Church of the Churchless

Mystery and Reality have an intriguing relationship

I'm a fan of both Mystery and Reality. I'm capitalizing their names to personalize them, as if they were beings we could actually interact with rather than abstract ideas.

Mystery is, well, mysterious. (I'll use "she" to talk about her because, being a man, I find females to be more of a mystery than males.)

You can't say much about her because there's not much to be said. She's what lies outside the bounds of our knowing. That makes Mystery intriguing, just as a beautiful woman in a suggestive dress makes us want to learn what lies beneath the surface of the cloth, while a fully naked woman leaves nothing to the imagination.

Reality obviously is open to view. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be calling him Reality. He isn't totally transparent to our understanding, of course, since there are many levels to him. It's fair to say that he's a complex guy. Just when you think you're privy to all of his secrets, Reality surprises by revealing hitherto unknown dimensions.

Frequently Mystery transforms into Reality. Less frequently, perhaps, Realty transforms into Mystery.

We can come to know something that previously we were completely clueless about. We also can realize that what was once a confident object of knowledge has become an enigma.

So Mystery and Reality are constantly dancing together.

But it's an unusual dance, because one of the partners is mostly, if not completely, unseen, while the other looks like he is shadow boxing (or rather, shadow dancing) all by himself. Together, they make a pair that provide endless enjoyment to humans as long as Homo sapiens has existed as a species.

Without Mystery, life would be boring, sterile, almost lifeless. Without Reality, life wouldn't exist as we know it, and probably not at all.

To offer up a familiar example -- TV shows -- last night I watched the final episode of Homeland, a captivating Showtime series that has engrossed me for quite a few years. It wasn't the final episode of a season. It was the final episode, period. Homeland is done.

I don't want to give too much away in case someone reading this is, like me until yesterday, making their way through a bunch of recorded episodes of the final season. Suffice it to say that, not surprisingly, I had no idea how Homeland was going to end up. It was a mystery.

However, I knew that within an hour or so all would be revealed. Mystery would transfer herself into Reality in an ontological sex change operation. From not knowing what would happen with the main characters would come a knowing.

Plots that preserve an ever-changing air of mystery are highly watchable. In truth I had no idea what was going to occur next, though often I wrongly believed that I did. My emotions were pulled this way and that as Mystery changed herself into Reality and then back again.

I'd silently scream things like "Carrie, you can't kill Saul! You just can't!"

But I knew that no matter what I wanted, the episode was a solid reality implanted on the hard disk of my DVR, digital video recorder. It was both pleasurable and painful to have my emotions manipulated in such a skillful way by the writers, actors, and director of Homeland.

In the end, Reality held center stage, as he typically does in TV shows and movies. I knew how Carrie and Saul ended their lengthy relationship, and it was exceedingly satisfying to me.

(Thank you for that, Homeland. I was worried you were going to pull a "Lost" on me; the final episode of that series left me with a What the Fuck? feeling, almost a sense of betrayal after so much time invested in following the unfolding mystery of the island, only to be met with a blah denouement.)

This points to a psychological truism, not quite a fact, but almost so: Often we want Mystery to reveal herself in a certain way. Of course, that goes against the grain of who she is -- hidden, unpredictable, enigmatic. So we love Mystery, until she disappoints by turning into a Reality we're uncomfortable with.

Naturally there's more to say about the relationship between Mystery and Reality. Likely I'll be doing that before too long.

I'll finish this blog post by saying that it turned out way different from what I first intended when I typed in the title, Mystery and Reality have an intriguing relationship. That's the beauty of writing, and of life. We set out in a certain direction, with a certain goal in mind, and before we know it we're exploring a very different territory.

Become an unknowing fool. It's the wisest thing to do.

Here's another post from the early years of this blog that I just came across in the course of choosing content for my second book of Church of the Churchless posts.

I'll probably keep on doing more of this "blast from the past" stuff until I'm finished with the second book, which doesn't have a name yet. The less time I spend on writing new content for this blog, the more time I'll have to work on that book.

As before, the italicized introduction is what will accompany the post. I like to share a few thoughts about how I view each old blog post now. Sometimes I still whole-heartedly agree with a post. Sometimes I'm half-hearted about it, since my views are evolving.

I’m still pretty sure that existence, life, and consciousness are unknowable, since they are the mysterious foundation of all our knowing. But I’m not absolutely sure about this. That’s the beauty of not-knowing. It leaves us open to all sorts of possibilities.

God calls me a fool. I agree.
May 28, 2006

Churchless brothers and sisters, God spoke to me this morning. Now the spirit is calling me to share the word. I’m just a tool. Also, a fool.

That was the message: “Brian, you don’t know.” To which I replied, “Oh God, you’re so right. I don’t know.”

Now, I can hear the skeptics asking, “How do you know that God was speaking to you if what you heard was, You don’t know?” Well, all I can say is that I know what I know, and I don’t know what I don’t know. And I know that God was letting me know that I don’t know.

Seems clear to me.

As so much often does in the morning when the caffeine is flowing through my hyped-up neurons and reading one of my holy churchless books tunes me into the harmonies of the cosmos’ deepest mysteries.

Like, the ultimate mystery: existence. And, the penultimate mystery: why something exists within existence. In this rarefied philosophical territory, I’m gasping fruitlessly for the air of even the slightest understanding.

As are we all. 

Such was the divine inspiration stimulated by my reading of John Horgan’s “Rational Mysticism.” In a concluding chapter he says that no one — not Jesus, not Buddha, not Muhammad, not Moses, nor any other guru, sage, or prophet, no one — could ever know the ultimate whys and wherefores of creation.

Why is there something rather than nothing? No one knows. And if you don’t know that, then any claim to knowing It All is spurious.

Laughingly so. Ridiculously so. 

Which helps explain why, after my not-knowing revelation had been revealed to me, I felt so good. For quite a while my meditation mantra became “I don’t know…I don’t know…I don’t know.” With every repetition I became more connected to the great Don’t Know.

There’s a joy in being a religious fool. 

I could feel the pressure of got to know… got to know… got to know dissipating. I felt emptier, lighter, freer. I realized that I’ll never know, you’ll never know, no one will ever know. Not everything. Not the deepest mysteries. They’re unknowable.

Existence. Life. Consciousness. Science doesn’t have a clue. Religion doesn’t have a clue. Humanity is clueless. That brought a foolish smile to my meditative face. The pressure to know is off. Accept it.

You exist. You’re alive. You’re conscious. 

But nobody can know what existence is, what life is, what consciousness is. To penetrate those mysteries you’d have to be non-existent, not-alive, unconscious. Who, then, would be around to do the penetrating? Or to be aware of what lies at the bottom of it all?

We are what we’re trying to know. It isn’t possible to know when there isn’t a sub-atomic particle’s distance between us and the object of knowledge. There can be no knowing when there isn’t a knower and the known.

But there can be fools who don’t know. I’m happy to be part of this august group. Which includes everybody on the planet. Including those who believe that they know.

Are they even bigger fools? Good question. Have to say, though: I don’t know.

Brian Greene: "Nothing supersedes the laws of physics"

I've been needing some cosmic scientific perspective during my morning pre-meditation reading time, given how the coronavirus pandemic dominates the news and peoples' psyches.

Physicist Brian Greene's new book, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe," has been meeting that need nicely. He's an excellent writer, thinker, and popularizer of scientific truth. 

Here's an example of what appealed to me in the first four chapters. I'm sure I'll be sharing more from the book as I get deeper into it.

Nothing supersedes the laws of physics. I love this bold simple statement. It rings true to me. If you disagree, feel free to leave a comment on this post in which you provide specific, detailed, persuasive, demonstrable evidence of something that lies outside the laws of physics.

Here's passages from the Information and Vitality chapter where Greene makes this persuasive claim.

By this point you may have concluded that life's molecules must have aced their studies of organic chemistry. Otherwise, how in the world would they know what they are supposed to do? How does DNA know to split down the middle and attach complementary bases to the ones it has exposed, creating a duplicate molecule?

How does RNA know to make copies of sections of DNA, transport that information to the appropriate cellular structures where yet other distinct but related molecules know how to read the genetic code and link up appropriate sequences of amino acids into functioning proteins?

Of course, the molecules don't know anything. Their behavior is guided by the blind, mindless, unschooled laws of physics. But the question remains: How do they consistently and reliably carry out a stunningly intricate series of complex chemical processes?

It's a question that harks back to my paraphrasing of Schrodinger's primary query in What is Life?: The jostling and careening of molecules within a rock are governed by the laws of physics. The jostling and careening of molecules within a rabbit are also governed by the laws of physics.

How do they differ?

We have now seen that the rabbit's particles are guided by an additional influence -- the rabbit's internal archive of information, its cellular software. Importantly, critically, vitally: This information does not supersede the laws of physics. Nothing does.

Instead, much as a water slide doesn't supersede the laws of gravity but through its shape guides riders along a specific trajectory they would otherwise not follow, the rabbit's cellular software is carried by chemical arrangements that through their shape, structure, and constituents guide various molecules along trajectories that they, too, would otherwise not follow.

...The point, then, is that information in a cell is not abstract. It is not a free-floating set of instructions that molecules need to study, memorize, and execute. 

Instead, the information is encoded in the molecular arrangements themselves, arrangements that coax other molecules to bump or join or interact in a manner that carries out cellular processes like growth, repair, or reproduction. Even though the molecules inhabiting a cell lack intent or purpose, and even though they are thoroughly oblivious, their physical structure allows them to accomplish highly specialized tasks. 

In this sense, the processes of life are molecular meanderings fully described by physical law that simultaneously tell a higher-level, information-based story.

For the rock, there is no higher level story. When you use the laws of physics to describe the bumping and jostling of the rock's molecules, you're done. But when you use the very same laws of physics to describe the bumping and jostling of rabbit molecules, you are not done. Not by a long shot.

Overlaid on the reductionist story is a whole additional story that tells of the rabbit's unique molecular arrangements that choreograph an exquisite spectrum of organized molecular motions. And it is these molecular motions which carry out higher-level processes within the rabbit's cells.

Indeed, for the rabbit, and for us, too, such biological information is also organized on larger scales, guiding processes that act not just within individual cells but across collections of cells, yielding the hallmark quality of coordinated complexity. When you reach for a cup of coffee, the motion of every atom constituting every molecule in your hand, arm, body, and brain is fully governed by the laws of physics.

Again, with gusto: Life does not and cannot contravene physical law. Nothing can.

But the fact that a huge number of your molecules can act in concert, coordinating their overall motion to cause your arm to reach out across a table and your hand to clutch a mug, reflects the wealth of biological information, embodied in atomic and molecular arrangements, directing a profusion of complex molecular processes.

Life is physics orchestrated.

Perfection is an imaginary ideal, a lifeless dead end

This morning I finished the book I've been blogging about recently, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, by Lesley Hazleton. It's a wonderfully thoughtful and well-written description of what it means to be an open-minded agnostic (or atheist), rather than a closed-minded religious believer.

Below are some passages that I liked in the concluding chapter, "Imperfect Soul." 

Hazleton starts out by debunking the notion of perfection. There's no such thing. Perfection, she says, is an idea, not a fact. This rings true for me, based on my 35 years of experience with an Indian religious organization whose teachings wrongly proclaim that there is such a thing as a "perfect living master."

Actually, there's no evidence that the Radha Soami Satsang Beas organization is led by a guru, or master, who is perfect. Far from it. RSSB gurus make mistakes. Their knowledge is incomplete. They are as clueless as anyone else about what will happen in the future.

In other words, the gurus are flawed human beings, as are we all. Yet their disciples cling to the idea of perfection as a concept with no grounding in reality. Hazleton writes:

Perfection may be an ideal, but whether it's a desirable one is another question. Ideals are by definition products of the imagination rather than of reality; they exist, that is, as ideas, not as facts.

The perfect truths of theology, claimed as "absolute truths," are thus inherently self-contradictory, because as William James noted, truth is always an evolving idea.

"It is temporary and constructed from our own experience..." he wrote. "The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine all our temporary truths will some day converge." It is, in short, imaginary.

Then Hazleton explores the unappealing rigidity of perfection. The rigidity arises because the imaginary ideal of perfection doesn't tolerate anything other than 100% perfectness. Again, not in reality, but in the religious theology. That produces a dead-end, since there is no way forward once someone or something is viewed as perfect.

There's an icy starkness to perfection, a kind of echoing emptiness. Perfection, that is, is soulless. And lifeless. It's real meaning is right there in its origin: the Latin perficere, to finish or to conclude. A perfect life would thus be one that is completed, and there is only one way that can happen.

Perfection is literally a dead end. And to be alive is necessarily to be incomplete and thus imperfect, each person in his or her own particular way.

This is why the idea of perfectibility seems so hollow to me. The definiteness, the absolutism, the dead-endness of it -- all these leave no room for life.

The perfect tomato in the store turns out to be tasteless, genetically engineered fo shelf appeal, not for the palette. A flawless face seems blankly unapproachable, leaving me unable to do anything but puzzle at its unnatural symmetry. Complete agreement with whatever I might say leaves me gasping for intellectual air, longing for something more than a mirror of my own thoughts.

In the latter part of the chapter, Hazleton speaks about soul. It's a difficult word to define, since people use "soul" in so many different ways. The one thing we know soul is not, of course, is a supernatural something-or-other separate and distinct from the body, since there's no demonstrable evidence of this.

Perhaps you have to be slightly crazy to even try to talk about soul in secular terms. The more you try -- the more I try, in any case -- the greater the risk of falling into cliche, into the trite generalizations and warm fuzziness too often mistaken for spiritual insight.

...A strong whiff of sanctimony hovers over the word, burdened as it has been with such modifiers as blessed and immortal. That tyranny of the definite article -- the soul -- reasserts itself with impeccable conviction, and conventional theology again becomes more hindrance than help.

...Yet I persist, because I sense -- and sense is the only word I can use here -- that it's important to reclaim soul from those who still conceive of it as a thing with an immortal life of its own, independent of the body. 

However vague we may be about it, I think most of us recognize soul not as a thing, but as a dimension of being that defies the narrow lens of dogma, going far beyond traditional religious ideas such as those I grew up with.

Here Hazleton does her best to point toward what soul means to her agnostic self. It's a quality of being. It's an emphatic openness to reality, the opposite of walling ourselves behind dogmas of one variety or another. This takes courage, since it is easier to embrace  some form of religious absolutism where no doubts or questions are tolerated. 

Soul as a matter of courage? If so, it's not the obvious courage of a lauded hero, but the quieter, everyday kind of courage it takes to be open to the world. 

It's not that some people have no soul, but that the quality of soul in them seems to have shriveled, turned in on itself as though in retreat. They have taken a defensive position, and built a wall around themselves.

...You wall yourself off when you expect the worst. Better the devil you know, you tell yourself, than the unpredictability of the unknown; better to be ruled by the past than by hope for a different future. 

You try to persuade yourself you are strong because you have made yourself impregnable, but you live nonetheless in a state of fear. Your view is blocked. You have closed the gates and walled yourself off from the world -- even, at the extreme, against the world.

And if the gates remain open? 

Could having soul be a matter of being brave enough to be vulnerable -- to acknowledge the risks of being vulnerable, that is, and to willingly embrace them nonetheless? Because risks they are. Those I think of as brave souls know this.

In a way, they're the personification of soul music: they often bear the scars of bitter experience, and yet are not ruled by fear or resentment. Not that they are saints; they are as deeply flawed as you or I, but they accept their own flaws, and thus those of others.

And if they seem to have gained a certain ease with the world, it is a hard-earned one. It's as though they have persevered and come out the other end of hardship worn and weathered, but with a deeper appreciation of what it is to be alive.

They welcome both the unknown and the unknowable, explore without preconceptions, and place their faith in trust, preferring the chance of being proved wrong to the illusory certainty of always being right.

Open and closed: perhaps these are the terms in which we need to think. Not soulful or soulless, nor brave souls or timid ones, but open-souled and closed-souled. Where the latter contracts and retreats from others, the former expands, reaches out, is open to the world instead of guarded against it.

Few people are entirely one way or the other, of course. Most of us can open up on occasion, yet are still tempted to close ourselves off when under stress. 

We struggle with trust, and uncertainty, and doubt, and find ourselves searching for the security of conviction even as we recognize its falseness. We're brave at times, fearful at others; we're contradictory, and paradoxical, and fallible. Which is to say, we're human.

But at our best, we respond to soul with soul, as happened with someone whose real name I don't even know posted a comment on an earlier attempt of mine to puzzle out what we mean when we say that someone has soul.

"I'm not sure I understand," she wrote (a gentle way of saying that I hadn't been very clear), "but I think I recognize it. It's what makes my heart swell -- what makes me glad to be alive." And then: "Is this it?"

Magic is in the details of everyday life

One of the most important things I've learned in my 70 years of living is this: the world is way more interesting than I am.

So the more I can get out of my head, and into what surrounds me, the happier I am. By and large. There are exceptions to every rule, including this one. 

As I've noted before, and surely will note again, mindfulness has become my meditation. I'm no longer seeking enlightenment, mystical uplift, or even self-knowledge. 

In fact, I don't believe that I have, or am, an enduring self. The world exists. I exist. When I'm fully aware of the world, that's enough for me.

Sure, I also spend time aware of my thoughts, emotions, memories, anticipations, and such. These internal experiences just have come to seem less real, less absorbing, and less interesting than what lies outside of me.

Today's guided meditation on my iPhone's Calm app was titled Immersion. Tamara Levitt ended the meditation with the following words. I liked them so much, I transcribed what she said to share in this blog post. 
       

Immersion -- part of a guided meditation by Calm's Tamara Levitt

By quieting our mind and body and tuning in, we can open up to our inner landscape. And in doing so we also develop the capacity to be fully present with our external environment.

When we really notice our surroundings, we can tune in to a universe of detail, discovering magic in places we normally pass through on autopilot. 

And we don't have to be at the top of a mountain. Our practice can help us find that fascination even in the mundane places we go each day. 

The next time you find yourself in a familiar setting, use your practice to see it anew.

You might be standing on a subway platform, sitting in your car waiting for the light to change, or standing in a cafe waiting for your morning coffee. 

First, make a conscious effort to slow down and tune in to your senses.

Let them fully immerse you in your environment. Get really present, and tune into the orchestra of sounds around you. Take in all the sights and smells. Notice any movements. The spin of a ceiling fan. The quiver of a beam of light coming in the window. 

Take in the sounds, the voices, or vehicle. Notice the expressions on people's faces. Observe colors and patterns with an intricacy you never had before. 

Pour over all the details of this space you've seen a million times before, but have never really seen. And then bring that attentiveness into your day. And see what happens. Who knows what moments you might capture. 

A furry caterpillar climbing on a leaf. A sunset. Or a new friend sitting right beside you. 

To quote from the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." 

"The View from Nowhere" is a laudable goal

Quite a few years ago I heard of Thomas Nagel's book "The View from Nowhere," liking the provocative title. Nagel is better known for his What Is it Like to be a Bat? paper, which raised equally profound questions about subjectivity and objectivity. 

No human knows what it is like to be a bat. Only a bat does. 

The same is true of every species, and indeed of every individual within a species. I've been married to my wife, Laurel, for 29 years. So obviously I know her very well. But I don't know what it is like to be Laurel. Only she does. 

I perceive my wife from the outside, an objective perspective. She perceives herself from the inside, a subjective perspective. What Nagel seeks to achieve in The View from Nowhere is a philosophical argument for how subjective and objective views of the world can be harmonized.

I've only read part of this book, yet feel that I've grasped enough of Nagel's way of thinking to fashion a blog post based on the first five of his eleven chapters. 

Here's how Nagel encapsulates his goal.

A theory of reality with pretensions to completeness would have to include a theory of the mind. But this too would be a hypothesis generated by the mind, and would not be self-guaranteeing. ... The idea of a full conception of reality that explains our ability to arrive at it is just a dream.

Nevertheless, it's what we aim toward: a gradual liberation of the dormant objective self, trapped initially behind an individual perspective of human experience. The hope is to develop a detached perspective that can coexist with and comprehend the individual one.

That's certainly a laudable goal. It reflects what science is all about, though Nagel seeks a perspective that is universal, not limited to scientific investigations. 

Appealingly, he simultaneously asserts the truth of our inherent subjectivity -- the fact that each of us knows ourself from the inside, while everyone else knows us from the outside -- with a commitment to fashion our ways of knowing into a perspective that comes as close as possible to being a view from nowhere.

Meaning, an objective view that minimizes the biases of our species, and our personal individuality as a member of Homo sapiens. In the chapter that I finished today, Nagel says that a "double vision" is needed.

I'm not completely sure what he means by this, assuming that the rest of the book will lead to an explanation. It isn't bouncing back and forth between a subjective and objective view, but rather involves combining subjectivity and objectivity in some way that eludes me at this point in my reading.

Here's some additional passages from the Double Vision chapter.

When we view ourselves from outside, a naturalistic picture of how we work seems unavoidable. It is clear that our beliefs arise from certain dispositions and experiences which, so far as we know, don't guarantee their truth and are compatible with radical error.

The trouble is that we can't fully take on the skepticism that this entails, because we can't cure our appetite for belief, and we can't take on this attitude toward our own beliefs while we're having them.

Beliefs are about how things probably are, not just about what they might possibly be, and there is no way of bracketing our ordinary beliefs about the world so that they dovetail neatly with the possibility of skepticism. The thought "I'm a professor at New York University, unless of course I'm a brain in a vat" is not one that can represent my general integrated state of mind.

The problems of free will and personal identity yield similarly unharmonious conclusions. In some respects what we do and what happens to us fits very naturally into an objective picture of the world, on a footing with what other objects and organisms do.

Our actions seem to be events with causes and conditions many of which are not our actions. We seem to persist and change through time much as other complex organisms do. But when we take these objective ideas seriously, they appear to threaten and undermine certain fundamental self-conceptions that we find it very difficult to give up.

For sure.

Looking at other people and other living beings, we see that everything which lives, dies. Looking at other people and other living beings, we also see that if a brain is seriously damaged, the consciousness of the being with that brain is altered for the worse.

Yet most humans have a belief that some part of them will continue to live on after their death, often termed a soul, no matter what happens to their body and brain.

That's because from the inside our consciousness seems to be ethereal, unitary, and timeless in some sense -- since we have been conscious from birth until now, while our body and mental contents have changed in countless ways.

I share Nagel's goal of doing our best to view ourselves, and the world, in as objective a fashion as possible.

This requires that we subject our own beliefs and ways of knowing to scrutiny, which isn't at all easy, because how see our own self and the world typically seems so natural, it's difficult for us to envision how that perspective could be any different.

One of Nagel's key ideas is that an objective viewpoint has to include the subjectivity of the viewer as one aspect of what is being perceived. Otherwise we make the mistake of considering that we know everything about some aspect of the world, whereas actually that knowledge should include the knower.

I enjoy learning about neuroscience and human psychology for this reason. I just wish that religious people also would consider that their sense of knowing what God, spirit, soul, heaven and such are like could be mistaken. Not just by a little, but by a lot. Still, we have to keep seeking truth while knowing that it won't be possible to grasp truth completely.

Nagel writes early on in his book:

I believe that the methods needed to understand ourselves do not yet exist.

So this book contains a great deal of speculation about the world and how we fit into it. Some of it will seem wild, but the world is a strange place, and nothing but radical speculation gives us a hope of coming up with any candidates for the truth.

That, of course, is not the same as coming up with the truth: if truth is our aim, we must be resigned to achieving it to a very limited extent, and without certainty.

To redefine the aim so that its achievement is largely guaranteed, through various forms of reductionism, relativism, or historicism, is a form of cognitive wish-fulfillment.

Philosophy cannot take refuge in reduced ambitions. It is after eternal and nonlocal truth, even though we know that is not what we are going to get.

Deep thoughts about a typo in my new book

I'm eager to write about a newfound typo in my recently published book, "Break Free of Dogma," for a couple of reasons. One is that this gives me another chance to plug my book, which is prominently displayed at the top of the right sidebar. 

Also, I've got some deep thoughts about the typo that I just discovered in the book. It came to light today after I gave some copies of the book to my fellow Tai Chi students.

Handing a book to Jeremy, I told him that several of the mini-chapters refer to Tai Chi, such as the last one. I turned to that page, reading aloud the mention of how our Tai Chi instructor, Warren, reacted when I wore a t-shirt with the Chinese symbol for Wu, which indicates negation or nothing.

I was shocked to see that rather than saying I wore it to my Tai Chi class on Monday and today, in the book it says boon Monday and today.

Wow. The original blog post had "on," but when I copied the post content into a Pages file, autocorrect must have changed "on" to "boon." I then proceeded to proof read the manuscript at least three times, failing to see the typo each time.

This is common in human perception.

For example, our eyes don't faithfully reflect what is out there in the world, as a mirror would. Instead, the brain actively makes predictions about what it expects to see, filling in aspects of reality in surprising ways -- such as by eliminating the blind spot with surrounding images. 

Some process in our brains interpolates the blind spot based on surrounding detail and information from the other eye, so we do not normally perceive the blind spot.

I expected to read "on, in part because I'd written the blog post that became a chapter in my book. So my brain failed to recognize the "boon" typo.

The lesson is that we can't always trust what we believe we're perceiving, because the brain often fails to show us what is really there.

