because the more we learn about the universe, the stranger it appears. 

So I don't understand the extreme resistance to Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. For sure, it makes a whole lot more sense than religious theologies. HIs ideas are equally far-out, yet have the advantage of being grounded in some solid logic and reasoning. 

If you want to delve into what others are saying about Tegmark's book, check out here, here, here, and here, 

Existence is the only unchanging thing. If it exists.

I've loved pondering the mystery of existence. Not individual stuff that exists within existence. Existence pure and simple. The fact that existence itself exists.

(Some of my ponders, along with links to others, can be found here, here, here, and here.)

However, lately I've been wondering whether this whole existence pure and simple notion makes any sense. For a long time I've had this intuitive, emotional, awestruck feeling that somehow there is an existential underpinning to the cosmos that is, duh, existence. 

Meaning, existence is akin or identical to "being." Which is a word that both philosophers and ordinary people use with ease. Yet usually without musing much about the concept.

It is. I am. We are.

Is, am, are.. these forms of "to be" sound so solid, so immutable, so unchanging. However, in reality everything does change. I am something for an instant. Then I'm something else.

Cells die and are born. Ideas come and go. Sensations flash into my psyche, then depart as quickly as they came. My internal organs are in constant motion. My body nearly so, in some fashion, for most of my waking moments.

Though godless and churchless now, I'm coming to realize that existence is a supposedly eternal omnipresent abstraction that, in some ways, took the place of a personal divinity for me. 

God doesn't exist. But existence damn well does! Just look around, and believe!

It's been comforting to envision a transcendent Mystery of Existence that always has been, is now, and always will be. Hey, in a world of change, it's good to know that something in the cosmos will always remain the same.

Existence. 

Well, this presumes that "existence" refers to something real, not just a concept conjured up by neurons in the human brain. No one has ever seen, felt, touched, heard, or otherwise sensed existence pure and simple. 

All we can experience is stuff that exists, not existence itself. In this regard, "existence" is like the idea of "self." We never catch ourselves as being a pure "self." Rather we experience happenings within and without ourselves. 

Which can include the feeling that existence exists, or I am soul.

I'm coming to embrace a foundational view of the cosmos that is based on the deep philosophical premise of: Who the Fuck Knows?

Yeah, I know that certain things exist. But when it comes to Existence separate from any particular thing, I'm clueless. Maybe the cosmos just is what it is, as I am what I am: an ever-changing process, nothing eternal, including the laws of nature. 

You see, my old notion of existence pure and simple lacks the ability to explain how all the stuff within existence came to be. So -- and this isn't an original idea -- existence must contain a creative principle in addition to a quality of just being. Otherwise existence would just sit there as a near-nothing.

Religious believers would jump at what I just said and scream, "That's God!"

To which I'd reply, "There's no proof of God, but plenty of proof that stuff exists. Why not just assume that the cosmos always has existed, and part of what exists is the ability to create more stuff that exists?" 

Praise Something or Other! Glory be to Whatever the Hell Makes Things Be! This is enough for me.

For relatives of MH370 passengers, hope is like religious faith

If someone I loved had been at the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, MH370, probably I'd be acting like the actual grieving relatives.

Many, if not most, are clinging to hope that, against all odds, the plane landed safely somewhere. The passengers are being held hostage. For some reason, the hijackers haven't made any ransom demands yet.

None of this makes sense. It is so improbable as to be virtually impossible. Believing in what I just said requires leaps of logic across vast gaps of implausibility. 

Yet on radio and TV I keep hearing the relatives speak that way. 

One man I heard interviewed today said that at first he held out a 20% chance of the plane having landed safely. Now he feels this is a 5% chance. He still holds out hope, though. As did another relative who said that even if there is the barest chance the passengers are still alive, he will believe they are.

Reminds me of religion. 

In fact, the psychological dynamics seem almost identical. With belief in the existence of God, there also is essentially zero evidence that this is reality rather than wishful thinking. Nonetheless, billions of people cling to hope that after they die, they will land safely in heaven or some other supernatural realm.

Just as with the relatives of MH370 passengers, I understand why religious believers embrace their hopes. It feels good to envision a happy ending to a sad story, whether this be a plane that has disappeared or the end of one's precious life.

An article, "Missing MH370: Too soon to give up, only hope remains," examines the roots of such irrationality.

Of all the rivers of words written and spoken of the missing plane, for the waiting families one is primary. Hope. Their sentences are littered with it: Hope they are alive. Hope they will come back. Sometimes it is all that is left, this thread, slim and frayed, which humanity hangs on to.

Hope is powerful yet tenuous, there is proof from the past that it is worth hoping, yet it is also an emotion that doesn't always lend itself to logic or reason.

Five years after SilkAir Flight 185 crashed into the Musi River in Indonesia in 1997, a woman still clung to the hope that her husband was alive. She believed he had lost his memory and was wandering somewhere in Indonesia but would eventually find his way back home.

Dr Tan Chue Tin, who tells this story, is a psychiatrist in private practice in Singapore who has worked with people who have lost people they love in plane crashes and the Hotel New World collapse in 1986.

"When you don't see the body," he explains, "there is no closure. This prolongs the grief process and adds to the denial they experience. The hope that their loved ones are still alive is magnified in such instances and this hope brings them comfort."

...Alongside hope always sits grief and, in a world beset by accidents, grief can't be compared for loss has no measurement. There is no set scale for tragedy, no degree for sadness, but this much is true of this plane: it is the ambiguity - how it disappeared, where it disappeared - which is crippling for families.

...As Dr Tan said: "The mind conjures up all kinds of scenarios when you have nothing concrete. The mind just needs to find an explanation to relieve the pain and anxiety. Right now, the relatives would believe anything that suggests that their loved ones are still alive."

Relax. Everything is equally important.

Periodically my brain comes up with Profound Cosmic Observations. This weekend it is... (drum roll please)...

Everything is equally important.

Meaning, whatever we experience at any given moment possesses the same existential value. This applies both to me and other people. 

