Church of the Churchless

We humans are animals. But most of us deny this fact.

I'm enjoying Melanie Challenger's book, "How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human." Here's some excerpts about our dental that we're animal.

The point here is that life is neither straightforwardly good nor progressive. This might be unbearable if it weren't for the possibility that humans are special. Something important saves us from the threatening parts of earthly life.

We're told this comes from the heart of human nature, some essential part of us. We can't see it and we can't measure it, but it marks us out as the most important life form on Earth.

For those with deep belief in a creator, we have a soul that is unique to the human body. For secular humanist thinkers, we have soul-like mental powers that are unique to the human brain. Each is a reason for why humans aren't truly animals. At least, not in any crucial way.

...This idea -- or something like it -- has been a source of profound solace for countless human lives. Whether it's the soul or some other property, these are ways to take humans out of a bewilderingly anarchic nature.

They are methods to save humans from the difficulties that nature's amorality presents to us. The idea may take on different hues in different times and places. But there's always something transcendent about humans that rescues us.

In this way, the major theories about the significance of human lives have the distinct whiff of psychological necessity rather than rational clarity.

...Hundreds of years of denying that we're an animal has left us with inconsistencies and confusion. 

...It is a testament to the depth of our denial that we are animals that we still can't admit this. All that we do, we do as animals. But we justify it as humans. The way we've structured the world is little more than the intuition of an animal whose greater interests lie with its own kind.

But we almost never confess to this. We tell ourselves instead that we have a soul. Or, if we don't want to call it a soul, we say there is a person inside us that is more important than the body from which it's made.

In this way, the bodies of other animals mean nothing. They are bits of machinery, spare parts. We may use them as we wish.

...It's worthwhile to note that no matter how deep into the physical substances of organisms we go, we never find an edge. There's no absolute dividing line between us and other animals, nothing that can offer us an unassailable moral category.

Science now shows us not only that the lives of other organisms are far more complex and sentient than we've sought to admit, but also that our traits -- to lesser and greater degrees -- are things that nature can reinvent.

A blow to God, perhaps. A far greater threat to a rational animal convinced it's the centre of things.

While the slightest insight into our experience shows how necessary it is to care about human lives, this doesn't separate us from the rest of our planet's life. Human life remains an animal life. Our awareness and our exchanges of ideas make us a powerful and sensitive animal, but none of this brings our animal life to an end.

That this idea has had such extraordinary influence across our societies is only now becoming clear. It is surfacing because it matters now more than it ever has that ten thousand years of modernity have delivered an animal that doesn't think it's an animal.

Respect for facts is a great virtue

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

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

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

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

This article describes the difference quite clearly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those aren't facts. They're beliefs. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Will" implies a reason behind it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supernatural beliefs lack both causes and mechanisms

When I press on certain keys on my MacBook Pro keyboard, magic happens!

Which you can see. Because I can touch type, words form on my laptop's screen. After I publish this post, the words appear on my Church of the Churchless blog.

Of course, all this isn't really magic. There's a chain of causes that leads to the words appearing in a blog post. Underlying those causes are hidden mechanisms -- software, hardware, internet functions, and such -- that most of us don't understand very well.

But what we're certain of is the overall way someone typing out thoughts at home can share those ideas on the internet, or worldwide web, even if we don't grasp the finer details of this.

When it comes to the realm of the supernatural, though, and religiosity in general, both causes and mechanisms are lacking. Well, let's make that believable causes and mechanisms with a foundation in demonstrable evidence.

This is a big reason why, after 35 years, I couldn't continue believing in the India-based religion that I once embraced wholeheartedly. 

I became a devotee of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB) because I liked the supposedly scientific nature of this mystical approach to meditation and God-realization. However, over time the RSSB teachings made less and less sense to me.

I was asked to believe that I had a soul that could be separated from my body. But there was no evidence of this soul. I was asked to believe that the RSSB guru could know what his disciples were doing from afar, but there was no reasonable cause or mechanism that allowed this to occur.

Many other examples could be given of how the RSSB teachings basically involved a lot of mumbo-jumbo, ideas that made sense only if you didn't think about them very much. This "science" actually turned out to be as much of a faith-based religion as Christianity.

Now, it's true that science often doesn't completely understand the mechanisms underlying causes. For example, gravity causes apples to fall from a tree. Einstein figured out that the mechanism is curved space-time.

But quantum theory doesn't have its own explanation for gravity that fits with Einstein's. So many physicists suspect there's a deeper mechanism that explains gravity which is compatible with both relativity theory and quantum theory.

Still, modern science is hugely better at describing how the world works than religion and supernaturalism is. In large part this is because science seeks causes and mechanisms that can be tested empirically, not just talked about in vague ways.

RSSB taught that consciousness is immaterial. That allows the conscious soul to survive the death of the material body. Left unexplained was how immaterial consciousness was so obviously affected by changes to the material brain such as being hit on the head with a baseball bat or undergoing anesthesia.

If the soul goes offline when you have surgery, how does it survive death? If the soul is who we really are, why doesn't it manifest when consciousness is temporarily absent from the brain?

In his book, "Rationality," Steven Pinker speaks about causes and mechanisms.

Even once we have established that some cause makes a difference to an outcome, neither scientists nor laypeople are content to leave it at that. We connect the cause to its effect with a mechanism: the clockwork behind the scenes that pushes things around.

People have intuitions that the world is not a video game with patterns of pixels giving way to new patterns. Underneath each happening is a hidden force, power, or oomph.

Many of our primitive intuitions of causal powers turn out, in the light of science, to be mistaken, such as the "impetus" that the medievals thought was impressed upon moving objects, and the psi, qi, engrams, energy fields, homeopathic miasms, crystal powers, and other bunkum of alternative medicine.

But some intuitive mechanisms, like gravity, survive in scientifically respectable forms. And many new hidden mechanisms have been posited to explain correlations in the world, including genes, pathogens, tectonic plates, and elementary particles.

These causal mechanisms are what allow us to predict what would happen in counterfactual scenarios, lifting them from the realm of make-believe: we set up the pretend world and then simulate the mechanisms, which take it from there.

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

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

And neither are you. Nor is anybody else.

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

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

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

But the truth is that we're not. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wishes are one thing. Reality is another. 

Science is repeatable. Religions aren't.

There are lots of reasons to choose science over religion. Chief among them, of course, is that science comes up with solid knowledge about reality, while religion doesn't. 

But I find science's repeatability to be an especially appealing feature of science. 

Meaning, if somehow all scientific knowledge were to disappear from the face of the Earth, while leaving humanity intact, there's little or no doubt that this knowledge eventually would be rediscovered. 

In other words, science is repeatable. It's methods aren't dependent on one-of-a-kind happenstance, like Einstein being born at a particular time and place with certain aptitudes. 

If Einstein hadn't come up with his theories of special and general relativity when he did, someone else would have trod the same scientific ground not long after.

Ditto with Darwin's theory of evolution. Others were on the verge of publishing their own take on evolution just when Darwin was about to, which, I recall reading, spurred Darwin to finish writing "On the Origin of Species" as soon as possible.

We can also easily imagine an alien civilization in a galaxy far, far away having much the same understanding of scientific reality as we humans do. Sure, their language, concepts, mathematics, and such probably would markedly differ from ours.

But almost certainly they'd have a similar understanding of atomic particles and the forces of nature as we do. After all, their basic physical reality would be the same as our basic physical reality.

By contrast, things would be very different if somehow all religious knowledge were to disappear from the face of the Earth. Or if we came into contact with an alien civilization and learned about what beliefs, if any, they might have in the realm of religion 

What are the chances that Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism would reappear if no trace of these religions remained? Essentially, zero. 

Same with every other religion, since each religion is heavily dependent on historical circumstances that can't be repeated. Jesus' supposed birth and death. The Koran being dictated to Muhammed by an angel. Hindu beliefs arising from ancient Indian sources.

Because Buddhism is the most psychological, and least supernatural, of the world's major religions, it's teachings would have the best chance of being rediscovered if all trace of Buddhism vanished. Even so, Buddhism obviously is a product of the insights arrived at by a specific person. 

Take away the Buddha, and you would still have Buddhism, yet in a markedly changed form. But take away Einstein, and the theory of relativity would be totally unaffected, since the theory rests on the nature of reality, not on any particular person.

Of course, most religious people find the non-repeatability of their faith to be a desirable feature. It gives them a pleasing feeling of being special. Jesus died for our sins so that we might live for eternity with our Father in heaven. Cool!

Unreal. But cool. 

Me, I prefer reality. Which is why I love science so much.

Particular people are responsible for scientific discoveries -- they don't fall out of the sky like snowflakes -- yet this knowledge has little or nothing to do with them, and everything to do with the nature of our world.

Quantum theory doesn't say consciousness creates reality

I'm no quantum physicist. That option closed down for me early on, when I was kicked out of my high school physics class because I was paying more attention to my girlfriend sitting behind me than to whatever the teacher was saying. 

But I've made up for that by reading lots of books about quantum theory, many of them in the course of researching my first book about the connection between ancient mysticism and the new physics, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder" -- which I got back in print via a rewrite that took out the preachy parts. 

I no longer believe in most of the mysticism in that book, but the scientific stuff is still valid, by and large. I keep up with current developments in quantum theory through my subscriptions to Scientific American and New Scientist.

The August 28 issue of New Scientist is a special issue about Quantum Frontiers. The stories on this subject were all interesting and clearly written for non-physicists like me. 

What's crystal clear is that most people who claim quantum theory proves something mystical or spiritual about the cosmos don't know what they're talking about.

Quantum theory is mysterious, for sure.

So far science hasn't figured out how it relates to relativity theory, which explains how gravity works. The other forces of nature are amenable to explanation by quantum theory, but not gravity. This means that there's a good chance a deeper explanation of nature needs to be found that unifies relativity theory and quantum theory.

Frequently New Age types claim that quantum theory has shown that consciousness creates reality. This isn't at all proven. Yes, the quantum measurement problem is real. Somehow various probabilities of a particle having certain properties, like being in a specific location, are converted to a single actuality when a measurement occurs.

This is called the collapse of the wave function.

The mathematics of quantum theory are marvelously accurate. That's why modern technologies like computers and cell phones have become so ubiquitous. However, physicists don't agree about the philosophical side of quantum theory. Meaning, the explanation of what's going on behind the mathematics. 

Here's a graphic from the New Scientist special issue that does a great job of summarizing the various ways scientists have tried to explain what quantum theory means.

I like the objective collapse theory, in part because it doesn't involve a conscious observer collapsing the wave function. As the entry for this in the table above says, that explains how the universe was able to be real before consciousness came on the cosmic scene. 

Here's a story in the special issue on this subject: "Do we distil reality from the quantum fog, or does it exist without us?"
Download Do we distil reality from the quantum fog or does it exist without us? | New Scientist

QUANTUM stuff, whether single atoms, electrons or photons of light, is notorious for seeming to be here, there and everywhere – and indeed everything – all at once. It exists as clouds of possibilities, manifested in a beast you can’t get around when contemplating quantum mysteries: the wave function.

On one level, the wave function is just a mathematical expression that lets you calculate the probability a particle will manifest in a particular location, say. The mystery is the way the maths says that, once you look at it, the wave function “collapses” to leave something definite we can all agree on. This creates the picture of the world that our classically trained eyes see. But how does the mathematics relate to the reality before the measurement – and what exactly, if anything, does the act of measurement change?

Erwin Schrödinger expressed the unease we might feel about apparently “making” reality when he mused about a cat inside a box that might or might not have been killed by a random quantum process inside it. Before you look, he asked, is the cat dead and alive at the same time?