A classic experiment along this line is a video of a person in a gorilla suit walking through some people passing a basketball back and forth. When an onlooker is asked to count the number of times the basketball has been passed, typically they fail to notice the "gorilla."

Expectations play a large role in perception. This is one reason I'm deeply skeptical about tales of mystical experiences. Almost always these reflect whatever religious teaching the person embraces. Muslims rarely, if ever, have a vision of Jesus, but Christians do.

Likewise, followers of a guru will claim they had a vision of him or her, not a vision of the Buddha or Krishna.

Thus almost certainly mystical visions are produced by the mind of the person having the vision, since otherwise we'd have to accept that a supernatural realm is populated with every conceivable religious entity that has appeared to devotees of the thousands of world religions.

I came to recognize the typo in my book. But most religious believers never realize that they are creating their own inaccurate images of their chosen faith. 

So just as it makes sense to have several people proofread a book, something I chose not to do, claims of a mystical vision need to be examined extremely closely and skeptically, since chances are that vision has been fashioned by a human mind, not an actual divinity.

If God is beyond thought and language, then shut up if you're religious

I'd like to rephrase in a more blunt fashion what I quoted Donald Hoffman as saying in yesterday's blog post. Here's Hoffman.

If a system of thought, religious or otherwise, offers a claim that it wants taken seriously, then we should examine it with our best method of inquiry -- the scientific method. That is taking it seriously.

Some topics -- such as God, the good, reality, and consciousness -- have been claimed to transcend the limited scope of human concepts and thus the methods of science. I have no quarrel with someone who claims this and then, being consistent, says no more about these topics.

But if one does say more, then "What can be said at all can be said clearly" and probed with the scientific method.

And here's my blunter rephrasing:

If you believe that God, or anything else supernatural, is so ineffable it's beyond thought and language, then, please, shut the fuck up and don't say anything to the rest of us about what can't be talked about.

On the other hand, if God, or anything else supernatural, can indeed be discussed in thought and language, then be prepared for some damn tough questions about what evidence you have for your belief.

Do you get it, religious believers? You can't have it both ways.

Meaning, you can't blather on about God, soul, spirit, karma, heaven, astral regions, mystical powers, or any other sort of supernatural shit if you claim that all this stuff lies beyond the domain of human concepts, thoughts, and language.

Just be silent. Keep your ineffable experience to yourself.

Because believe me, there's nothing more boring than to have someone drone on about their supposed experience of God or something else divine, then have that person respond with "It was a personal experience" when asked to provide evidence of its existence.

Guess what?

Everything anyone experiences is personal. There's no such thing as an impersonal experience. But it's possible to talk about personal experiences when what's been experienced exists in a realm of shared reality. 

For example, yesterday my wife and I went on a bike ride at Black Butte Ranch in central Oregon with my daughter and granddaughter that involved stopping for a photograph in front of Black Butte. You don't have to take my word for it. Here's a photo. (I don't like to smile much, or at all, in photos because I don't like my smile.)

But no one really knows what my experience of the bike ride that included a stop to feed carrots to horses grazing in the Big Meadown was like. Yet obviously I don't go around claiming that everyone should do what I just did, and have the same experience that I did.

So why do religious believers talk endlessly about how everyone should love Jesus, follow the teachings of Muhammed, embrace a living guru, or whatever? I have much more evidence to support my experience of Black Butte Ranch than any believer has about a supposed supernatural experience.

The difference between us is that I know that my experience was of a genuine reality, so I feel no need to try to convince others that what I experienced was real. On the other hand, religious believers like to blab on, and on, and on about things that there is no evidence for -- except in their own minds.

This is why they should shut their mouths unless they're prepared to present persuasive evidence that what they experienced is true. Please, don't bore those of us who like to exist in reality with your fantasies. Look, I'm fine with fantasies, so long as they are acknowledged as such.

That's what every book of fiction is: a fantasy of the author's mind. Ditto for every movie other than documentaries, or every piece of art that isn't a photograph. I have no problem with people sharing supposed supernatural experiences if they admit that there's no reason for anyone else to believe that the experience was of something objectively real.

But as Hoffman said, once you claim to be able to express your religious experience of a supernatural reality in words or concepts, be prepared to have skeptics like me try to tear apart your arguments. Reality is too precious to be diminished to someone's personal fantasy.

"The Case Against Reality" seems more right than wrong

It's rare that I find it difficult to put down a non-fiction book because I'm so eager to read the final chapters and grasp the author's concluding arguments.

Such was the case, though, with The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes, by Donald Hoffman. I hadn't planned to spend so much time reading the book this morning, but I carried on until I'd read all but a technical appendix.

Hoffman's Big Idea is this: evolution selects for fitness, not truth. If a living organism perceives reality well enough to be able to pass on its genes, that's what evolution is all about. Or at least, mostly about. In shorthand, FBT, Fitness Beats Truth.

Another acronym Hoffman uses a lot is ITP, the Interface Theory of Perception. Here's a paragraph that encapsulates key ideas in the book.

Perception is not about truth. It's about having kids. Genes that fashion perceptions that help us raise kids are genes that may win the fitness game and elbow their way into the next generation. The FBT Theorem tells us that winning genes do not code for perceiving truth.

ITP tells us that they code instead for an interface that hides the truth about objective reality and provides us with icons -- physical objects with colors, textures, shapes, motions, and smells -- that allow us to manipulate that unseen reality in just the ways we need to survive and reproduce. 

Physical objects in spacetime are simply our icons in our desktop.

This Big Idea strikes me as being more right than wrong. Which means that I agree with most of what Hoffman says in his engrossing book.

Still, a Publisher's Weekly review had some key words that reflect how I see The Case Against Reality. "Intriguing but overreaching treatise."

I'm a believer in objective reality. So I resonated with Hoffman's contention in all but the final chapter that objective reality exists. For example, he writes:

According to the FBT Theorem, if selection shapes perceptions, then perceptions guide useful behaviors rather than report objective truths about an independent world. Something exists independent of us, but that something doesn't match our perceptions. This feels difficult to understand because of our penchant to reify our interface. 

Hoffman notes that a Maserati certainly seems real. It can be seen, and touched with eyes closed. However, Hoffman says:

It proves nothing. It suggests, but does not prove, that there is something objective. But that something could be wildly different from anything you perceive. 

When you open your eyes, you interact with that unknown something and create a visual icon of a Maserati. When you close your eyes and reach out your hand, you create a tactile icon. The same is true for all the other senses.

OK, that seems reasonable.

There's an objective reality, but all sentient beings perceive it differently. We humans view reality in one fashion, while other species view it quite differently. An ant, bat, dolphin, and eagle all have their own way of looking upon the world, as would, almost certainly, aliens from a galaxy far, far away.

I certainly agree that there is no one way, or preferred way, to perceive reality. Evolution has led each species here on Earth to possess different reality interfaces, in Hoffman's language. So the icons that populate these interfaces also are going to be unique.

No two people perceive the world in exactly the same way, and certainly no two species do. Hoffman appears to be on solid ground when he says this in his Preface:

The purpose of a desktop interface is not to show you the "truth" of the computer -- where "truth," in this metaphor, refers to circuits, voltages, and layers of software.

Rather, the purpose of an interface is to hide the "truth" and to show simple graphics that help you perform useful tasks such as crafting emails and editing photos. If you had to toggle voltages to craft an email, your friends would never hear from you.

That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enough to raise offspring. Space, as you perceive it when you look around, is just your desktop -- a 3D desktop. Apples, snakes, and other physical objects are simply icons in your 3D desktop.

Those icons are useful, in part, because they hide the complex truth about objective reality. Your senses have evolved to give you what you need. You may want truth, but you don't need truth. Peceiving truth would drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive.

Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.

However, Hoffman casts independently existing objective reality aside in his final chapter. I found this intellectually dubious. He spends nine chapters arguing that evolution has fashioned interfaces for determining what is useful for us, fitness-wise. So what we perceive is objective reality filtered through both a species-specific interface and our personal interface.

(A blind person, for example, has a decidedly different interface than a sighted person.)

Then, in chapter 10, Hoffman casts objective reality aside. Or at least, objective reality that is independent of conscious agents. He writes:

"But," you might object, "didn't you earlier define 'objective reality' as that which exists when no one observes? And don't conscious experiences exist only when some agent observes? Haven't you contradicted yourself when you propose conscious realism, and claim that objective reality consists of conscious agents?"

Indeed, for sake of argument, I adopted a notion of objective reality that is accepted by most physicalists. Then I used evolutionary assumptions that are also accepted by most physicalists to make the case against physicalism and its notion of objective reality.

Now that I have presented that case, I am proposing a new ontology, and with it a new notion of objective reality in which conscious agents, with their experiences and structures, are central.

Well, I think his original ontology was stronger. Somehow Hoffman ends up arguing that "Objects, shapes, space, and time reside in consciousness. If the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated." 

That's a huge argument to make in the concluding pages of a book where Hoffman argued quite differently up to that point. Understand: he isn't saying that living creatures perceive space and time from their own unique evolutionary perspective. Rather, he claims that there is no such thing as space and time absent a conscious observer.

He may be right. Perhaps the universe was just sitting there doing nothing for billions of years after the big bang, waiting for conscious observers to bring it into being.

But how did conscious observers come to exist if there was no space and time for evolution to work its magic? This strikes me as a major flaw in Hoffman's replacement ontology. His final two paragraphs sound way too New Age'y for my tastes.

What is spacetime? This book has offered you the red pill. Spacetime is your virtual reality, a headset of your own making. The objects you see are your invention. You create them with a glance and destroy them with a blink.

You have worn this headset all your life. What happens if you take it off?

That said, I still hugely enjoyed his book. Again, it seems much more right than wrong. Check out his TED talk, and I think you'll agree.

Calculus is cool. Spiritual, even. Infinity rocks.

Astoundingly, I'm enjoying a book about calculus, Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz. The subtitle is the reason: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe.

Hey, I'm all in on having the secrets of the universe revealed to me. Especially when the cost was a mere $16.52 to have Amazon deliver the book to my doorstep. 

I started this post with the word "astoundingly" because I was forced to take a calculus class in the first year of my Systems Science Ph.D. program studies way back when. (I completed the course work, but then gave up on being called Dr. Hines, as appealing as that prospect was.)

All I remember about the class was that I didn't like it. I passed, but I can't recall a single deep philosophical statement about the universe during that enforced dive into the equations of calculus, introductory variety.

I've only read 25 pages of Infinite Powers, yet already I'm fascinated by calculus -- because Strogatz, a Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell, is both an excellent writer and a talented expositor of this difficult subject. 

Here's a sampling in Strogatz' own words of what's intrigued me in the few pages I've perused so far. (The headlines are mine.)

Calculus is key to modern civilization.
Without calculus, we wouldn't have cell phones, computers, or microwave ovens. We wouldn't have radio. Or television. Or ultrasound for expectant mothers, or GPS for lost travelers. We wouldn't have split the atom, unraveled the human genome, or put astronauts on the moon. We might not even have the Declaration of Independence.

The universe is mathematical. 
For reasons nobody understands, the universe is deeply mathematical. Maybe God made it that way. Or maybe it's the only way a universe with us in it could be, because nonmathematical universes can't harbor life intelligent enough for us to ask the question.

In any case, it's a mysterious and marvelous fact that our universe obeys laws of nature that always turn out to be expressible in the language of calculus as sentences called differential equations. Such equations describe the difference between something right now and the same thing an instant later or between something right here and the same thing infinitesimally close by.

Calculus expresses the universe's operating system.
To put this awesome assertion another way, there seems to be something like a code to the universe, an operating system that animates everything from moment to moment and place to place. Calculus taps into this order and expresses it.

Infinity is what gives calculus its power.
Calculus succeeds by breaking complicated problems down into simpler parts. That strategy, of course, is not unique to calculus. All good problem-solvers know that hard problems become easier when they're split into chunks. The truly radical and distinctive means of calculus is that it takes this divide-and-conquer strategy to its utmost extreme -- all the way out to infinity.

Instead of cutting a big problem into a handful of bite-size pieces, it keeps cutting and cutting relentlessly until the problem has been chopped and pulverized into its tiniest conceivable parts, leaving infinitely many of them. Once that's done, it solves the original problem for all the tiny parts, which is usually a much easier task than solving the initial giant problem.

The remaining challenge at that point is to put all the tiny answers back together again. That tends to be a much harder step, but at least it's not as difficult as the original problem was.

Even the quantum world bows down to calculus. 
Admittedly, some aspects of our ever-changing world lie beyond the approximations and wishful thinking inherent in the Infinity Principle. In the subatomic realm, for example, physicists can no longer think of an electron as a classical particle following a smooth path in the same way that a planet or a cannonball does.

According to quantum mechanics, trajectories become jittery, blurry, and poorly defined at the microscopic scale, so we need to describe the behavior of electrons as probability waves instead of Newtonian trajectories. As soon as we do that, however, calculus returns triumphantly. It governs the evolution of probability waves through something called the Schrodinger equation.

It's incredible but true: Even in the subatomic realm where Newtonian physics breaks down, Newtonian calculus still works. In fact, it works spectacularly well.

Completed infinity is the original sin of calculus. 
Should we take the plunge and say that a circle truly is a polygon with infinitely many infinitesimal sides? No. We mustn't do that, mustn't yield to that temptation. Doing so would be to commit the sin of completed infinity. It would condemn us to logical hell.

...Like the biblical original sin, the original sin of calculus -- the temptation to treat a circle as an infinite polygon with infinitesimally short sides -- is very hard to resist, and for the same reason. It tempts us with the prospect of forbidden knowledge, with insights unavailable by ordinary means.

The sin of dividing by zero.
All across the world, students are taught that division by zero is forbidden... The root of the problem is infinity. Dividing by zero summons infinity in much the same way that a Ouija board supposedly summons spirits from another realm. It's risky. Don't go there.

...The transgression that dragged us into this mess was pretending that we could actually reach the limit, that we could treat infinity like an attainable number. 

...In the context of chopping a line into pieces, potential infinity would mean that the line could be cut into more and more pieces, as many as desired but still always a finite number and all of nonzero length. That's perfectly permissible and leads to no logical difficulties.

What's verboten is to imagine going all the way to a completed infinity of pieces of zero length.

That, Aristotle felt, would lead to nonsense -- as it does here, in revealing that zero times infinity can give any answer. And so he forbade the use of completed infinity in mathematics and philosophy. His edict was upheld by mathematicians for the next twenty-two hundred years.

Infinity is a dangerous temptress. 
Somewhere in the dark recesses of prehistory, somebody realized that numbers never end. And with that thought, infinity was born. It's the numerical equivalent of something deep in our psyches, in our nightmares of bottomless pits, and in our hopes for eternal life. 

Infinity lies at the heart of so many of our dreams and fears and unanswerable questions: How big is the universe? How long is forever? How powerful is God? In every branch of human thought, from religion and philosophy and science and mathematics, infinity has befuddled the world's finest minds for thousands of years.

Discrete and continuous become one. 
Consider how an old-fashioned analog clock differs from a modern-day digital/mechanical monstrosity. On the analog clock, the second hand sweeps around in a beautifully uniform motion. It depicts time as flowing. Whereas on the digital clock, the second hand jerks forward in discrete steps, thwack, thwack, thwack. It depicts time as jumping. 

Infinity can build a bridge between these two very different conceptions of time. Imagine a digital clock that advances through trillions of little clicks per second instead of one loud thwack. We would no longer be able to tell the difference between that kind of digital clock and a true analog clock. 

Likewise with movies and videos: as long as the frames flash by fast enough, say at thirty frames a second, they give the impression of seamless flow. And if there were infinitely many frames per second, the flow truly would be seamless. 

...So in everyday life, the gulf between the discrete and the continuous can often be bridged, at least to a good approximation. For many practical purposes, the discrete can stand in for the continuous, as long as we slice things thinly enough. In the ideal world of calculus, we can go one better.

Anything that's continuous can be sliced exactly (not just approximately) into infinitely many infinitesimal pieces. That's the Infinity Principle. With limits and infinity, the discrete and the continuous become one. 

Get real. Accept limits. Embrace continuous. 
From the beginning, calculus has stubbornly insisted that everything -- space and time, matter and energy, all objects that ever have been or will be -- should be regarded as continuous. Accordingly, everything can and should be quantified by real numbers.

In this idealized, imaginary world, we pretend that everything can be split finer and finer without end. The whole theory of calculus is built on that assumption. Without it, we couldn't compute limits, and without limits, calculus would come to a clanking halt.

If all we ever used are decimals with only sixty digits of precision, the number line would be pockmarked and cratered. There would be holes where pi, the square root of two, and any other numbers that need infinitely many digits after the decimal point would exist. 

Even a simple fraction such as 1/3 would be missing, because it too requires an infinite number of digits (o.333...) to pinpoint its location on the number line. If we want to think of the totality of all numbers as forming a continuous line, those numbers have to be real numbers.

They may be an approximation to reality, but they work amazingly well. Reality is too hard to model any other way. With infinite decimals, was with the rest of calculus, infinity makes everything simpler.

Science is our best guide to a possible supernatural reality

Here's another comment from David C. Lane on a recent post of mine that makes so much sense, I'm sharing it even before I've even lunch. Sometimes my hunger for transmitting truth is greater than my stomach's yearning for food. 

Didn't someone  once say, man does not live by bread alone? (or Trader Joe's meatless chick'n tenders).

Lane talks about his Remainder Conjecture in which supernatural claims should only be accepted after a rigorous examination of them through the lens of science.

This fits with David Hume's observation, which I wrote about yesterday, that we have a tremendous amount of evidence for the physical laws of nature, and extremely little evidence for any possible supernatural phenomena.

So any claim, for example, that someone was able to use ESP to predict a future event, or perform a miracle that violated the laws of nature, has to be viewed extremely skeptically absent very convincing evidence that the supernatural event actually occurred.

After all, we humans are mistaken all the time about what happens in our minds. We accept illusions as fact. We conjure up stories that fit with our desires and sense of self. We forget things. We lie to others and sometimes to ourselves.

Science generally wants to know how something happened, though this is less important when accurate predictions can be made about what is happening. For example, the basics of genetic inheritance were understood before DNA was discovered. And quantum physics is marvelously successful without understanding what exactly is going on at the quantum level.

But if someone makes a claim about having experienced a supernatural phenomenon, we need to ask how that happened. What in the human brain is able to contact a supposed supernatural realm? Of if that capacity isn't in the brain, then where is it? In an immaterial soul? OK, if that's hypothesized, then where is the evidence for soul?

Below Lane's comment I've shared an excerpt from an essay he shared in another recent comment, "The Virtual Reality of Consciousness." The basic message of the essay is that our consciousness doesn't reflect reality as it is, but as our mind makes it out to be. 

Enjoy. I really like Lane's contention that those who view paranormal phenomena as being real should welcome each and every explanation for those phenomena that utilizes the normal.

Spence,

The movie the "remainder conjecture" is to actually open up a blind spot, not hide one.

For instance, if we exhaust physical explanations first (for instance, trying to understand the neural correlate theory of consciousness) and we find after intensive and comprehensive research that it is insufficient to the task, then it opens up a window, what I call a "remainder", which gives us suggestive indications that something ELSE is needed beyond the physical parameters we explored.

So, ironically, those most in favor of the paranormal should be at the forefront of exhausting each and every explanation that utilizes the normal.

This in itself doesn't discount the supernatural in the least, but means that we won't be duped into confusing a purely physical event for a psychic one, which has too often happened in the past.

Science actually starts with ignorance since it doesn't assume (theologically or prematurely) to have any absolute answers and thus from this state then proposes guesses and models and then tests those to see which one best fits the situation and which one provides the greatest predictive value.

Therefore, science is always doubting, always questioning, and in so doing has been wonderfully progressive in terms of understanding that which before was misunderstood.

Also, what used to be seen as magical or mysterious or produced by a god, has often turned out to be generated by physical means. The sun and nuclear fusion (see Hans Bethe for more) is a good illustration of this.

Same with the idea of gravity. Einstein's general theory of relativity made predictions that could be tested.

However, some things like "gravitational waves" were so subtle that it took a 100 years for us to detect them, which was a great breakthrough that just came to light.

The same, of course, with the subatomic physics when physicists knew that there was a missing piece in the Standard Model..... In the early 1960s they theorized a missing Boson, later found and called (after one of its more well known theorizers) the "Higgs Boson."

The Nobel prize in physics was awarded for this breakthrough, though it took decades for the proof needed to verify it.

My point is a simple one. The more patient we are in science to look for physical causes first the better off we will be, since in that pursuit we won't be duped into magical and transcendental temptations too early.

I don't think it is at all absurd to try to find an explanation for all that we can. Indeed, that is why science is science, since it doesn't simply quit but rather chugs onwards..... and in so doing the most remarkable things can happen.

Often people forget that in the early 20th century there were many that felt that the secret of genetics would never be found and instead opted for Elan Vital..... thankfully, biologists and chemists such as Linus Pauling, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkings, and James Watson were not deterred in looking for physical causations.

Indeed, they were influenced by Erwin Schrodinger's book, WHAT IS LIFE, which argued for looking for a physical medium by which information (genetic and otherwise) could be universally transmitted.

And, lo and behold, the double helix structure of DNA was discovered in 1953..... and it has radically changed our understanding of how life works.

So, again, let us pursue the Wilsonian idea of Consilient reductionism first..... and if that exhausts itself and there remains a "remainder"..... then we have something to build upon.

Or as Blaise Pascal said (or was attributed in saying), which I think goes to the heart of how science proceeds:

little faith, little doubt
great faith, great doubt

and

infinite faith, infinite doubt.

Here's the video Lane made about the Remainder Conjecture.

And here's the excerpt from Lane's essay, "The Virtual Reality of Consciousness." 

Yet, there is a downside in possessing a higher form of consciousness since it allows its owner to ponder all sorts of improbable events that will never actually happen.

We too often can get ensnared with our ideas, our fantasies, our projections and begin believing all sorts of nonsense. For a robust virtual simulator to work it must conjure up a plethora of scenarios that mix and match incongruent narratives.

In other words, for imagination to work it must be massively elastic. The glitch is that sometimes our simulations over take us and we get entrapped within their corridors.

To the degree that we can test our imaginings in the empirical world and acknowledge their successes and failures we are regarded as somewhat sane; to the degree that we cannot we may be viewed as somewhat insane. It is a thin line indeed that separates the two.

Changing your mind is a superpower. Use it.

I have a superpower. But unlike those with superpowers who inhabit the pages of comic books and the screens of movie theaters, my astounding ability is available to everyone.

It's called changing your mind. 

I'm sure you've used it  -- many times. After all, we change our minds about countless things during the course of our lives. For example, I've changed my mind about my...

Politics (Used to be conservative, now I'm a liberal).
Cars (I've gone from a 57' VW bug to a 2017 VW GTI, with many other makes in between). 
Marriage (Got divorced, then remarried).
Profession (Earned a master's in social work, then went into health planning/research).
Eating (Loved meat until I became a vegetarian in 1970).
Residence (Grew up in the country, then lived in cities, now back in the country again).
Religion (Was Catholic for a while as a child, then a believer in an Eastern religion, and now an atheist).

So how is changing your mind a superpower? After all, everybody does this, all the time. True, but since we're so used to changing our minds, it's easy to overlook how marvelous this ability is.

First, to change your mind you need to have one.

Rocks don't have minds. Nor do stars. Living beings, though, have various sorts of minds. We humans have a powerful one. Other primates, ditto, though to a lesser degree. Plants have some sort of cognizance, but probably not a mind. Computers are very adept at certain tasks, yet so far lack what we would call a "mind."

Thus people are able to learn, adapt, modify our thinking, feeling, intuition, and such.

Because very little of human behavior is controlled by instinct, we have the capacity to transmit knowledge between people and across generations. We can read Plato and understand a great mind that lived thousands of years ago, thereby altering our own.

One of the best things about being able to change our mind is how good it feels, and how freeing it is. 

Yesterday I wrote on one of my other blogs about how I struggled to figure out why my DR Field Mower wouldn't start. I changed my mind several times over several days, with a foolish "fried battery" mistake thrown in. But in the end I learned what the problem was, with the aid of a friend who is much more knowledgeable about machines than I am.

I watched him methodically evaluate possible reasons for the mower not starting, with his mind changing about the various possibilities as he went along. This is similar to what a doctor does when arriving at a diagnosis, or a scientist when testing a hypothesis.

If a mind stays stuck, it can't move in a more productive or realistic direction. We have to be willing to give up an idea in order to embrace a better one.

Of course, "better" and "worse" can be difficult to discern in some situations.

When a mower won't start, it's easy to tell which is the better idea. It's the one that, when followed, leads to the mower starting. (In my case, we disabled the neutral switch, which was broken, and the mower started just fine -- so that was a good idea.)

In the examples I gave above about some of the areas in which I've changed my mind during my 70 years of living, most people would agree that in these areas, there aren't objective criteria about which of my mind-changes were better or worse.

Subjectively, though, I can confidently say that my current 2017 VW GTI is a much better car than the 1957 VW bug that I drove in college.

For one thing, the heater works in my GTI, so I don't have to scrape ice from the inside of the windshield while driving along, like I had to at times in college. But if someone is a collector of old cars, a '57 VW bug (or beetle) could be much more attractive to them than the modern car I have now.

Ditto for the other areas.