In other words, whatever I'm doing, it's equally worthy of my awareness and attention. Ditto for what anyone else is doing. The experience of an Indian rickshaw driver is equal to that of a Wall Street options trader.

I got to pondering this oh-so-ponderable notion yesterday as I was putting together some replacement bar stools for our kitchen counter.

Now, it hadn't occurred to me that we even needed new bar stools. But my wife is far more knowledgeable in the home decorating arena than I am. So almost always I bow to her judgement in such matters. Which led to me sitting on the living room rug, surrounded by pieces of two bar stools that Laurel had ordered from Cost Plus World Market, and I'd picked up.

When the World Market guy was loading the large box into our SUV, I told him, "Is it OK if I phone you at midnight with a question about how the hell these stools go together? They don't come with IKEA-like instructions, do they?"

He laughted and replied, "Call my boss. She's in charge of things like that. You shouldn't have any trouble assembling them, though."

Sort of true. 

However, the instructions were in Chinese English. Pretty clear, though with a few puzzling aspects. Such as the fact that the instructions referred to four long bolts and four short bolts. Yet each stool came with eight long bolts.

Which ended up fitting. After a bunch of fiddling. 

My theory is that underpaid and overworked Chinese workers who make furniture express frustration with their working conditions by drilling some holes just a tiny bit off-center. Not enough to attract attention. Just enough to give the eventual buyer fits when he or she tries to get the last bolt holding a chair leg on to thread properly.

Midway through the bar stool assembling process, after I'd spent ten minutes or so working on a recalcitrant bolt, I began to think, Is this how I should be spending my precious time in what almost surely is my one and only precious life?

Sitting on a rug. Allen wrench in hand. Fiddling with bolts on bar stools that, until recently, I didn't even know were needed to replace the stools that I'd been satisfactorially sitting on for many years. 

But then I realized that whatever I could have been doing instead wouldn't be any different. After all, every moment I'm alive and conscious, I'm experiencing something. If I started to divide these moments into worthy and unworthy, important and unimportant, significant and non-significant -- that way lies madness.

So to speak. Not clinical madness. Just the illogical frustration of believing that what I am doing now isn't what I should be doing.

That the present moment has gone awry; an existential error has occurred; I have been cast into a life experience that shouldn't be happening, and a more desirable one has been lost in an alternative potential reality.

The absurdity of this manner of thinking became obvious to me even as I continued to assemble the bar stools. 

It is natural to look some experiences as more pleasant than others. Or as more satisfying than others. I can't equate getting a root canal with lying on a warm tropical beach. However, each is equally important in the cosmic scheme of things.

Each is an experience that, um, I am experiencing. Each is part of what exists in a space-time continuum. Each is what I am aware of during a limited lifetime that has only so many awarenesses.

At the end of the day I felt good seeing the bar stools all assembled. I guess I could have worked on a novel, composed a symphony, sought a cure for cancer, or tutored low-income children. Instead, I put together two bar stools. 

There's a peace of mind that comes with accepting whatever happens as what is happening. And accepting that whatever happens to other people, this is what is happening to them. 

I've talked about this before in some other blog posts. Such as, "Meaning of life: one damn thing after another" and "How 'nothing' is the key to a meaningful life."

I don't know if what I've said here is more or less significant than what I've said before. It's just another of those damn things that happen, one after the other. All equally meaningful.

Consciousness is like a performance with no audience

The illusion of a separate self or soul dies hard.

It's just so convincing, because this is how it feels to each of us: that someone, an "I," is looking both outward to the world and inward to our own consciousness from some privileged lofty place.

Much, if not most, of religion, spirituality, and mysticism is founded on this belief.

Supposedly our true self is distinct from the brain's goings-on. It survives bodily death. It stands apart from our physical nature in some sense (even though a baseball bat to the head belies this assumption).

I wish it were true. I'd rather be a "me" that isn't limited to a single human lifespan. I'd like to look forward to an other-worldly existence after I die. 

But I also am a lover of science, of truth, of reality as it is, not as how I'd like it to be. So I regularly read neursoscience books that describe what researchers have learned about the human brain and consciousness. 

Like, Stanislas Dehaene's "Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts." I blogged about the book previously here. 

Today I read a chapter that echoed the conclusion of many other neuroscientists and psychologists: the brain is us; there is no separate "I" inside our head. Like I said, this seeming fact is at odds with how our consciousness appears to us. 

However, appearances can be deceiving. It appears that the Earth is flat. It appears that the Sun goes around the Earth. It appears that stars are tiny points of light.

And it appears that we are the audience in a theatre of consciousness, watching the show put on by our brains. The truth, says Dehaene, is quite different. 

The philosopher Daniel Dennett reminds us that we must be wary of the theatre allegory, for it can lead to a great sin: the "homunculus fallacy." If consciousness is a stage, who is the audience? Do "they" too have little brains, with a ministage and all? And who, in turn, watches it?

One must constantly resist the absurd Disney-like fantasy of a homunculus standing in our brains, peering at our screens and commanding our acts. 

There is no "I" who looks inside us. The stage itself is the "I."

There is nothing wrong with the stage metaphor provided that we eliminate the intelligence of the audience and replace it with explicit operations of an algorithmic nature. As Dennett whimsically states, "One discharges fancy homunculi from one's scheme by organizing armies of idiots to do the work."

...Consciousness is not an outsider added to the nervous system but a full in-house participant.

This, of course, is entirely compatible with a Buddhism or Taoism stripped of its supernatural elements. Reality is interrelationships. Dynamism. Flows of energy, materials, and information. Everything is interdependent. No entity is an island, complete unto itself.

After many years of pondering this modern scientific worldview -- which has ancient philosophical overtones -- I find it more and more appealing.

I resisted it at first.

Even though I no longer was explicitly religious, I found it difficult to give up a belief in a separate "I" distinct from the physical brain. Damn it, I wanted to be Me beyond my last breath! I deserved to be more than my timebound bodily self!

Now, though, I find a lot of beauty in the thought expressed above: The stage itself is the "I."