The orthodox take on quantum theory, known as the Copenhagen interpretation, says yes: the maths adds up, so just shut up and calculate. “From a practical point of view, it works perfectly,” says Angelo Bassi, a theoretical physicist at the University of Trieste in Italy. “But from a fundamental point of view, why should the wave function collapse?”

Some physicists argue that it all makes complete sense if you think of the wave function as a way to predict what might happen. It changes with time, just like a weather forecast. “The universe is not made of wave functions, just as it is not made of weather forecasts,” says Christopher Fuchs at the University of Massachusetts, a leading advocate for an interpretation of quantum theory known as quantum Bayesianism, or QBism.

For QBists like Fuchs, quantum theory is a tool for us to better navigate the world, not a description of the world as it exists independent of our presence. So of course the wave function collapses – and how could it be anything other than us doing the collapsing?

Or you can go to the opposite extreme and say that the wave function doesn’t collapse at all. In the many worlds interpretation, every possible outcome of a measurement encoded in the wave function happens in different universes. No one collapses anything at the point of measurement – the world just splits, carrying us with it into one particular branch.

If you prefer an answer that gives us a hope of understanding physical reality, and doesn’t invoke a multiverse that we can never hope to observe, there is yet another option: that wave functions collapse spontaneously, without the influence of observers. This “objective collapse” was first proposed in the 1970s, but has enjoyed a revival in recent years largely because it promises to submit to empirical testing. “The other interpretations simply aim at reinterpreting the wave function,” says Bassi, who is a proponent.

In this picture, the chances of an atom’s wave function collapsing on its own is so small that you might have to wait billions of years to see it. Group enough of them together, however, and it rises dramatically. The cumulative effect would be a kind of faint background “noise” of collapsing wave functions that a sensitive enough detector might pick up.

“Testing the large-scale limit of quantum mechanics”, or TEQ, is a project that aims to do just that, and perhaps write the observer out of quantum theory for good. Designed specifically to look for collapse noise, the project involves levitating a bead of glass a few nanometres wide using electric fields, watching its motion closely. The latest version was delayed, but Hendrik Ulbricht at the University of Southampton, UK, who is leading the experiment, expects results within a year. “We are all very excited,” he says.

Looking for noise isn’t something physicists typically do. “Usually, we suppress the noise as much as possible, because the physics is in the signal,” says Ulbricht. But there is an interesting precedent. When astronomers Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias first detected an all-pervasive background radio signal in 1964, they thought it might be coming from New York City, from other galaxies or even from nearby pigeons. Finally, they realised they had discovered the cosmic microwave background, relic radiation left over from the big bang. “There could be a similar story with these collapse models,” says Ulbricht. 

Metacognition is key to knowing yourself

I'm about halfway through reading Stephen Fleming's Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. Basic concepts of the book are mind reading, in the sense of inferring what is in someone else's mind, and metacognition, literally thinking about our thinking, or more broadly, being aware of ourself. 

Since Fleming, a British neuroscientist, cites many research studies in his book, reading it can take some effort. However, Fleming is a good writer, and frequently uses examples from everyday life, so on the whole I'm liking it a lot. 

The title, Know Thyself, points toward a fact I've marveled at for a long time. We humans can turn our attention upon ourself in a way that other animals can't. Fleming's idea, which makes sense, is that this metacognition and mind reading (another term for the more usual "theory of mind") are closely related.

Meaning, many of the same brain processes are at work when we think "I feel bad that I got so angry" (metacognition) and "I believe that she thinks I'm mad at her" (mind reading). One is directed inward at our own mind; the other is directed outward at other minds.

And the same sorts of problems can arise in both metacognition and mind reading. We can be wrong about our own mind, and we can be wrong about other people's minds. Fleming writes:

First of all, it is important to distinguish between the capacity for metacognition and the accuracy of the self-awareness that results.

The capacity for metacognition becomes available to us after waking each morning. We can turn our thoughts inward and begin to think about ourselves. The accuracy of metacognition, on the other hand, refers to whether our reflective judgments tend to track our actual skills and abilities.

...In fact, metacognition is likely to be even more susceptible to illusions and distortions than perception. Our senses usually remain in touch with reality because we receive constant feedback from the environment.

If I misperceive my coffee cup as twice as large as it is, then I will likely knock it over when I reach over to pick it up, and such errors will serve to rapidly recalibrate my model of the world.  Because my body remains tightly coupled to the environment, there is only so much slack my senses can tolerate.

The machinery for self-awareness has a tougher job: it must perform mental alchemy, conjuring up a sense of whether we are right or wrong from a fairly loose and diffuse feedback loop. The consequences of illusions about ourselves are usually less obvious.

If we are lacking in self-awareness, we might get quizzical looks at committee meetings, but we won't tend to knock over coffee cups or fall down flights of stairs. Self-awareness is therefore less moored to reality and more prone to illusions. 

Those illusions basically involve us feeling that we know something that we actually don't know, or failing to feel that we know something which we actually do know.

There are lots of gradations, of course. The ideal is to feel uncertain about knowing things that our knowledge really is uncertain about, to feel confident about knowing things we really do know about, and to feel not at all confident in things that we don't know about.

That last "feel" is what makes us call a plumber when we know we don't know how to fix a leaky faucet. Lacking it makes us attempt a repair when we're not competent to do the job, something I have some familiarity with. 

(One sadly vivid memory is giving up on a faucet repair, calling a plumber, and have him simply reverse one of the parts I had backward. When I joked that this 30 second repair now was going to cost me $80, or whatever, he said "You're forgetting what it took me to learn how to do that 30 second repair," which was absolutely true.)

At an extreme, this sort of thing is called frontal lobe paradox.

The paradox is that people with frontal lobe damage may have significant difficulties with everyday tasks such as cooking or organizing their finances, but because their metacognition is impaired, they are unable to recognize that they need a helping hand. 

Without metacognition, we may lose the capacity to understand what we have lost. The connection between our self-impression and the reality of our behavior -- the reality seen by our family and friends -- becomes weakened.

A less extreme example is how most people believe they are an above-average driver, a statistical impossibility.

If "God" is all there is, science is the way to know God

The August 16, 2021 issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article about the new James Webb Space Telescope that will be launched soon. It will be much more powerful than the Hubble space telescope. 

I liked the end of "The Youthful Universe." You can read it below.

Science truly is our best way of learning about "God" -- if by that word is meant everything that exists. That's how I've come to view God.

Sometimes during my day I'll say, "Thank you God." I'm not thanking a divine being. I don't believe in supernatural entities.

Rather, I use "God" as shorthand for the marvelous reality that is evident everywhere from the mysterious quantum realm of the very small to the unfathomable vastness of the universe that will be explored by the James Webb Space Telescope. 

So for me thanking God is simply an appreciation of the causes and effects inherent in the laws of nature that produced the thing I feel thankful for.

Once you get a taste of science, the offerings of religion seem horribly bland. Science, as the story excerpt below says, is about knowing. Religions are about believing, a much less appealing alternative.

The seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler studied the physical world for the messages he felt that God had written into the Book of Nature. Galileo, in fact, had supporters inside and outside the Church.

Sometimes people in power have been reluctant to acknowledge the truths that science uncovers. Each time we look farther, our universe gets larger. Or, depending on your perspective, we get smaller.

Astonomers take the position -- an incidentally ethical one -- of being radically in favor of knowing. 

Bob Williams, the former head of the Space Telescope Science Institute, grew up in a Baptist family in Southern California, one of five children.

He'd wanted to be an astronomer since the seventh grade, when he received a pamphlet on astronomy in science class; he then saved his paper-route money to  buy a telescope.

He earned a scholarship to U.C. Berkeley and studied astronomy there. 

"My father didn't want me to go to college," he said. "He told me that if I went to get an education I would lose my faith. And he was right about that. We were raised to take every word in the Bible as literally true. But then I was learning about continental drift. About evolution."

Williams said that he is often asked about faith.

Many traditions use the term "God" to mean, basically, everything that is. In that view, the universe itself is the Book, and astronomers are reading it as it is.

What could be better than contemplating the inner and outer worlds?

Today I finished physicist Anthony Aguirre's book, "Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality." Rather than describing how the book ends, you can read the ending yourself. I liked what Aguirre says here.

To me, one clarion message comes through: when you are tempted to think or say "the Universe is fundamentally like this," then go and sit and think some more.

So why do we like to divide things into opposing camps? Probably no small part of it is a rather strong drive, bestowed upon us by our evolution as surviving beings, to identify some certain things with ourselves, our group, our tribe.

The "selfing" process walls us off as individuals in an often hostile world and seeks to protect not just our bodies, but by extension, whatever we identify with. Our own beliefs tend to be converted into truth much more easily than is warranted. 

Even in the most abstract of questions, it's easy to see, in oneself or in others, a strength of belief that the world is a certain way -- material or ideal, free or fated, inherently good or evil -- all out of proportion to the actual evidence and even when confronted with many people believing quite different things for reasons they find just as persuasive. 

This is a tendency worth keeping a keen eye on.

But it isn't just tribalism. Convincing, opposing views persist because the questions are hard. The easy ones get settled and largely forgotten about. In a well-run government, only the hard questions come to the desk of the emperor (or president). So too with the structure we've built out of our hard-won understanding of the world, both individually and collectively.

Of course, sorting things into what has been settled and what is still unknown or open for debate is not always easy, or agreed upon. 

But overall, there is some sense of a cutting edge: the world really is not flat, but we can debate about the speed at which it is warming; lightning is caused by segregation of electric charges, not gods' whims; gravity is not a propensity to go down but rather a propensity for stuff to curve space-time in a particular way. 

Knowing exactly where this cutting edge lies can be something of an art. Sometimes it is obvious and surrounded by debate. Sometimes, as we've seen, it can be much more subtle, discoverable only through a careful skepticism of simple or familiar answers. But there it lies, still licking its chops.

Even knowledge of moral truths, which are perhaps harder to place on the subjective-objective axis of being, has progressed.

Slavery is wrong; discrimination is wrong; women are equal in worth to men; might does not make right. Even if they contain some invention as well, we must choose to see these as hard-earned discoveries that we cannot unknow.

We may then focus on how to to bring our reality in closer accord with these ideals, as well as tackle the still much more open questions: What makes a just society? How do we balance liberty and security? When does technology bring, or undermine, well-being? What does the future hold, with its quantum computers, artificial intelligences, genetic engineering, and interplanetary travel -- and how can we make that a future we really want?

The progress we've made so far comes from a long history of remarkable human effort and drive. Humans are agents of action. Minute to minute, hour to hour, week to week, we decide, decide, decide, and act, act, act. 

Our cognitive architecture is that of an astonishing prediction-and-decision engine, much of which runs with little notice. We dash across rocks, make coffee, and shuffle papers more or less on autopilot. But when the predictions or the decisions get hard, then suddenly they are at the center of our awareness. This can become very stressful, frightening even.

But it is also when we feel most alive, most interested, most awake. Who wants to read a novel or see a drama in which no character has to make a difficult decision, caught in a dilemma between conflicting desires and with only guesses as to what will come?

Yet humans don't just act and decide and feel. We have also learned to contemplate.

To think and ponder free-style on ideas and truths that may have elegance and beauty but near-zero utility. I'm often amazed that we can do this at all, let alone so well as to conjure an understanding of the metric structure of space-time, or the evolution of the quantum state, or the meaning and generation of entropy.

And we've learned to contemplate in other less intellectual ways. To very simply and purely be. To look ever more closely at our own minds and how they run. To see the minute gradations of our relations with others and with the world.

Like adventures in the physical world, this contemplation of the inner world and the world writ large can be exhilarating and even terrifying. As one's mental picture of the Universe and its operation shifts, reality can swing from being a comforting den to a windswept mountaintop to a dark forest and back again.