Though I'm a proud progressive, I'd never say that this is the only valid way of thinking about politics, since conservatives can have equally good reasons for thinking the way they do. And when it comes to marriage, my first wife and I were pleased to be done with each other after 18 years of wedded bliss that eventually turned into non-bliss.

Yet she and I both found other partners with whom we were wonderfully compatible. That's the nature of life: it changes. And as life changes, so does our mind (or, as our mind changes, so does life).

I'm not saying that change is always welcome, or even tolerable.

That isn't what I mean by changing your mind being a superpower. Sure, it is possible to reduce anxiety, fear, suffering, and such by altering one's thoughts and feelings, but I'm not aware of anybody who can remain completely unmoved by severe pain, disappointment, or loss. 

What is possible, though, is altering our psyche to embrace a new reality, even though it may be unwelcome. That's a superpower in and of itself -- the ability to say "This is...," no matter what those three dots stand for.

Here's some examples of what I mean.

On this blog I've been writing quite a bit about the legal, financial, and ethical troubles involving the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), Gurinder Singh Dhillon. I was a member of RSSB for 35 years, so I like to use this organization as an example of how religions can be wrong, and do wrong, since I'm so familiar with it. 

(If I'd remained a Catholic for 35 years, then became an atheist, likely I'd be using Catholicism as an example of bad religion.)

Fairly frequently commenters on my blog posts about the Dhillon family's alleged criminality will say something like, "Brian, when it turns out that the guru did nothing wrong, you're going to be unable to accept this." 

That really isn't true. 

Because I'm adept at changing my mind, if the Indian legal system ends up exonerating Gurinder Singh Dhillon, I'll accept that reality with very little trouble. In the same fashion, back in November 2016 it took a few days for me to fully accept that Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States.

But it didn't take long for my mind to adjust to a new reality.

Now I'm hoping Trump will be a one-term president. If that doesn't happen, and he is re-elected, I'll be disappointed. However, I won't deny that this happened. (I do worry, though, that Trump won't be able to accept the reality of a 2020 defeat.)

I'll end by noting that even though I'm used to many varieties of religious craziness after 15 years of regularly writing here on the Church of the Churchless, it still surprises me when a commenter expresses extreme surprise at how I could have changed my mind about the validity of the RSSB teachings after being a member of the organization for such a long time.

Often I'll ask them how many things they have changed their mind about during their lifetime. Have you stuck with the same job, same car, same residence, same friends, same political views? Almost certainly not.

There's something about religion that encourages a rigidity of mind that isn't nearly as evident in other areas of life. Members of some religions, like Mormonism or Scientology, will shun people who leave the religion. Yet if someone changes their mind in a way that leads them to join the religion, that's not only fine, it's marvelous. 

For many fundamentalists, mind-changing is a one-way street. It's great if you convert to their religion, yet horrible if you deconvert.

Strange? Yes.

But since just about every religion believes that it, and it alone, is privy to the eternal ultimate truth of the cosmos, this encourages true believers to denigrate anyone who embraces that religion, then chooses to leave it. I guess changing one's mind makes those fundamentalists fearful that their chosen faith really isn't true.

Which, almost certainly, it isn't.

I feel good about having changed my mind to realize this. It's much more pleasurable to accept reality as it is, or at least as it appears, than to cling to a rigid way of thinking that no longer makes sense to me.

I'm an atheist with more faith than any religious believer

A week ago I came up with the title to this blog post.

The next day I wrote a comment in reply to someone who goes by "In Search Of" that ended up being a good start to explaining why I consider that atheist me has more faith than religious believers.

Here it is.

Following my comment you'll find excerpts from one of my first Church of the Churchless blog posts from way back in 2004, "Just have faith." I'm pleased that while I've become more of an atheist over the past fifteen years, my basic faith in reality hasn't changed.

In Search Of, you asked: "Brian, help me out here. Am I being unreasonable? Why can't I get an intelligent response to my question? Are we unable to differentiate between logic and faith? Or are the two at opposite poles? Is this the real question we're trying to answer? And is it an answerable question?"

Great questions. Interestingly, I came up with the title of a future blog post yesterday that I wrote down for future reference: "I'm an atheist with more faith than any religious believer." In brief, here's what came to mind that led to the idea for this blog post.

I have faith in reality.

Not just bits and pieces of reality, but reality as a whole -- the entire unimaginably vast cosmos, including the aspects that we humans currently know about and also the parts that remain a mystery. Sure, I also have faith in discrete entities. My doctors. Scientists. My VW GTI. My MacBook Pro.

But it isn't possible to have 100% faith in anything discrete.

For example, every finding of science is open to revision if new facts are revealed. Ditto for my faith in my car, which has had defects that needed to be fixed. And certainly ditto for religious leaders, even those like Gurinder Singh Dhillon that are supposedly "perfect masters."

Yet even given all that, I believe in a cosmos that operates according to some beautiful laws of cause and effect.

This applies at the quantum level also, though the laws appear to be more probabilistic than deterministic. Still, probability is a law, or quantum mechanics wouldn't be such a precise science that's responsible for much of our modern technology.

So my mantra is: "I open myself to reality, however it may appear." I wrote a blog post about this: "An atheist meditation that pleases God."

Where I went astray during many of my 35 years of being devoted to RSSB and the Sant Mat meditation practice was having undue faith in a particular aspect of reality. Namely, RSSB and the gurus in that tradition. My observation is that many others fall into the same trap.

They ignore evidence that doesn't fit into their mental model of what reality is like.

But reality doesn't give a shit about our mental models. Reality is simply what it is: reality. As another favorite saying of mine from Philip K. Dick puts it, "Reality is that which, when we stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

The guru's financial dealings/wrongdoing aren't a matter of belief. They're well documented. But RSSB devotees are so used to relying on belief, they aren't able to accept that no matter what they believe, reality remains.

So no, I don't believe that faith and reason are opposed.

At least, not in how I view faith: as trust in a reality that exists independent of our beliefs about it. Thus my view is that it's up to us humans to do our best to understand reality, not for reality to comport with our beliefs about it. That latter option leads to magical thinking.

I see it all the time in comments on this blog. RSSB devotees feel that if they only scream loudly enough into cyberspace, "The guru did nothing wrong! The guru is God! Stop criticizing the guru!", somehow this will change the reality of the guru's behavior.

All of our mental models are false to some extent.

However, we get so attached to them, often there is no crack in the mental model armor where greater and more accurate knowledge can enter.

Religious people are especially prone to this, because their need to believe that not only this life, but also their afterlife, is in the hands of a higher power is so strong, so compelling, so desperate, their reluctance to adjust their mental religious model is equally strong.

With my VW GTI, which I like a lot but am not hugely devoted to, I still found it difficult to accept that a creaking in the sunroof really was a major defect. I tried quite a few ways to fix it before it finally dawned on me, and my dealership, that the whole thing needed to be replaced, basically. See: "My VW had a creaky sunroof. Here's the tale of a 5-week repair."  

There's an analogy here.

Sometimes an entire mental model needs major refurbishing, or even replacement. That's what happened with me and the RSSB teachings. Well, looks like I just wrote a good portion of the above-mentioned planned post. Thanks for giving me that head start.

And here's the excerpts from the above-mentioned "Just have faith" post.

Faith is wonderful.
Faith is all we need to be spiritual.
Just faith. Faith alone.
So we shouldn't have faith in anything other than pure, naked, empty 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?

Someone with the type of faith extolled by the Church of the Churchless would unhesitatingly choose Door A and boldly stride into Reality. For their faith is not in anything particular, but is a faith that truth can be known, should be known, and, indeed, must be known.

We humans are stuck in The Matrix of our own brains

Most religions, mystical practices, and spiritual paths assume there's a truer reality than our everyday existence. Few people, though, think deeply about how it is possible to tell whether Reality X is more true than Reality Y -- assuming that both actually exist.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari does think about this sort of stuff, though. Today I read the Science Fiction chapter in his newest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. 

Harari notes that movies like The Truman Show and The Matrix show people trapped in an illusory reality that they have to struggle to get out of.

However, both movies -- despite their brilliance -- in the end recoil from the full implications of their scenarios. They assume that the humans trapped within the matrix have an authentic self that remains untouched by all the technological manipulations, and that beyond the matrix awaits an authentic reality that the heroes can access if they only try hard enough.

The matrix is just an artificial barrier separating your inner authentic self from the outer authentic world. After many trials and tribulations both heroes -- Neo in The Matrix and Truman in The Truman Show -- manage to transcend and escape the web of manipulations, discover their authentic selves, and reach the authentic promised land.

This is pretty much the basic plot line of the aforementioned religions, mystical practices, and spiritual paths. Something is preventing us from reaching "the authentic promised land." Original sin. Karmas. Maya. Worldly desires. Attachments. Etc. Etc.

What, though, if all of the ways to get out of the constricted box of illusion are just another form of the matrix? What if attempts to get out of the box we think we're trapped in just lead to a different sort of box? Harari goes on to say:

The current technological and scientific revolution implies not that authentic individuals and authentic realities can be manipulated by algorithms and TV cameras but rather than authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don't realize that they're already trapped inside a box -- their brain -- which is locked within the bigger box of human society with its myriad fictions.

When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix. 

When the peasants and workers revolted against the tsar in 1917, they ended up with Stalin; when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realize that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks.

Then Harari talks about the common assumption that Life Will Be Really Great only if we can get outside of the box that we feel we're trapped in that limits our capacity to be happy, contented, satisfied, at peace. Since I've been to Fiji, and don't remember being much, if any, happier while i was there, I can relate to this passage.

People fear that if they're trapped inside a box, they will miss out on all the wonders of the world. As long as Neo is stuck inside the matrix and Truman is stuck inside the TV studio, they will never visit Fiji, Paris, or Machu Picchu. 

But in truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. Breaking out of the matrix or traveling to Fiji won't make any difference.

It's not that somewhere in your mind there is an iron chest with a big red warning sign that reads OPEN ONLY IN FIJI! and when you finally travel to the South Pacific you get to open the chest, and out come all kinds of special emotions and feelings that you can have only in Fiji.

And if you never visit Fiji in your life, then you missed these special feelings forever. No. Whatever you can feel in Fiji, you can feel anywhere in the world, even inside the matrix.

This is very much in line with what I said in a 2018 blog post, "Keep the feeling of religion, and discard the theology." 

I don't believe in God. But I believe in the feelings that accompany belief. 

So now that I've realized the falsity of religion, I've discarded the theological aspects of my former belief system and kept the positive feelings.

Here's some examples.

I used to enjoy the feeling that God was looking out for me, managing my life in such a way that even bad experiences were aimed at bettering my long-term salvation chances. This made me feel hopeful about the future, since I considered there was a trajectory to my life that would end with me becoming familiar with divinity, and maybe actually merging with it.

Now, I'm simply hopeful. The feeling is the same. I've just eliminated the crazy theological reasons I had for believing that the future would turn out fine.

Serving God (or a guru, for I was a member of an organization that believed the guru was God in human form) was another enjoyable feeling. Back in my true believing days I engaged in a lot of seva, as it was called, which is an Indian term for service, or volunteering.

Well, I still like to feel like what I'm doing is benefitting others.

But I've discarded the notion that there's some sort of special benefit to being of service to a supposedly Godly person or organization. This allows me to enjoy the sensation of "selfless service" without having that feeling rest on an imagined theological foundation.

People cling to religion because they like the good feelings that come with believing. 

What I'm suggesting is that those feelings are separable from the theological framework, rituals, holy books, forms of worship, and other trappings of a religion. 

In the same fashion, happiness is a feeling. But obviously there are many ways for someone to be happy. There isn't a single cause of happiness, just as there isn't a single cause of the good feelings that people enjoy from embracing religious beliefs. 

You can give up religion and keep the feelings. 

Even if those feelings are happening within a box, or matrix. Here's Harari's thoughts about that.

Perhaps we are all living inside a giant computer simulation, Matrix-style. That would contradict all our national, religious, and ideological stories. But our mental experiences would still be real. If it turns out that human history is an elaborate simulation run on a supercomputer by rat scientists from the planet Zircon, that would be rather embarrassing for Karl Marx and the Islamic State.

But those rat scientists would still have to answer for the Armenian genocide and for Auschwitz. How did they get that one past Zircon University's ethics committee? Even if the gas chambers were just electric signals in silicon chips, the experiences of pain, fear, and despair were not one iota less excruciating for that.

Pain is pain, fear is fear, and love is love -- even in the matrix.

It doesn't matter if the fear you feel is inspired by a collection of atoms in the outside world or by electrical signals manipulated by a computer. The fear is still real. So if you want to explore the reality of your mind, you can do that inside the matrix as well as outside it. 

Harari is an ardent practitioner of meditation, Buddhist variety. I wrote about this in "How meditation helped Yuval Harari write 'Sapiens,' a terrific book." 

Religions forget that we humans are animals

Calling someone animalistic isn't an insult. It is a fact.

We humans are animals. Just unusual ones, since members of no other animal species can write articles (or blog posts) about the fact that they're animals.

Thus our bodies do what other animal bodies do. 

Pee. Poop. Breathe. Have sex. Play. Feel. Sleep. Eat. Drink. And so on. 

Sure, we also think about all kinds of stuff. The structures we build are more impressive than a termite hill. Our social relationships are more complex than a wolf pack. 

Yet the fact remains, we are animals.

One reason I've come to reject religions is that almost all of them deny our animalistic nature. Religious moral codes are filled with ridiculous attempts to ignore the needs and urges of the human body.

Sex is supposed to only occur between a married man and woman. Not out of wedlock. Not between two people of the same gender. (And certainly not between more than two people, regardless of gender.) 

Alcohol is OK in certain religions, though not in others. Recreational drugs like marijuana or psychedelics rarely are. Why? Who knows. Probably because of bullshit like "the body is a temple that must be kept clean and holy."

Other animals enjoy being intoxicated. But only the human animal feels guilty about it, mostly thanks to ignorant religious dogmas. 

For 35 years I bought into some of that body-denying dogma, Eastern mysticism variety. 

I didn't drink alcohol. I didn't use marijuana or any other drugs. I kept my sexual urges within the confines of marriage. But after I got divorced in 1990 from my first wife, and then "divorced" from my religion in 2004, I loosened up.

I realized that life needs to be lived happily, not fearfully.

I stopped worrying about following commandments and rules that no longer made sense to me. I enjoyed sex with my eventual wife-to-be. I enjoyed a glass of wine. I enjoyed smoking (or vaping) marijuans.

Nothing bad happened to me. No thunderbolts rained down from the sky. The heavens didn't part to reveal a god proclaiming you are a sinner! I simply felt more relaxed, more human, more natural, and yes, more animalistic.

So if you're a religious believer who feels like you're being confined in a life-denying box, I highly recommend breaking out. Life is too short to live it anyway other than fully.

The oft-heard adage, among adherents of my previous religion, at least, is flat-out wrong. We aren't spiritual beings having a human experience. We are humans being deluded into pursuing dogmatic spiritual experiences.

Genuine spirituality gets contaminated by religiosity. There are no rules that can't be broken. Everyone who seeks the deeper meaning of life is an army of one. Once you allow yourself to follow in someone else's footsteps, you are unable to find your own way.

Spirituality isn't opposed to the body. It is part and parcel of it. Pleasure is holy. Denying our animalism is a sin against our true nature. 

Why atheist me isn't interested in religious views

Recently a regular commenter on this blog, Spence Tepper, proposed an experiment. Basically, it was a sort of "reflective listening" exercise, where before arguing for your own position, you state as clearly as possible how someone opposed to your position feels/thinks.

Here's what Tepper said:

In fact, Brian, I would like to offer a social psychology experiment for those of us participating here regularly. Let's all work with you to create a list of our names and our current position on matters of Atheism, Agnosticism, Theism etc. And the opposite position. Then, for one week, each day we comment on a blog post you provide talking the exact opposite point of view to our normal perspective.

For example, I would argue purely for Anti-theism and point to the amoral and corrupting influence of all forms of theistic belief, including RSSB. You might choose to adopt the role of a devout Catholic... Arjuna and One Initiated might assume the roles of Atheist and Sceptic. Etc... If any of us falters or appears not to make the best case of the role, anyone is free to call us on it.

And we will be bound to deepen our case for the opposite view, or to do some research on that view and return with a stronger argument for it. My hypothesis is that, after a week of doing this with full sincerity, we will change our position. It might only change a little, or we might actually be firmer in understanding why we actually believe what we do now. But I believe our post experiment position will change permanently.

I also believe that each of us will report an understanding and greater respect of the opposite view we don't have now, which we would be unable to develop without stepping into that role ourselves. Well? Any takers?

Here's why I'm not interested in the idea.

(1) Been there, done that. Not every atheist used to be a religious believer, and not every religious believer used to be an atheist. But often this is the case. When it is, the person who switched sides, so to speak, has a very good understanding of how the other side thinks, because they themselves used to think that way.

This applies to me.

In my teen and early college years, I was an atheist. Then for 35 years I was a devotee of an Eastern religion. And for the past 13 years or so I've reverted to atheism. So I understand the religious mentality because it used to be a core part of my psyche. Meaning, I don't need to put myself in the role of a religious person, since I played that role for many years.

(2) Objective reality doesn't have two sides. Reality isn't this and that. It simply is. 

Of course, when we aren't sure what reality is like, various hypotheses can be put forward, since no one knows which is true. For a long time people debated whether the sun revolved around the earth, or the earth revolved around the sun. Now that debate is over.

Ditto with whether human-caused global warming is happening. I have little or no interest in understanding how global warming deniers think, because their thinking is wrong. Likewise, I consider that anyone who believes in God or the supernatural is wrong, because there is no demonstrable evidence for those beliefs. 

Yes, I understand that lots of people feel that God and the supernatural are real. I used to feel that way myself. But I don't see any point in trying to understand a viewpoint that is almost certainly incorrect. 

(3) Facts would change my mind, not another mind. I love politics. I love discussions. I love newspaper opinion pages. So part of what Spence Tepper suggested appeals to me -- the part about examining the basis for opposing positions. In fact, in my blog posts I regularly ask religious believers to provide solid evidence that God or the supernatural exists. 

I'm very much open to changing my atheist mind, but so far no one has provided that evidence.

However, it isn't understanding a religious believer's mind that would cause this change. Like I said above, I used to have that sort of mind. I remember how I used to think, and now I don't think that way, since it no longer makes sense to me.

In some cases, knowing how another mind feels about something is instructive. I like to read Top Critic reviews on the Rotten Tomatoes web site when deciding whether to watch a certain movie. But when it comes to deciding whether God exists, or the supernatural exists, for me this isn't a matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact.

Again, I already understand why people believe in God and the supernatural. I'm sympathetic to those beliefs, since I used to have them myself. Yet I don't see any reason to restate them, as Tepper suggested. The facts are on the side of atheism, and that's much more important to me than the mental mindset of a religious believer. 

Join the godly, supernatural, mystical "I Don't Know For Sure" club

It gives me great pleasure to invite not only visitors to this blog, but everybody in the whole freaking world, to join a non-exclusive club I've just formed:

The I Don't Know For Sure club. 

Admission is free. There are no dues. Also, no meetings. Nor any sort of organization. This club exists only in the minds of those who answer "no" to a simple question.

Are you 100%, completely, absolutely, without-a-doubt confident that what you believe about god, the supernatural, and mystical experiences is objectively true?

Now, though this question is simple, I still feel a need to explain it.

What I'm after here is getting people to consider whether there is at least the tiniest sliver of doubt that their spiritual/religious beliefs, or lack thereof, are true.

And I've used "objectively" to define true.

Meaning, I'm not asking about whether someone has an absolutely firm belief that, for example, God either exists or doesn't exist; that life after death either exists or doesn't exist; or that it is possible or impossible to experience a supernatural realm.

A belief is subjective. I'm asking about objective reality. For it sure seems that either God exists, or God doesn't exist, no matter whether humans believe or don't believe in God. 

I've become an atheist. I no longer believe in God, life after death, or supernatural mystical experiences. Yet here's the thing: 

I don't know this with absolute certainty. So I'm a non-card-carrying member of the I Don't Know for Sure club, with a membership number of #1 (which, as noted above, only exists in my own mind).

If you also want to join this club, leave a comment on this post to that effect.

And if you like, mention whether you're (1) a religious/spiritual believer who isn't 100% sure that what you believe is objectively true, (2) if you're an atheist who isn't 100% sure that your non-belief is objectively true, or (3) someone in-between who isn't sure whether whatever it is you believe or don't believe is objectively true. 

My theory, which admittedly may not hold up, is that despite the obvious great divide between religious believers and atheists, there's a thin bridge that unites most of them: a recognition that what they consider to be objectively true, may not be.

In my case, I see atheism as being much more probable.

But this means there's a chance I could be wrong. I readily admit this, and have done so frequently in my churchless blog posts. That said, I don't think there's a high probability I'm going to live on in some ethereal form after my bodily death.

However, if this happens I'll be overjoyed to tell whatever loving divine being I meet on the "other side," Wow, I sure was wrong. (If it's a hateful devilish being, I won't be as enthusiastic about this.)

Admitting that no one knows for sure strikes me as a wonderful way to bridge the gap between religious belief and atheism. Sure, it isn't a wide bridge, given that I suspect many, if not most, people would say they're at least 99% sure that, say, God either exists or doesn't exist.

But any admission of "I don't know for sure" leaves open the door to looking upon those with different views with a kinder, gentler, less dogmatic eye.

And this is a very good thing in our current world where people are increasingly divided into opposing tribes that find little or nothing good to say about the other side, or see little or nothing they have in common.

Reality requires a broad scientific look, not narrow mystic visions

Put on your philosophical wading boots. I'm about to jump into the deep end of some interesting, but sort of complex, questions about the nature of reality as seen through the eyes of quantum physics.

But rest assured that, in accord with the focus of this Church of the Churchless blog, I'll be drawing some inferences about what makes sense, and what doesn't, when it comes to religious, mystical, and spiritual claims about reality.

This might take a few blog posts, so I'll do my best to keep this initial post as short and simple as possible.

(Which means, it is going to seem lengthy and complex to many readers; sorry about that, it's the nature of the philosophical beast we're trying to come to grips with.)

I'm about two-thirds of the way through a fascinating book, "What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics," by Adam Becker. Becker is a science writer with a Ph.D. in astrophysics.

The key word in the title is meaning. Here's why.

Historically, the prevailing view of quantum physics is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, which often is pithily summed up as "shut up and calculate!" In other words, most physicists don't worry about the underlying meaning of what is known about the quantum world.

They're content with the fact that the mathematics of quantum mechanics are amazingly accurate and precise, which is why we've experienced such fantastic accomplishments in fields such as computer technology, lasers, medical imaging, and so much else.

Now, I'm going to quickly jump into the religious/mystical side of life, to avoid readers of this post heading off to another corner of the World Wide Web. 

In Becker's "More Things in Heaven and Earth" chapter, he discusses a useful analogy to illustrate the core philosophical debate between the "shut up and calculate" folks, and the "let's dig deeper for underlying meaning" folks. This is basically the distinction between logical positivism and realism.

Before we get into that analogy, I need to say that I'm not arguing for a simplistic direct connection between logical positivism and mystical ways of thinking, versus realism and scientific ways of thinking, because the situation is murkier than that. Here's some quotes from Becker:

The logical positivists were understandably opposed to philosophical castles in the sky and the tortuous prose they were often defended with. But the logical positivists weren't merely against metaphysics -- they believed they could actually dismiss metaphysical claims as meaningless.

Meaning, they held, was a matter of verification: knowing what a statement means is equivalent to knowing how to specify it using your senses. According to the positivists, when you say "it's hotter outside that it is in here," you really mean "if you go outside you will feel hotter than you do in here."

The statement's meaning is the method of verifying it empirically -- and if there's no way of verifying a statement against your senses, then that statement has no meaning.

...But idealist and theological claims aren't the only kinds of statements that make no contact with the senses.

There are also more straightforward claims like "the couch is in the living room even when nobody's there," that can't be confirmed directly. Statements like these about the existence and persistence of material objects independent of perception are realist claims -- they're statements about a real world that exists whether or not there are any humans around,

These statements are fundamental to science. Yet some of the positivists, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, dismissed realist claims as meaningless too, because they can't be verified by experience. All that is meaningful, on the positivists' account, are statements about perceptions, along with the purely logical statements of mathematics. 

Obviously mysticism isn't a mathematical enterprise. But leaving that aside, over the fourteen years I've been writing on this blog I've heard countless (more or less) stories of how someone had a vision of God, or of Jesus, or of a guru, or of divine light and sound, or whatever. 

When I and other skeptics would ask for evidence that those mystical experiences were real, typically the response would be along this line: "I know what I experienced, and it felt genuine to me, so you should believe that it was real."

This is basically a positivist argument.

Of course, unlike scientific positivism, there really isn't any way for other people to reproduce that experience -- though believers in mystic visions like to say things like, "You just need to meditate in this fashion for a long time, and have faith in God/guru/angelic beings/whatever."

I'm going to turn now to Becker's analogy, which hopefully will make my point more clear. He uses something most of us are familiar with, a TV remote control that has stopped working, to illustrate the distinction between positivism and realism.

Quine's paper, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," took aim at the core of the positivist program, the verification theory of meaning. Quine pointed out that there was no way to verify single statements -- all attempts to verify a statement inevitably involve the assumed truth of other statements, which are themselves subject to the same problem.