Those 100 billion neurons inside my cranium, all interconnected in marvelously complex ways, churning up the awarenesses that comprise my consciousness, in a fashion that gives the lie to a separate and distinct "me" even though habits of language lead me to keep on using that word (as I just did) -- there is something mysteriously and marvelously appealing about this vision of reality.

It's difficult to say more. Perhaps you feel somewhat the same way. Perhaps you don't. Regardless, the truth as provisionally known to neursoscience is what it is.

And I'm more than OK with that. 

True "religion" -- becoming one with nature, not God

For many years, about thirty-five, I believed in pursuing a supernatural sort of oneness. Even wrote a book about how a Neoplatonist Greek philosopher, Plotinus, taught it was possible to Return to the One.

That One was viewed as the ultimate source of this physical world, through creative intermediaries. Yet returning to what could loosely be called "God" required transcending materiality and leaving behind sensory awarenesses.

I still consider that such might be possible. Heck, anything is possible. But not everything is probable. 

These days I'm much more focused on becoming one with nature. Or more accurately, realizing that I'm already one with nature. Because what isn't part and parcel of nature, this physical universe? 

Here's some passages I liked from a book by theoretical physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, "The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew."

In the end, it is easier to explain why bees construct honeycombs shaped like perfect hexagons than why human beings place identical towers on the sides of the Taj Mahal or the two grandmothers on equal sides of the mother.

The first is the result of economy and mathematics, the second of psychology and aesthetics. Perhaps in asking why the pervasive symmetries in nature are found appealing to the human mind and imitated in our human-made constructions, we are making an erroneous distinction between our minds and the remainder of nature.

Perhaps we are all the same stuff.

After all, our minds are made of the same atoms and molecules as everything else in nature. The neurons in our brains obey the same physical laws as planets and snowflakes. 

Most important, our brains developed out of nature, out of hundreds of millions of years of sensory response to sunlight and sound and tactile connection to the world around our bodies. And the architecture of our brains was born from the same trial and error, the same energy principles, the same pure mathematics that happen in flowers and jellyfish and Higgs particles. 

Viewed in this way, our human aesthetic is necessarily the aesthetic of nature. Viewed in this way, it isn nonsensical to ask why we find nature beautiful. 

Beauty and symmetry and minimum principles are not qualities we ascribe to the cosmos and then marvel at in their perfection. They are simply what is, just like the particular arrangement of atoms that make up our minds.

We are not observers on the outside looking in. We are on the inside too.

Another perspective on this is Donald Crosby's "Religious Naturalism and It's Place in the Family of Religions." Thanks to Alex Szeto from Unitarian Universalists Hong Kong, UUHK, for letting me know about this essay.

After quickly reading the piece, I emailed Alex, "Great essay. I agree with almost everything in it. The word 'religious' usually turns me off, but I think Crosby is using the word as a substitute for 'what gives life meaning,' or something like that. The sense of awe at simply being alive and part of a marvelous, vast, mysterious universe."

Here's how Crosby's essay starts off:

Religious naturalism deserves recognition as an important form of religious faith among the various religious stances and outlooks of the world. It does so especially today, when its significance is coming to be increasingly acknowledged, vigorously developed, and actively propounded.

What is religious naturalism? Simply put, it is the recognition that to be is to be natural and the conviction that nature in all of its forms and manifestations is a proper focus of religious commitment.

When I say that to be is to be natural, I am exempting from reality anything other than nature, meaning that, for religious naturalism, there is no such thing as a supposed supernatural being, beings, regions, revelations, origins, purposes, destinies, and the like.

All of reality is natural, or, to state the matter negatively, nothing beyond, beneath, or above nature and its multifarious forms exists.

This does not mean that there can be no deeply fulfilling and saving religious faith, outlook, or devotion. It means that the appropriate source and object of such faith, outlook, and devotion can rightly be regarded as nature itself. 

Great news! You are your brain.

My brain is following up on a previous blog post, "Brains are us: a fresh thought for a New Year." Now, I almost just wrote My brain is causing me to follow up...

This shows how difficult it is to break the habit of assuming that there is a "me" and also "my brain." Slice my head open or put me in a MRI machine: evidence of the brain's existence will be clear.

But evidence of a "me" existing -- where is it? Really, nowhere to be found.

If you doubt this, pick up just about any Zen book. Or Buddhism book. The existence of a separate self is a widespread assumption, yet by no means universal.

The thought, "You are your brain," used to bother me. A lot.

Because I hated the idea that when my brain died, so did I. Meaning, the sense of "me." If consciousness is physical, when the material brain stops working, so does the consciousness of the body to which the brain is attached.

Now, though, I find this notion entirely acceptable, if not downright pleasing. It's hard to put this positive feeling into words, but I'll give it a try.

For most of my life I've loved the thought of oneness. Even wrote a book about it.

The One I longed for, though, was immaterial. Supernatural. Spiritual. Other-worldly. It was a unitary reality beyond the physical; the foundation of this world that wasn't really a part of it (because it is the One, partless).

This put unity far away, a goal to be reached rather than a reality to be immediately embraced.

Realizing that, almost certainly, the brain is me and I am the brain brings the One close to hand. No distance at all, really.

Materiality is everywhere evident. I am material. We are one. There is no difference between me/brain and other/world. All is the same substance.

There is something beautiful about this thought. Again, difficult to put into words.

I feel like a weight has been lifted from my psyche. I no longer feel the need to become anything other than what I already am: a brain experiencing itself; a strange loop of consciousness; matter becoming aware of materiality.

It's akin to the feeling I have when I wonder what it would be like to be a character in an alien computer simulation. Which, of course, could be true. 

I could be wrong, but if I discovered that I was just a bunch of computer code constructed by a bored teenager from a super-advanced civilization in another galaxy, I think I'd feel a sense of relief.

Maybe you could call this "enlightenment."

Everything I believed to be solidly real, actually wasn't. At least, not real in the sense that I used to consider it was. So now the pressure is off. No need to figure out what reality is all about, because this is impossible for me to do.