But you're made of that very, very special stuff, infinitesimal in the universe, that is able to appreciate this, and to take the adventure. The journey can be exhausting, true, painful, humbling, but I often feel: "What could be better?"

Who am I?
What is this?
Where, from here?

Here's an elusive cosmological koan to beguile you

When I saw a book called Cosmological Koans mentioned in another book I was reading, there was little doubt in my mind that it would be delivered to me by Amazon before too long. And so it came to pass.

Anthony Aguirre is a Professor of Physics at University of California - Santa Cruz. That is so perfect! I can't imagine a more appropriate place for a koan loving, Buddhism inspired, creative writing physicist than UC Santa Cruz. 

(I went to college at San Jose State in the 1960s; Santa Cruz beaches were a favorite spot for LSD trips, along with the mountains separating San Jose from the Pacific coast and Santa Cruz.)

For quite a while I could only read one cosmological koan chapter a day, because each koan stretched my mind so much. Aguirre mixes together science and philosophy in a wholly unique way. It's hard for me to describe this book, other than to say it is like no other.

But when I got to Part 5, "Who Am I? Don't Know!," I found myself in more familiar territory. So I've been reading several cosmological koans a day, eager to get to the final Part 6, "Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form."

Below is a passage from the Time and Free Will cosmological koan. You'll see that Aguirre skillfully keeps the reader off balance, as a physicist Zen master would. Just when you think his train of thought is heading in a certain direction, surprise!, it jumps onto another track. 

The two tracks are connected, yet also separate. This makes for provocative reading. Also, frustrating reading, since I have to attend closely to the subtleties of what Aguirre is saying, rather than letting his words wash over me in a free and easy fashion.

I like how Aguirre presents a fresh way of what being in the present is. Basically, there's no such thing. Although in a sense there is. "Now," he says, is the point where uncertainty in the history is the least. 

Brilliant. Along with perfectly obvious. Koan on...

Though the state-based and the history-based descriptions can be mathematically translated into each other, they give quite different feelings, and they relate to different aspects of how we experience the world. 

The state-based view accords with how we experience the present. The world is some way, which we infer from observations. The world's future is tightly connected to its present configuration in ways that are somewhat but not entirely predictable, and the future's unpredictability leads to feelings of both freedom and frustration.

But the past feels more history based: we look back at how things evolved through time, at full trajectories, at seemingly inescapable chains of cause and effect. We may have uncertainty about the past, but feel that the past itself is certain while our knowledge of it is partial.

We might also think of the future in terms of histories, playing our stories in our minds of how things could go. But we generally believe -- or at least act -- as if we are uncertain of the future because the future itself is uncertain, not just our knowledge of it.

The state-based and history-based perspectives also give very different senses of the uncertainties inherent in the "now." 

This uncertainty in the present state gives rise to a sense of "splitting" of the future into many different possibilities: from one uncertain present, many possible futures. Yet from the history-based view, no history starts now; each extends indefinitely forward and back in time. 

The uncertainty in the present is just a particular type of uncertainty in the history. "Now" is, in a sense, the point at which our uncertainty in the history is the least, and it is in the space-time locale at which the different possible histories say very similar things about our observable surroundings.

Our present knowledge thus allows us to select a subset of all possible histories that accord with our present view and knowledge of the world. We call this subset selection "learning about the world"; selecting a smaller and smaller subset means that the present state is more and more precisely specified, which in turn means that we attain greater and greater knowledge. 

Insofar as the two views can be mathematically related, there is no sense in which one is more "right" than the other. However, insofar as they are views of how the world works, we might be led more, or less, astray. 

In particular, we are quite used to thinking of "places" in space, so it is natural to think of "places" in time. And the mathematics of fundamental physics allows us to do this. Yet we also recognize that there are some "things" that have a wholeness that is rather at odds with divvying them up into parts that are here and there.

We recognize that we can't talk about the left-hand side of a thought, or the northern half of a computation, the east end of blueness, or the bottom of a smell.

We also understand that processes unfold in time, and by its very nature a process, which involves time, cannot be happening at an instant any more than an arrow can fly during a moment of zero duration.

Yet we are often tempted to think about things like "your mind now" or "the person up until some point in time." We slice time into past, present, and future as if we might really slice it this way without doing terrible violence; but we can't, any more than we can take a slice out of a person to study the operation of their heart.

If there is no "left side" of a thought, is there really a "beginning" of a thought, or an "end"?

If we don't slice up our minds, if we consider them as just part of a chain of events and outcomes, then look what happens: they become unfettered, extending over great distances in space and time and including books, relations, records, laws, statements, and arguments, as well as neurons.

Much more than they are extended in space, our minds are extended in time, as undivided processes playing out over many timescales. Our mental life is built largely of memory, and we function as intelligences and agents in the world largely through predicting, envisioning, and acting toward the future.

Any amount of introspection will reveal that we tend to spend most of our time in either what was or what might be.

Perhaps we should take this very seriously -- this idea that our very existence is contingent on being extended nonlocally in time. Many of the rather unsettling implications we've explored in Part 5 have hinged on an assumption that there is a state of a mind, a self, a consciousness, as it is right now. 

Could there be something fundamentally wrong with this notion that could extricate us from some of those disturbing directions of thought?

This view is slippery, elusive, and beguiling. 

I'm enjoying my Mendi neurofeedback device

Recently I got the Mendi brain exercise (neurofeedback) device that I'd ordered early last year via a Kickstarter campaign. Repeated delays kept pushing back the estimated time us backers would get our Mendi.

Finally it came, from Sweden. Here I am modeling my Mendi. I took the photo in front of several katana swords and a fan in my office, because the Mendi has a certain Japanese/samurai look to it.

The Mendi web site describes what the device does.

An iPhone app connects with the Mendi via bluetooth. You train your brain by playing a game. You focus on a ball, with the goal to have the ball rise vertically. This video shows an early version of the app. The current version is a bit slicker, but works in the same way.

I've only been using the Mendi for a short time and need to do more exploring with it. This is my initial impression of what works best to get the ball moving upward.

My first try with the Mendi produced a pretty good score. I think this was because I simply focused on the ball and didn't try to make the ball go up.

The next few Mendi sessions didn't go so well, probably because I was trying to get a better score. From what I can tell so far -- and my experience likely is different from other Mendi users -- trying isn't the best way to train the brain.

Not trying is. 

Meaning, I do best when I simply look at the ball with a sense of open curiosity. This is hard to put into words. My best scores come when I'm alert and aware of the ball, yet am looking at it with no motivation to control it, just to observe it.

Which, of course, is what mindfulness is all about: nonjudgemental awareness of what is happening in the present moment. 

I started meditating in 1970 when I was 21. Now I'm 72 and have only missed a day or two of meditation in the past 51 years. So I have a lot of experience with various forms of meditation: mantra, open awareness, mindfulness, counting breaths.

But I've never used a neurofeedback device like Mendi. I'm seeing the benefits of it. When I enter a certain relaxed state of mind, the ball moves upward. If I'm tense or trying too hard, the ball jumps around or goes down.

I'm already able to visualize the ball going up and thereby approach the same state of mind I'm in when using the Mendi device. Can't say my life has markedly changed, just that I see the potential of this form of brain training. 

Here's a screenshot of my most recent session. 

This is what the three scores mean.

The app keeps track of all of your sessions. I was definitely in a zone during the 3-minute session at 8:24 pm yesterday. Focusing on the ball seemed quite effortless. I was sitting on the floor for that session, rather than in a chair.

A few times the app has told me that something was wrong, like I was moving too much (I wasn't) or light was shining directly on my head (yes, I was facing a bright window). It's advised to use the Mendi in a dim room.

This might explain whey I did better when I used my Mendi in the evening when it was almost dark here in Oregon. I also could have been in a more relaxed frame of mind.

Testimonials on the Mendi web site are impressive. But that's to be expected of testimonials on a web site. I'll keep experimenting with the device and report on how that goes in a subsequent blog post. Some early reviews are here, here, and here.

Thanks to Appreciative Reader for defending the scientific worldview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the comment from Appreciative Reader.

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

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

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

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

DISPROVING SPECIFIC GOD IDEAS : YOUR CHALLENGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But to latch on to that as some kind of justification for a worldview that claims that science does not directly refute clearly and DEMONSTRABLY absurd claims like that the moon is made of cheese (or that the sun is drawn around the earth by horses, and will abandon us unless we sacrifice to it; or that lightning and storms are caused by gods who will wreak destruction on us unless they are propitiated; or that the world was created six thousand years ago by a psychotic but immensely powerful god that will annihilate us and/or consign us to hell if we don’t abide by his commandments and his prophets’ and son’s instructions) is to have simply seen and maybe even to have participated in science, but to have come away with no more than a cargo-cult impression of what science actually is and what a scientific worldview actually entails.

WHAT YOU SEE AS THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAWS IN ATHEISM (OR AT LEAST, IN THIS PARTICULAR VERSION OF ATHEISM)

Let me quote you first on this, before likewise enumerating my response :

“Here is the fundamental flaw. I'll state it in three ways.
1. What science hasn't tested science cannot comment upon.
2. Evidence that has not been gathered is not non-existent.
3. The unknown is not non - existent. It is the basis of scientific inquiry.”

(1.) “Science” does not comment on anything. People do.

The scientific method is a tool that people use to suss out what is reasonable to believe, and what not. Thereafter, it is people who arrive at positions on different claims and issues.

We’ve been through this already, the difference between the scientific method and a scientific worldview. You’ve ignored that last discussion, and gone on with your inner monologue without referencing our past discussion on this.

To imagine that a scientific worldview entails referencing the scientific method only in such instances where there has been some formal scientific study, and in everything else either believing any random thing that one likes, or else not taking any position at all, is to arrive at some cargo-cult version of “science”.

The core of the scientific method is that one will not accept any hypothesis that one cannot back up with evidence. Any position --- and that includes the God question as well (or at least, some versions of it, that is to say, some specific abstract God-ideas) --- that cannot admit of direct evidence, it is simply not “scientific” to believe at all.

It is not that no evidence equals we have carte blanche to believe whatever we want, or that we must necessarily suspend any conclusion at all (which suspension of all conclusion is in practice sometimes/often simply not even feasible, in any case). It is that no evidence equals we have no reason to hold that position as true, no reason to accept it.

(2) “Evidence” refers to some support for some proposition or some hypothesis. Therefore, if evidence has not been “gathered”, it is literally not evidence at all.

Sure, whether we self-important humans catalog something or cogitate on something does not in any way impact the underlying reality. That is understood, obviously. Not once have I suggested otherwise.

The point is, in as much as evidence has not been “gathered”, it may perhaps exist, but in as much as we do not yet know of it, it is entirely and wholly fallacious to base any conclusion on such evidence. In as much as some conclusion that you seek to support via such not-yet-gathered evidence is fallacious, such conclusion we are constrained to not accept, that is to say, we reject such conclusion.

This is entirely straightforward. And your views on this are entirely mistaken.

(3) Similar to above. Agreed, the unknown is not non-existent, and, rather than saying “it is the basis of scientific enquiry”, I think it may be more precise to phrase it thus, “It can be the basis of scientific enquiry if we should choose to make it so.”

Anyway, minor nitpicking aside, I have not once suggested otherwise. But the question isn’t what does exist; the question is what do we believe, what belief or claim do we accept. If something is unknown then we can’t go around believing random things about it.

(Which, mind you, is what you are doing. You’re claiming there are no grounds to do science on God. And you take that as carte blanche to go ahead and believe in God --- which you have every right to --- but where you err is in claiming that such an attitude comports with a scientific worldview. The fact is it doesn’t.)