For example, say the remote control for your TV isn't working, and you can't turn the TV on. You suspect that the batteries in the remote are dead. You can verify this by replacing the batteries and trying to turn on the TV with the remote again. You do this, and the TV turns on.

Does that mean you were right? No.

It's entirely possible that the batteries in the remote control weren't dead at all. Maybe the remote had a short and will only work intermittently, no matter what batteries you use. Or maybe the old batteries were in backward, and you didn't notice; you just popped them out and put in new ones pointing the right way.

Or maybe something more exotic is going on: maybe the remote always worked, but when you tried it before, the TV mysteriously shifted its picture to the infrared and its sound to the ultrasonic, so you couldn't see or hear it; the TV happened to go back to normal after you changed the batteries, but not because you changed them. 

The last idea is clearly preposterous -- how could that happen? -- but the point remains that in testing out the new batteries in the remote, you've assumed a wide variety of basic facts about the world, all based on previous experience, and any of which could, in principle, be wrong.

This isn't merely true of suppositions about batteries in remote controls; verification of any statement behaves this way 

Looking out the window and saying, "It's raining outside," assumes that your view through the window's glass gives you an accurate picture of the outside world, and that your eyes are functioning property, and that the dimmed light and falling droplets  are in fact caused by a rain cloud and not an alien spaceship blotting out the Sun and dropping some exotic substance onto your front lawn.

So you can never verify a single statement: you're always stuck verifying the entirety of your knowledge about the world, or at least a very large fraction of it. As Quine put it, "Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body."

With the verification theory of meaning left gasping for air, Quine dismissed the idea that it's meaningless to talk about unobservable things. Unverifiable statements must have meaning, because no individual statement is verifiable.

Thus the "metaphysics" so dreaded by the positivists came roaring  back: rather than speaking simply of sensations, Quine contended that it was perfectly intelligible to speak of physical objects with existence independent of the speaker.

So this gets me back to the title of this post: reality requires a broad scientific look, not narrow mystic visions.

I'll talk about this more in another blog post, because this one is plenty long already. For now I'll simply observe that without using these terms, for quite a few years I've been engaged with positivist believers in mystical experiences who don't want to take a broad realistic view of the cosmos.

For example, a supernatural experience typically demands that someone assume that human consciousness can function outside of the physical brain; that there are spiritual realms of existence beyond the physical universe; that there are "laws of nature" unknown to science, and so on. This sort of worldview requires a very different understanding of reality than is known either to science or everyday experience.

Which is why I no longer believe in it.   

It hurts to argue with reality

This is a great simple explanation of why it makes sense to love science, to love truth, to love reasoned fact-based discussions of what is happening in the world. Fantasies can be fun, but reality has a way of biting us in the butt when we ignore what is.

"Atheist Experience" guys demolish arguments of a supernatural believer

I've come to the conclusion that a big part of being a spiritual person is thinking clearly.

(When I say "spiritual," I don't mean religious or supernatural; I mean finding meaning in life, the underlying spirit of one's life, so to speak.)

If we don't think clearly, there's a danger that our emotions, feelings, desires, intuitions, and such will lead us astray. I'm certainly not saying that thoughts are more important than other aspects of our psyche -- just that we need to find a balance between the rational and non-rational parts of ourselves.

Case in point: this You Tube video is a 24-minute example of how a deist caller to the Atheist Experience TV show is utterly unable to discuss in any sort of coherent fashion why he believes God, or any other supernatural entity, exists. 

I watched the whole video, but in the first 5-10 minutes you can get a good feel for the discussion between the atheist guys and Jeff from Aptos, California. 

The person who emailed me a link to the video yesterday said:

Hi Brian, I just listened to this call on the call-in program called The Atheist Experience. What is so unbelievably fascinating about this call is that the caller has absolutely no clue about what's being said.

I would go further and say he is unable to comprehend or make sense of what the hosts of the show are saying so clearly. It is like they are speaking a foreign language.

 

The caller is so fixated on his own viewpoint that it is impossible to have a normal conversation with him. It is the same with many of the people who comment on your blog.

I agree that many Church of the Churchless commenters display the same lack of understanding of what it means to believe in the supernatural, and not to believe in the supernatural.

Over and over, the caller, Jeff, is asked to explain why he is a deist, a believer in God. He's repeatedly asked to provide reasons, or evidence, to support his belief in God. But all of his explanations are either circular, or unresponsive.

Of course, there's no demonstrable evidence of God, or I and almost every other atheist in the world would believe in God. After all, us atheists typically are open-minded, as Don and Matt, the Atheist Experience guys, are. 

As noted regularly on this blog, most recently in this post, atheism isn't a belief; it is the absence of a belief in theism, in God. Don and Matt keep pointing out that they aren't saying there is no God. Rather, they consider that because of insufficient evidence that God exists, they assume that not-believing in God is the wisest choice.

I liked how they interrupted the caller when he tried to answer their question about why he is a deist by starting out with, "But you..." They correctly said that when someone begins to answer a question about themselves with "But you...", it's clear that they aren't intent on providing an answer.

Asking an atheist to prove that there is no God is an example of how religious believers fail to think clearly. The burden of proof is on a believer, not a skeptic.

In a trial, the prosecution has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone committed a crime. Fairly frequently, the defense won't call a single witness. Why? Because they don't have to prove that the defendant didn't commit a crime.  

Likewise, an atheist doesn't have to prove that God doesn't exist. Atheists like me, and like Don and Matt, leave open the possibility that God or some other supernatural entity might exist. If there is sufficient evidence of this, we would believe. Because there isn't, we don't.

Of course, there are good reasons to believe in God, even if God doesn't exist. Here's some of them:

(1) It feels good to believe that death isn't the end of us, but the beginning of an afterlife.
(2) It feels good to be part of a religious community, given the social support that comes with this.
(3) It feels good to be provided a moral code, rather than having to decide what is right and wrong on our own.
(4) It feels good to consider that we're part of a "chosen people," instead of just being an ordinary person.
(5) It feels good to believe that a divine power is guiding your life.

Here's the thing though: just because something makes us feel good doesn't mean it is true. Fantasies can be fun. 

I regularly get comments on this blog along the lines of, "Brian, why are you trying to take away an important source of support for people, their belief in God?" My answer: "I'm not trying to do this. What I'm trying to do is learn the truth about God and supernaturalism in general."

For me, the arguments in favor of believing in God or the supernatural are weak, too weak for me to accept. Yes, I used to believe in not only God, but in the existence of living masters, or gurus, who essentially were God in human form. Now I don't believe in either.

However, since I used to believe, I understand the appeal of believing. Life is hard. The Buddha got it right when he taught that life is suffering. We all need shoulders to lean on. I get why most people in the world believe in God and the supernatural. This feels good.

There's nothing wrong, and a lot right, with feeling good. I'm simply saying that feeling good because of a belief in God is one thing, and that belief being true is a very different thing.

Science was mentioned in the Atheist Experience video as being our best way of determining what is true. For sure. Here's a 4-minute video in praise of science that's well worth watching.

Religious believers ignore reality, while making up fantasies

After fourteen years of blogging here on the Church of the Churchless, I'm not surprised anymore by this evident fact about most religious believers:

They make two mistakes. They ignore aspects of this evident physical reality that conflict with their chosen religious dogma. And they embrace fantasies about supernatural realms that almost certainly don't exist. 

Thus religious believers close their eyes to what can actually be known, while making up stories about what is unknown -- such as what, if anything, lies outside the bounds of our universe.

Here's some examples of what I'm talking about. 

I've written several posts about recent stories that reputable Indian business publications have published about a guru's highly questionable financial involvements. (See here and here.)

These are well-researched stories that lay out in considerable detail how Gurinder Singh Dhillon, the guru of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), is deeply enmeshed in the tale of how two brothers, Malvinder and Shivinder Singh, who are relatives of Dhillon, have lost billions of dollars through shady business deals.

But RSSB true believers refuse to accept the facts that are right in front of their eyes, even going so far as to consider that the guru is orchestrating the bad press about him as a test of how devoted and obedient his devotees are.

Obviously this is crazy.

But since crazy is the foundation of every religion, including the teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, followers of the guru who comment on this blog, such as "One Initiated," have resorted to name-calling and insults because they are unable to come up with facts to refute the tell-all stories published by Bloomberg and Business Today.

(Additional stories about Gurinder Singh Dhillon and the Singh brothers have been published by other organizations.)

What's obvious to everyone but those head-in-the-sand acolytes is how readily religious believers ignore facts that threaten their belief system, while accepting extremely spurious dogmas that have no demonstrable evidence to back them up.

I'm proud to be a member of the Truth Telling Club. We aren't an actual club, of course. But I feel a close connection to everyone who does their best to accept reality as it is, and to dismiss fantasies that aren't real.

This is difficult work. It requires research, an open mind, a willingness to admit errors and mistakes, a heartfelt commitment to following the truth wherever it leads. 

By contrast, religious believing is easy.

So is ignoring facts about the ugly side of one's chosen religion, such as the sleazy financial dealings Gurinder Singh Dhillon has been engaging in while he supposedly was dedicating himself to both his own spiritual uplift and that of his disciples.

The good news is that the truth always wins out. Reality always has the last word. Why? Because truth and reality are vastly more powerful that falsehood and fantasies.

Likely there is more truth to come out about the RSSB guru's financial dealings.

We live in a world where secrets are difficult to keep, even by the rich and powerful.

Fortunately, our world has plenty of people who value honesty above lies, truth-telling above dissembling, straight talk above meaningless blather. Religions likely always will be with us, but I'm confident that their power will diminish as reality increasingly comes to be valued above fantasy.

Why I don't believe in anyone's supposed supernatural experience

Today I got an email from someone who said:

Well, here in your blog itself, you have all of these people sharing their experiences.  Huge voluminous paragraphs detailing all kinds of dramatic experiences, with stars and moons and spatial flight and GIHFs [God In Human Form] popping up with personal guidance and what-have-you.  My question is : Why do you ignore them now, now that you do see these experiences spoken of, quite plainly?

This was my response.
----------------------------
As you might expect, I consider that people who say they’ve had experiences of a supernatural reality are either deluding themselves, or other people. Both are possible, of course, if someone believes they’ve had a genuine experience, then tries to convince others that it was real. 

I’m reading an interesting book, Selfie. 

The author notes that culture is a key ingredient in human experience. This is obvious, of course, when it comes to so-called mystical experiences. How often do Christians have a vision of Krishna? Very rarely, if at all. 

Likewise, how often do Sant Mat devotees have a vision of Jesus? Very rarely, if at all.

The only way I could begin to accept that “supernatural” experiences are real would be if everyone who reported that sort of experience had virtually identical descriptions of it. But they don’t.

 

A few minutes of Googling turned up some examples. Here’s some people who had visions of Jesus.

 

http://www1.cbn.com/700club/ron-zaucha-vision-jesus

 

https://www.godisreal.today/jesus-vision/

 

And there’s people who have visions of fairies, with whom they interact.

 

http://www.fairycongress.com/seeing-fairies/

 

So why should I believe Sant Mat devotees who claim to have visions of the radiant form of their guru, or some supernatural realm that's part of the Sant Mat dogma? Why should their visions be given more credence than the people who have visions of Jesus or of fairies?

 

Now, some would say that ALL supernatural experiences must be accepted as real, because there are myriads of kinds of supernatural realities. I guess this would be similar to an alien visiting Earth and landing in a tropical forest, while another alien landed on a pole and saw snow/ice. 

 

OK, that’s possible. However, a big difference is that Earth is part of physical existence, so the various parts of our planet can be explored, photographed, etc.  

 

And I’d argue that going that "believe everything" route requires giving up any semblance of a rational, evidential, factual take on reality. We then would end up accepting all sorts of conspiracy theories, alternative views of science, crazy ideas of every variety. 

 

So I choose to not believe in the objective reality of anyone’s description of a supernatural experience, rather than believe in all of them. There’s no evidence that a supernatural reality even exists, much less that humans are able to experience it via some sort of elevated consciousness.

 

     -- Brian

"Existence is entirely futile." A brave essay on the human condition.

With the author's permission, here's a highly thoughtful, well-reasoned, nicely-written email message I received recently that presents a stark, but persuasive, perspective on the human condition. 

I enjoyed reading about what led this person to change from a hopeful spiritual person to a nihilistic atheist. The message ended with an invitation to me to comment on it, which I was pleased to do -- which led to some further thoughts from the message sender.

I've shared an edited version of our interchange after the essay itself. Enjoy. And I mean that word, enjoy, because even though what follows will strike many people as being depressingly bleak, I find the essay to be a refreshingly honest view of the suffering that inevitably accompanies consciousness and self-awareness.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the thoughtful and witty blog. I have enjoyed it a lot.

I'm writing to share my story of what precipitated my personal transition from a somewhat hopeful "spiritual" person to a nihilistic atheist. I'm writing because I know that you also made the journey from believer to atheist, and I thought you might find this interesting. If not, forgive me and delete this as soon as possible.

I grew up in a conservative Christian home although I never could genuinely believe in those inane ideas. In my young adulthood I migrated toward eastern spirituality with my final resting spot being Buddhism due to the fact that it is non-theistic (seemed the most plausible). Through those years I read as much on these topics as I could, along with other books on philosophy (especially existential philosophy), practiced meditation, etc.

Throughout my entire life of critical thinking, the phenomenon of suffering has drawn the most of my intellectual resources.

Anybody who stares into the abyss of suffering that exists very quickly realizes that the existence of suffering utterly and irrevocably destroys any belief in God and any belief in "ultimate" meaning/purpose. This became more and more difficult to ignore, so I nestled into the notion that life was essentially neutral. The existence of suffering made it impossible to be "good", yet I thought it might still be neutral. 

One quick disclosure: I have an incurable and untreatable genetic disease that leaves me in almost constant pain, both physical and emotional.

So, early on, this journey began as a quest to see if this predicament could be reasonably reconciled with an existence that could still be deemed "good". I latched onto accounts of profound mystical experiences, where the individual relayed experiences of bliss, joy, love and the unshakable knowledge that existence was overflowing with benevolence.

The fact that these experiences occurred buoyed me. During that time, I think I collected and read every experience that was ever put into print. I also found websites that had collections submitted by people. 

Fast forward: I now understand these experiences to essentially be a psychological coping mechanism. The fact that the overwhelming majority proceed from deeply traumatic periods bolsters this understanding.

The human mind is adaptive and it creates psychological fictions when it needs to.

Some have contended that these experiences are too life enhancing to represent some pathological state or to be the product of trauma. I thoroughly disagree and I compare them to the phenomenon of dissociative personality disorder. This is an immensely powerful and effectual response to trauma, sometimes triggered by only a single traumatic event (usually sexual abuse).

While the casual onlooker may see an abnormality, this is a phenomenon that allows for coping with the trauma. In this sense it is adaptive and "positive". Compare this to the trauma of simply being alive with the pervasive stress and pressures of survival and the omnipresent fear of death/extinction. All of this against the backdrop of apparent meaninglessness. It is no wonder that the psyche generates these encouraging fictions.

Mystical experience, like religion in general, is a natural phenomenon. Homo sapiens, the cognitive animal, needs cognitive encouragement to survive and nothing accomplishes this more than the conviction that life is essentially meaningful, blissful, loving, and peaceful regardless of the appearance to the contrary. 

So, this was one of my discoveries that started to put a crack in the armor of my hope. The other being ontology and pondering the nature of time. Long story short, I kept coming up against what I now call the "impenetrable impasse of ontology." Every philosophy, religion, and even branches of science (physics, cosmology) eventually reaches this impasse.

In short, we cannot account for the existence of anything without providing for the existence of something that is timeless, eternal, or outside of time; something that is uncaused. This can be conceptualized as an eternally preexistent static Being, "substance," or energy.

Theistic religion invented a creator being; they reached the impasse. Modern cosmology has conceived of the uncaused as pure potential in the form of "quantum foam." This eternal something can also be conceived in the form of an endless causal chain, infinitely regressing into the past. In this case, it is only the chain or sequence itself that is uncaused and eternal. Some theories in modern astrophysics have reworked this theory (see the book Endless Universe).

The bottom line is that something eternal must exist. To many this is immediately hopeful. To me, it is the absolute deathblow to hope.

What this impasse of ontology showed me is that existence is entirely futile.

I realized that eternity itself is the epitome of futility. I realized that suffering is directly born out of an eternal chaos and is not temporary in any way, shape, or form. If this universe is either the latest conflagration of an endless causal chain or the product of a timeless substance, the result is the same.

Anything uncaused simply exists—existing for no purpose or reason—and anything it generates must also be correspondingly devoid of meaning and purpose.

But the most problematic feature is that this purposeless energy/process generates unfathomable degrees of pure misery. Anything eternal does not ultimately evolve, progress, or change at all. Thus, it is process that will never cease generating this misery. I realized in the starkest possible terms that suffering is entirely inescapable and eternal. 

As horrifying as it was, this made sense to me because I had come to actually view suffering as being the very core and essence of life.

I had long known negative experience to be greater quantitatively and qualitatively. Not only is profound suffering universal and ubiquitous, but it is also far more consequential.

Negative experience is more impactful and carries incomparably greater psycholgical weight than anything positive (except maybe the fictive mystical experience, hence its survival value). A single traumatic event can utterly destroy a life, while the same cannot be said for an exceedingly happy event. 

I also realized that there can be no experience without being limited, as consciousness can only exist if it has a "point-of-perspective" from which to experience.

All the new age drivel about an "infinite consciousness" is just that -- pure drivel. It is an abject contradiction in terms and is categorically impossible. The necessity of limitation as a functional condition for the existence of consciousness further strengthened my discovery that suffering is inescapable.

The one and only hope that I carry with me today is that I will be entirely obliterated at death, which I certainly presume will be the case.

Over my long journey, I have come to realize that suffering is the very nature of being alive and nothing can change that as it is ultimately derived from a unchanging eternal "cause." Suffering would not be occuring right here and now if it was not an intrinsic aspect of existence. The blind chaos that spits out universes will forever generate universes of pure agony, just like the one we are living in.

This is why I look forward to death more with each passing day. I loathe such clichés as "life is a gift." Life is not a gift. Life is a random yet inconceivably tragic event. 

Thanks for listening. I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have the time and would like to respond.

 This is some of what I said in my reply.

There’s a lot to say about what you said. You’ve obviously thought long and deeply about matters that most people don’t think at all about. Kudos to you for doing that. You’ve shown a lot of courage, discarding spiritual/religious crap that merely tries to smooth over the evident suffering and pain in this life by providing specious answers to difficult questions. 

 

I tend to see existence as being generally neutral, since likely consciousness is fairly rare in the cosmos. At least, as compared to the vastness of interstellar space and the hundreds of billions of stars in a typical galaxy.

 

But when consciousness is involved,  I think you’re correct: pain and suffering are inevitable.

 

This is particularly true when a being has not only awareness, but self-awareness. Our dog suffers (she hates loud bangs, so fireworks last night stressed her out), but I don’t see any sign that she worries about her suffering. When she is in pain, mental or physical, she suffers. Then, she is back to enjoying her dog life.

 

I heartily agree with you that mysticism, spirituality, religion — they’re all attempts to deal with the oppressive reality of a universe that doesn’t give a shit about us.

 

You say that the cosmos generates universes of pure agony. Yes, this certainly can be true. Your life testifies to that, as do countless other examples of people who suffer horribly, not to mention the lives of countless animals raised in terrible conditions for the eating pleasure of humans (I’m a vegetarian, partly for that reason).

 

Yet for me, and obviously there’s no right or wrong answer here, being so personal, I find the universe to be essentially neutral — which was your initial conception. I can’t argue against your current view, since it also makes good sense. I just tend to see us humans as an anomaly, rather than a feature of the universe. Somehow we have developed sufficient consciousness to become aware of our awareness, which now is both our greatest strength and also our greatest weakness.

 

This is part of the essay-writer's response to my thoughts.

 

I see where you are coming from to say that the physical universe is , in and of itself, value-neutral. If the universe had only produced inert bits matter, I agree that it would be value-nuetral. Yet I find the fact that it eventually generated self conscious beings to be tragic -- a tragedy which tips the scales in the direction of negativity. 

 

In many schools of philosophical thought, our principle predicament is often articulated as our confrontation with a meaninglessness/purposelessness universe (i.e., a neutral universe).  I wrote an essay some time ago that it is not meaninglessness that makes life problematic, but suffering. If life was meaningless yet beautiful, existence would certainly still be a mystery but it would not be a problematic mystery.

 

The lack of meaning only becomes a problem in the context of suffering and thus, it is the existence of suffering that is the original, fundamental, insurmountable  problem. People will always fool themselves with various schemes of purported meaning that can be dreamed up, but the reality of suffering will always be there to slap them in the face. Suffering cannot be denied and is always there to keep us honest.

 

I find religion/mysticism to be a survival strategy of our species. In this way I understand it and don't blame people. There will always be psychological crutches. Doubtful anyone would even be able to function at all with none. 

 

My psychological crutch is the conviction that death is total obliteration. A crutch need not always be untrue. I think that our eventual extinction is the greatest accidental gift the universe bestowed on us. 

 

We are an anomaly, yet we are an anomaly of the universe that is left to experience the very universe that randomly generated us. In this sense we are unique and uniquely cursed. Our subjective experiences of pain are of an entirely different order than mere space rocks colliding into each other.

 

Relatively speaking, sentience is the "most important" phenomenon in the universe because it the most consequential. When compared against an infinite expanse of swirling gasses and molten rock, one suffering person is incomparably more important. 

 

[Regarding some quotes about our psychological zombie'ness that I shared.] We are zombies in the sense that we are programmed by nature and there isn't a thing we can do about it. We are programmed to seek out positive experience and avoid negative experience. This is only possible for beings that are conscious and capable of experience. We seek to gain positive experience and avoid negative experience because we know what it is like to experience.

 

Thus, there is some link between that in us which seeks future experience and that which has/had experience. I know of no better candidate for that which has experience than consciousness. Does this imply that consciousness is somehow active? I don't know, but if so, I know that it acts to no avail.

 

The absurdity of life is such that we can never have what we are wired to seek. Our instincts are fundamentally at odds with reality. 

 

 

A test that science passes and religion fails: reality "kicks back"

How do we know what is real? This is a question that has occupied philosophers and scientists for as long as we humans have been pondering the nature of reality.

I don't pretend to know the answer, but I resonate with physicist David Deutsch's approach to the question. In his book, "The Fabric of Reality," Deutsch views explanations as being key to understanding what is real. He writes:

Explanations are not justified by the means by which they were derived; they are justified by their superior ability, relative to rival explanations, to solve the problems they address. That is why the argument that a theory is indefensible can be so compelling. A prediction, or any assertion, that cannot be defended might still be true, but an explanation that cannot be defended is not an explanation.

Now, I realize that this quote isn't exactly crystal clear. Which is understandable, because Deutsch's scientific world view isn't reducible to a couple of sound bites. But I'll try to do just that with another nibble at his philosophical perspective regarding understanding.

What is an explanation, as opposed to a mere statement of fact such as a correct description or prediction?

In practice, we usually recognize the difference easily enough. We know when we do not understand something, even if we can accurately describe and predict it (for instance, the course of a known disease of unknown origin), and we know when an explanation helps us to understand it better.

But it is hard to give a precise definition of 'explanation' or 'understanding'. Roughly speaking, they are about 'why' rather than 'what'; about the inner workings of things; about how things really are, not just how they appear to be; about what must be so, rather than what merely happens to be so; about laws of nature rather than rules of thumb. 

They are also about coherence, elegance and simplicity, as opposed to arbitrariness and complexity, though none of these things is easy to define either.

Deutsch uses Galileo as an example of how mere prediction is much different from genuine understanding. He says that at first Galileo didn't get into trouble with the Catholic Church even though he promoted a sun-centered (heliocentric) view of the heavens. The reason: the Church viewed Galileo's theory as just a way of predicting the motions of the planets.

Thus the Church was able to keep on believing that the Earth was at the center of the cosmos by considering that the planets behaved as if they orbited the Sun, not that they actually did so. 

To our modern sensibilities this doesn't make sense. But we live in scientific times that are far different from the religion-dominated era of Galileo. 

Deutsch says that one reason the sun-centered view won out was that the Church's perspective required a belief in everything that Galileo taught (because that was how fairly accurate predictions of planetary motions could be made), plus an additional belief that somehow reality was responsible for making it seem as if the sun was at the center of the cosmos, even though it actually wasn't. 

For example, if one were asked why a planetary conjunction occurred on such-and-such a date, or why a planet backtracked across the sky in a loop of a particular shape, the answer would always be 'because that is how it would look if the heliocentric theory were true'.

So here is a cosmology -- the Inquisition's cosmology -- that can be understood only in terms of a different cosmology, the heliocentric cosmology that it contradicts but faithfully mimics.

Religions obviously fail to produce the same sorts of understandings about reality that science does. In fact, it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a single fact about the world that any religion has produced that science didn't already know. 

This is a major stumbling block for those who consider that religion has a privileged view of reality. If this is the case, why hasn't a saint, prophet, or other holy person ever come up with an explanation of some phenomenon that was so persuasive, that explanation eventually came to be added to the world's common store of knowledge?