I'm just a bunch of electrons configured in a temporary special way. In other words, pretty much what neuroscience tells me I am in this earthly reality: neurons doing their thing as a human brain.

Hope this makes some sense. If not, that's understandable. I am me (albeit not really) and you are you. Our brains are quite different, yet also very much the same. 

For another perspective on this fascinating subject, check out "The brain... it makes you think. Doesn't it?"

Is God real according to Ken Wilber?

I enjoyed getting an email from Сергей Бадаев. Which I gather is Sergey Badaev in Cyrillic. The "from" line caught my attention, though I have to admit that at first I suspected spam.

Not at all.

Sergey had an essay to share, along with some other links:

Dear Brian,

I have read your article on "Integral World" (Integral Egos Gone Wild  http://www.integralworld.net/hines2.html) and I thought you may like to read my article the topic of which has some connection with the topic of your article.
It is "Is God Real According to Ken Wilber?" (http://www.integralworld.net/badaev2.html)
I will appreciate your remarks and comments.

Here are two more my articles on "Integral World" if you get interested:
Individual and Social in the Integral Theory of Ken Wilber (http://www.integralworld.net/badaev1.html)
AQAL's Weak Points (http://www.integralworld.net/badaev3.html)

Best regards,
Sergey Badaev

I liked his "Is God Real..." piece a lot. Well written. Nicely argued. I always enjoy cogent critiques of Ken Wilber's approach. This one strikes at the heart of Wilber's view of reality. 

Which Wilber shares with many other believers in supernatural phenomena. Here's some excerpts from Badaev's essay. Hope this stimulates you to read the whole thing.

Here is a key problem in Wilber's arguments, as he does not take into account two different meaning of the word 'real'.

On the one hand, we can call 'real' everything which is a part of our actual experience. For example, if I feel pain, this pain is real as a part of my experience. If I feel hungry, my hunger is real as well. Any fiction is real if it is a part of my experience.

On the other hand, we can call 'real' only the correct interpretation of our sensual experience when there is a corresponding fragment of so-called physical reality.

For example, an apple on the table is real because I can come, take it and eat it. But an 'apple' that I can see on the screen of my monitor is not real. I cannot take and eat it. This is just a virtual image which is created by numerous colourful dots on the screen.

...So, for any organism like us, there is a critical task to distinguish in our inner experience the images and perceptions which are the results of signals from the outer world and the images and perceptions which come from the sense organs or from the brain itself.

...If to be real means to be a part of my inner experience, it is real even if it is not confirmed by other people. For example, if I try some food and feel bitter, this bitterness is real for me even if other people report that this food is sweet.

On the other hand, if some people take a huge dose of alcohol and see some small green crocodiles, their collective confirmation will not be a reliable criterion that those crocodiles are part of physical reality.

Benefits of realizing you're just a brain

Being religious or non-religious isn't an on-off, binary, this-or-that state of mind. It's a continuum. Much the same as drinking or non-drinking is.

If someone once was a serious alcoholic, changing to only drink a couple of beers a day will seem like a huge difference. He or she will think, "I'm barely drinking." But to someone who doesn't drink at all, that person will appear to still be wedded to alcohol.

These sorts of attitudes are reflected in both comments and posts on this blog. What seems non-religious to some, will look like raging religiosity to others. It all depends on where you are on a continuum. This can be called the Spectrum of Theistic Probability. 

Richard Dawkins puts it this way:

1. Strong Theist: I do not question the existence of God, I KNOW he exists.
2. De-facto Theist: I cannot know for certain but I strongly believe in God and I live my life on the assumption that he is there.
3. Weak Theist: I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.
4. Pure Agnostic: God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.
5. Weak Atheist: I do not know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be skeptical.
6. De-facto Atheist: I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable and I live my life under the assumption that he is not there.
7. Strong Atheist: I am 100% sure that there is no God.

But there is more to spiritual belief than God. Many people don't believe in God, but do believe in supernatural phenomena. They've given up a Father figure who resides in an ethereal heaven, yet hold on to other sorts of other-worldly entities.

Such as consciousness separate from the brain.

After heading down the churchless path, for quite a while I carried along this belief, or at least a "weak theist" version of it (I am very uncertain that consciousness exists separate from the brain, but I am inclined to believe that it does).

Now, though, I'm much more on level 6 of the continuum above. I live my life under that assumption that when I die, that's it. No more me. When my brain dies, so does my existence as a conscious entity. I can't be certain of this, but it seems like by far the most likely possibility.

A blurb on the cover of the most recent issue of New Scientist said, "Meaning of life. Learning to live with the reality of existence." Ooh... that sounded intriguing. It was the first story that I read.

Which turned out to be an interview with neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland called At peace with my brain. Or in the online version, The benefits of realising you're just a brain.

Here's some excerpts. I'll include the entire piece as a continuation to this post.

Why is it so difficult for us to see the reality of what we actually are?
Part of the answer has to do with the evolution of nervous systems. Is there any reason for a brain to know about itself? We can get along without knowing, just as we can get along without knowing that the liver is in there filtering out toxins. The wonderful thing, of course, is that science allows us to know.

Are there any implications of neuroscience that you feel unsettled by?
I'd have to say no. It takes some getting used to, but I'm not freaked out by it. I certainly understand the ambivalence people have. On one hand, they're fascinated because it helps explain their mother's Alzheimer's, but on the other, they think, 'Gosh, the love that I feel for my child is really just neural chemistry?' Well, actually, yes, it is. But that doesn't bother me.

By and large I find neuroscience liberating because it allows us to see our connections to other biological things, and because it's not full of metaphysical junk about preparing your life for the great beyond. Of course it's possible we're wrong. But it doesn't seem very likely, and that lack of likelihood is sufficient for me to not want to organise my life around this possibility. I want to enjoy it now. I don't want to make useless and meaningless sacrifices, and I don't want to trash this planet because I think a better one awaits me.