Nor is it that what is technically unknown, as far as formal science, we will necessarily suspend all judgment on. That science hasn’t explicitly considered and tested whether the moon is made of cheese, or whether the sun is drawn by horses around the earth, or whether the sun will not rise unless propitiated with sacrifice, does not mean that we will necessarily suspend all judgment on such.

(And I don’t mean idiosyncratic personal judgment, I mean a conclusion that comports with a scientific worldview.)

We know the approximate composition of the moon, so we can certainly conclude that it isn’t made of cheese. And what is more such conclusion will be fully in agreement with a scientific worldview, even though there are no papers published specifically on the subject, “Is the moon made of cheese?” Ditto questions about whether the sun is a God that is drawn by horses around the sun, or whether the universe was created by a psychotic and decidedly unpleasant God six thousand years ago.

Those aren’t flaws in atheism, as you claim they are. They are flaws in your reasoning and your own POV.

YOUR POST ON THE FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENCE OF “NOT ACCEPTING” VIS-À-VIS REJECTING A CLAIM

What you argue here is no more than yet more contortions, Spence.

That the hypothesis is not accepted (and, for that matter, not rejected either) by the people carrying on the experiment and for the duration of the experiment and analysis, that hardly needs pointing out. In any case, it *has* already been pointed out, more than once, in a separate context, which would be the context of distinguishing between the POV appropriate to the scientist researching some specific hypothesis, vis-à-vis the POV appropriate for everyone else. That is an out and out non sequitur as far as this particular discussion.

Should the experiment not bear the results the hypothesis predicts, then in the setting aside of the hypothesis there is no universal distinction between “not accepting” and “rejecting”, as you suggest. To speak of this in the context that you do is to not understand what was said at all, not even a little bit (hint, repeated for the third or fourth time already: refer back to Osho Robbins’s analogy of “Not guilty” vis-à-vis “Innocent”); or else it is to resort to deliberate disingenuity.

Here’s a concrete example that will make the distinction clear, using the overtly formal scientific setting that you seem to imagine imparts some especial sanctity that everyday examples don’t.

(It doesn’t, actually, and everyday examples are equally as effective, provided you grok the actual underlying implications of the scientific method. Nevertheless, I’ll try to accommodate your apparent fetish for examples from formal science.)

Contrast the Ether theory with the String Theory. The former is an example of a hypothesis rejected, while the latter is an example of a hypothesis not (yet) accepted. The experimental results in the case of the former clearly refuted the prediction that the ether theory had thrown up. It clearly showed that, rather than there showing up a difference in the speed of light, instead the speed of light remained the same.

That is direct refutation, leading to rejection. As far as the latter, there has been no direct refutation, at all, so far. But nor has there been any evidence that bears it out, no evidence that justifies bypassing Occam’s Razor. In as much as no evidence has been found, the theory is not accepted.

(Disclaimer: This example focuses only on the difference between “not accepting” and “rejecting”, and not on the actual promise that string theory holds out, or the fact that people are still working on string theory while no one works on ether theory. Don’t focus on that part of it, I clearly recognize that in that specific respect this analogy/example is imperfect. That string theory is not, as a result of yielding no evidence, tossed right out the window as the ether theory has been, is because it is early days still, and because it otherwise explains our observations so very completely. No doubt if in another fifty or seventy years string theory still does not bear out any evidence [that isn’t explained equally well by other, simpler hypotheses], so as to justify its far more complex structure, then it might be relegated to the museum or the trashcan as well, conceivably.)

Come on, man. Do I really need to spell this out like this all over again in words of one syllable? Have my many posts on this, already presented in this thread, as well as the many discussions elsewhere (including one whole thread we’d both participated in that was on this very subject) not made the distinction between the two amply clear, that you should compose the post you did just preceding, that betrays zero understanding of the difference between the two (and indeed between soft atheism and hard atheism)?

You know what it looks like to me? You’re not actually reading my posts. You’re basically focused on your soapboxing, while going through the motions of responding to my posts, all with the aim of somehow passing off your theistic worldview as somehow not anti-scientific.

Otherwise you wouldn’t so blatantly misread and/or misrepresent this part so completely so late into this discussion; and you wouldn’t keep on repeatedly and totally missing the point of the unicorn/dragon thought experiment (and keep raising tangential non sequiturs around it rather than actually addressing the meat of the argument presented via that construct); and you wouldn’t keep raising these wild objections to these very obvious and simplistic God-ideas having been clearly debunked by science (even as some more subtle God-ideas admittedly remain beyond the reach of such easy and direct debunking).

Apologies, Spence, if some of what I’ve said here seems rude. I really truly hope this thread will not sour the general regard we have for each other.

But … how do you even begin to hold a coherent conversation with someone who insists, in the teeth of all reasonable argument, that such blatant irrationalities like the Olympian Gods and the Aztec Sun God and Biblical God and the Norse Gods as literally depicted --- as well as, presumably, the moon made of cheese --- are not ruled out by a scientific worldview?

With someone who, at the end of a detailed discussion (indeed, more than one detailed discussion) around “rejecting” and “not accepting” (and soft atheism and hard atheism) comes out with an elaborate post that betrays either zero understanding of what was being said all along, either that or else it deliberately seeks to misdirect?

I’m going to walk away now from this discussion, but without the hope that I’d held yesterday of arriving in future at closer agreement and better understanding, because how on earth do you even address this bizarre state of affairs, where on one hand there is familiarity with (some of) the techniques of science, but on the other hand there is complete cluelessness as to its implications?

And I’m going to walk away more resolutely this time than I was able to yesterday, because although it started out promisingly enough, what this discussion has now devolved into is an apparently endless exchange of comments that is neither illuminating nor, at this point, particularly pleasurable. Again, my apologies.

Why neither unicorns nor God are to be believed in

Once again, I'm sharing a marvelous comment from "Appreciative Reader" on a recent post of mine.

I especially liked the Shadowfax part near the end. Shadowfax is an invisible unicorn impervious to detection by all means, yet lives in Appreciative Reader's spare garage.

Or at least, this is what Appreciative Reader claims. 

Should other people assign Shadowfax a 50-50 probability of actually existing? Of course not. They should consider that perhaps one day there will be evidence of Shadowfax, since anything is possible.

But until that day arrives, there's no reason to believe in this invisible unicorn. Just as there's no reason to believe in God, since there's exactly as much demonstrable evidence of God's existence as there is of Shadowfax's existence.

The difference between them, of course, is that billions of people believe in God, while only Appreciative Reader believes in Shadowfax -- and only to make a point about the scientific approach to understanding reality.

Here's the comment.

"Can we agree that personal choices, personal logic may be our best effort to be scientific, but do not actually constitute actual objective science?"

.......Sure, Spence. But with the qualification that that personal choice isn't a free-for-all, but follows the broad guidelines of what I'd referred to as a scientific worldview.

That is, to describe that worldview as an agglomeration of essentially personal choices is to add precision to what I'd earlier on termed "scientific worldview", but is not to actually change what that actually amounts to.

In other words, to state that this is a personal worldview, is not to let open the floodgates to accepting whatever some individual person happens to find likely or reasonable, not unless they can rationally defend it with reference to the scientific method and per the terms we've already discussed.

With those qualifications, sure, absolutely, agreed to that much.

But I was hoping for broader agreement than just that much. Let me have one more go at trying to arrive at it.

Following on what I'd just said, in my comment above, Spence, let me quote, and comment on, what you'd said in your previous post:

"... to claim science hasn't proved God exists and therefore God doesn't exist is a false statement."

To recognize that science hasn't proved God exists, and therefore, for all practical purposes, to hold that God doesn't exist, is the rational worldview that is in keeping with a scientific outlook.

Happy now, with that rephrasing? And taken in conjunction with my last two comments addressed to you, do you, finally, agree with my larger point?

For perspective, let me introduce you to Shadowfax.

There is, beyond my front garden, a spare garage that now is a store (a dump, more like) for sundry gardening equipment and supplies.

I claim that that garage houses a unicorn. A real unicorn. His name is Shadowfax.

Except he is invisible, and impervious to detection by all means, all technology, that are thus far known to man. Might some means be invented to detect Shadowfax in future? One day, maybe, why not? But not so far.

So what are you to make of this unicorn? Your science has no means to return a clear resounding “No” when asked if this unicorn exists. And of course, a “Yes” answer is out of the question too.

So then will you spend your days honestly believing that perhaps in Appreciative Reader’s garden there lives a unicorn, maybe yes, maybe no, with more or less equal probability of either?

That’s patently ridiculous, that approach.

If in the years to come science does come up with some means to show you that that unicorn is in fact real, then you will certainly start believing in it. But until then, it makes sense to simply reject the claim of the existence of that unicorn.

That, in brief, is what soft atheism is all about. That is the sane approach to arriving at a scientific worldview.

Otherwise you’ll spend your days half-sure and half-unsure about the existence of Olympus and the gaggle of gods and half-gods of ancient Greece, and of Shangri-La and Tibetan mystics with what are effectively superpowers, and of the literal rendering of all the tall tales in the Bible, and of the Hindu pantheon, and the (Vajrayana) Buddhist deities, and the Yeti and the bigfoot, and the Loch Ness monster, the world as simulation, the world as projection of a brain in a vat, in fact any and every fanciful concoction of man’s fertile brain that hasn’t explicitly and directly been ruled out by science so far (and indeed even such things as science has actually rejected, because after all such rejection is tentative and may yet, in future, be reversed, given adequate evidence).

Shh, quiet now. Yes, Shadowfax? Oh, ok, I'll ask him.

Spence, Shadowfax instructs me to ask you if his refulgent being has impressed you with the splendor and the simplicity that is the scientific worldview.

(Which is the short form for "the personal worldview that is appropriate for the individual, arrived at basis regard for the scientific method as *the* most efficacious means devised thus far for arriving at the truth".)

What should I tell him?

Science embraces the unknown, but wants evidence of it

I'm a huge fan of the comments "Appreciative Reader" leaves on my blog posts. Which means, I agree with almost everything this person says.

I only wish that I could express myself as clearly and reasonably as Appreciative Reader does. He writes so expertly, I enjoy sharing his top performing comments in a blog post.

That's what I've done here. 

I don't mean to disparage the views expressed by other commenters. No doubt some other people would find their arguments more impressive than Appreciative Reader's -- because they resonate more with the mystical/religious worldview of some of the other commenters.

I just find Appreciative Reader's description below of how science looks upon the unknown to be right-on. Scientists absolutely love the unknown.

That's what powers science: a passion to find new knowledge by expanding the borders of the known.

But here's the thing. As Appreciative Reader argues, it isn't possible to specify what lies in unknown territory. If that could be done, some of the unknown would have become known. 

We can speculate and hypothesize about what lies in the darkness beyond the light of knowledge.

However, until that light illuminates a previously unknown entity, which enables people to assess the evidence for that thing and possibly admit it into the realm of the known, it makes no sense to speak of what's unknown as if it were demonstrably real.

Sure, God could exist. Sure, consciousness could exist apart from the brain. Sure, life after death could be true. These and many other "could's" are speculations that can't be accepted as fact until there's good reason to do so.

That doesn't stop individuals from claiming to have an experience of something unknown. It just prevents science-minded people from accepting those claims as being anything other than a personal experience. People claim all sorts of things that are highly unlikely, like alien abductions.

Saying so doesn't make it so. Evidence makes it so. Here's Appreciative Reader's comment.

Hello, Spence.

In your last two comments you quoted these words of mine, ""Until such time, as we do know such exists substantially, we'll treat is as not existing. Be it consciousness, or be it fairies."

And you started out your comments with these words, developing this theme further in the rest of your two comments addressed to me :

Quoting you this time: "That system of belief would put an end to all science. Science is based on exactly the opposite. That the unknown exist, and that to understand reality we must investigate and learn. Many things do exist that are unknown. Your statement is tantamount to claiming the unknown doesn't exist."
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This is exactly the kind of apparent ignorance about the nature and the implications of the scientific method that I'd spoken of on the other thread, that one sometimes comes across from people one would certainly expect to know better.