Here's one reason: religion deals largely with supernatural entities that lack what David Deutsch calls "kick back." This term is derived from the story of Dr. Samuel Johnson responding to Bishop Berkeley's solipsistic view that matter doesn't really exist by kicking a rock and saying, "I refute it thus." 

Philosophers correctly point out that Johnson didn't really refute Berkeley's assertion by kicking the rock. Rather, Deutsch uses this episode to point out a criterion for reality:

But Dr. Johnson's idea is more than a refutation of solipsism. It also illustrates the criterion for reality that is used in science, namely, if something can kick back, it exists. 'Kicking back' here does not necessarily mean that the alleged object is responding to being kicked -- to being physically affected as Dr. Johnson's rock was.

It is enough to say that when we 'kick' something, the object affects us in ways that require independent explanation. For example, Galileo had no means of affecting planets, but he could affect the light that came from them. His equivalent of kicking the rock was refracting that light through the lenses of his telescopes and eyes.

The light responded by 'kicking' his retina back. The way it kicked back allowed him to conclude not only that light was real but that the heliocentric planetary motions required to explain the patterns in which light arrived were also real.

I was a religious believer for about thirty-five years, so I'm intimately familiar with the many ways people convince themselves that God, Jesus, a guru, angels, spirit, or some other form of divinity is "kicking back' within their consciousness.

Prayers seem to be answered. Unusual events are viewed as miracles. Sights and sounds are perceived in meditation. God is viewed as working in mysterious ways that are plainly apparent to believers.

Yet there is scant evidence that any of this adds up to reality "kicking back" with evidence of a supernatural realm. If there were, converted atheists like me wouldn't be so skeptical of religious claims that fail to stand up under not only close scrutiny, but any kind of serious examination. 

Science progresses with its understandings of the universe. Religion doesn't. This alone points to the failure of religious believers to demonstrate that reality does indeed "kick back" when someone attempts to understand divinity.

Yes, all sorts of phenomena do transpire within the minds of believers. However, almost certainly this is their own psyches kicking back against themselves. Meaning, religious beliefs result in mental phenomena produced by those same beliefs. This isn't the sort of really real reality that Deutsch, along with along scientists, are looking for.

Me neither. I'd much rather know something demonstrably true about the world, even if this is a small thing, than believe in the grandest religious fantasy. 

All problems and solutions are within the mind, not the world

One reason I love to read is that a few sentences in a book can make me go Wow! or Whoa! to such an extent, I feel like it is worth reading hundreds of pages to be exposed to a single fresh thought.

That happened to me this morning as I was reading the "Criteria for Reality" chapter in physicist David Deutsch's book, The Fabric of Reality. Here's what grabbed my attention:

Galileo may have seen the world as a book in which the laws of nature are written in mathematical symbols. But that is strictly a metaphor; there are no explanations in orbit out there with the planets. The fact is that all our problems and solutions are located within ourselves, having been created by ourselves. When we solve problems in science we arrive through argument at theories whose explanations seem best to us.

Now if this is true of science, it is doubly true of religion -- because science deals with problems concerning the observable outside world, and religions typically deal with problems involving what almost certainly is an imagined supernatural realm.

Thus, for example, religions would have us worry about what will happen with our immortal soul, conveniently failing to mention that there is no demonstrable evidence for the soul, much less its purported immortality. Likewise, religions raise the concern about how we can be sure we're doing God's will, even though there's no evidence that God exists.

So it's good to keep in mind, as Deutsch reminds us, that all problems and solutions exist within the human mind, not out there in the world. This doesn't mean that our problems and solutions aren't real, just that they have a different sort of reality than, say, electromagnetism, the planet Mars, or jellyfish.

I've pondered this general notion in several blog posts, though not in exactly the fashion Deutsch has. Here's links to some of those posts, along with an excerpt from each.

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.

Best statement about reality, in just thirteen words

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.

Science shows how humans create reality

We don't see the universe as it is. We see the universe as it appears to us through the filter of a Homo sapiens consciousness.

Bats, snakes, monkeys, salmon, dogs, and every other sort of sentient creature see things differently, as does, in a non-conscious sense, a radio telescope and other devices that enable us to perceive aspects of the cosmos beyond our natural capacity.

However, since no one has ever had a non-human experience of reality, both our individual and collective view of How Things Really Are is inextricably biased toward anthropomorphism.

We need to scratch the "Really" in both science and spirituality.

Pay attention to the world, not thoughts

On the other hand, thinking about how to experience something different from what is happening now often is necessary. If my computer won't start up, I need to think about what to do before doing it.

Religions, though, want us to think a lot about imaginary experiences. Prayers, mantras, ritual invocations, and such are designed to place true believers in a frame of mind where the here and now is made subservient to a fantasized there and then.

Sure, all this religious stuff can feel good. Sitting in church, surrounded by people who believe like you do, hearing tales of a heaven that is so much better than this imperfect world -- all this can produce highly appealing thoughts.

But that's all they are: thoughts. Reality is somewhere else, all around the worshipper. The sound of the preacher's voice, the hardness or softness of the pew, the brightness of candles, the sight of an image of Jesus on the cross. 

Religion is a warm bath. Atheism is a cold shower.

I love not only warm baths, but hot ones. It feels good to be immersed in water close to my body temperature. It relaxes me, makes me feel comfortable, sometimes puts me to sleep.

When I want to wake up, though, a cold shower is much better.

Now, I don't actually take cold showers unless our water heater is broken and I'm desperate to get clean. However, I have taken a cold shower of truth, which is why I chose atheism over religion after some 35 years of being an ardent believer in God, soul, spirit, and heaven.

(Eastern religion variety)

Because I'm deeply familiar with both religious believing and atheist doubt, I know what I'm talking about when I say that it takes much more courage to be an atheist.

Believing in God, or some other form of supernatural divinity, is easy. Most people in the world, and certainly most people here in the United States, are religious. So being a believer puts you in the majority, which is like being in a warm cultural bath of godliness.

Even if someone doesn't follow the same faith as you, if you're religious you get a heck of a lot more respect than if you're one of those damned atheists who are all hung up on that disturbing word, truth. 

Disturbing if you're religious, that is. Those words are music to the ears of truth-seekers, like me. 

It wasn't easy for me to give up the warm bath of my religious beliefs. After all, I'd spent almost four decades believing that I was special, one of God's chosen people, destined for a pleasant afterlife, embraced by the cosmos in a fashion few other humans were.

Fantasies are fun. Reality can be painful.

I'm pleased to report that, like many others who have chosen clear-eyed truth over blind faith, I've come to realize that it is more important to live life honestly than to hold onto religious lies.

There is no demonstrable proof of God. Likewise, there is no convincing evidence that anyone, alive or dead, has known God. But the human mind is adept at weaving together stories that create a pleasing myth. 

God loves us. God has sent a messenger to save our souls. God has a wonderful plan for us if we have faith. 

What's not to like about these sentiments? Well, one big thing: almost certainly they aren't true. (Us scientifically minded atheists know that nothing is 100% certain, but 99.99% is good enough, and I'm generous when I give a .01 chance of God actually existing.)

So if you've given up on religious fantasies, or are on the way to doing this, congratulations.

You've bravely chosen truth over lies, which is a very good thing. Have courage and keep treading the truthful path. It won't always be comfortable, but it will be much more satisfying than embracing religious falsehoods.

Free will and religion are both comforting fantasies

I've just about finished re-reading a great book by a British attorney, Richard Oerton, who has spent half a century pondering the nature, or rather lack thereof, of free will. 

Previously I've written about "The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing Up to a False Belief" in these posts:

Free will is a wonderful thing to lose
Sitting in the jury box, I deny free will
Belief in free will linked to desire to punish

Oerton makes some highly persuasive arguments against free will, building his case with a mixture of logic and facts. I'm enjoying his book even more the second time through, perhaps because I've had five years since the first reading to do my own further musings about free will.

I'm going to share some excerpts from Oerton's chapter, "Free will and religion: some parallels." 

A basic parallel is that both free will and religiosity come naturally to people. It just seems so obvious that humans can freely choose to do this rather than that. It also appears so obvious that God exists, since how could the universe come into being without a creator?

Well, reality doesn't give up its secrets easily. This is the lesson of science: coming to know how things really are, as opposed to how they appear to be, is tough going. Religious belief is easy to come by. So is believing in free will. 

What Oreton does is his book is challenge the easy belief in free will. He also makes a good case for viewing religion and free will as two sides of the same faulty-belief coin. Here's some passages that I particularly liked in the above-mentioned chapter. He's just spoken about the Age of Faith many centuries ago when atheism would have been almost unthinkable.

There may have been a few who questioned the existence of God but, by and large, it would not have entered anyone's head to do so. Religious belief was in the air that people breathed, taken for granted. They were born into it, they lived in it and they died in it. 

They knew that God existed, and knew with such certainty that they would never have felt the need to say so. And don't we think now about free will in very much the same way as our ancestors thought then about God? Don't we accept it just as unquestioningly? Our own age may not be an age of religious faith, but it is an age of faith in free will.

...One of these parallels lies in the fact that God and free will are both mystical concepts. The idea that we might be able to understand God is almost blasphemous. God is by definition transcendent, supernatural, and (as the old hymn has it) moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.

If an unbeliever questions a believer about the nature or behavior of God, the unbeliever will be met sooner or later (and probably sooner) by the assertion that, because God is what God is, such questions are unanswerable. And so it is with free will: those who want to live by it must accept that there are no good answers to the questions which they might (but seldom do) ask about its nature and purported effects.

...those who believe in free will see the behaviour of their fellow human beings in such a way as to justify and reinforce their belief -- just as religious believers see the work of God so clearly in the workings of the world that they cannot see these workings in any other way.

And here's some passages that make some great points about how, if we accept the reality of evolution, as every educated person should, some tough questions about free will arise.

We can't very well say that free will has always existed, if only because the human race hasn't always existed. It would not be credible to suggest that the earth's first life forms had free will. It would not be credible to suggest that an influenza virus now has free will, or even a tapeworm, or a woodlouse.

All these living things must be creatures of causality, governed and moved purely by physical processes. If we, as twenty-first century people, are not governed by physical processes because we have what we call free will, we must have managed, at some stage of our evolution, to detach ourselves from the laws of nature which up until then had governed us.

But when and how? So far as I know, evolutionary scientists have not concerned themselves with these questions, and they are unlikely to do so unless they themselves believe in free will, know exactly what it is and manage to devise some criteria according to which its existence or non-existence can be recognized. 

We would be wise not to hold our breath.

Yet another parallel lies in the fact that like belief in God, belief in free will (so long as it remains unexamined) tends to be comforting to those who hold it.

...And the "utilitarian" argument for belief in God -- that it ought to be fostered because it is socially cohesive and leads people to live better lives -- is paralleled by a similarly utilitarian argument for belief in free will: that it is an important part of our society, our culture, our morality, our sense of self, and so on, and that we must therefore hang on to it however incoherent it may prove, on examination, to be, because humankind cannot stand very much reality.

How deluded are you? (If you're religious, you'll score higher.)

The most recent issue of New Scientist has a story called "Delusional You." The online version is differently titled: Grand delusions: Why we all believe the weirdest things.

Now, most of us consider that it is other people who are deluded, and that we're an exception, being nicely connected to reality. Which, I suppose, is another delusion. Here's an excerpt from the story.

That we are all prone to delusions may not be so surprising. A range of cognitive biases makes the human mind fertile soil for growing all kinds of irrational beliefs. Confirmation bias, for example, means we ignore inconvenient facts that go against our beliefs and uncritically accept anything that supports them. Desirability bias leaves us prone to shoring up beliefs we have a vested interest in maintaining because they make us or our group look good. Clustering bias refers to our tendency to see phantom patterns in random events, impairing our ability to draw logical conclusions from the available evidence.

The New Scientist story includes the Peters Delusion Inventory, "which is the most widely used measure of delusional proneness."

I was pleased to find that I scored in the low range, having answered "yes" to only two of the 21 questions. And one of them seemed problematic to me, Do you ever feel as if some people are not what they seem to be? Yeah, I feel this often, particularly when I'm around politicians. This can be reality, not delusion.

Anyway, below is the Peters Delusion Inventory. I couldn't resist putting four decidedly religious'y questions in red, and three more spiritual/New Age'y questions in purple. This shows that religiosity, or more generally, belief in special powers, makes it more likely that someone will be delusional.

This is somewhat at odds with how the story says we should look upon delusions. 

First we need to be clear about what a delusion is. "There's a loose way of talking about delusions -- like when we talk about the 'God delusion' --“ which simply means any belief that's likely to be false and is held despite lack of evidence, or even in spite of the evidence," says Lisa Bortolotti at the University of Birmingham, UK. The psychological take is more nuanced.

Delusions are still seen as irrational, but they are also idiosyncratic, meaning the belief is not widely shared. That rules out lots of things including most religious beliefs, conspiracy theories and the denial of climate change. Furthermore, the idiosyncratic nature of delusions makes them isolating and alienating in a way that believing, say, a conspiracy theory is not. Delusions also tend to be much more personal than other irrational beliefs, and they usually conform to one of a handful of themes.

Hmmmm. The way I see it, just because a delusion is widely shared doesn't make it less of a delusion. Consider the four religious'y questions in red below. 

Lots of true believers do feel they are especially close to God, have been chosen by God in some way, believe in the occult, and sometimes feel they have sinned more than the average person. These aren't idiosyncratic beliefs; they rest at the heart of some major religions and mystical paths.

And the questions in purple are widely held by those who follow certain meditation practices.

In the thirteen years since I started this Church of the Churchless blog, I've seen many comments from people who believe in telepathic communication, consider that it is possible to completely stop thinking, and view thoughts as alien to the supposedly pristine "soul consciousness" that is separate from the mind.

Now, feel free to take the delusion test.

How Deluded Are You?

Almost everyone is vulnerable to delusions, but some of us more than others. These 21 questions constitute the Peters Delusion Inventory, which is the most widely used measure of delusion proneness. Give yourself one point for each “yes” and zero points for each “no”, then tot up your score.

1 Do you ever feel as if people seem to drop hints about you or say things with a double meaning?

2 Do you ever feel as if things in magazines or on TV were written especially for you?

3 Do you ever feel as if some people are not what they seem to be?

4 Do you ever feel as if you are being persecuted in some way?

5 Do you ever feel as if there is a conspiracy against you?

6 Do you ever feel as if you are, or destined to be someone very important?

7 Do you ever feel that you are a very special or unusual person?

8 Do you ever feel that you are especially close to God?

9 Do you ever think people can communicate telepathically?

10 Do you ever feel as if electrical devices such as computers can influence the way you think?

11 Do you ever feel as if you have been chosen by God in some way?

12 Do you believe in the power of witchcraft, voodoo or the occult?

13 Are you often worried that your partner may be unfaithful?

14 Do you ever feel that you have sinned more than the average person?

15 Do you ever feel that people look at you oddly because of your appearance?

16 Do you ever feel as if you had no thoughts in your head at all?

17 Do you ever feel as if the world is about to end?

18 Do your thoughts ever feel alien to you in some way?

19 Have your thoughts ever been so vivid that you were worried other people would hear them?

20 Do you ever feel as if your own thoughts were being echoed back to you?

21 Do you ever feel as if you are a robot or zombie without a will of your own?

0-5 You are less prone to delusions than most. Your thinking style is probably more analytical than intuitive.
6-7 Congratulations! You are normal. The average score is 6.7, with no difference between men and women.
8-21 You are more prone to delusions than most. You are likely to think intuitively and jump to conclusions.

         Schizophrenia Bulletin

How an atheist can find "spiritual" inspiration

A few days ago I was talking with somebody about finding "spiritual" uplift without believing in God or any other supernatural entity.

I put that word, spiritual, in quotation marks because I no longer consider that there's some sort of other-worldly spirit or soul. Not in me. Not in anybody else. Not in the cosmos.

Yet I'm still attracted to the notion of spirituality. In a thoroughly secular sense.

Meaning, well... it's all about meaning.

Whatever inspires us to carry on through tough times; whatever propels us forward on our life journey when we're not sure if we can take another step; whatever makes us willing to sacrifice for a cause greater than our self; that is what I talking about when I speak of spirituality these days. 

It's the eff in ineffable. We recognize it in ourselves because it's at the core of our being. But it's damn tough to describe to someone else, being so intimately related to our wordless sense of purpose. 

When this thing I'm calling spirituality is missing, life seems pointless.

So it's important for everyone, atheists as well as religious believers, to cultivate the seeds of spirituality so we aren't left with barren psychological soil that leaves us feeling dry, despairing, desolate, deserted.

Having experienced both religiosity and atheism at different times in my 68 years, I think believers in God have a somewhat easier time of it when it comes to spiritual uplift. After all, they can simply imagine their chosen divinity smiling down upon them, urging them on to embrace their religious practices with more fervor.

This is what a revival is all about -- being spurred to pursue a divine goal with increased energy and effort. 

So how can an atheist feel the same sort of spiritual uplift? What inspires a secular mind to pursue a godless life with the passion akin to a religious zealot? 

Tough questions, for sure.

I can only speak for myself, since there are more varieties of atheism than religiosity, given that each and every atheist finds meaning in a unique way. All Christians find satisfaction in a belief in Jesus, whereas each atheist seemingly roots their life in something different.

Ah, but there's a common denominator underlying the wild diversity of atheist spirituality: reality. 

By which I mean, really real reality. The reality of this universe, this galaxy, this planet. The physical reality that not only surrounds us, but is us. The reality we live and breathe every moment from our first breath to our last expiration. 

It is here that I find spiritual inspiration. 

When I deeply commit to embracing reality as it is, or at least as best I can understand it, that is when I feel the same kind of spiritual uplift that used to enervate me when I was a religious believer.  In both cases -- secular and religious -- I felt a strong drive to expand my capacity to grasp reality.

However, I now realize that in my true believing days I was driven toward an imaginary supernatural reality, not anything demonstrably genuine. My feeling of inspiration was real; the godly goal I was pursuing was false. 

So, yes, it is indeed possible for atheists to find spiritual inspiration. The source of that inspiration isn't difficult to find. It isn't far away. In fact, there is no distance between the inspired person and what inspires. 

Reality.

It is both what we seek and what is seeking. Pretty damn simple. And wonderfully inspiring.  

 

Tempting as it is to pray, health problems should be managed without God

I've got some semi-serious health problems. Meaning, they aren't fatal or debilitating. But they're damn annoying. The details aren't necessary to know for the purposes of this post, though I've blogged about what I'm going through here. 

It's been interesting to see how my atheist mind has been dealing with the stress I've been feeling.

Back in 2006 I wrote a couple of posts on the subject of turning to God during difficult times. The first was "Atheists in foxholes do exist." It concluded with:

Religious belief or faith is almost always individualistic. That’s a paradox, considering that humility and loss of ego usually is considered to be a religious virtue. It’s self-centered to believe that a God, guru, angel, Buddha, or whoever is going to bestow upon us the blessing of a miracle that isn’t available to all.

We are special. Divinity cares more about us than others. These beliefs underlie every intercessionary prayer. For if we merely wanted God to give us what is natural, normal, lawful, and regular, we’d merely say “thy will be done” (which, in my opinion, is the best prayer—if you feel the need to pray at all).

It’s better to let reality trump belief. Focus on what is happening, not in what you hope will happen. Focus on what you can change about reality, not on what you hope a higher being will change.

Even in a foxhole. Especially in a foxhole.

And here's an excerpt from the other post, "Yes, there are agnostics in dentist's chairs."

During my devotional days I’d try to adopt the attitude that a dental visit was God’s will, part of my bad teeth karma. I’d repeat the mantra given to me by my guru and do my best to enter into a relaxed “thy will be done” attitude.

Today I felt just as calm, cool, and collected. Yet the Brian whose mouth was open for well over an hour was an agnostic, not a believer. I felt no need to lean on a higher power. Reality was my mainstay.

“What has to happen is happening,” I told myself. “Accept it.” And I did. I found that it helped to focus on my one-syllable mantra, if only to keep myself from worrying about how much decay would be found once the malfunctioning crowns/bridge were removed.

However, what I'm going through now is much tougher for me to handle than a visit to the dentist (even for a root canal).

I'll be honest and admit that Atheist Me has occasionally laid in bed at night, when I feel the most anxious, and uttered some prayers to the God I no longer believe in. I've also called upon the Indian guru I no longer believe in to make an appearance in my consciousness.

So I totally understand why believers in a divinity find comfort in feeling that their health problems have some spiritual purpose/benefit, are being overseen by a supernatural being, or will be ameliorated through the grace of a higher power. 

After all, if a nonbeliever like myself is tempted to appeal to God for help, obviously religiously-inclined people are going to look upon God as the Healer of Last Resort (or first resort, since some extreme believers reject medical treatment entirely -- even for their children, which should be considered child abuse).

Here's what I've found, though. 

As my favorite saying by Philip K. Dick puts it, Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. 

Beautiful!

Reality is what sustains us. Reality also is what makes us suffer, pushing us down. Reality is all there really is. And that includes our thoughts, beliefs, imaginings, and such that only exist within our own minds.

Yet as Dick said, there's a difference between a reality that is only a mental belief, and a reality that continues to exist even in the absence of a belief about it.

When I'm physically hurting, that's real.

Praying to God might make me feel better about the pain, but prayer to an imaginary God isn't going to make the pain go away. More accurately, if the pain does go away, this will be due to the power of a person's mind, not the power of a supernatural being.

Thus I still use a mantra to help me get to sleep at night, and to relax during the day. But I no longer believe that the mantra has some mystical power, or is being sensed by a divine being. It makes me feel better, which is all I need.

Yes, I realize that prayer also makes religious believers feel better. That's why I said in my previous post:

Recently a couple of people have asked me, “What’s wrong with believing?” after listening to one of my rants about the power and glory of Faithlessness. It’s a question that is akin to the more basic query: “What’s wrong with feeling good?”

Because religious belief does make many people feel better. Yesterday on a cable news channel I saw an interview with a female doctor about the power of prayer. She said that she had a patient who now was almost totally paralyzed.

He told her that prayer and a belief in God’s goodness—that there was a divine reason or plan for what had happened to him—was sustaining him. Seemingly you can’t argue with that. Whatever works. 

That still makes sense to me. Whatever works.

And this will be different for atheists and believers. Atheists with a health problem can derive the same comfort from a secular practice as a religious person can get from a faith-based practice.  

When should a subjective spiritual experience be trusted as reflecting objective reality?

I love the title of this blog post, because it is such a damn fine question. During the thirteen years this Church of the Churchless blog has existed, I'd say that this question has been at the root of more posts and comments than any other existential issue.

After all, consider how relatively easy it is to assess the validity of (1) objective experiences of physical reality, and (2) subjective experiences of physical reality. 

As an example of (1), if someone claims that they saw a giraffe in their back yard, we've got to consider the circumstances. Perhaps they live in a part of rural Africa where giraffes are common. We'd then give some provisional credence to their claim, though it would be nice to have a photo of the animal, or at least of its footprints (chewed leaves high up on a tree would be additional evidence).

However, if the person lives in New York City, we'd be a lot more skeptical. Sure, it's possible that a giraffe escaped from a zoo or circus. This is very unlikely, though. If a photo of a giraffe in their back yard was provided as proof, we'd want to make sure that it wasn't photoshopped.

My point is that experiences of objective physical reality fall into an intersubjective realm. 

Most people have the basic five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. Our individual sensory experiences certainly differ -- some can see or hear better than others, and wine tasters are said to be able to distinguish more tastes than the average person -- but by and large, if someone makes a claim about having some sensory experience of the physical world, there are ways to confirm how valid this claim is.

An astronomer who claims to have discovered an unknown planet in the far reaches of our solar system would need to provide some solid objective evidence that the planet actually exists in objective reality.

Moving to (2), on the other hand, purely subjective claims really can't be challenged. If we both see the same movie in a theatre, our experience of the objective images/sounds on the screen will be very similar, but our subjective reaction to the movie may be very different.

"I hated that film." "What? You must be kidding. I  loved it!" "No, I really hated it." 

Absent some form of sophisticated brain imaging, and maybe not even then, it is usually impossible to know whether someone is truthfully relating a subjective experience. Maybe my movie-watching companion actually liked the film, and is saying she hated it for some unknown reason.

My point here is that usually we take at face value claims about subjective experiences.

If someone tells me they felt at one with the universe after hiking to the top of a coastal mountain and seeing the sun set over the ocean, I'm not going to feel any inclination to challenge that assertion. 

Ditto if they went to a Taylor Swift concert and said it was a life-changing experience. "Great," I'd reply, thinking to myself, I doubt this would have been my reaction, but everybody's different.

So now we get to the tricky question. 

Objective physical reality really isn't very different for different people. Mostly we experience the objective world in similar ways. If this wasn't the case, intersections with red, green, and yellow lights would be filled with crashes, rather than with drivers almost always reacting to the same sensory inputs in a predictable fashion.

And I think we'd all agree that subjective reality is the opposite -- different people have different subjective experiences of the world. Now, since no one has access to any other person's subjectivity, we have to infer this. However, all of our relationships with people lead us to recognize that they typically view the world much differently than we do. 

What's perplexing is when someone claims to have had a subjective experience of an objective supernatural reality. (And believe me, this happens frequently in comments on my blog posts, so I'm almost perpetually perplexed.)