...Some might say the idea that you are just your brain makes life bleak, unforgiving and ultimately futile. How do you respond to that?
It's not at all bleak. I don't see how the existence of a god or a soul confers any meaning on my life. How does that work, exactly? Nobody has ever given an adequate answer. My life is meaningful because I have family, meaningful work, because I love to play, I have dogs, I love to dig in the garden. That's what makes my life meaningful, and I think that's true for most people.

Now, at the end of it, what's going to happen? I will die and that's it. And I like that idea, in a crazy sort of way.

Your planet has a population of 1

Here's my most recent Strange Up Salem column, which I've been writing regularly since last May for my town's alternative newspaper, Salem Weekly. It has a churchless vibe. My first column is here.

Your planet has a population of 1

Be yourself. And let the world be itself.

Eight words. Which do a damn good job of summing up my lifetime of philosophizing, spiritual seeking, pondering the Meaning of It All. 

The strangest thing is you, me, every individual. Inside the human cranium is an utterly private realm, unknown to anyone but the consciousness that experiences it from the inside.  

Enclosed in our subjectivity, we try to communicate what it is like to be us. Words, gestures, emotions, music, poetry, art. There are so many ways people try to build a bridge between the inner and outer worlds.

All fall incomplete. The bridge always has gaps. It is impossible for anyone else to truly know what you’re experiencing.

Often we hear “This is really hard to put into words” and “You aren’t getting what I mean.” There was a bestselling book called Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Actually, the planetary geography is even more diverse.

Each of us inhabits a unique planet of personal experience with a population of one. 

This is marvelously strange. I revel in the knowledge that no sentient being in the universe has ever looked upon existence in the way that I do. Or, as you do.

Yet here we are, so often tentative, unsure, wary of wholeheartedly embracing our precious existential peculiarity. 

We look to others for confirmation that what we think or feel is OK. We are afraid of appearing different. We blend into cultural norms like a chameleon who automatically takes on the appearance of its surroundings.

Still, there’s nothing wrong with conformity if this is what we really want. I’m just urging us toward a more confident acceptance of the One-Of-A-Kind that each of us is.

There is no alternative to the oft-heard advice, “be yourself.” 

It isn’t possible for you to be anyone other than who you are at every moment. So why the reluctance to express yourself openly, honestly, forthrightly? Remember: your experience of life is yours alone.

However, what you sense also is sensed by others. There is a world outside your skin which isn’t you. It belongs to all. Such is the marvel of objectivity, the complementary yin to the yang of subjectivity.

Like artists, we all have a unique vision that springs from our private consciousness. Like scientists, we all have a shared knowledge derived from efforts to understand public reality. Wisdom lies in keeping these talents properly aligned.

Often people get things backward. 

They wrongly take aspects of their personal inner world to be objectively real for everyone (such is the mistake of religious fundamentalists). They deny scientific truths like evolution and global warming.

In line with the slogan “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts,” this is my Core Creed of Strangeness: 

Glory in your uniqueness while marveling at the world’s commonality. From our own personal planets, we gaze upon a single universe. E pluribus unum: out of many, one.

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Strange Up Salem seeks to lift our city’s Blah Curse. Give us a Facebook like. Brian Hines blogs at hinesblog.com

It's possible to prove God does not exist

When faced with the lack of evidence of God's existence, one of the favorite retorts of religious people is, "Well, you can't prove that God doesn't exist."

I've been prone to argue back, the burden of proof is on the person making a claim that something exists. Or, it is impossible to prove a negative.

But these are rather simplistic responses. I've come to feel that a more nuanced reply should be, "Hell, yes, I can prove that God doesn't exist." 

Here's how it can be done.

Get some specifics from the God-believer. What are the characteristics of this God you consider to exist? What does this God do? Where does this God reside? How does someone know this God is present to them? 

After all, there are lots of supposed gods. Immaterial and material. Personal and impersonal. Eternal and timebound. 

It is indeed possible for me to prove that something does not exist if the entity is more than a vague abstraction. I can prove there isn't a full grown giraffe in my kitchen by looking everywhere an animal that size could hide without being seen.

Which, actually, is nowhere. 

If God is described with enough specificity, proof of God's non-existence becomes feasible. For example, if God is believed to regularly overturn the laws of nature, then regular evidence of these miracles should be evident. If such doesn't exist, then it can inferred that this sort of God doesn't either.

It also is important to remind the God-believer that 100% proof isn't possible. We're talking about probabilities when it comes to something being true, or untrue. 

After all, tomorrow it is possible the sun will disappear, all dogs will start talking in perfect English, or gravity will reverse itself. The fact that these events have a very low probability of happening makes us confident they won't exist tomorrow.

But someone could argue, "Well, you can't prove this." Of course not. We have to consider the reasons for believing they might occur, then judge how likely it is one of the events will happen.

It is fallacious to say that because something either exists or doesn't exist, there's a 50-50 chance of each. Lots of religious believers think this way, though. So reminding them about probabilities introduces a healthy dose of reality into a debate over whether God exists.

How sure are you that God exists? 90% sure? 20%? 1%? By contrast, how sure are you that electricity exists? 99.9%? What is the basis for whatever percentage of confidence you have?

Again, it isn't possible to say with 100% confidence that anything is true, or isn't true; exists, or doesn't exist.

We always can think of reasons to doubt any statement.

I could, for instance, resort to a "Matrix" sort of argument no matter what your claim is: Sure, it seems that electricity is real. But what if we actually are part of an alien computer simulation where the programmer has added an electromagnetism feature to the virtual world?

So considering specifics and probabilities go a long way toward proving that something either exists or doesn't exist.

At some point common sense rules. If there is no demonstrable evidence that something with characteristics X,Y,Z exists outside of a human mind that believes it is real, we say "it doesn't exist." Ditto if the evidence is so shaky and minimal, the probability of the thing's existence is exceedingly low.

Check out "You Can Prove a Negative."