Not only that, this entirely misrepresents my own words, part of which you'd yourself quoted, to attempt to argue against a blatantly strawman version of my comments. The whys and the wherefores of this I'd rather not get into, but the 'what' of it is incontrovertible.
-------
The latter portion of what I've just now said, first, as that is so much easier to establish.

Here's what I'd said in my own comment, that you've quoted from (and I quote these extracts verbatim):

"This isn't in any way to shut oneself off from the possibility of what might be. Nor is it to shut oneself into unreasonable closed-minded certainty that nothing beyond what is known might ever be known. All the possibilities of Mystery, with a capital M, are acknowledged, and indeed honored. But not accepted, until one has reason to."

"Nor does it stop one from performing one's own researches. Into science, or into technology. Into fairies, on into mystic realities. Into whatever appears promising to one, into whatever appeals to one."

"I don't see we can do any more than accept things as they are. Which does not stop us from striving to find out more, in such ways as we are able and willing."

It is astonishing that you should apparently parse the above so as to conclude, as you do here, that "That system of belief would put an end to all science. ... Science is based on exactly the opposite. That the unknown exist, and that to understand reality we must investigate and learn. ... Many things do exist that are unknown. Your statement is tantamount to claiming the unknown doesn't exist." (etc)

You've read exactly the opposite of what I'd very clearly said in my post. I wonder why that is?
-------
Moving beyond these I-said-you-said inconsequentialities, let us turn to the more consequential part of your comment, that betrays a confusion about the implications of the scientific method, that is surprising coming from you.

Cue, at this time, Carl Sagan: “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” Because what you're advocating here is clearly the equivalent of having one's brains fall right out.

There are many things we don't know. The domain of what we don't know is far more vast, infinitely more vast, than what we do know. Further, what little we do know is tentative, and always subject to correction in future. But what are the implications of this?

It is reasonable to accept and treat as known what we do know thus far, no far how little and no far how tentative. The rest it is reasonable to reject.

And to reject something is neither to claim that it shall forever remain rejected, nor to turn away from exploration of it; to reject some hypothesis is no more than to not accept such at this time, and such rejection is always tentative and always subject to correction in future.

Like I'd said in the other thread, it is surprising that this obvious thing should need to be spelt out in this manner to those whom one would have expected would know better.

Let's take an actual example to make this clear.

There's this real-life hypothesis that our universe is a simulation. We don't know enough to incontrovertibly reject the hypothesis. Indeed there are actual physicists who are researching this very issue. But as far as actually accepting this claim, what is the reasonable stance?

The reasonable thing to do is to not accept this hypothesis, for now, to clearly reject this hypothesis, for now. Such rejection is not to say that one will not research this subject, nor to claim that one has shut oneself off from ever accepting this hypothesis; it is only to state that one does not have justification, at this time, to rationally accept this hypothesis.

For all practical everyday purposes, one rejects this hypothesis. (To emphasize again, that does not preclude people who are interested in the subject from exploring and researching it further.)

Thus with consciousness and mystical realities and the God question, which is clearly what this discussion is all about at bottom. Until the day we have reasonable rational grounds to accept such, we will not accept such. That is a perfectly sound position.

That does not stop us from speculating. Nor does that stop us from actually exploring and researching the issue. That also does not stop us from realizing the essentially tentative nature of our rejection --- which tentativeness is an intrinsic part of the scientific worldview --- and it does not stop us from promptly changing our mind in future should circumstances so warrant.

To see in this clearly stated position the antithesis of science, as you do, is to completely misunderstand one's clearly written words, as well as to profoundly misunderstand the nature of a scientific worldview.

Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Well, the responses I got to my previous post, "Objective reality is validated by the reality-based community," were underwhelming. 

Not really surprising, since I said:

The question I'd pose to those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive view of reality is this: what alternative to Rauch's approach below do you suggest for determining the nature of objective reality?

Meaning, it is easy to criticize reason, rationality, facts, science, open discussion, criticism of propositions about reality, and such. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to come up with a better approach than the Constitution of Knowledge.

Read what follows.

Then, if you disagree with some of what Rausch says below, leave a comment on this post describing the nature of your disagreement. Others can then submit their own ideas. This is how knowledge is gained: by a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

No one could suggest a better approach for gaining knowledge than a reality-based community willing to engage in the social pursuit of truth.

So in this post I'm going to take a different approach, with the goal of convincing those who hold a mystical, religious, or intuitive perspective that there isn't any other valid means of gaining knowledge of objective reality.

Note that I said "objective reality." Obviously we all gain knowledge of subjective reality just by being ourselves. Every experience each of us has is subjective, since it isn't evident to other people.

There's no way anyone can put a thought, emotion, perception, or any other content of consciousness on a table and say, See, this is my experience.

Thus a basic assumption here is that there are almost eight billion subjective human realities, one for each person on Earth. Yet there is only one objective shared reality. Rausch writes:

The main idea of the Constitution of Knowledge, as we have seen, is that reality is what we know, not what you or I know. No purely personal belief can be knowledge, no matter how much merit you or I might think it possesses.

...A corollary is that members of the reality-based community accept that, despite their diversity, they are all exploring aspects of one reality. The Constitution of Knowledge does not require them to see the world the same way or to agree on facts.

In fact, it only works where people see the world differently and disagree on facts, so that they can test their ideas and surmount their biases.

Its unique capacity, however, is to force individual differences toward social convergence. It does so by requiring persuasion, which in turn requires that we try to account for our differences by comparing them.

Science has made astounding progress in the past several hundred years by doing just that. By and large, scientists the world over agree on the knowledge gained from the scientific aspect of the reality-based community.

By contrast, religious believers and mystics have made essentially zero progress in arriving at a common spiritual knowledge. The same questions are being debated today as were being debated hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Why? One obvious reason is that there's no persuasive evidence that a supernatural realm exists. Thus there's no way to test propositions about what that realm consists of, since almost certainly it exists only in the subjective minds of individuals.

Consider the religious belief system that I used to accept, that of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), a form of Sant Mat, an India-based religiosity that claims Perfect Living Masters can guide their disciples back to God by connecting them to the shabd, or Sound Current, the power that activates the cosmos.

That'd be amazing if it was true. But how would it be possible to determine the truth of RSSB or Sant Mat?

It can't be by accepting someone's claim that they're experienced divine light and sound. Hallucinations of that sort are commonplace. Psychedelic drugs can produce those phenomena. People can be mistaken. People can lie. People can fool themselves.

No matter how strongly someone believes in a religious, mystical, or supernatural tenet -- whether this belief is held by a small number or billions -- the question remains, Why should anyone else believe what you believe?

Christians believe Jesus is the Son of God. Muslims believe there is no God but God and Muhammed is His prophet. Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, plus adherents of thousands of other religions all have their own unique beliefs.

Atheists and agnostics are skeptical about all of those beliefs. For good reason, because there is no reality-based community in the realm of the supernatural. Again, almost certainly this is because that reality doesn't exist.

Yet suppose you're someone who has had such a profound experience of a supernatural reality that you feel the need to speak your truth to others? (A number of those someone's leave comments on this blog.)

Again, why should I or anyone else believe you? 

It can't be because you've done the experiment of meditation, or whatever you want to call it, and the rest of us haven't. I haven't done any quantum mechanics experiments nor genetics experiments, but I accept the scientific knowledge in these areas.

I do so because there is a reality-based community -- researchers, journals, conferences, peer review, universities, government agencies, science writers, etc. -- that's skilled at assessing the validity of scientific propositions.

If a single scientist claims this or that is true, no one should believe them. Yet if their claim survives careful scrutiny by the reality-based community, there's good reason to believe them. At least until the claim is debunked.

With religious and mystical claims about the supernatural, so far none have become validated knowledge. 

Not miracles. Not ESP. Not life after death. Not astral projection. After thousands of years of attempts by humans to find proof of the supernatural, there's so little to show for this search, we might as well round it off to zero. 

The reason is that what Rausch says in his book is correct. 

By extension, the empirical rule also dictates what does not account as checking: claims to authority by dint of a personally or tribally privileged perspective. In principle, persons and groups are interchangeable. 

If I claim access to divine revelation, or if I claim the support of miracles which only believers can witness, or if I claim that my class or race or historically dominant status or historically oppressed status allows me to know and say things which others cannot, then I am breaking the empirical rule by exempting my views from contestability by others

...You have to check your own claims and subject them to contestation from others; you have to tolerate the competing claims of others; you have to accept that your own certainty counts for nothing; you have to forswear claiming that your god, your experience, your intuition, or your group is epistemically privileged; you have to defend the exclusive legitimacy of liberal science even (in fact, especially) when you think it is wrong or unfair.

Each of us isn't a thing, but a web of connections

Before moving on to subjects other than quantum theory, which I've written about here and here recently, I want to talk in my own words regarding what I like about Carlo Rovelli's book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." 

The previous posts consisted mostly of excerpts from the book. So here's my attempt to describe what appealed to me the most about Helgoland. (That's an island in the North Sea where Heisenberg came up with his key concepts about the quantum world.)

Rovelli is an exceptionally clear writer. He also has a poetic sense that isn't unique among physicists, but is uncommonly well developed in Rovelli. This book deals with notions that never made much sense to me, yet I largely accepted given that the ideas are embraced by so many experts in quantum theory.

For example, the idea that an observation by human consciousness brings a certain quantum reality into being. As Rovelli notes, galaxies billions of light years away obey the laws of quantum physics, as does everything else in the universe.

Consciousness doesn't exist everywhere, unless we assume that everything in existence possesses at least a minute form of proto-consciousness. 

Ah, but if that is true, then there's no need to bring in human consciousness as the means by which the probabilistic nature of quantum equations, involving various possibilities, "collapse" down to a single outcome when an observation of an electron, photon, or whatever occurs.

The Many Worlds approach to quantum theory deals with the observation problem by positing that all possible outcomes of an observation occur, with reality splitting into an infinity of worlds at every instant, of which we inhabit only one of them.

The relational approach to quantum theory makes much more sense. Both the quantum world and the world familiar to us aren't made up of things, but of connections, of relationships. 

Not family relationships, of course. Something much more general.

As I stare at my computer screen, there's a dance going on between the photons striking my eye, the pixels of the screen, vision processing centers in my brain, and more besides. Our dog would see something different. As would a snake. Or a bat.

I like how Rovelli says that there is no such thing as an outside perspective on the world or universe. It's all 100% inside, in two senses. 

First, there's no way we can get outside of the universe, of everything that exists (some call this the cosmos). We humans, along with everything else, are part of the universe. We aren't experiencing the universe. One aspect of the universe is experiencing another aspect.

Or we can say, "The universe is experiencing itself." 

Most books about quantum physics don't include a mention of Nagarjuna, the Buddhist thinker. But Rovelli's book does.

It isn't that Nagarjuna had a mystical insight into the nature of quantum reality. Rather, Rovelli says that ancient texts should be read not from the perspective of what the author initially intended to say, but how the work speaks to us today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over and over in his book, Rovelli says that we need to embrace the idea that reality may be very different from how we currently consider it to be. This is how science is so successful: scientists do their best to understand reality as it actually is, even if that understanding is uncomfortable or surprising. 

On his third page, in a section called Looking Into the Abyss, Rovelli writes:

But this is what science is all about: exploring new ways of conceptualizing the world. At times, radically new. It is the capacity to constantly call our concepts into question. The visionary force of a rebellious, critical spirit, capable of modifying its own conceptual basis, capable of redesigning our world from scratch.

I love those words.