My main reaction to this sort of claim is to echo the oft-heard phrase, "Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence." 

Look, if someone says they have discovered some new aspect of physical reality, this is a really big deal. A new subatomic particle. A new planet. A new species. A new tribe (in the 1950s this was common to see in National Geographic; now, very rare).

Solid intersubjective proof would have to be provided of the claim. This is how science works. Also, everyday life. We don't believe that someone saw a space alien, Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness monster just because they said they did.

However, if someone takes LSD, or meditates intensively for years in a dark room, then claims to have had a marvelous epiphany of what the cosmos is all about -- nirvana! enlightenment! satori! -- I'm got no interest in talking them out of that claim.

How could I?

I had many LSD and other psychedelic "trips" in my college years. They basically were indescribable. I can say "walls melted into flowing colors," but those words don't begin to capture my memory of an LSD experience. And here's the important thing:

I'm not claiming that my subjective psychedelic experiences were of some objective reality. I had a unique experience of the world, but this was the same world that a "straight" companion would have experienced -- aside from purely internal non-sensory drug-induced experiences.

So when I hear that a person claims to have subjectively experienced a supernatural level of objective reality, my skeptical sensors go on full alert. I used to believe this was possible, but I've come to recognize the difference between believing and knowing.

Someone may be fully convinced that they've had an experience of a higher non-physical realm of reality. But without intersubjective evidence needed for knowledge, this claim should be viewed skeptically -- even by themselves.

I've meditated almost every day for over 45 years. For a long time I'd meditate for several hours in a dark room or closet. I've seen light. I've heard sounds. I've had profound experiences. But again, I don't claim they were of an objective supernatural reality. All I know is that my subjective self experienced such and such.

Like I said, this is a perpetual theme on this blog: in a comment people will claim to have experienced X, Y, or Z through meditation, the guru's grace, God's power, or whatever. 

I rarely respond to these claims.

I'm totally willing to accept that their subjective experience is real. However, this is the same as my being totally willing to believe that someone loved a Taylor Swift concert. A subjective claim doesn't require any validation. It is what it is: someone's inner experience of physical reality.

But when someone claims that they've had an inner, or subjective, experience of an unknown (to the rest of us) bit of supernatural reality, I'm not going to accept that claim without some solid demonstrable evidence. 

Objective reality seemingly should come with some objective attributes, even if these are far removed from everyday physical reality. I accept the evidence for a quantum realm, even though quantum phenomena behave very differently from things in everyday reality.

Scientists can show us the effects of the quantum realm, even though it can't be directly experienced by our senses. Most of our modern technology is based on quantum mechanics, so when my iPhone works, that's proof enough for me.

Where, though, is there any solid evidence of a supernatural realm? Short answer: there isn't any.

No one who claims to have experienced such a realm returns with miraculous powers, hitherto unknown knowledge, or anything else that points to a objective realm beyond the physical. 

All we have are stories, claims, beliefs, dogmas, and such.

I've got no problem with people who say they've had an experience of divinity. My problem is with people who want me, and others, to accept that their personal experience was of some objective reality. 

"The Realm of the Wise" is a book I both agree and disagree with

A while back I got an email from Marc Deprey, who shares my interest in Greek philosophy -- notably Plotinus' conception of the One as being both the fountainhead and essence of existence. 

Deprey said that he'd written a book, "The Realm of the Wise," that has quite a bit in common with my book about Plotinus' teachings, "Return to the One." 

Bookaholic that I am, I couldn't resist ordering a copy from Amazon. The Realm of the Wise is appealingly short -- just 134 pages. 

There is very little, if any, overt religiosity in Deprey's book, another plus. He cites Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave, just as I did in my own book. 

In this cave scene, it is we who are bound. It is we who see density in the shadows. It  is we who see separate, distinct things where inter-connectedness and interdependence pervades. It is we who see these reflections as the only reality and dismiss the surrounding space that makes them possible as meaningless, as no-thing. It is we who are prisoners in our own cave, which for us is filled with our thoughts, perceptions, and sensations and nothing more. 

So Deprey, like many other truth-seekers, considers that this world basically is an illusion. We're absorbed in staring at shadows on a cave wall. We need to find a way to turn around and experience the ethereal light that illumines the objects of physical reality. 

I pretty much agree with these sentiments. We don't see the world as clearly as we should. Our minds are full of misconceptions. We drive ourselves (and others) crazy with our interpretations of reality that are way off the mark. Thus much of Deprey's book has a Buddhist'y sort of tone that I liked. 

Meaning, we need to distance ourselves a bit from the feelings, thoughts, desires, and such that all too often drive us in negative and unproductive directions. We'd be better off looking at ourselves from more of a detached perspective. But Deprey goes farther.

The book's subtitle is Finding Your Wise Guide. This isn't a person. Nor is it any other entity separate from ourself. 

When the essential quality of the universe, namely simple awareness itself, informs us, we have entered the Realm of the Wise.

...When it comes to determining the best action, the most compassionate, the wise way, we expect our mind to be its own master. In contrast, dogs are wiser than us. Our dog looks for its master, "whines" in longing love when separated from him or her. In the same way, our mind also longs for its master. 

But unlike our dog, we feel alone, and our aloneness generates fear forcing our mind to act impulsively without insight. So who is our mind's master? The Wise Guide, the unconditioned awareness, the intelligent space.

Nice sentiments. Not too long ago, I would have agreed with these words. Even now, I wish they were true. Indeed they might be, but I've got some problems with the notion of "unconditioned awareness" in my current mindset. 

I just can't understand what "simple awareness itself" could be like. After all, there is much evidence that consciousness, or awareness, is produced by the workings of the brain. And there is essentially zero evidence that awareness exists independently of the brain.

Now, I readily admit that I've gone back and forth on this question in thirteen years of Church of the Churchless blog posts. In 2011 I wrote favorably about the notions of pure awareness and Absolute Unitary Being. 

This isn't any sort of other-worldly mystical state, according to the authors. They describe how, physiologically, the brain can produce a feeling of oneness that transcends our usual feeling that there's a difference between subjective me and the objective world.

I kind of doubt, though, that this is the same as Deprey's "unconditioned space," which appears to be more like a calm, clear consciousness that can reflect worldly objects and mental images without being affected by them. 

Again, as much as I would like to believe that this sort of awareness is possible, I just can't accept that it does. It seems more like wishful thinking than an actual state of being. 

If you want to know why I feel this way, check out "My (only) big problem with Sam Harris' 'Waking Up' book." Here's some excerpts.

Harris sees a mystery where there doesn't have to be one. He distinguishes between (1) brain processes and (2) consciousness. But if consciousness is a product of the human brain, not something separate and distinct from the brain, then consciousness is part of what the brain does.

Consciousness is a brain process.

...Sam Harris seems to believe that consciousness is something "extra" that gets added on to brain processes. Otherwise, why would Harris speak about "pure consciousness"? 

Here's another passage from Singh's book which speaks to this issue.

Complaining that psychology can't explain why red things look red to our brains is like complaining that a chef who has demonstrated how to combine and cook all the ingredients of a casserole still hasn't explained why a casserole has come out of the oven.

Casseroles simply are what get produced by that precise cooking procedure. Conscious experiences simply are what get produced by environments stimulating brains to deal with ongoing events.

I'm with Singh.

Harris has an extensive history of meditating under the tutelage of various teachers. He has left behind most of the mystical crap that was part of those teachings, but seemingly not all of it. Harris' attachment to "consciousness" being something distinct from what the brain does appears to be a holdover from those earlier Buddhist days. 

This is another Paul Singh quote that makes a lot of sense to me.

Being conscious is necessary for enjoying life, but consciousness isn't something that people have. Biologically and psychologically, it only makes sense to say that an animal can consciously enjoy eating food, but it is the eating of food that is enjoyed and not the consciousness as well.

We don't say, "That meal was a pleasure to eat, and my consciousness of eating was pleasurable too." There is no such thing as consciousness as yet another thing for us to enjoy. We simply enjoy the things around us. It is the food that is enjoyable, not the consciousness of the food.

Similarly, when I open my eyes and look at an apple on the table in front of me, I see the apple, not a consciousness of the apple. There aren't two things, a seen apple and a consciousness of the apple, involved here. If I say, "The apple is in my consciousness," I can only mean to say "I see the apple," or "The apple is in my range of vision."

Imagine a psychologist asking a subject to look at that apple on the table, and then asking, "Don't tell me whether you see the apple. I'm sure that you see the apple. I just want you to tell me if the apple is in your consciousness." 

Surely this would be a joke. Seeing the apple is just being conscious of the apple. Having consciousness is simply being conscious of what's going on. There is no such thing as consciousness over and above simply being alive and aware of one's surroundings.

My atheist sources of awe: existence, evolution, consciousnessI

In my previous Church of the Churchless post I talked about how much I liked "The Way of Wonder" by Jack Haas. Wonder, awe, even reverence -- these aren't feelings that only religious believers have. 

Hey, us atheists are equally wonder-filled, awestruck, reverent before something much greater than us.

We just are in awe of what really exists, not what is imagined to exist.  (Like God, heaven, soul, spirit.)

On a dog walk this afternoon I got to thinking about what I find most atheistically awesome about reality. Here's my top three, in order of awesomeness. 

Naturally I've included links to some of my blog posts concerning these subjects.

(1) Existence exists. 
There's nothing more mind-blowing to me than the stark fact that existence exists. If I ever feel like I need some chill up my spine, all I have to do is contemplate the undeniable reality of the cosmos. I am. The world is. Wow! 

Check out: 
"Existence exists" -- the cosmic lock to which humans have no key
Existence exists. Amazing!
Embrace awe that existence exists, not religion

(2) Evolution says all life has a common ancestor
We all are one. Humans, starfish, roses, elephants, bacteria, everything. Some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago there was a Last Universal Common Ancestor to which all life is related. This likely was a small single-cell organism. Far out! I'm related to everything alive.

Check out:
Evolution is sacred, religion is profane

(3) Consciousness allows us to feel awestruck 

I used to feel that consciousness was way more mysterious than I consider it to be now. Science is making strides in understanding how consciousness arises in brains. Nonetheless, I'm still amazed that I, and every other conscious being, is able to be aware of the world that surrounds us, and indeed is us. 

Check out:
Float gently on a stream of consciousness
"I Am a Strange Loop"-- a book that beautifully explains consciousness, soul, and I-ness
Consider a cosmos with no consciousness

It isn't all about us. Humans aren't special.

We have no option but to use our human ways of knowing to understand the universe. However, this doesn't mean that us Homo sapiens possess the capability of accurately answering all the questions about the cosmos that come to mind. 

Or even being sure that we're able to ask the proper questions. 

More and more, I'm embracing the conclusion that human consciousness likely isn't capable of grasping the Great Big Questions (notably including why the universe exists at all), much less the answers to them.

Here's a letter from the June 2017 issue of Scientific American on this subject. I've also included the "Imagine No Universe" piece referred to in Dave Bolton's letter.

THINKING OF NOTHING

In “Imagine No Universe” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer explores attempts to answer the question of why there is “something rather than nothing” in the universe and the difficulty in defining “nothing.”

Why do we assume we have the potential brainpower to ever explain such mysteries? Could there not be aspects of the universe our human intelligence is unable to reach at the present time? Consider this: A dog travels in your car. Can it ever understand motor mechanics or geography? Your cat watches television. Has it any knowledge of electronic communications?

Why do we, just one of the species in existence, assume our brains are capable of knowing why we exist and what there is beyond infinity? This should not inhibit us in striving to understand the purpose of life, and so on. But we should accept that it may take a millennium of human development to know everything. Perhaps then we will become gods!

DAVE BOLTON
Essex, England

-------------------------
Why Humans Prefer to Be the Center of the Universe

Michael Shermer

Imagine nothing. Go ahead. What do you see? I picture dark empty space devoid of galaxies, stars and planets. But not only would there be no matter, there would be no space or time either. Not even darkness. And no sentient life to observe the nothingness. Just ... nothing. Picture that. You can't.

Here we face the ultimate question: Why is there something rather than nothing? I have compiled several responses from a number of sources, including a 2013 book by John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn entitled The Mystery of Existence (Wiley-Blackwell) and Lawrence M. Krauss's 2017 book The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far (Atria Books).

Nothing is nonsensical. It is impossible to conceptualize nothing—not only no space, time, matter, energy, light, darkness or conscious beings to perceive the nothingness but not even nothingness. In this sense, the question is literally inconceivable.

Nothing is something. It is a logical fallacy to talk about “nothing” as if it were a “something” that ceases to exist. Here we bump up against the problem of defining what we mean by “nothing” and the restrictions that language imposes on the problem. The very acting of talking about “nothing” makes it a “something.” Otherwise, what are we talking about?

Nothing would include God's nonexistence. In Leslie and Kuhn's taxonomy of “nothings,” they list what categories of things might be included in “something” that would be negated by “nothing”: physical, mental, platonic, spiritual and God. If by “nothing” is meant no physical objects or matter of any kind, for example, there can still be energy from which matter may arise by natural forces guided by the laws of nature. Physicists, for example, talk about empty space as seething with virtual particles, from which particle-antiparticle pairs come into existence as a consequence of the uncertainty principle of quantum physics. From this “nothingness,” universes may “pop” into existence.

Nothing excludes creation ex nihilo. If by “nothing” is meant that there is no physical, mental, platonic or nonphysical entity of any kind, then there can be no God or gods, which means that there cannot be anything outside of nothing from which to create something. This negates the Christian theologian argument that God created the universe ex nihilo, or “out of nothing,” based on the English translation of Genesis 1:1 that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This is misleading. Recent scholarship has suggested that the Hebrew word for “creation” in Genesis 1:1 is bara (ברא)—a verb that more accurately translated means to “separate” or “divide.” Genesis 1:1 should read, “In the beginning God separated the heavens and the earth.” Separated from what is not indicated.

Nothing is unstable; something is stable. Asking why there is something rather than nothing presumes “nothing” is the natural state of things out of which “something” needs an explanation. Maybe “something” is the natural state of things, and “nothing” would be the mystery to be solved. In his sweeping narrative, The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far, a sequel to his 2012 book A Universe from Nothing, Krauss notes that “Einstein was one of the first physicists to demonstrate that the classical notion of causation begins to break down at the quantum realm.” Although many physicists objected to the idea of something coming from nothing, he observes that “this is precisely what happens with the light you are using to read this page. Electrons in hot atoms emit photons—photons that didn't exist before they were emitted—which are emitted spontaneously and without specific cause. Why is it that we have grown at least somewhat comfortable with the idea that photons can be created from nothing without cause, but not whole universes?”

One answer has to do with our discomfort with the Copernican principle, which holds that we are not special. We prefer religious and anthropic explanations that the universe was created and fine-tuned for us because they put humans right back in the center of the cosmos anthropocentrically—it is all about us. But 500 years of scientific discoveries have revealed that it isn't about us. From this fact, we may gain purchase on a perspective that engages both the religious and scientific impulse toward a sense of awe one gains from contemplating nothing.

Believers, be clear about what sort of belief you want others to accept

Someone recently emailed me, asking if I read the many comments (223, currently) on a recent Church of the Churchless post. Here's part of my reply.

I admit that I haven’t read the many comments on this post in much detail. In my current irreligious frame of mind it just strikes me as mostly meaningless to discuss/argue about subjective experiences as if they reflect some objective reality. There’s no way to tell whether someone’s supposed “mystical” experience is anything other than a projection of their own mind absent some sort of convincing demonstrable evidence.

 

Logical or reasonable arguments can lead anywhere. To me, most of the content of the comments is akin to debating the details of how unicorns look and act. The first question to ask is, “Do unicorns exist?” If they don’t, then it is just an exercise in creative fiction to delve into details of an imaginary creature. 

 

Philosophical debates aimed at how one lives in this world strike me as quite different. I read a lot of philosophy, both explicit and implicit. Finding meaning in this world clearly is a subjective exercise. But the world itself is objectively real, which gives meaning to the search for meaning. 

 

Trying to find meaning in supernatural realms and powers for which there is no evidence of their existence strikes me as a waste of time. And I say this as someone who has wasted a lot of time in this pursuit.

Here's another way of expressing what I was trying to say in my reply: believers should be clear about what sort of belief they are claiming is valid, and so worthy of being embraced by other people.

The basic distinction is between subjective and objective reality, as I noted in my reply. Now, I realize that "subjective" and "objective" mean different things to different people. But the dictionary definitions make good sense. 

Subjective: characteristic of or belonging to reality as perceived rather than as independent of mind :  relating to or being experience or knowledge as conditioned by personal mental characteristics or states

Objective: of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers :  having reality independent of the mind

So let's say that someone speaks of experiencing God, heaven, or some other manifestation of a supernatural reality beyond the physical universe. For example, as in the above-mentioned comments, some people talk about astral realms, radiant forms, divine light and sound. 

I have no problem accepting that a person had an experience along these lines. After all, the mind is capable of creating many mental manifestations that are much different from everyday reality.

If you take a psychedelic drug, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
If you have a psychotic form of mental illness, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
If you meditate for lengthy periods, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
If you meet with a holy leader you're deeply devoted to, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences.
And if you deeply desire to have a certain religious experience, likely you're going to have profound personal experiences in line with that desire.

Naturally this doesn't exhaust the ways religiously-minded people can have deeply moving experiences of what seems to be a divinity beyond themselves. Every religion is awash with stories about devotees who have experienced a glimpse -- or a full-on encounter -- with the divinity they believe in.

I'm interested in these stories in much the same way I'm interested in hearing someone talk about going to Glacier National Park, a Monster Truck event, Paris, a Taylor Swift concert, or any other experience that leaves this person with an amazing feeling best expressed as "You had to be there to believe it."

Meaning, I accept that they had a profound experience. But I don't accept that this was an objective manifestation of reality.

Well, in the examples above the experience was of something objectively real, such as Taylor Swift. However, the person's experience of a Taylor Swift concert was their own, whereas the objective reality of the concert was independent of their individual mind.

In the case of religious, mystical, or spiritual experiences, often the discrepancy between subjective and objective is much greater.

After all, there is no shared experience of God, heaven, soul, spirit, or any other supernatural entity. All we have are descriptions of individual experiences, and there is no way to prove that these are anything other than the manifestation of a person's subjective mind.

So I wish religious believers would be clearer about what they claim to have experienced.

I had numerous profound encounters with what seemed to be a higher reality in my college days, when I imbibed LSD, mescaline, and other psychedelics. But I rarely, if ever, told other people that my psychedelic experiences were of an objectively real reality.

Yes, at the time the sensations I experienced seemed like a doorway to a higher state of consciousness. And maybe they were, in a personal subjective sense. Meaning, for me. Not for anybody else.

Yet religious believers often extrapolate from their individual personal experience of some supposed divinity and claim that their experience proves that the divinity is objectively real. Which, of course, it doesn't. 

"I had a subjective experience of X" is very different from "X exists as an objective fact." The first statement doesn't demand proof, because subjective experiences basically are unprovable. The second statement does demand proof, because it is a claim about universal reality. 

Perhaps "why?" is a word without meaning

Like young children, we adults also love to ask Why?  It just seems so natural to want to understand why our car won't start, why our spouse is angry with us, why we've got a stomach ache. 

I'm not denying the usefulness of why, of seeking causes, of fathoming the source from which a certain aspect of reality has sprung. 

However, more and more, I'm beginning to sense that the question which we take for granted -- why? -- may lack meaning beyond the minds of us humans. 

Of course, this could be said of anything.

Even when it comes to seemingly solid scientific facts, like how electromagnetism works, it's possible to envisage an alien being with a consciousness much different from ours not being able to grasp our principles of modern physics in this area.

This being might comprehend our common physical reality in a decidedly unique way. Which could include a lack of needing Why? to make sense of things.

I've talked about this general notion in a couple of blog posts:
"Why ask 'why' if the question is unanswerable?
"There's no answer to 'Why does the world exist?'"

Regarding the latter post, it seems almost unarguable that there can't be a reason for existence existing, since the existence of that purported reason would lead to another Why? 

This is the problem with positing God as the creator of existence.

What or who created God? If the answer is "nothing, God has always existed," then one can simply say, "fine, I choose to accept that existence has always existed, which eliminates the need for God." 

Ultimately, there has to be an end to Why? But when we're talking about everyday less-than-ultimate reality, does Why? make any more sense?

I don't know for sure.

Increasingly, I'm at least wondering whether we need Why? as much as most of us believe we do. And at the edge of my perplexity about Why?, I have a dim intuition that this entire concept is a human construction that isn't part of the fabric of reality as it exists outside of Homo sapiens' minds.

Here's three sources that have contributed to this vague feeling. I'll let the quotes speak for themselves.

(1) Some lines from the movie, "Arrival," where a mysterious alien spacecraft arrives on Earth carrying equally mysterious beings. Someone has said that it is important to know the purpose of the alien visit. A linguist responds:

Dr. Louise Banks: And "purpose" requires an understanding of intent. We need to find out, do they make conscious choices or is their motivation so instinctive that they don't understand a "why" question at all. And biggest of all, we need to have enough vocabulary with them that we understand their answer.

(2) Some quotes from a New Yorker article, "A.I. vs. M.D.: What happens when diagnosis is automated?"

“Our results support the hypothesis that a process similar to naming things in everyday life occurs when a physician promptly recognizes a characteristic and previously known lesion,” the researchers concluded. Identifying a lesion was a process similar to naming the animal. When you recognize a rhinoceros, you’re not considering and eliminating alternative candidates. Nor are you mentally fusing a unicorn, an armadillo, and a small elephant.

You recognize a rhinoceros in its totality—as a pattern. The same was true for radiologists. They weren’t cogitating, recollecting, differentiating; they were seeing a commonplace object. For my preceptor, similarly, those wet rales were as recognizable as a familiar jingle.

In 1945, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle gave an influential lecture about two kinds of knowledge. A child knows that a bicycle has two wheels, that its tires are filled with air, and that you ride the contraption by pushing its pedals forward in circles. Ryle termed this kind of knowledge—the factual, propositional kind—“knowing that.” But to learn to ride a bicycle involves another realm of learning. A child learns how to ride by falling off, by balancing herself on two wheels, by going over potholes. Ryle termed this kind of knowledge—implicit, experiential, skill-based—“knowing how.”

The two kinds of knowledge would seem to be interdependent: you might use factual knowledge to deepen your experiential knowledge, and vice versa. But Ryle warned against the temptation to think that “knowing how” could be reduced to “knowing that”—a playbook of rules couldn’t teach a child to ride a bike. Our rules, he asserted, make sense only because we know how to use them: “Rules, like birds, must live before they can be stuffed.”

...“Imagine an old-fashioned program to identify a dog,” he said. “A software engineer would write a thousand if-then-else statements: if it has ears, and a snout, and has hair, and is not a rat . . . and so forth, ad infinitum. But that’s not how a child learns to identify a dog, of course. At first, she learns by seeing dogs and being told that they are dogs. She makes mistakes, and corrects herself. She thinks that a wolf is a dog—but is told that it belongs to an altogether different category. And so she shifts her understanding bit by bit: this is ‘dog,’ that is ‘wolf.’

The machine-learning algorithm, like the child, pulls information from a training set that has been classified. Here’s a dog, and here’s not a dog. It then extracts features from one set versus another. And, by testing itself against hundreds and thousands of classified images, it begins to create its own way to recognize a dog—again, the way a child does.” It just knows how to do it.

...The “black box” problem is endemic in deep learning. The system isn’t guided by an explicit store of medical knowledge and a list of diagnostic rules; it has effectively taught itself to differentiate moles from melanomas by making vast numbers of internal adjustments—something analogous to strengthening and weakening synaptic connections in the brain. Exactly how did it determine that a lesion was a melanoma? We can’t know, and it can’t tell us. All the internal adjustments and processing that allow the network to learn happen away from our scrutiny.

As is true of our own brains. When you make a slow turn on a bicycle, you lean in the opposite direction. My daughter knows to do this, but she doesn’t know that she does it. The melanoma machine must be extracting certain features from the images; does it matter that it can’t tell us which? It’s like the smiling god of knowledge. Encountering such a machine, one gets a glimpse of how an animal might perceive a human mind: all-knowing but perfectly impenetrable.

(3) Some quotes from Daniel Dennett's new book, "From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds."

Imagine we are back in the early days of this process where persistence turns gradually into multiplication, and we see a proliferation of some types of items where before there were none and we ask, "Why are we seeing these improbable things here?" The question is equivocal! For now there is both a process narrative answer, how come, and a justification, what for.

...We can reverse engineer any reproducing entity, determining its good and its bad, and saying why it is good or bad. This is the birth of reason, and it is satisfying to note that this is a case of what Glenn Adelson has aptly called Darwinism about Darwinism: we see the gradual emergence of the species of reasons out of the species of mere causes, what fors out of how comes, with no "essential" dividing line between them.

Just as there is no Prime Mammal -- the first mammal that didn't have a mammal for a mother -- there is no Prime Reason, the first feature of the biosphere that helped something exist because it made it better at existing than the "competition."

Natural selection is thus an automatic reason-finder, which "discovers" and "endorses" and "focuses" reasons over many generations. The scare quotes are to remind us that natural selection doesn't have a mind, doesn't itself have reasons, but is nevertheless "competent" to perform this "task" of design refinement.