Let's sum up. If "you can't prove a negative" means you can't prove beyond reasonable doubt that certain things don't exist, then the claim is just false. We prove the nonexistence of things on a regular basis. If, on the other hand, "you can't prove a negative" means you cannot prove beyond all possible doubt that something does not exist, well, that may, arguably, be true.

But so what? That point is irrelevant so far as defending beliefs in supernatural entities against the charge that science and/or reason have established beyond reasonable doubt that they don't exist.

Here's the Stephen Hales paper by the same name that inspired the above-linked Psychology Today piece.

The very nature of an inductive argument is to make a conclusion probable, but not certain, given the truth of the premises. That [is] just what an inductive argument is. We’d better not dismiss induction because we’re not getting certainty out of it, though. Why do you think that the sun will rise tomorrow? Not because of observation (you can’t observe the future!), but because that’s what it has always done in the past.

Why do you think that if you turn on the kitchen tap that water will come out instead of chocolate? Why do you think you’ll find your house where you last left it? Why do you think lunch will be nourishing instead of deadly? Again, because that’s the way things have always been in the past. In other words, we use inferences — induction — from past experiences in every aspect of our lives. 

...So why is it that people insist that you can’t prove a negative? I think it is the result of two things. (1) an acknowledgement that induction is not bulletproof, airtight, and infallible, and (2) a desperate desire to keep believing whatever one believes, even if all the evidence is against it.

That’s why people keep believing in alien abductions, even when flying saucers always turn out to be weather balloons, stealth jets, comets, or too much alcohol. You can’t prove a negative! You can’t prove that there are no alien abductions!

Meaning: your argument against aliens is inductive, therefore not incontrovertible, and since I want to believe in aliens, I’m going to dismiss the argument no matter how overwhelming the evidence against aliens, and no matter how vanishingly small the chance of extraterrestrial abduction.  

I figure out the Meaning of It All

Here it is... the capstone of 65 years of living, my grand theory of meaningfulness, the key to a satisfying life, all of philosophy and science encapsulated in a few pithy sentences. 

(Plus, I readily admit, convincing proof of my delusional grandiosity.)

This is where everything goes wrong, and where everything goes right: keeping our personal subjective interior in relationship with the world's objective exterior.

The key is figuring out that relationship. I assume that such exists. There are indeed two aspects to our living. Subjective and objective. 

I realize many would disagree.

Those strongly inclined toward idealism see everything as residing within each human consciousness. Those strongly inclined toward materialism see everything as residing within constructs of physical matter/energy.

I've leaned in both of those directions myself at different times of my life. I understand their appeal. But my Meaning of It All, v. Nov. 2013, is based on a blend of subjective and objective, personal and universal, consciousness and matter.

The most private place in existence is the inside of my own head. No one but me has access to it. I am the only one who knows what it is like to be me. It is impossible to give anyone else even the most minute glimpse of my inner world. 

Yet we all try. In various ways.

Words, gestures, art, music, dance, the whole gamut of human expression. Which, in the end, fails to bridge the gap between our subjective experience of reality and the reality that exists outside experience.

For there is indeed an objective side to life. Does the moon exist when no one is looking at it? Oh, yes, it does, notwithstanding some quantum theorists who hold that the world is brought into being by observation. 

I take a common sense approach here.

The world preceded me; the world will continue when I am gone. Ditto for humanity as a whole. Ditto for life as a whole. I accept that 14 billion years ago the universe big-banged into being, and existed without living entities for a very long time.

So this strikes me as obvious: there is our subjective experience, and there is objective existence. Never the twain shall meet -- though the twain always relate. Each of us is engaged in a never-ending dance with the world. 

We embrace it; it embraces us. We and it always remain separate, yet are unfailingly connected.

A meaningful life is founded on this: realizing how subjective me and objective world relate. When I confuse inner and outer, personal and universal, subjective and objective... confusion, disappointment, conflict.

Often, if not usually, we screw things up. We get reality completely backward. We look upon our subjective consciousness, our personal experience of the world, as being the Way Things Really Are. 

Wrong.

This is just the way things are for us. How it is inside the utterly private realm of our own minds. When I feel anger at the driver who almost hit me on the freeway, that emotion exists nowhere outside my own psyche. 

Ditto for everything else that I experience within my consciousness. Seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling, thinking, intuiting, marveling, questioning, realizing, understanding: each and every "...ing" is purely mine, no one else's.

Not so for the world. This belongs to all.

Our dogs inhabit the same house my wife and I do. They walk on the same rugs, pass through the same doors, and eat food in the same kitchen as we do. Naturally our dogs subjectively experience these things differently, but there is no difference in the objective world being experienced.

Unfortunately, people often fail to realize this. Which includes me, though not to the same extent as religious crazies and science deniers. 

Who flip around the proper relation of subjective and objective.

They take their subjective beliefs as being objectively true, while looking upon objective truths as being subjective beliefs. Thus evolution, global warming, and other verified knowledge about the outside world is denigrated, while personal interior views of reality are exalted as universal verities.

Again, backwards. Horribly backwards.

It is dangerous, both for the individual and for society, to screw up the proper relationship between subjective and objective reality. That this happens so often is a warning sign: Homo sapiens may be a species which has attained a state of consciousness that threatens the ability of humanity to thrive, if not survive.

Other animals realize that they are not the world.

When they fail to respect objective reality, they suffer the consequences. Death, injury, distress. Bad things happen when a living being doesn't know that the world outside of its consciousness possesses a reality unto itself.

Thinking doesn't make it so. Believing doesn't make it so. Faith doesn't make it so.

A coyote or rabbit is much more wise in this regard than humans. "Dumb" animals are smarter than a person who imagines they can create their own reality. 

Or be saved by a God that only exists within their own minds. 

I am. But only to myself. The world also is. For everybody and everything. Simple truths. Yet not easy to genuinely comprehend. 

Wisdom is humility in the face of mystery

The title of this post is a sub-heading in the final chapter of Robert Burton's "A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves." 