Mind and consciousness through the eye of quantum physics

Here's additional excerpts from physicist Carlo Rovelli's wonderful new book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." (See here for my first post about the book.)

The passages below are from final chapters where Rovelli focuses on the nature of mind and consciousness in light of quantum physics. 

Rovelli's take on this subject is very much in line with a post I wrote in 2018, "Awareness is a process, not a thing." 

Consciousness isn't a thing. It is a process. Thinking of it as a thing makes us wonder what kind of a thing it is, whereas we should be asking, what sorts of processes and interactions give rise to consciousness?

Hope you enjoy these words from Rovelli as much as I do.

If the fine grain of the world is made of material particles that have just mass and motion, it seems difficult to reconstruct our perceiving and thinking complexity from this amorphous grain.

But if the fine grain of the world is better described in terms of relations, if nothing has intrinsic properties except in relation to other things, perhaps in this physics we can better find elements able to combine in a comprehensible way, to be the basis of those complex phenomena that we call our perceptions and our consciousness.

If the physical world is woven from the subtle interplay of images in mirrors reflected in other mirrors, without the metaphysical foundation of a material substance, perhaps it becomes easier to recognize ourselves as part of that whole.

...But there is no need to attribute photo-consciousness to elementary systems in order to get around a frozen "simple matter." It is enough to have observed how the world is better described by relative variables and their correlations.

This allows us to be released from the prison of a blunt opposition between the objectivity of matter and mental life. The rigid distinction between a mental world and a physical one fades. It is possible to think of both mental and physical phenomena as natural phenomena: both products of interactions between parts of the physical world.

...If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it. The descriptions of the world are, in the ultimate analysis, all from inside. They are all in the first person. 

Our perspective on the world, our point of view, being situated inside the world (our "situated self," as Jenann Ismael beautifully puts it), is not special: it rests on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all of physics, is based.

If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no "outside" to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it.

The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. This world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives. 

...I think that when we wonder about the relationship between the "I" and "matter," we are using two concepts that are both confused and misleading, and this is the origin of the confusion surrounding the questions about the nature of consciousness. 

Who is the "I" that has the sensation of feeling, if not the integrated set of our mental processes? We have an intuition of unity when we think about ourselves, but this is justified by the integration of our body and by the ways our mental processes work, of which the part we call conscious does one thing at a time.

The first term of the problem, the "I," is the residue of a metaphysical error: the result of the common mistake of mistaking a process for an entity.

...To ask what consciousness is, after having unraveled the neural processes, is like asking what a storm is after having understood its physics: it is a question that makes no sense. To add in a "possessor" of sensations is like adding Jove to the phenomenon of the thunderstorm.

It is like saying, after having understood the physics of the storm, that there still remains, as Chalmers would put it, the "hard problem" of connecting it with the anger of Jove.

It is true that we have the "intuition"of an independent entity that is the "I." But we also had the "intuition" that behind a storm there was Jove. And that the Earth was flat. It is not through uncritical "intuitions" that we construct an effective comprehension of reality.

Introspection is the worst instrument of inquiry if we are interested in the nature of mind: it is tantamount to looking for our own prejudices and wallowing in them.

Even worse is the the second term of the question, "matter." It is, as well, the residue of an incorrect metaphysics based on too naive a conception of matter as a universal substance defined only by mass and motion. This is erroneous metaphysics because it is contradicted by quantum physics. 

If we think in terms of processes, events, in terms of relative properties, of a world of relations, the hiatus between physical phenomena and mental phenomena is much less dramatic. It becomes possible to see both as natural phenomena generated by complex structures of interactions. 

...The best description of reality that we have found is in terms of events that weave a web of interactions. "Entities" are nothing other than ephemeral nodes in this web. Their properties are not determined until the moment of these interactions; they exist only in relation to something else. Everything is what it is only with respect to something else.

Every vision is partial. There is no way of seeing reality that is not dependent on a perspective -- no point of view that is absolute and universal. 

...Every time that something solid is put into doubt or dismantled, something else opens up and allows us to see further than we could before. Watching what appears to be as solid as rock melt into air makes lighter, it seems to me, the transitory and bittersweet flowing of our lives.

The interconnectedness of things, the reflection of one in another, shines with a clear light that the coldness of eighteenth-century mechanisms could not capture.

Even if it leaves us astonished. Even if it leaves us with a profound sense of mystery.

Relational view of quantum theory reeks of truth

If you're into quantum physics, prepare to have your mind blown. Well, whether or not you're into quantum physics, prepare to have your mind blown.

At least a little bit. Because below I've shared an excerpt from physicist Carlo Rovelli's amazing new book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." 

The excerpt doesn't do justice to the entire book, but it will give you a feel for Rovelli's relational take on quantum physics -- which makes so much sense, it's hard to understand how anyone could disagree with it (though I'm sure many do).

I'll have more to say about the book in additional blog posts. I wanted to share this lengthy excerpt to provide a foundation for those other posts, one of which will be about how Rovelli finds echoes of the Buddhist thinker Nagarjuna in quantum physics. 

I've read many books about quantum physics. Rovelli presents a way of looking at quantum phenomena that's so compellingly clear, those other books seem confusing by comparison. Every sentence of what follows has a lot of meaning, so read it slowly.

In a physics laboratory, where we study a small object such as an atom or a photon of Zeilinger's lasers, it is clear who the observer is: it is the scientist who prepares, observes, and measures the quantum object, who deploys their instruments of measurement, detecting the light emitted from the atom or the place where the photons arrive.

But the vast world is not made up of scientists in laboratories, or instruments of measurement. What is an observation, when there is no scientist observing? What does quantum theory tell us, where there is no one measuring? What does quantum theory tell us about what happens in another galaxy?

The key to the answer, I believe, and the keystone of the ideas in this book, is the simple observation that scientists, and their measuring instruments as well, are all part of nature. What quantum theory describes, then, is the way in which one part of nature manifests itself to any other single part of nature.

At the heart of the "relational" interpretation of quantum theory is the idea that the theory does not describe the way in which quantum objects manifest themselves to us (or to special entities that do something special denoted "observing"). It describes how every physical object manifests itself to any other physical object. How any physical entity acts on any other physical entity. 

We think of the world in terms of objects, things, entities (in physics, we call them "physical systems"): a photon, a cat, a stone, a tree, a boy, a village, a rainbow, a planet, a cluster of galaxies... These do not exist in splendid isolation. On the contrary, they do nothing but continuously act upon each other. To understand nature, we must focus on these interactions rather than on isolated objects.

A cat listens to the ticking of a clock; a boy throws a stone; the stone moves the air through which it flies, hits another stone and moves that, presses into the ground where it lands; a tree absorbs energy from the sun's rays, produces the oxygen that the villagers breathe while watching the stars, and the stars run through the galaxies, pulled by the gravity of other stars... The world that we observe is continually interacting. It is a dense web of interactions. 

Individual objects are the way in which they interact. If there was an object that had no interactions, no effect upon anything, emitted no light, attracted nothing and repelled nothing, was not touched and had no smell... it would be as good as nonexistent. To speak of objects that never interact is to speak of something -- even if it existed -- that could not concern us. It is not even clear what it would mean for us to say that such objects "exist."

The world that we know, that relates to us, that interests us, what we call "reality," is the vast web of interacting entities, of which we are a part, that manifest themselves by interacting with each other. It is with this web that we are dealing. 

...The discovery of quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the properties of any entity are nothing other than the way in which that entity influences others. It exists only through its interactions. Quantum theory is the theory of how things influence each other. And this is the best description of nature that we have.

It is a simple idea, but it has radical consequences that open the conceptual space required to understand quanta.

...The properties of an object are the way in which it acts upon other objects; reality is this web of interactions. Instead of seeing the physical world as a collection of objects with definite properties, quantum theory invites us to see the physical world as a net of relations. Objects are its nodes.

The first radical consequence is that to attribute properties to something when it does not interact is superfluous and may be misleading. It is talking about something that has no meaning, for there are no properties outside of interactions. 

This is the significance of Heisenberg's original intuition: to ask what the orbit of an election is when it is not interacting with anything is an empty question. The electron does not follow an orbit because its physical properties are only those that determine how it affects something else, for instance, the light that it emits when it is interacting. If the electron is not interacting, there are no properties.

This is a radical leap. It is equivalent to saying that everything consists solely of the way in which it affects something else. When the electron does not interact with anything, it has no physical properties. It has no position; it has no velocity. 

The second consequence is even more radical

Suppose that you are the cat in Schrodinger's thought experiment. You are shut in a box and a quantum mechanism has a one in two probability of releasing the sleeping drug. You perceive whether the drug has been released or not released. In the first case, you sleep; in the second, you remain awake. For you the drug was delivered or it was not delivered. There are no doubts. As far as you are concerned, you are asleep or you are awake. You are certainly not both at once. 

I, on the other hand, am outside the box and do not interact either with the bottle of sleeping draught or with you. Later on, I can observe interference phenomena between you-awake and you-asleep: phenomena that would not have been produced if I had seen you asleep, or if I had seen you awake. In this sense, for me you are neither asleep nor awake. This is what it means to say that you are "in a superposition of sleeping and waking."

For you, the soporific is released or not, and you are asleep or awake. For me, you are neither awake nor asleep. For me, "there is a quantum superposition." For you, there is the reality of being awake, or of not being so. The relational perspective allows both things to be true: each relates to interactions with respect to distinct observers -- you and me.

Is it possible that a fact might be real with respect to you and not real with respect to me? 

Quantum theory, I believe, is the discovery that the answer is yes. Facts that are real with respect to an object are not necessarily so with respect to another. A property may be real with respect to a stone, and not real with respect to another stone.

Be born again through science

Frank Wilczek, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004, has written a compelling book about the universe: Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

Here's a passage from his Afterword chapter that I like a lot. It is indeed strange that we make such a division between internal and external worlds, when in truth there is only one thing going on.

The child of our introduction, now an adult, may come to understand the fundamental conclusions that science, following its radically conservative method, reaches about the physical world. 

Then she is prepared to revisit the starting point of her adventure with reality, and to view it afresh, in the light of her knowledge. 

She can choose, in this sense, to be born again.

It is not a trouble-free choice. It is disruptive. But the choice is unavoidable, as a matter of integrity. You've seen in this book a small sampling of the evidence for the scientific fundamentals. That evidence is overwhelming and indisputable. 

To deny it is dishonest. To ignore it is foolish.

And so our heroine comes to reconsider the division of experience into internal and external worlds. The fundamentals of science have taught her a lot about what matter is. She knows that matter is built up from a few kinds of building blocks, whose properties and behavior we understand in detail.

And she knows, from direct experience, that scientists and engineers can use such knowledge to make impressive creations. 

Her iPhone allows her to communicate instantly with friends around the globe, to tap into humanity's accumulated knowledge at will, and, though pictures and recordings, to snatch her sensory world from time's devouring flow.

She has learned, too, that the special objects she recognizes as other people, and herself, are made from the same sort of matter as the rest of the world 

Many once-mysterious aspects of living things such as how they derive their energy (metabolism), how they reproduce (heredity), and how they sense their environment (perception), she can now understand from the bottom up.

For we now understand, in considerable detail, how molecules -- and ultimately, quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons -- manage to accomplish those feats. They are complicated things that matter can do, by following the laws of physics. No more, and no less.

These understandings do not subtract from the glory of life. Rather, they magnify the glory of matter. 

In light of all this, it is radically conservative to adopt what the great biologist Francis Crick has called "the astonishing hypothesis": that mind in all its aspects, is "no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

Indeed, this amounts to extending Newton's method of analysis and synthesis to brains. Experiments in neurobiology have been following that strategy aggressively.