...There are reasons why trees spread their branches, but they are not in any strong sense the trees' reasons. Sponges do things for reasons, bacteria do things for reasons; even viruses do things for reasons. But they don't have the reasons; they don't need to have the reasons. 

...This is competence without comprehension.

Have faith that reality is better than any belief

One of my first Church of the Churchless posts, "Just have faith," was written in November 2004. It's still one of my favorites. Re-reading it today, I was pleased that I still agree with just about everything in it. 

The reason: even though thirteen years ago I was more open to the hypothesis of God and life after death than I am now, the method of open-minded scientific faith that should be used to investigate all sorts of hypotheses -- both worldly and spiritual -- rings as true to me today as it did back then. 

My personal research into the nature of reality has led me to the conclusion favored by most other scientifically-minded people: there is no demonstrable evidence for the existence of a conscious being, power, or force we could call "God." 

So I have come to reject the God hypothesis, even though my previous belief that God exists was highly pleasing to me.

This is the power of faith. Real faith. Meaning, faith that whatever reality consists of, knowing this truth, even if it makes us uncomfortable, is preferable to embracing a false comforting belief.

Below is what I said in my "Just have faith" post. Note that in the last sentence I speak of "God" being another name for "ultimate reality." This is a rather unusual use of the word, God, but it makes sense to me.

I still pray to God, even though I'm an atheist. However, when I say "God, show me your true nature," I'm really saying "Reality, I want to know you as you are." 

Just have faith

Faith is wonderful.
Faith is all we need to be spiritual.
Just faith. Faith alone.
So we shouldn't have faith in anything other than pure, naked, empty faith.

What is faith stripped of thought, emotion, perception, expectation, imagination? Whatever it is, that's what we are seeking. Such is the message at the mystical core of every deep spiritual teaching. A few examples:

Christianity: "Be silent therefore, and do not chatter about God, for by chattering about him, you tell lies and commit a sin....Also you should not wish to understand anything about God, for God is beyond all understanding....If you understand anything about him, then he is not in it, and by understanding something of him, you fall into ignorance." Meister Eckhart (Selected Writings, Penguin Books)

Judaism/Kabbalah: "God is not what we think It is. God is not a thing, a being, a noun....Jewish mystics often refer to It as Ein Sof, which means Endlessness....Ein Sof precedes thought and it even precedes the Nothingness out of which thought is born. Nothingness is viewed as a level of awareness that is the result of the 'annhilation of thought.'" Rabbi David Cooper (God is a Verb, Riverhead Books)

Islam/Sufism: "Anything that has a beginning and an end is a 'shell.'...There is more to the pronouncement of faith than what is said with the tongue because it too has a beginning and an end....We know then that the 'soul' of prayer is not only its external form but also a state of total absorption and unconsciousness during which all these external forms, for which there is no room, remain outside." Rumi (Discourses of Rumi, Threshold Books)

Buddhism: "If you want to reach the other shore of existence, give up what is before, behind, and in between. Set your mind free, and go beyond birth and death....I have conquered myself and live in purity. I know all. I have left everything behind, and live in freedom. Having taught myself, to whom shall I point as teacher?" Teachings of the Buddha (The Dhammapada, Nilgiri Press)

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?

Someone with the type of faith extolled by the Church of the Churchless would unhesitatingly choose Door A and boldly stride into Reality. For their faith is not in anything particular, but is a faith that truth can be known, should be known, and, indeed, must be known.

This is the faith Henry David Thoreau speaks of in Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living it so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the Devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'" (Where I Lived, and What I Lived For chapter)

Such is a scientific faith, a faith that does not foreclose in advance any possibility about what reality may consist of, a faith not in the unproven pronouncements of some supposedly holy person or book but in one's own direct experience of divinity--or direct non-experience, as the case may be.

Still, there is nothing wrong with belief, so long as our beliefs remain subservient to reality. When reality extends its hand, we should be able to happily surrender even our most cherished beliefs. This will not be difficult if our faith is in the rightness of whatever spiritual experiment we have chosen to undertake, and not in the surety of realizing a particular outcome.

A material scientist adjusts his beliefs, or hypotheses, in accordance with the results of his experiments. He does not design an experiment to produce certain desired findings, for this would not be science. The scientific method is what a scientist has firm faith in; everything else is provisional until proven.

Similarly, the height of spirituality is to just have faith.
Faith that reality is better than any and all beliefs.
Faith that the ultimate reality we may call "God" will be reflected in an open mind...but not a closed one.

 

Reality is a terrible thing to waste -- yet religions and politicians do

What is real? This is one of the most important questions. I've grappled with it for my entire adult life. 

The basic problem I or anyone else faces in answering that question is that we humans are subjective beings who exist in an objective world. 

So subjectivity and objectivity are intermingled in everything we do, which includes grappling with the nature of reality.

Wisdom, in my admittedly subjective opinion, largely lies in recognizing the difference between "I believe," "I feel," and similar I-based views, and "It is true that..." The latter sort of statement refers to an intersubjective reality, which is the closest we can come to objectivity.

Meaning, if several people agree about the nature of something, and have good reasons for arriving at that agreement, this should bring us closer to knowing the reality that exists outside of our individual subjective minds. 

Religious believers usually consider that God is the source of this universal reality. I don't. However, we have some common ground in that a sense of the "sacred" (broadly defined) motivates both secular and religious truth-seekers. 

Traditionally, as in the Middle Ages, science was viewed as a means of revealing the glory of God's creation. That attitude still is prevalent today, so long as we leave out a single word, "God's." Most scientists, and most lovers of science, are awestruck by the marvelous regularities revealed by the laws of nature. 

Also, by the unfathomable vastness of the universe (or universes) as we look outward at the cosmos, and the equal mystery of the infinitesimal quantum realms that lie within every speck of matter/energy.

Even during my true-believing days in an Eastern form of religion, I found it objectionable when my fellow devotees would dismiss modern science, and rationality in general, as a lesser form of knowing. They had been brainwashed into viewing closed-eyed meditation as the only way to grasp ultimate truth.

I had a different view.

Science could tell us a lot about objective reality, but not everything. Our seemingly subjective consciousness could become a means of knowing objective realms of reality beyond the physical, given sufficient training in certain forms of meditation.

Now I'm skeptical that this is the case.

I still meditate every day, but I see this as akin to mental exercise/conditioning and not as a means to escape the bounds of ordinary ways of learning about the world. So even more than before, I've come to view scientific, intersubjective, communal understandings of reality as sacred (in a secular sense of the word).

It deeply bothers me when religious leaders and politicians ignore objective facts in favor of subjective beliefs. For example, human-caused global warming is a fact. Not a 100% certain fact, but an extremely highly likely fact, not much less probable than the fact that the Earth orbits the sun or water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. 

So when Trump cabinet nominees refuse to acknowledge the reality of human-caused global warming, I see this as profane. Again, in a secular sense, the opposite of sacred -- which to me is seeing the world as it objectively is, not as we subjectively would like it to be, or believe it to be.

On climate change, a handful of Trump nominees have broken with the president-elect, who has called global warming “a hoax.” Zinke, Pruitt and Rex Tillerson, the nominee for secretary of state, each acknowledged in their confirmation hearings that the climate is changing, but stopped short of blaming burning fossil fuels. The nominees each employed a version of what Mother Jones called Republicans’ favorite excuse on global warming: “I’m not a climate scientist.”

OK, so you're not a climate scientist. Neither am I. But I accept what climate scientists have learned about global warming, just as I accept what physicists have learned about gravity, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics. 

Reality is a terrible thing to waste. Here we are, living what almost certainly is our one and only life in the one and only universe we can know about, 

I can sort of accept that ordinary individuals have the right to believe untrue stuff about the world, since the consequences of their false understanding of reality usually don't affect other people. 

But when religious leaders or politicians engage in blatant reality-denial, that's a whole other thing, because their utterances and actions do affect other people. Lots of them. Everybody on the planet, really, when it comes to denying global climate change caused by human activities. 

Fighting in defense of reality is essential. It's our sacred duty, whether or not we believe in God. 

"The Simplest Case Scenario" is a must-read for philosophical science-lovers

Scientific. Philosophical. Well-written. Creative. Mind-expanding. 

"The Simplest Case Scenario" by Karl Coryat pushed all of my book-loving buttons.  It's subtitle points to why I liked it so much: How the universe may be very different from what we think it is.

I've believed this for my entire adult life. But for most of that time I thought that the Secret of the Cosmos could only be revealed through mysticism, meditation, philosophical contemplation, enlightenment, psychedelics. 

At the same time, I've always adored science.

I've read countless (almost) books about quantum mechanics, cosmology, neuroscience, cutting edge physics, systems theory, evolution, and such. But I figured that scientific thinking could only go so far, and it was necessary to break out of its boundaries to approach the Meaning of It All.

Well, Coryat has done a damn fine job of melding the facts of modern science with a consciousness-expanding view of what lies at the core of reality.

And he does this without resorting to supernaturalism, religion, God, or anything in the realm of woo-woo -- which is why I like his approach so much better than the many authors like Deepak Chopra who try to make quantum theory into New Age'y "create your own reality" ridiculousness.

Coryat's basis thesis is that the universe is made of information, not stuff.

Physicist John Wheeler's "it from bit" hypothesis supports this contention, but this book goes further than any other scientific writing I've come across in ferreting out the implications of information being the root of reality.

For example, we assume that photons reaching us from a star a billion light years away have been doing their electromagnetic thing for that length of time. Meaning, the photons have been objectively real across that immense span of space-time. However, Coryat persuasively argues that an act of observation essentially brings the photons into being.

This seems counter-intuitive and wrong.

Yet if all we know about the world comes from information, what reason is there to posit a realm of stuff that somehow is both itself and also a source of information about itself? The simplest case scenario, as Coryat puts it, is to understand that "When you look at an object, you aren't actually looking at the object. You're looking at information about the object."

From this simple thread of a premise, the book spins some marvelous webs of conclusions in a convincing manner. My knowledge of quantum mechanics and other scientific subjects is greater than that of most people, but nowhere near professional level.

Still, I feel like I have a pretty good ability to sense bullshit in books that purport to explain the rock-bottom nature of reality, even if I can't pinpoint the factual reasons for my skepticism.

It is a tribute to Coryat's writing ability and obvious extensive background research that my copy of "The Simplest Case Scenario" only contains a few marginal question marks penned in by my highlighter. 

I found his treatment of free will to be overly simplistic and out-of-touch with how this supposed human quality should be defined. Namely, as the ability to choose to act differently even if every particle in the universe, including those that comprise the willing brain, were in exactly the same condition.

In other words, genuine free will requires some sort of supernatural assumption, a liberation of consciousness from universal laws of nature. Coryat doesn't believe such exists, yet he argues for the appearance of intentionality in complex informational systems. Yes, but this isn't free will.

I also couldn't follow his contention that a universe comprised of information, rather than stuff, leaves little or no room for the possibility of advanced alien life forms. He says, "The stumbling block for finding truly alien life is that the history of any other informational systems needs to be consistent with our techno-biological history."

There's a good chance I don't understand the subtlety of Coryat's thinking in this regard.

However, it seems to me that while being able to understand or communicate with an alien life form requires some form of cognitive/perceptual commonality, I don't get why a informational universe demands that only one basic type of observer exist within it. 

This isn't a perfect analogy, but whenever I go on a walk with our dog and she spends several minutes avidly sniffing some blades of grass that hold no interest for me, I'm reminded that she and I exist in the same world, but perceive it in very different ways. 

And what Coryat said in his entry in a Foundational Essays contest -- which formed the basis of this book -- seems at odds with his current position: "Perhaps for an alien race with its own origin and history, the universe would reveal an entirely different set of constants and laws. Indeed, it would be a different universe."

These are minor quibbles, though, and like I said, they might arise from misunderstandings on my part.

My book review bottom line is: READ IT.

Appealingly, to do this you don't even have to buy "The Simplest Case Scenario," though as a habitual reader of printed books, I recommend that you get an Amazon copy on real paper. Alternatively, Coryat is offering a free PDF download of his book at simplestcasescenario.com

Karl Coryat is an interesting guy. Check out his minimalist web site: http://www.pisspoor.com/coryat.html He's a music journalist, a successful Jeopardy contestant, and a comedian. 

He also just might have figured out the Secret of the Universe. Or, not. Read his book and make up your own mind. 

Viewing life as a Plinko board: probabilistic, chaotic, uncertain

It's easy to see what happens in life. It's much more difficult to comprehend why something happens.

For example, we know that Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. But why this occurred -- beyond the obvious "Trump got more electoral votes than Hillary Clinton" -- is a question that can't be definitively answered.

This doesn't stop people from theorizing, though. 

At one extreme, a religious believer might say It was God's will. Or phrased more generally, This was fated to be. At another extreme, a nihilistically-minded person could opine, Shit just happens; end of story.

A book I've been reading, "The Simplest Case Scenario: How the Universe May Be Very Different from What We Think It Is," contains a metaphor that strikes me as an appealing middle ground between extreme determinism and extreme randomness.

Karl Coryat, the author, argues persuasively that the universe is composed of information rather than matter/energy. I'll write about his intriguing interpretation of modern science after I've finished his book, which should be in a few days. I'm looking forward to posting a highly positive Amazon review.

Coryat uses a Plinko Board analogy to convey how the universe, or by implication any part of it, could take many potential pathways -- but ends up taking only one. 

The Price is Right game show uses a Plinko Board. Here's a video showing it in action. (I've made the video start at the point a contestant does the Plinko thing.)

Coryat explains how a Plinko board, or box, works.

If you drop a chip into a Plinko box, the chip may take any of a number of paths to the bottom. Whenever the chip falls between two pegs, it hits a peg underneath and must "decide" whether to go left or right. In this manner, each row of pegs that the chip encounters is like a coin toss, where we would expect the chip to go to the left or right with equal probability. Stated another way, it's as if the chip is presented with a series of yes-or-no questions, and the chip chooses an answer every time, effectively at random.

So this makes it sound like life is a crap game. You throw your dice and random luck makes things happen. However, in a footnote Coryat deepens our understanding of what is going on when a chip is dropped into a Plinko board.

Technically, the falling chip is exhibiting chaotic behavior. Rather than its path being determined strictly by the laws of probability, the path depends upon the precise way it was dropped, as well as minute factors such as air currents, dust, the exact shape of the chip, unevenness of the pegs, etc. 

Still, the path is sufficiently unpredictable and unreproducible, and the outcome closely enough simulates probability laws, that we can think of the chip's path as being determined by probability. (The same is true of a well-performed coin flip or dice-roll.)

Chaotic behavior is deterministic. But the factors causing the behavior are so complicated, or so subtle, or so difficult to discern, for all practical purposes the ultimate reasons why something happens remain hidden in a chaotic shroud. 

Often this is called The Butterfly Effect. Wikipedia says:

The butterfly effect is the concept that small causes can have large effects. Initially, it was used with weather prediction but later the term became a metaphor used in and out of science. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

The name, coined by Edward Lorenz for the effect which had been known long before, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a hurricane (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier.

Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.

I find a lot of comfort in these notions: Plinko box, chaos theory, butterfly effect.

Now, I admit that in my true-believing days I also found comfort in a belief that karma determined what happened in life, and that it was possible to escape karma's clutches by raising one's consciousness to a higher supernatural level through meditation and the grace of a guru.

(Yeah, I know that sounds weird, but so is every false religious belief. In addition, much of modern science sounds decidedly weird, even though it is true. So weirdness is found almost everywhere one looks.)

Thus in my previous state of mind, I would have thought, "Donald Trump won the presidency because this was meant to be."

Not believing this anymore, yet not being willing to accept that randomness rules the universe, I'm attracted to the logical, scientific, reasonable notion that determinism controls what happens in life -- yet usually not in obvious ways. 

Mostly we like to look for Big Reasons that explain Big Events. Like, the winning of a presidential election. Or more personally, why we ended up married to a certain person, living in a certain place, having a certain career, and such.

So political commentators obsess over election results, exit polls, demographics, campaign strategies, etc., etc. There's nothing wrong with this. However, there's good reason to suppose that a presidential election is more akin to a Plinko box than we might like to think.

What if a staffer had said something at a certain time that made Clinton decide to not set up a personal email server for her Secretary of State work? What if Attorney General Lynch had the thought, "I shouldn't let Bill Clinton onto my plane," which would have made it much more possible for her to overrule FBI Director Comey's decision to publicly reveal a further investigation into Clinton's emails just before the election?

Many what if's of this sort can be visualized. A few tiny influences could have had a giant impact on the election, per the butterfly effect. In fact, almost certainly they did. It's just impossible to figure out what they were.

The course of real life events can't be observed like the falling chip in a Plinko box. All we know is the final outcome, not the convoluted chain of often-chaotic causes and effects that led to this rather than that happening. 

Like I said, I find this comforting.

I don't enjoy the thought that Trump's victory was destined. Nor do I embrace the notion that it is possible to know why he won, and Clinton lost, because this would mean that if the Clinton campaign had been smarter, they would have come out on top on election day. Which leads to a sense of blame. And neither do I believe that there is no reason Trump won.

But in between It was meant to be and Shit happens is Sometimes life takes strange turns. Why? Impossible to say. Just like it is impossible to say why a single chip falling in a Plinko box ends up where it does. 

Three philosophical approaches for coping with a Trump presidency

Like a lot of people, I was shocked last Tuesday when, instead of the Hillary Clinton win that I expected, I went to bed with the nightmare of a President Trump coursing through my still-awake brain. 

It took me a long time to fall asleep. I did my best to relax, to reassure myself that this wasn't the end of the world. But damn, it sure felt like it. 

During the past post-election week, I've been exploring mental defusing approaches to keep my head from exploding.

They seem to be helping, though it's difficult to separate the healing that comes from the simple passage of time and relief provided by the three philosophical approaches described below.

Your results may differ, of course, because you and I are different people.

I'm a godless scientific-minded materialist. So "Trump's election is part of God's plan" doesn't do anything for me, while it may for you. However, my first philosophical approach has some similarities to this sentiment. Minus God and plan.

It's my favorite, so I'll describe it in more detail than the other two approaches.

(1) Determinism rules the world. And, elections. I'm a big non-believer in free will. (Type "free will" in the Google search box in the right sidebar to find my many posts on this subject.) There's just no evidence that anything other than deterministic laws of nature are responsible for why things turn out the way they do.

It's easy to accept this when it comes to events involving entities that aren't alive, such as earthquakes. When a town is devastated by the ground shifting underneath it, nobody blames the earth for doing something wrong.  

Likewise, if a lion attacks someone in an African jungle, the animal isn't viewed as blameworthy. At least, not in the sense of "it could have acted otherwise." Lions do what they do because that's their nature. But most of us view human beings differently.

We have this strange idea that Homo sapiens is a species that isn't governed by the deterministic laws that everything else in the universe, living and non-living alike, must follow. The reason: evolution has given us a sense of being an ethereal free-floating consciousness that is able to freely choose what the mind and body do.

Almost certainly, this is an illusion, one that has benefits, yet also drawbacks.

Just as a wrongly-held belief in free will makes us judgmental toward criminals (vindictive punishment isn't scientifically justified in a deterministic world, while controlling their behavior and rehabilitation is), so does it make us think "Donald Trump wouldn't have been elected president if only... ."

Clinton hadn't wanted her own email server. Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic nominee. FBI Director Comey hadn't released his letter soon before the election. Etc. Etc.

There's no such thing as "if only" in a deterministic world. Only one thing can happen at a time. Then another thing happens. And a following thing. There is no reality where anything happened differently than what actually occurred. 

I find this comforting. This is why I enjoy dispassionate fact-based analysis of 2016 election results, as described in a recent post on my other blog.

As weird as Trump is, his winning the White House wasn't a random unexplainable bolt of electoral lightning. Like everything else in life, it was the result of causes and effects, some of which can be understood by us humans, and some of which elude our current ability to make sense of political reality.

I don't like what happened on November 8. But then, I don't like a lot of things that happen in the world.

Having Dover remind me that everything happens for various reasons, including presidential victories, helped me view the reality of President Trump as simply one more explainable undesirable event -- like an epidemic, earthquake, or economic downturn.  

Now, I want to be clear: believing in determinism doesn't mean that one is fatalistic. Rather, just the opposite. Earthquakes and lion attacks have to be fought, resisted, dealt with, anticipated. But our reactions to determined events also are determined. (As is someone writing a blog post about determinism, and other people reading it.)

The advantage of a deterministic point of view is that energy isn't wasted in non-productive negative feelings of "this shouldn't be happening."

A skilled boxer doesn't worry about the punch that didn't land, or his opponent's blow that did. He uses that information in deciding what to do next. Focusing on a non-existent might have been distracts from bringing about the potential actuality of what can be. 

(2) There is no objective right or wrong, good or bad. Related to my strong belief in determinism is a conviction that nowhere in the universe does an objectively real entity known as "right," "wrong," "good," or "bad" exist.

These labels are applied to things, people, events, and such by subjective human beings. They don't possess any reality outside of the human mind. Which doesn't mean they are unimportant judgments; deciding what is right or wrong, good or bad is an inescapable part of being human. 

Our makeup is such that, in contrast to animals, we continually draw abstract conclusions from concrete happenings.

An earthquake isn't only that. It gets adjectives: devastating, horrific, terrifying. Similarly, the election of Donald Trump isn't only that. It gets the same sort of adjectives from people who were opposed to him: frightening, disastrous, dangerous.

I try to keep in mind that about half of the electorate was pleased, if not overjoyed, by Trump's victory. At the same time, about half was saddened, if not seriously depressed. Was one of these reactions correct, in tune with objective reality, commensurate with the way the world really is?

No. Both were subjective. The only objective truth is: Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. 

(3) Expanding our perspective alters our point of view. Obviously. Yes, it is possible to see the universe in a grain of sand. Still, there is a difference between the universe and a grain of sand. 

Science-lover that I am, news that there are hugely more galaxies in the universe than previously thought helps me to view Trump, myself, and everything else in our world as less cosmically significant. 

Recent research conducted by an international team led by Christopher Conselice, an astrophysics professor at the University of Nottingham, found that the universe has about 2 trillion galaxies, which is 10 times more than previous estimates.

Two trillion galaxies. Not two hundred billion, which is still a heck of a lot. Two trillion. Each containing on average maybe 100 billion stars. 

I feel very, very small. Not insignificant. Just small. 

Understand: it is vitally important that we protect the livability of our one and only planet Earth. All those other galaxies, all those other stars with all those other planets, they don't do us a bit of good, because we're stuck with our galaxy, our star, our planet. 

Still, I enjoy having my mind blown by the thought of those 2 trillion galaxies. It doesn't change the reality of what just happened in the 2016 presidential election. But it damn sure gives me a different perspective on it.

Shermer on why a supernatural God almost certainly doesn't exist

This month's Scientific American has a great "Skeptic" column by Michael Shermer: At the Boundary of Knowledge: Is it possible to measure supernatural or paranormal phenomena?

Shermer cites physicist Sean Carroll's book (The Big Picture, which I enjoyed) in this passage.

Take our understanding of particles and forces, which Carroll says “seems indisputably accurate within a very wide domain of applicability,” such that “a thousand or a million years from now, whatever amazing discoveries science will have made, our descendants are not going to be saying ‘Haha, those silly twenty-first-century scientists, believing in ‘neutrons’ and ‘electromagnetism.’”

Thus, Carroll concludes that the laws of physics “rule out the possibility of true psychic powers.” Why? Because the particles and forces of nature don’t allow us to bend spoons, levitate or read minds, and “we know that there aren’t new particles or forces out there yet to be discovered that would support them. Not simply because we haven’t found them yet, but because we definitely would have found them if they had the right characteristics to give us the requisite powers.”

Excellent points. After thousands of years of recorded human history, there is precisely zero solid demonstrable evidence of supernatural psychic powers. Which means, the chance is extremely close to zero that such powers exist.

In his next concluding passages, Shermer also demolishes the likelihood of a supernatural God.

What about a supernatural God? Perhaps such an entity exists outside nature and its laws. If so, how would we detect it with our instruments? If a deity used natural forces to, say, cure someone’s cancer by reprogramming the cancerous cells’ DNA, that would make God nothing more than a skilled genetic engineer. If God used unknown supernatural forces, how might they interact with the known natural forces? And if such supernatural forces could somehow stir the particles in our universe, shouldn’t we be able to detect them and thereby incorporate them into our theories about the natural world? Whence the supernatural?

It is at the horizon where the known meets the unknown that we are tempted to inject paranormal and supernatural forces to explain hitherto unsolved mysteries, but we must resist the temptation because such efforts can never succeed, not even in principle.

When I believed in a divine power that existed above and beyond the bounds of the natural world, arguments like these threatened my spiritual sensibilities. 

Now, I worship at the Altar of Reality. So I'm attracted to whatever brings me closer to what is real, even if these truths are difficult to accept. I'd prefer that a loving God was waiting to embrace my immortal soul after I die.

But what I prefer and what is real outside of my preferring brain often are very different things. We've got to choose which to pay the most attention to.

Free will is an illusion: convincing Sam Harris video

Below is a 9-minute video that encapsulates Sam Harris' views about free will.

Which, in short, is that it is an illusion. And that the world would be better off if people recognized this, rather than wrongly believing that humans are able to freely choose what to do at any given moment.

The background music in the video is a bit distracting. But Harris' message is so convincing, and the video is so well done (aside, perhaps, from the music selection), I urge you to watch it.