Burton cautions against taking neuroscientific claims about how the human brain/mind works too seriously when they aren't backed up by solid evidence. Yet even when they are, he reminds us that our interpretation of evidence is guided by processes in the very brain/mind we're trying to understand.

Naturally this applies to religious, mystical, spiritual, and philosophical claims equally, if not more so. Just because we feel like we can stand outside of our own mind and look upon ourselves objectively doesn't mean this is possible.

Burton writes:

When reading any neuroscientific claim about the mind, remember:

• All thoughts about and studies of the mind are guided by involuntary brain mechanisms that collectively generate an illusory sense of a personal, unique self capable of willful, unbiased exploration of how a brain creates a mind.

• Taking into consideration how these involuntary mental states create our sense of a mind is a necessary first step to any real, albeit partial, understanding of what a mind might be.

• Failure to acknowledge the biologically imposed limits on a mind examining itself will only result in further neuroscientific excesses.

What he is saying is simple, but difficult to take to heart. Intellectually we can realize that our own mind is conditioned to look upon reality in certain ways, ways that are beyond our ability to control. 

However, that realization doesn't change how we experience reality. For example, the Müller-Lyer illusion fools us into believing that the lines are different lengths. But actually they are the same length.

Yet even after you study the bottom set of lines and realize they are all the same length, when you look again at the top set of lines they will still appear to be different lengths. 

Accurate conceptual knowledge doesn't affect inaccurate experiential perception. Here's how Burton describes the situation.

If I were asked to distill this book into a single message, I would say that all of us -- neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and lay readers -- should be constantly aware of the essential paradox that drives all investigations of the mind. 

The mind exists in two different dimensions -- as felt experience and as abstract concept. The unavoidable takeaway is that a constellation of involuntary mental sensations play a critical role in how we think about what a mind "is" and "does."

It is the human condition to experience a largely involuntarily generated mind that feels quite strongly that it can rationally explain itself. This paradox is unavoidable and not amenable to better science or new technologies.

Though we can and should work hard to refine our thoughts, there will always be limits. Ironically, even if there were to be an absolute last word on the nature of the mind, we wouldn't recognize it unless we all thought the same way -- and that's a physiological impossibility. 

...Not one of us, not the smartest or cleverest or most profound neuroscientist, philosopher, or observer of mankind, has the final word.

Each of us is weaving stories, not uncovering absolute truths. The mind is and will always be a mystery. For the neuroscientist, a humble acknowledgement of the limits of inquiry should be the first step in the study of the mind.

Again, not just for neuroscientists. For everybody.

Especially religious believers who wrongly believe that their beliefs reflect objective reality, rather than how their mind experiences things.

Here's how Burton ends his book.

The operating credo of neuroscience should be a rigorous adherence to scientific method coupled with the recognition that the study of the mind is a data-based art form, not another branch of the basic sciences.

Humility, reverence, and respect for the unknowable should be the default mind-set when contemplating great mystery, and there is nothing more mysterious than a mind contemplating itself.

"Soul Dust" shows how we create an enchanted world

Here's my new loving it book: "Soul Dust," by Nicholas Humphrey. I loved his "Seeing Red" also. Blogged about that earlier book of Humphrey's here and here.

Intimations of "Soul Dust" are evident in this quote from "Seeing Red" that I included in the second post.

My suggestion is that in the course of human evolution, our ancestors who thought of their own consciousness as metaphysically remarkable -- existing outside normal space and time -- would have taken themselves still more seriously as Selves.

The more mysterious and unworldly the qualities of consciousness, the more seriously significant the Self. And the more significant the Self, the greater the boost to human self-confidence and self-importance -- and the greater the value that individuals place on their own and others' lives.

In which case it is easy to see how the very qualities of consciousness that seem to render it so mysterious and magical would have been the occasion for consciousness's becoming a runaway evolutionary success. In fact, those qualities would soon have been designed in. 

Read the Amazon description of "Soul Dust." Check out the reader reviews. I heartily recommend the book to anyone who wants to preserve a sense of an enchanted world while also embracing what science knows about reality.

Having read about half of "Soul Dust," I've filled the margins with lots of highlighted exclamation marks. Humphrey is an excellent writer, an engaging thinker, and seemingly a highly competent psychologist (he's a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics). 

With so many interesting ideas to choose from, I'll take the easy way out in this post and share some of what I read this morning about how humans attribute what actually is within to without -- the world outside our craniums. 

Frequently I take issue with those who claim it is possible to know reality "as it is."

Huh?

First, we Homo sapiens' know reality as it is possible to be known by the unique capabilities of the human brain/body. Second, every person experiences reality in his or her own unique fashion.

My "first" is evident to anyone who goes on a walk with a dog, which posseses a vastly different sense of smell. My "second" is evident to anyone who is married or otherwise knows another person intimately.

Vive la différence, as they say. 

It's difficult to do justice to Humphrey's prose by paraphrasing it. So here's some quotes from his The Enchanted World chapter. 

The attribution of these phenomenal qualities to impersonal things really is a category mistake -- a philosophial error where a property is being ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property.

....If it is an error, however, is it one that you ought to regret? My answer, as I trust you will have seen by now, is no: quite the opposite. For it is precisely this misattribution of phenomenal qualities that gives conscious human beings the impression that they live surrounded by things of unaccountable loveliness in their own right.

What matters is psychological impact, not philosophical rectitude. And, psychologically, the result is that you come to inhabit an enchanted world. What would persuade you that it is indeed you who are the enchanter, you who are, as it were, coloring things with the fairy dust of your own consciousness? 

...Borrowed phenomenality transforms the world into an awesome place. How often have you stared into a flaming fire, listened to the hoot of an owl in a dark wood, dangled your feet in a cold stream, or watched the sun setting in a blaze of color and been knocked back by the transcendent beauty of it? 

...The impression you got that the qualities inhere in the things as such is, we have seen, all part of the illusion. But even as you celebrate the things for being themselves, it will not escape you that it is a peculiarly generous kind of self-sufficiency, where things are self-sufficient in ways that are the very qualities you care about.