And although our understanding of how minds work is still incomplete, so far, in thousands of sensitive experiments, the strategy has never failed. No one has ever stumbled upon a power of mind in biological organisms that is separate from conventional physical events in their bodies and brains.

Even in their most delicate experiments, physicists and biologists never had to make allowances fo what people nearby were thinking. By now, any failure of Crick's "astonishing hypothesis" would be astonishing. 

Upon that realization, the division of experience into internal and external worlds comes to seem superficial. For babies, that division is a useful discovery, and for adults, it is a convenient rule of thumb. But our best understanding suggests that there is just one world, after all.

Matter, deeply understood, has ample room for minds. And so, also, it can be home to the internal worlds that minds house. 

There is both majestic simplicity and strange beauty in this unified view of the world. Within it, we must consider ourselves not as unique objects ("souls"), outside of the physical world, but rather as coherent, dynamic patterns in matter. It is an unfamiliar perspective.

Were it not so strongly supported by the fundamentals of science, it would seem far-fetched. But it has the virtue of truth. And once embraced, it can come to seem liberating. Albert Einstein spoke to this, in a kind of credo:

A human being is a part of a whole, called the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us.

Marvelous putdown of supernatural nonsense

I really like this comment by Appreciative Reader. 

To make the comment easier to read, I've italicized the quotes from a comment by someone else and left Appreciative Reader's responses in regular type.

Being wordy myself, I admire succinctness in philosophizing, even though I'm rarely capable of it. Nice going, Appreciative Reader.

"Empirical science is only concerned with the origins and evolution of the material universe"

There is evidence for no other.

"Our five senses which allow our minds to compare, contrast and analyze material forms are aimed outwards, toward the material universe."

There is evidence for no other.

"The tangible, tactile world is all that physicists are desiring to understand and describe, reveling in a never-ending presentation of changing theories."

That is the nature of the scientific method. New evidence gives rise to new theories, in a virtuous cycle of expanding (collective) awareness and knowledge.

"No one knows which came first: Consciousness or Matter."

There is no evidence of consciousness other than in and from matter.

"To be seated anxiously at the edge of one's seat, awaiting science to supply anything of concrete value regarding the secret of life, is a waste of precious time and energy."

To each their own. We are free to use our time and energy as we please. We each define for ourselves what is a worthwhile use of our time and energy.

"You came first...matter followed as a necessary accretion for experiences with resistance, pleasures, pain, suffering, desires, deterioration and death...a very long saga, indeed."

There is no evidence that this kind of a worldview is anything other than fancy and wishful thinking.

"The God Equation" is about Einstein's impersonal god

I bought theoretical physicist Michio Kaku's latest book, The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything, after seeing him interviewed by Stephen Colbert. 

I enjoyed the book, though I agree with some Amazon reviewers that it doesn't really break new ground. But since my understanding of the old ground is shaky, I enjoyed Kaku's take on familiar topics.

Particle physics. Relativity theory. Quantum mechanics. Big bang. The search for common ground between how relativity and quantum theories view reality. String theory.

Spoiler alert: physicists haven't yet come up with a viable Theory of Everything. String theory is the leading candidate, but string theory suffers from not-so-minor drawbacks such as an almost complete lack of ability to test its validity.

To a theoretician, all these criticisms are troublesome but not fatal. But what does cause problems for a theoretician is that the [string theory] model seems to predict a multiverse of parallel universes, many of which are crazier than those in the imagination of a Hollywood scriptwriter.

...Some might argue that these alternate universes are only mathematical possibilities and are not real. But the problem is that the theory lacks predictive power, since it cannot tell you which of these alternate universes is the real one.

Still, there's a lot to like about string theory.

It could resolve the conflict between relativity theory (space-time is smooth) and quantum theory (the subatomic realm is lumpy) by positing that extremely tiny strings are the fundamental constituents of reality.

Mystics would resonate with that notion, a point I made in my first book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder. Here's how Kaku puts it.

As a result of the torrent of equations, a new picture was beginning to emerge. Why were there so many particles?

Like Pythagoras more than two thousand years ago, the theory said that each musical note -- each vibration of a string -- represented a particle. Electrons, quarks, and Yang-Mills particles were nothing but different notes on the same vibrating string.

What is so powerful and interesting about the theory is that gravity is necessarily included. Without any extra assumptions, the graviton emerges as one of the lowest vibrations of the string.

...As physicist Edward Witten once said, "String theory is extremely attractive because gravity is forced upon us. All known consistent string theories include gravity, so while gravity is impossible in quantum field theory as we have known it, it's obligatory in string theory."

So while a huge amount of work remains to be done on string theory, there's a possibility it could live up to the title of Kaku's book, The God Equation. 

However, this wouldn't be the God most people worship, but Einstein's God.

In this and other letters, Einstein despaired of answering questions concerning the meaning of life, but he was clear about his thinking concerning God.

One problem, he wrote, is that there are really two kinds of Gods, and we often confuse the two. 

First, there is the personal God, the God that you pray to, the God of the Bible who smites the Philistines and rewards the believers. He did not believe in that God. He did not believe that the God who created the universe interfered in the affairs of mere mortals.

However, he believed in the God of Spinoza -- that is, the God of order in a universe that is beautiful, simple, and elegant. The universe could have been ugly, random, chaotic, but instead it has a hidden order that is mysterious yet profound.

In his final chapter, Kaku speaks about meaning in a familiar fashion that resonates with me.

In the end, I believe that we create our own meaning in the universe.

It is too simple and easy to have some guru come down from the mountaintop, bearing the meaning of the universe. The meaning of life is something that we have to struggle to understand and appreciate.

Having it given to us defeats the whole purpose of meaning.

If the meaning of life were available for free, then it would lose its meaning. Everything that has meaning is the result of struggle and sacrifice, and is worth fighting for.

How animals navigate would be a "miracle" if people did it

After thirty-five years of believing in weird mystical stuff, I've become a naturalist.

I'm still open to the possibility that there's more to reality than what's evident in the natural world, but lacking solid evidence of that possibility, my bet is that it doesn't exist.

Yet in no way do I feel a diminishment of cosmic awe. There's plenty to be amazed at without imagining a realm beyond the physical.

A story by Kathryn Schulz in the April 5, 2021 issue of The New Yorker provides a good example of this. My mind was blown by "Where the Wild Things Go: How animals navigate the world."

(The online version has a different title.)

Consider how we humans would look upon a member of our species who could do what a rock lobster  is capable of.

You can cover a rock lobster’s eyes, put it in an opaque container filled with seawater from its native environment, line the container with magnets suspended from strings so they swing in all directions, put the container in a truck, drive the truck in circles on the way to a boat, steer the boat in circles on the way to a distant location, drop the lobster back in the water, and—voilà—it will strike off confidently in the direction of home.

Scientists have done these things to rock lobsters in order to eliminate the most obvious mechanisms a lobster could use to navigate, such as using the earth's magnetic field to track its location.

We'd be amazed if a person could do what a rock lobster does, as the New Yorker story says in the next paragraph.

Needless to say, you and I cannot do this. If you blindfold human subjects, take them on a disorienting bus ride, let them off in a field, remove the blindfolds, and ask them to head back toward where they started, they will promptly wander off in all directions. If you forgo the bus and the blindfolds, ask them to walk across a field toward a target, and then conceal the target after they start moving, they will stray off course in approximately eight seconds.

Of course, humans also are capable of amazing navigation feats. But we've done this largely through learning, not instinct.

The Polynesians were able to move from island to island in vast reaches of the south Pacific through careful observation of currents, clouds, birds, and such, then pass on that knowledge to another generation.

Some animals also learn from members of their species -- geese learn a migration route from their elders -- but much of animal navigation is based on talents we're mostly clueless about.

Cats, bats, elephant seals, red-tailed hawks, wildebeests, gypsy moths, cuttlefish, slime mold, emperor penguins: to one degree or another, every animal on earth knows how to navigate—and, to one degree or another, scientists remain perplexed by how they do so.

Yet even though what animals are capable of seems miraculous, no reputable scientist claims that animals possess some supernatural power. We don't know how they navigate, but almost certainly some day we will.

So in the realm of animal navigation there's agreement that natural causes are producing amazing effects. Why would the mystery of human consciousness be any different? Just because something is astonishing doesn't mean it stems from a supernatural source.

More generally, the astonishment is that any physiology can contain a navigational system capable of such journeys. A bird that migrates over long distances must maintain its trajectory by day and by night, in every kind of weather, often with no landmarks in sight.

If its travels take more than a few days, it must compensate for the fact that virtually everything it could use to stay oriented will change, from the elevation of the sun to the length of the day and the constellations overhead at night.

Most bewildering of all, it must know where it is going—even the first time, when it has never been there before—and it must know where that destination lies compared with its current position.

Other species making other journeys face additional difficulties: how to navigate entirely underground, or how to navigate beneath the waters of a vast and seemingly undifferentiated ocean.

The New Yorker story describes various mechanisms animals use to find their way around. I don't want to give the impression that scientists are clueless about how animal navigation works.

My point is that astounding capabilities require careful research to understand what is going on. This applies to exceptional human feats, whether mental or physical. There's a huge amount to learn about the natural world.

None of that learning needs to be based on supernatural fantasies.

Narratives and cognitive structures aren't "traps"

What never fails to amaze me is how religious believers and mystical enthusiasts will use the power of their human mind to criticize other people who use their human mind to criticize religion and mysticism.

The plain fact is that there's no way to communicate with other people except through mental capabilities such as language, reason, and such.

So unless someone wants to remain in their own private internal world -- and everyone who comments on this blog has indicated this isn't what they want to do -- narratives and cognitive structures are the only way to interact with others.

That doesn't have to be done through language, of course, though words are a powerful means of communication. Paint a picture. Dance. Perform music. 

There are lots of ways to communicate a narrative. But underlying all of them is a message to be shared, and someone else to share it with. Absent that, each of us lives in an isolated subjective realm.

Below is a comment on a recent post from "Appreciative Reader." I liked it so much, I felt it deserved to be featured in a blog post.

One of the points made by Appreciative Reader is what I restated ahove: if a person wants to communicate with others, it makes no sense for them to denigrate language, narratives, and cognitive structures.

After all, that denigration is occurring by means of -- no big surprise -- language, narratives, and cognitive structures. This is like someone standing on a sidewalk, yelling at passers-by, "No one should be standing on the sidewalk!"

Dude, you really should practice what you preach before you do your preaching. Here's the comment from Appreciative Reader.

Hello, Dungeness. Long time!

I’m afraid I’m hogging the comments section of this thread. But I’m going to permit myself one more longish comment, because I disagree in the strongest possible terms with your POV, and I would like to articulate my disagreement clearly, and invite you to see if you wouldn’t, in light of what I’m going to say, like to revise your view.

-------

Now at one level, obviously, I agree with um, and with you as well, as I’ve already said earlier on. If personally you don’t care to engage with narratives as far as some particular field, or even more generally, then that is, at one level, merely a question of your personal predilections, and as such your business and no one else’s. No question of “disagreement” with an essentially personal choice of that nature.

-------

But the part where you generalize that kind of approach, when it comes to mysticism? The part where you seem to see narratives and cognitive structures as “traps”? I’m sorry, that’s something I find entirely nonsensical. Here’s why.

The beauty of the scientific method is this, that it helps us navigate through, and discover more and more about, and make use of, reality as we find it. Irrespective of the nature of that reality.

What you’re resorting to is basically magical thinking. Faced with any and every thing, the closed-minded God-believer will say, “…because God!”, without thinking through what that means. What you are doing is the exact equivalent of that, except instead of “…because God!”, you’re using the more sophisticated but essentially similar “…because mysticism!”.

And you know what, even in a world of actual magic, that kind of magical thinking is …I’m sorry, nonsensical.