Now, I realize that some people don't look upon free will in the way that Harris does.

Harris, like me, considers that free will means just that: we are free to will what we want to do. This is how the legal system looks upon free will. It also is how virtually everybody who believes in free will looks upon it: as the capacity to do this rather than that. 

The alternative view of free will makes little, if any, sense. Namely, that while we are not free to choose what we will, if there is nothing constraining us from carrying out that determined choice, then we have "free will." 

Well, this viewpoint simply means that humans have as much free will as a well-functioning computer does. Absent software or hardware problems, a computer is able to carry out the tasks that it has been programmed to do. But does this mean it has free will?

No. Likewise, Harris says that because we live in a deterministic universe, human actions also are determined by all of the influences acting upon us from birth onward (even before birth, of course, given genetic influences). 

If you watch the video and find flaws in Harris' arguments, please leave a comment explaining what you think he got wrong. Like I said, I find the video highly convincing, but I'm open to hearing reasons why free will isn't an illusion. So far, I just haven't come across any convincing ones.

Sam Harris - Free Will from The Inspiration Journey on Vimeo.

Science warns: don't get sucked into a black hole of belief

When I was in college forty-six years ago, back in the ancient year of 1970, I was attracted to a Eastern form of mysticism that went by various names, including Science of the Soul. 

I really liked the idea of being able to do a spiritual "experiment." 

Become a vegetarian. Live a moral life. Meditate for several hours a day as instructed by the guru. Observe what happens in meditation. Explore the hypothesis that there are higher non-physical domains of reality. Attempt to enter these via an altered form of consciousness.

For about thirty-five years I diligently conducted that experiment.

When I considered what I'd learned from all that meditating, all that following the teachings of the guru, all that volunteer service I'd put in on behalf of the spiritual organization, I came to a conclusion:

I no longer believed what I'd been told was true. I'd lost faith in the guru and his teachings. I didn't think that reality extended into supernatural realms, there was life after death, or that God existed.

To me, then as now, I viewed my change of heart and mind as completely consistent with my commitment to investigate a Science of the Soul. After all, scientists alter their views as new and better evidence becomes available. Science isn't a fixed set of facts, but a dynamic process of seeking what appears to be the most likely truths about the cosmos.

Below are some quotes from physicist Sean Carroll's marvelous book, "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself." In his Accepting Uncertainty chapter, Carroll talks about the scientific method in a fashion that resonates with me. 

In between the quotations, I've commented on them. First, Carroll speaks about absolute faith. This was something that many of my fellow disciples had. At least, they claimed they had 100% confidence that the Guru was God in human form and his teachings were true.

Me, I was never that sure.

For a long time I felt that the chances were high that it was indeed possible to leave this physical universe behind and enter higher regions of supernatural reality. But I had my doubts about this, even though I did my best to suppress them behind a covering of belief. 

That lingering skepticism probably protected me from being sucked into a black hole of belief, for which I'm grateful. Carroll writes:

The word "faith" is highly charged, and this isn't the place to argue over how it should be defined. Let us merely note that sometimes faith is taken as something that is absolutely certain. Consider these statements from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: [I've just included one of them]

...Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie.

It is this kind of stance -- that there is a kind of knowledge that is certain, which we should receive with docility, to which we should submit -- that I'm arguing against. There are no such kinds of knowledge. We can always be mistaken, and one of the most important features of a successful strategy for understanding the world is that it will constantly be testing its presuppositions, admitting the possibility of error, and trying to do better.

We all want to live on a stable planet of belief, but we want to avoid being sucked into a black hole of belief, where our convictions are so strong that we can never escape, no matter what kind of new insight or information we obtain.

In the next passage, Carroll speaks about a subject that has frequently come up on this blog since I started Church of the Churchless in 2004, disturbed at how the religious right had played a big role in getting George W. Bush re-elected as president. When I disparage blind faith, religious believers often respond with "But Brian, you have your own kind of faith -- faith in the ability of science to uncover the truth about reality."

Here's how Carroll deals with that spurious argument.

You will sometimes hear the claim that even science is based on a kind of "faith," for example, in the reliability of our experimental data or in the existence of unbreakable physical laws. That is wrong. As part of the practice of science, we certainly make assumptions -- our sense data is giving us roughly reliable information about the world, simple explanations are preferable to complex ones, we are not brains in vats, and so forth.

But we don't have "faith" in those assumptions; they are components of our planets of belief, but they are always subject to revision and improvement and even, if necessary, outright rejection. By its nature, science needs to be completely open to the actual operation of the world, and that means that we stand ready to discard any idea that is no longer useful, no matter how cherished and central it may once have seemed.

Then Carroll talks about an important subject, our inability to know anything for certain. It's all a matter of probabilities. That's how my spiritual beliefs (and then the lack thereof) altered over the years: gradually, as I experienced increasing evidence that pointed to naturalism, rather than supernaturalism, being most likely to be true.

Am I completely convinced of this? No.

I'm very much open to the cosmos, or God, proving me wrong. If I come across convincing evidence for life after death, soul travel, and an immaterial divinity, I'd be overjoyed to say, Changed my mind again! 

For now, though, I'm going with what seems much more likely to be true. This is my one and only life; there's no spiritual reality beyond the physical world; consciousness is produced by the brain and ends when the brain does. Carroll says:

Because we should have nonzero credences for ideas that might seem completely unlikely or even crazy, it becomes useful to distinguish between "knowing" and "knowing with absolute logical certainty." If our credence for some proposition is 0.0000000001, we're not absolutely certain it's wrong -- but it's okay to proceed as if we know it is.

...Consider going home tonight and cooking some pasta for dinner. But before you open the lid on that jar of marinara sauce, ask yourself: What if a freak mutation inside the jar has created a deadly pathogen that will be released if and only if you open the lid, spreading through the world and killing all forms of life. Clearly that would be bad; just as clearly, it seems very unlikely. But you can't prove that it won't happen. There's a chance, even if it's very small.

I'm not bothered by the loss of my once-cherished beliefs in God, an afterlife, and zipping around heavenly regions in my astral, causal, and soul-selves. I started out my spiritual quest by wanting to know the truth about the cosmos. I'm still committed to that quest. 

It just has led me to change my beliefs to be in accord with how reality most likely is. I'll keep searching for More Reality, as we all do. Like Carroll says, certainty never happens. 

The resolution is to admit that some credences are so small that they're not worth taking seriously. It makes sense to act as if we know those possibilities to be false.

So we take "I believe x" not to mean "I can prove x is the case," but rather "I feel it would be counterproductive to spend any substantial amount of time and effort doubting x." We can accumulate so much evidence in favor of a theory that maintaining skepticism about it goes from being "prudent caution" to being "crackpottery." We should always be open to changing our beliefs in the face of new evidence, but the evidence required might need to be so overwhelmingly strong that it's not worth the effort to seek it out.

We are left with, not absolute proof of anything, but a high degree of confidence in some things, and greater uncertainty in others. That's both the best we can hope for and what the world does as a matter of fact grant us. Life is short, and certainty never happens.

"Existence exists" -- the cosmic lock to which humans have no key

I'm obsessed, in a pleasing way, with a cosmic notion: existence exists. 

(A Google search of my blogs reveals the posts where I've tried to "eff" this ineffable subject. Some are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Seemingly there's not much I could add to what I've said about this ultimate mystery. Except... what I'm going to add right now.

Which is another attempt to speak about the unspeakable feeling that comes over me when I contemplate the fact that existence exists.

This feeling can't be produced on demand.

Right now I'm talking about a memory of it, not the feeling itself. For me, it's a sort of godless grace. When the feeling happens, I'm grateful for the sensation of getting a glimpse of what can't be known. 

At least, I'm pretty sure, not by a human brain. Any human brain. Doesn't matter if you're a genius, a mystic, a Nobel prize winner, a poet, a savant, a philosophical mastermind. 

I'm convinced that the feeling I've talked about in my blog posts is a cosmic lock, not a key. It vaguely points in the general direction of Ultimate Mystery, but in no way does it lead closer to an understanding. 

Here's one of my attempts to talk about the cosmic lock.

It happened again today. That sudden "bottom falling out from under me" feeling, sort of the mental equivalent of being startled by an elevator going into free fall.

I like the feeling. It's the most genuine sensation of spirituality, not really an apt word, but best I can come up with, that comes over me in my churchless way of looking at the world.

What it is -- and I'm also struggling to find the right words here -- is awe that existence exists. 

I was walking along with one of our dogs on a pleasant rainless mild Oregon day, enjoying the early spring sprouting greenness on a trail that leads through woods to a nearby lake. 

I'd been thinking about how nature has no straight lines, no obvious rigid order, no firm demarcations between this and that. Only the human-built structures along my way possessed those features.

Then my vision of nature became much more cosmic. In an instant I was swept past all the various manifestations of nature into a void of mystery which was as much an ultimate fullness as an absolute emptiness.

Down the rabbit hole. Cut the elevator cable. Dive out of the balloon with no parachute. Exhilarating. 

Time stood still. Or rather, time no longer existed. I was face to face with what is for me the only unarguably true spiritual sensation:

Existence exists. Always has. Always will. Is now. 

After my most recent "bottom falling out from under me" feeling I had this intuition: that sensation is mind-blowing because the human brain lacks the ability to cognize the primal reality of existence existing... eternally, uncaused, uncreated, just freaking there. 

Evolution has brought us Homo sapiens some marvelous cognitive abilities compared to other species. We have unraveled many cosmic mysteries -- quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and so much else. 

There are significant gaps in our knowledge of the universe. But I agree with leading scientists that there don't appear to be any insurmountable obstacles to vastly expanding our already-immense grasp of how the cosmos is put together and operates.

When it comes to the sheer facticity of existence, though, the is'ness of reality, it seems extremely unlikely that we humans ever will be able to open that cosmic knowledge lock. The feeling I have when contemplating existence exists is akin to a psychological short-circuit.

My brain just doesn't seem capable of grasping the fact that all facts can be friends with "why?" -- except the primal fact of existence. I have the sense that natural selection has given us humans the ability to unravel complex tangles of cause and effect, but NOT the ability to grasp the meaning of existence pure and simple. 

Assuming there is such a meaning. Or such a thing as "existence pure and simple."

Maybe advanced beings from an alien civilization in a galaxy far, far away possess the cosmic understanding of existence exists that eludes me, and seemingly every other member of my species. 

But how would we know this, even if we came into contact with such a civilization? I strongly suspect that if an alien being handed me the key to the ultimate cosmic lock, I'd have no idea how to use it.

Or, how to grasp what lay beyond the open door. 

Stephen Hawking's "Genius" series looks at free will confusingly

Wow! As a big Stephen Hawking fan, I never thought that I'd write a blog post where I took him to task for getting a scientific subject wrong. 

But after watching Episode 3 of Hawking's new "Genius" series, I've got to point out how confusing this Why Are We Here? episode was when it came to free will. 

I've read a lot about free will. I've thought a lot about free will. I've written a lot about free will. (For example, see here, here, and here.)

So I was all eyes and ears as Hawking led three ordinary people -- meaning, non-scientists -- through exercises designed to get them thinking in a scientific way. Clips can be viewed on the PBS web page devoted to Episode 3, along with the entire hour long show. 

We see them marveling at floating plates in a room within an English castle. Not surprisingly, this isn't the result of magic, but magnetism. The lesson learned is that scientific understanding of the laws of nature is the way to comprehend the world, not supernatural explanations.

Then the three Genius explorers tackle a difficult problem: how to knock an olive on a toothpick that's balanced on the edge of a cocktail glass into the drink. Without touching it with their hands.

A pendulum device on a long chain looks promising. The swinging round ball definitely has what it takes, but the scientific students keep either missing short (no contact) or long (too much contact, so the glass breaks). After many tries, and many refills of the drink by a bartender in the room, they figure out what to do.

Use a board with markings to get the ball in a precise spot, and use a button that deactivates a magnet holding the ball in place so the "push" on the ball is exactly the same every time. It doesn't take long for them to find the sweet spot where the olive is gently knocked into the glass. 

And they can do this repeatedly. Lesson: if something is done in exactly the same way, the same thing will happen according to the laws of nature. 

A replication of the famous Libet experiment about conscious vs. unconscious choice gets us directly into questions of free will. The three people are asked to push a button (which sets off fireworks!) at a moment of their choice while staring at a large clock projected onto a castle wall. 

They note the time they consciously chose to push the button. As Libet found, and as other researchers have confirmed, a conscious decision to do something is preceded by unconscious activity in the brain. So this teaches the threesome that free will doesn't really exist, since the sense of "I freely choose to do this" is an illusion.

Actually, brain processes outside of our awareness determine what we choose. Thus they learn that determinism resulting from the laws of nature rules the universe, and us.

I was nodding along agreeably with Episode 3 up to this point. The points Hawking was making seemed eminently justified, being in line with familiar scientific principles I'd read about in numerous books and articles.

But then the episode took a turn.

A Doppelganger challenge featured many people wearing masks of the three Genius explorers. They lined up behind the real person. Then each individual decided to take a step to the right or left when a loud "beep" sounded. Before long these choices resulted in the Original and Doppelgangers being considerably out of step with each other, so to speak.

The lesson Hawking was teaching here struck me as way more scientifically problematic than what had been presented before. This exercise pointed to the Many Worlds (or Many Universes) theory of quantum mechanics. 

As a Wikipedia article discusses, the notion that all possible outcomes occur, that the "universe splits into all possible universes all the time" (as Hawking says near the end of Episode 3) is by no means a settled understanding of science. The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics has a lot of fans, but the article quotes a critic: "And who here believes the laws of physics are decided by a democratic vote?"

Yet Hawking and some other scientists, such as physicist Sean Carroll, speak as if it is virtually certain that every possible action or choice does occur in a parallel universe. 

Now, obviously there's no problem entertaining this hypothesis. It makes a lot of sense, and resolves some difficult questions about the quantum world. My problem is with how Episode 3 related free will to the Many Worlds theory. I failed to see how everything happening that could happen saves free will, as one of the threesome seemed to believe.

After all, Hawking had just led the three people to several understandings: the laws of nature rule the universe, and unconscious brain processes determine our conscious choices.

So someone decides to step to the right when hearing the beep in the Doppelganger exercise. This wasn't a freely willed choice. Yet certainly a different choice -- step to the left -- could have been made by the person's brain, given different causes acting within the brain.

I fail to see how everything that could happen, does happen has any relevance to free will. If anything, the Many Worlds theory points to Determinism Gone Wild. Not only does one thing happen according to the laws of nature, everything happens. 

Assuming the Many Worlds theory of the quantum realm is true. I'm not aware of any empirical evidence that it is. Thus Hawking's conclusion in Episode 3 struck me as poetic and appealing, but not convincing: "The universe you see is the one that gives rise to you out of all possible universes."

A member of the threesome said, "It took a whole universe to make me." OK, granted. The Big Bang can be viewed as the cosmic event that led to the present moment. Another quote from the episode: "We are a product of the universe, but the universe we live in is personal to us."

Well, sure.

We all experience the world through our own subjectivity. And the Many Worlds theory takes this farther, since there supposedly are countless other "me's" having subjective experiences in parallel universes. Naturally the only universe I'm aware of is the one I'm in.

It makes sense for Hawking and his collaborators on "Genius" to end Episode 3 on a semi-uplifting note after effectively putting free will on a skewer and roasting it to death. The basic answer he gives to the episode's main question, Why Are We Here?, is that we are here because we're not in an infinity of other parallel universes. 

Again, how this relates to free will and choice eludes me. But maybe the universe simply has determined that I'm not supposed to understand this.

2016 Portland Atheist Festival: Laurel Hines rocks the stage

Yesterday my wife, Laurel, and I made a non-religious pilgrimage northward up I-5, where we (and three other faithless Salem friends) took part in the first-ever Portland Atheist Festival.

Laurel volunteered to walk around with an "Atheists rock!!" sign and handouts. Which, not surprisingly, she handed out to people who wandered over to check out the booths in downtown Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square.

 

This video shows Laurel taking part in a "coming out" feature of the festival, as described in an Oregonian story, "Upcoming Atheist Festival hopes to coax non-believers out of the closet." 

This Thursday, one person after another will step up to a microphone in Pioneer Courthouse Square to boldly tell the city what he or she believes.

Or doesn't believe.

It is, after all, an event for atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and freethinkers.

Laurel's t-shirt reflected the commitment to science and reason she talked about in the video: "I think therefore I'm Atheist."

I did my own "coming out" thing on stage. However, since I shamelessly used the microphone to plug this blog that I started in 2004, my deep skepticism toward religion wasn't exactly a revelation.

Best I can remember, this is the gist of what I said:

Religions come in both Western and Eastern varieties.

Back in 1970, it was the time of the Beatles/Maharishi, psychedelics, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Timothy Leary, sex, drugs, rock and roll. Like so many others I wanted more reality, more life, more living. 

So I was attracted to an Indian guru who promised that with several hours of meditation a day, I and other disciples could experience higher regions of reality. We could leave this world behind and soar with our astral self, causal self, soul self. 

I ended up writing several books for the guru's organization. I gave talks about the teachings. In most of the talks, I'd quote Philip K. Dick, a science fiction author: Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

But often when I'd mention in a talk that I hadn't yet experienced those higher regions of reality -- cosmic light and sound -- sone fellow disciples would come up to me afterward and say, "Thank you for saying what you said. I thought I was the only one who wasn't experiencing those things."

It turned out that, so far as I could tell, nobody was.

So it began to dawn on me that when I and others stopped believing in the guru's teachings, when we stopped thinking about them, the supposed Extra Reality of which those teachings spoke did indeed go away. 

Thus the hours I was spending each day in a dark room, meditating, actually was taking me away from reality -- the reality of this world, the only evident reality there is. 

Now, I still meditate. Just for twenty minutes a day or so, though. And I don't try to escape from this world to some supernatural realm. Rather, I focus mindfully on my breathing and whatever else I'm aware of in my surroundings. 

Reality is a terrible thing to waste. Embrace science and this physical world, not religion.

Here's a few more photos from the Atheist Festival (and the surrounding area):

"Freedom is the distance between Church and State." Another good t-shirt slogan.


Buttons and other atheist paraphernalia on one of the festival displays.

A few blocks away from Pioneer Courthouse Square I found a gleaming Secular Cathedral that drew me in: the downtown Portland Apple Store.

I felt ever so comfortable after I entered the Cathedral, joining others who enjoy worshipping at the altar of all things Apple. Who needs the promise of God when, seemingly, an upgraded MacBook Pro lineup is supposed to be announced next month?

Non-believers in religion urged to come out of the closet

Here's a Guest Opinion by my wife, Laurel, that is in the current issue of Salem Weekly -- our city's alternative paper.

In it she plugs the May 26 Portland Atheist Festival. Laurel and I are signed up to be some of the people who will speak for two minutes about why they're proud to be atheists.

Non-Believers Come Out of the Closet
by Laurel Hines

If you are one of the ever-growing numbers of people who don’t believe in a religion, you are “a-theist” (not part of a religion). If you don’t like the religious dogma that Ted Cruz and others hope to inflict on the nation, you must come out of the closet and declare your “a-theism”. If it worries you when legislators make policies based on religion instead of modern science, you must come out of the closet and declare yourself as “a-theist”!

A Pew Research survey recently found that 23 percent of the U. S. population is nonaffiliated, and a third of Millennials identify now as non-religious. Yet few are willing to declare themselves as atheist or even agnostic (uncertain about God’s existence). Yet politicians will continue to ignore secular Americans until they are convinced that there is a price to be paid for doing so.

The Catholic, Evangelical, and other religious lobbies, meanwhile, have significant influence in our government. The non-believers avoid the atheist label because of the tendency of people to assume only the religious are moral and good people. Yet those of us who are atheist/non-believers know that is hog-wash, and that actually the opposite is true ( atheists are under represented in prisons; some churches are awash in child molesters in the clergy).

Morals are inherent in social beings, and religion is not necessary for moral behavior.

Secular non-believers need to assert that our numbers are growing and significant, and that we vote. But it takes joiners to create a lobby!

Freedom of conscience for all – which exists only in secular democracies- should be a top concern for the non-religious.

Unless we non-believers accept a label and unite under a label, and join organizations that take action by fighting to keep our government secular (like Atheists of America or Freedom From Religion), we face legislation based on religious morals and beliefs,  and not science, reason, or facts.

On Thursday, May 26th, from 11 AM to 2 PM, the first ever Portland Atheist Festival will be held in Pioneer Courthouse Square (https://www.facebook.com/portlandatheistfestival/).  Come and meet an atheist, or come and declare your atheism! We need to come out of the closet and show the world who we really are. The success of LGBTs in the past couple years shows that coming out of the closet and demanding to be heard can create major change for oppressed groups. Atheists are oppressed because we don’t declare ourselves and we don’t unite.

So let’s do it! Come to the Atheist Festival May 26th.

Laurel Hines is a retired clinical social worker/psychotherapist. She now volunteers at Willamette Humane Society, is an active animal advocate, and champions reality that can be supported by science and reason. She is part of a growing group of Salem Freethinking Atheists.

"Free will isn't. Existence is." My hoped-for TEDx talk.

Well, it's time for my third annual TEDxSalem speaker application.

I was rejected in 2014 and 2015, having pitched Grand Talks About The Cosmos that, obviously, didn't strike the speaker selection committee as being such marvelously interesting topics as I considered them to be.

Noting that the deadline for prospective speakers to apply for the 2016-17 event was coming up on April 18, I decided to pitch another talk idea. This time, Free will isn't. Existence is.

If nothing else, another TEDxSalem rejection will add to my Tortured Artist (or Misunderstood Genius) resume.

In my old age, well, more accurately, my even older age, I can picture myself sitting at the end of a bar, or better, an Oregon cannabis smoking lounge (once they're legal), drowning my tortured artist/misunderstood genius woes with mind-altering substances, telling whoever will listen about my brilliant ideas that have been rejected by an uncaring world not yet ready for The Truth As Known By Me.

Here's how I answered the question, "What would your TEDxSalem talk be about?  What is your 'idea worth spreading?' What revolution do you want to start in our community? Describe your talk."

"Free will doesn't exist." This is a revolutionary neuroscientific fact that hasn't yet been widely embraced. Like Darwin's Theory of Evolution, or Copernicus' sun-centered cosmology, it will take time for the massive implications of this unsettling understanding to be fully understood.

Criminal justice, personal relations, social welfare programs, politics, conceptions of self-awareness -- these all have to be looked at in a new light under the glow of "Free will doesn't exist." And a closely-related fact: The brain is us.

While many people will initially feel chilled when the comforting blanket of illusory free will is taken away by modern science, the warmth of a philosophically unarguable proposition remains: Existence is.

Almost certainly there is no independent conscious will guiding things on either the cosmic or individual level. "Stuff just happens" is a pithy three word encapsulization of the best 21st century understanding of both the world outside and inside of our heads.

But with this realization comes peace of mind, love, interconnectedness, awe at the endless workings of the laws of nature via cause and effect. Once our mind is blown by the fact, "Free will doesn't exist," we are open (not free!) to explore the many positive implications of this revolutionary worldview.

Damn, I'd find this talk super fascinating!

I guess I could just give the talk to myself, if my application is rejected. Or re-read some of my blog posts on the subjects of Free Will Isn't and Existence Is. Here's a sampling:

Free Will Isn't -- here, here, here, and here

Existence Is -- here, here, here, and here

Understanding reality (including religion) is a matter of "likely"

After almost a dozen years of writing Church of the Churchless posts, and reading comments on them, I'm familiar with the arguments religious people use to justify their beliefs. 

When I point out that there is no demonstrable evidence supporting a belief in God, heaven, soul, spirit, angels, the afterlife, or any other form of supernaturalism, frequently I'll hear something like this:

Hey, Brian, you can't prove God doesn't exist, so there's no proof for your skeptical view either.  Thus, it's a tie! There's no proof God exists, and there's no proof God doesn't exist, so it's up to each person to decide which "no proof" to accept.

Well, typically I respond by saying that the way both science and common sense works is that we believe in the existence of something when there is good affirmative reasons to say "it exists."

If we demanded proof that something doesn't exist before giving up a belief in it, there would be no end to the absurd views of reality that would result. Such as...

"Fairies make the flowers in gardens grow. I know this because you can't prove fairies don't exist." 

Today I was reading a book I bought recently, "Human Universe" by physicist Brian Cox (it is based on a BBC program). Here's a passage that nicely presents the scientific point of view that I share, but can't express as well as Cox and Richard Feynman did.

Brian Cox writes:

I'll put my cards on the table here. I believe in UFOs. That is to say, I believe that there have been sightings of flying things in the sky that the observers were unable to identify, some of which were objects. 

But I do not believe for a moment that these were spacecraft flown by aliens. Occam's razor is an important tool in science. It shouldn't be oversold; nature can be complex and bizarre. But as a rule of thumb, it is most sensible to adopt the simplest explanation for an observation until the evidence overwhelms it.

My favourite response to the criticism that dismissing the possibility of alien visitations to Earth is unscientific was provided by physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman in his Messsenger Lectures at Cornell University in 1964:

'Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers -- because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said "I don't think there are flying saucers". So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?"

"No, I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely." At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?"

But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. 

To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extraterrestrial intelligence."

It is just more likely. That is all.'