The things are singing your song. No wonder that people sometimes lose track of who is the object and who is the subject of this magical relationship. 

...So what is going on? I want to describe it as follows. It is as if when you see and hear and touch and taste things, some of the magic of your phenomenal sensation is rubbing off onto the things as such. And this has the extraordinary result of making it seem to you as if the things themselves possess phenomenal qualities. 

As if things out there in the world have an extra dimension of subjective presence. Maybe even as if you have a private line to them, as if they are imbued with your subjectivity. 

But of course none of this makes sense! We have established in the first chapters of the book that the phenomenal properties of sensation are the properties of a very special kind of activity you are creating inside your head. 

What is more, they are illusory, "impossible" properties. There is therefore no way that these properties can be properties of things out there in the world. 

...At every opportunity you find yourself projecting your own phenomenal experience out into the world of things. Or rather, I should say, you do not find yourself doing this except when, as with the table, the result seems so bizarre: most of the time you never notice your own role in giving things their marvelous qualities -- you simply assume that is the way they are made.

Marvelous. Modern neuroscience is telling us...

There is no God. But each of us is a god of sorts.

We make the world in our own image. Then behold it and say, "Creation is good." Or perhaps, "Creation sucks." Either way, what we sense outside of us is what we have fashioned inside of us.

One sip of coffee is more real than a thousand thoughts of God

I've drunk a lot of coffee in my life. Also, thought a lot about God.

What I've concluded after all these years (65, to be exact) is that a single sip of coffee brings me hugely closer to reality than a thousand God-thoughts.

I could have said "a million," because the gap is so wide between (1) something that actually exists in the world beyond the human brain, and (2) something that exists only as an abstract human conception.

In no way do I call myself a Buddhist. But there are many aspects of Buddhism that I find appealing, along with many that I reject. The notion of spaciousness is one that I like, though I have my own take on it.

Usually people tend to relax the body by concentrating on different parts. Real relaxation comes when you relax from within, for then everything else will ease itself out quite naturally.

When you begin to practice, you center yourself, in touch with your "soft spot", and just remain there. You need not focus on anything in particular to begin with. Just be spacious, and allow thoughts and emotions to settle. If you do so, then later, when you use a method such as watching the breath, your attention will more easily be on your breathing.

There is no particular point on the breath on which you need to focus, it is simply the process of breathing. Twenty-five percent of your attention is on the breath, and seventy-five percent is relaxed. Try to actually identify with the breathing, rather than just watching it. You may choose an object, like a flower, for example, to focus upon. Sometimes you are taught to visualize a light on the forehead, or in the heart. Sometimes a sound or a mantra can be used.

But at the beginning it is best to simply be spacious, like the sky. Think of yourself as the sky, holding the whole universe.

Like Madonna, albeit with a lyrics sex change, I find myself a material guy living in a material world.

Pretending otherwise by embracing thoughts of God, soul, spirit, heaven, angels, and other supernatural imaginings not apparent to the senses either directly or indirectly leads to the non-spacious realm that exists only within the human brain.

Which, of course, is also material. However, looking out provides a vision of vistas unknown to those who focus on contents of their own psyche that have no connection with the outside world. 

A cup of coffee exists as objective fact.

Other people can testify to the reality of the coffee that I raise to my lips. Laboratory equipment can measure the coffee's qualities. Predictions can be made of the coffee's effect on my mind and body. God and other supernatural concepts, though, are merely abstract thought-objects, not real world-objects.

Buddhism, Zen variety, advises enlightenment seekers to chop wood and carry water. Note: not think thoughts and imagine imaginations. 

Chopping is done to wood. Carrying is done to water. But thinking thoughts and imagining imaginations are recursive, confining, within-cranium activities. Important and worthwhile, certainly. Unspacious and unsatisfying, though.

Compared to living spaciously in the real world beyond the human brain. I confirm this every time I go for an evening dog walk. Which is just about every day.

It's easy to get caught up in my own thoughts and imaginings while walking along with older dog Serena and younger dog Zuzu. Naturally at those moments I'm aware of where I am, but only marginally. To borrow a Buddhist term, I'm acutely mindful of what my own mind is churning out, yet only minimally aware of what surrounds me.

Which, when I return to focusing my material senses on the material world, is more satisfyingly solidly real than the thoughts, feelings, and such that exist only as private neurological productions.

Here's Serena ahead of me on a recent near-sunset dog walk along the Metolius RIver in central Oregon.

The golden soon-to-fall deciduous leaves contrasted beautifully with the reddish bark of the Ponderosas. Thinking about wispy supernatural nothings seems bizarrely absurd when such evocative natural somethings surround me.

A few days previous I'd paused the dog walk to take out my iPhone and capture an after-sunset shot of the moon perched over fir trees and Spring Lake near our western Oregon home.

i realize that religious believers would say, "Both of these photos reflect the glory of God's creation." To which I reply: nice thought. I'll stick with my directly experienced reality.

Life is too short and too precious to waste by living within the confines of one's own religiously confined mind, focused on unseen dogmas while failing to embrace the clearly present reality that beckons every waking moment.

Here's some good tips about how to live more spaciously. Check out "How to Be Fully Awake Instead of Living on Autopilot." I heartily agree with...

1. Sit in stillness. Stop moving, stop doing, stop planning and living in the future. You can sit on a cushion or sit in a chair.

2. Go outside and feel the wind on your face, smell the fresh air, and connect with nature. If it’s possible, lie in the grass, stare at the sky, and listen to the birds. Feel your heart open.

3. Connect with another person, smile, and make eye contact. If you observe yourself becoming judgmental or critical, try to see that person as another human being struggling to be happy, just like you.

4. If you have pets, connect with them through touch. Feel their affection. We can communicate with them and learn from them about how to stay in the moment.

5. Tune in to your body, let it move, and feed it well. Practice awareness of your senses. Feel what you are touching, listen to the sounds around you, and smell what’s cooking.

6. Breathe deeply. Count your breaths to 21 when you are driving in your car. Calm down and stay present. Repeat.