What is Rowling’s Hogwarts after all? It’s a system of understanding, and cataloging, and analyzing, and then channelizing the magical forces in a (fictional) magical world. No real magician (as in, real magician in a hypothetical or fictional world where magic reigns) would simply put up his hands and say “…because magic!” and leave it at that.

The real magician will find out how exactly the magic operates, essentially use the scientific method and empiricism on that magical world, much as we apply the scientific method to QM [quantum mechanics, I assume] for instance. Unless he is able to do that, he can never even become a magician.

So, I’d say your view, that narrative-building as far as mysticism—even granted, for the sake of argument, that mysticism is a thing (which after all in a larger context is by no means a given)—as something that is essentially beyond cognitive understanding, is …well, blinkered, not clearly thought through.

-------

Of course, in a mystical world, or in a magical world, or in our everyday mundane world, whether you personally engage with some particular narrative, or any narrative, that like I said is a whole different matter. That is your business and yours alone.

I can choose to live in this world without having formulated any detailed narrative, any detailed personal worldview, about the nature of QM, or for that matter even gravity, or the universe, and still manage to live a full enough life, as long as those aspects are not important to my everyday functioning.

But to see all narratives as “traps”, and to see mysticism, should mysticism be a thing (or for that magic, should magic exist) as something essentially beyond cognitive understanding, that kind of POV simply does not hold up to examination.

-------

I’m reminded here of the fable, parable, whatever, of someone-or-other finding a piece of truth on the way. And the Devil looks on at what’s happening, smiling. The Devil’s minions are super worried, and grovel their miserable way up to their horned scarlet master, asking him in wheedling tones why he’s not worried, because that piece of truth can take that man forever out of the Devil’s reach.

And the Devil smiles knowingly, and says, This has happened before, and this will happen again, and all that poor fool will do is go cataloging that piece of truth, and never actually leave my dominion.

I guess the message within that fable, parable, whatever, is what you’re channeling here, right? Well, okay, at a personal level that message does make some kind of sense. If I wish to live in this world, using things like computers and GPS and computers and whatnot, then, if I get caught up in compulsively understanding the mechanism of each and every thing I see and would use, then that bottomless rabbit hole would end up being what my entire life will devolve into.

I’ll never actually use those things, I’ll never find the time to live my life. Which is clearly dysfunctional, unless that kind of inquisitiveness is, A, somehow limited and focused, and B, somehow channelized, into a profession perhaps, such that I draw some kind of personal benefit from it.

To that extent, and also to the extent that it is, like I’d said earlier, a matter of one’s own predilections, this kind of attitude, of not wanting to get into cognitive structures and narratives, might work, at a personal level, as long as one doesn’t get too deep into whatever-it-is, and as long as one is …well, lucky enough to get by despite one’s ignorance. The channelizing of one’s energies away from cognitive understanding might then even be beneficial, at a personal level.

But to generalize that argument, as you are doing, and to think of cognitive structures and narratives as “traps” is, …I’m sorry, that makes no sense at all.

UPDATE: Here's a response from Dungeness.

Brian, since my name is invoked in your commentary, I hope you'll include my
response to this off-point screed about my remarks. I certainly didn't generalize
any attack on cognitive structures and narratives at all. Gosh, I didn't build up
or advance any "narrative" except that it's entirely dubious to opine that
an inner transcendent experience can be "proven" hallucinatory or bonafide
through cognitive means either by skeptic or believer.

Here's my full response:

@ But to generalize that argument, as you are doing, and to think of cognitive structures and narratives
@ as “traps” is, …I’m sorry, that makes no sense at all.

Wow, that's quite an indictment AR. I was responding to your targeted question
of whether a transcendent inner experience was a "hallucination or bona fide". I
only asserted that the cognitive trap was trying to make sense of a transcendent
experience in an attempt to validate it as "hallucination or bona fide". Language and
logic as we know them fall short in that Solomon-esque endeavor to validate an
transcendent experience. I only suggested a different lens and a mystic's discipline
were needed. Perhaps in lieu of "needed", "helpful" would be a more acceptably
non-denominational term.

I never "generalized" this to "cognitive structures and narratives". That's overreach.
By the way, I explicitly lauded scientific rigor and never suggested we abandon it
either. At a practical level, the clarity, heightened awareness, and health benefits
of a mindfulness discipline only enhance science and its path of discovery.

@ Faced with any and every thing, the closed-minded God-believer will say, “…because God!”, without
@ thinking through what that means. What you are doing the exact equivalent of that, except instead of
@ “…because God!”, you’re using the more sophisticated but essentially similar “…because mysticism!”.

To equate mysticism with magical thinking and close-mindedness is dismissive and
misses the mark also. Ironically, mysticism, in contrast to the blind faith of religion,
insists that you confirm premises experientially within via a disciplined practice of
mindfulness. Mysticism acts collaboratively and complementarily with science.
There's no place for magical thinking.

"We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive
where we started And know the place for the first time." --T.S. Eliot

Why quantum is relative, as Buddhism surmises

For many years I've had a strong interest in quantum physics -- from the perspective of someone who knows next to nothing about its mathematics, but is fascinated by the philosophical side of it.

There's a "shut up and calculate" position that most quantum physicists embrace. 

The theory works. Spectacularly. If it didn't, our technological modern world would be much different.

So lots of scientists don't worry about the philosophical foundation of quantum physics. They're just interested in applying the mathematical underpinning to practical problems and applications. 

Then there are physicists like Carlo Rovelli.

He wrote a fascinating piece in the March 13 issue of New Scientist, "Why quantum is relative." The online version has a different title. Here's a PDF file.
Download Quantum weirdness isn’t weird – if we accept objects don’t exist | New Scientist

Rovelli has written a book about his take on quantum physics, Helgoland. It's to be released in the United States in May. Naturally I've put in a pre-order.

Here's the Amazon description of the book, which sums up Rovelli's approach.

One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, he examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving.

Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg made the crucial breakthrough for the creation of quantum mechanics, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious.

As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercely debate the meaning of the theory, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships rather than substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for thinking about the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness.

Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better comprehend our place in it.

Since I'm supremely confident that if I tried to sum up the New Scientist article on my own, I'd screw it up, I'm sharing some excerpts from it that I found particularly compelling.

Read the whole piece via the PDF file above to get a fuller picture of Rovelli's quantum philosophizing. It sure seems like Buddhist notions of reality are extremely close to Rovelli's viewpoint.

Dig down deep enough, and things have properties that are independent of anything else, right?

Perhaps not. Quantum physics, which describes the bizarre behaviour of the physical world at the most elementary level we know, may be telling us the opposite.

Things don’t have properties exclusive to themselves: their properties only exist by virtue of their relationship to other things, just like there are really no “chairs” without someone around to interact with them and see them as such.

Coming to terms with this idea may clarify the persistently mysterious nature of the quantum world. It might even help make other mysteries, such as the nature of our conscious experience, a little bit less mysterious.

...A chair is the way it interacts with its surroundings. To talk about the properties of the chair by itself, when it isn’t interacting with anything, is meaningless.

All of the properties we commonly use to characterise a chair – its colour, its comfort, its weight – are defined through interactions with something else. And so it is for the properties of the single atoms or elementary particles forming the chair.

...As hinted at in the opening of this article, it isn’t a novelty to realise that aspects of the world are relational. Biology, psychology, economics and many other sciences focus on relations more than entities.

Physics itself is already full of relational notions: velocity is only defined with respect to something else, as are electric or gravitational potential and orientation, to name just some examples. The physical world seemed to provide a non-relational substratum formed by substances with absolute properties.

Quantum mechanics, I think, is the discovery that this isn’t the case: the world is woven by relationships that go all the way down to the smallest physical entities.

An understanding of the world in terms of relations rather than entities might even help us disentangle other thorny issues, for instance the nature of consciousness. If we think of the physical world as if it were made by little stones each with its own properties, the jump from this picture to the subjective experience of mental phenomena is huge.

But if the physical nature of the world is better described in terms of how physical systems, simple as well as complex ones, affect one another, perhaps the disjoint will appear less dramatic: products of the mind are just the complex phenomenon formed by the tangled and richly interwoven interactions between the world and the brain.

Our old metaphysical prejudice was that physical reality is made by some fundamental substance with absolute properties. Quantum theory questions this.

I think this is fine: our metaphysical prejudices have formed and evolved within the restricted domain of our everyday experience. We are used to thinking about the world in terms of things with absolute properties because this is what we experience, thanks to the stability generated by decoherence.

But we shouldn’t force what we have discovered about nature to align with these prejudices: rather, our prejudices should be modified by our discoveries about nature.

Quantum theory has altered our understanding of physical reality in ways that are even more profound than the Copernican revolution, when we learned that we live on a madly spinning rock. Digesting the full implications of Nicolaus Copernicus’s work has taken centuries.

We are only beginning to digest the full implications of the quantum revolution.

 

"Unique" -- fascinating book about the science of human individuality

I love science. So I love scientific books.

Since I'm also fascinated by what makes us into the person that we are, David Linden's "Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality" hits the sweet spot for me of reading pleasure. 

Linden is a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute.

Impressive credentials. Plus, Linden is an excellent writer with a sense of humor. 

Here's some excerpts from the three-fourths of the book that I've read so far. These will give you a flavor of the fascinating facts that Linden shares on every page.

Heritability of human traits. One main conclusion of MISTRA [Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart] and related studies was that most human traits, regardless of whether they are physical or behavioral, have a significant heritable component, usually ranging from 30 to 80 percent.

...For decades, the dominant thinking in the field of psychology, and in society at large, was that the most important determinant of one's adult personality was the influence of immediate family, particularly the parents.

This idea came from the twentieth-century psychological movement called behaviorism, which held that humans come into the world as blank slates, ready to be molded by social experience. 

As a result, it was quite a shock when the MISTRA experiments showed significantly higher correlations in personality measures in identical twin pairs than in fraternal ones. The main result was that about 50 percent of the variation in personality can be accounted for by heritability. 

...Importantly, while one's likelihood of having religious beliefs is influenced by both heredity and shared environment, the specific religion you choose has no hereditary component. 

Your genes might contribute to making you religious, but they will not specify a Hindu or Wiccan or Roman Catholic faith -- that's mostly a family and community affair.

Human genome. On average, considering the entire DNA sequence (both the genes and the stretches of other DNA between them), each human is about 99.8 percent similar to any other human, 98 percent similar to a chimpanzee, and 50 percent similar to a fruit fly.

This is because, if you go back far enough in evolutionary time, about eight hundred million years, humans, chimps, and fruit flies al share a common ancestor.

If only a 2 percent difference separates us from chimps, then it follows that small differences in the DNA sequence have a big effect on traits.

...The genome is not a detailed cell-by-cell blueprint for the development of the body and brain, but rather a vague recipe jotted down on the back of an envelope.

...The key point is that the genetic instructions for development are not precise.

...That's the main reason why identical twins, who share the same DNA sequence and nearly the same uterine environment, are not born with wholly identical bodies, brains, or temperaments.

This means that your individuality is not a matter of "nature versus nurture" but rather "heredity interacting with experience, filtered through the inherent randomness of development."

Free will. We like to imagine that we are fundamentally creatures of free will. We reliably call certain facts, events, and concepts to mind. We make conscious decisions and act volitionally. Our individuality is inextricably bound up with a deep sense of agency and autonomy.

To a large degree, this is a trick our brain plays on us. Most of our behavior is subconscious and automatic. In the words of neuroscientist Adrian Haith: "Almost everything you do is a habit." 

...Almost all of our instincts about memory are wrong. We feel like creatures of free will, with detailed and unlimited recall of those events that have helped to form us as individuals.

In reality, most of our behavior is composed of learned, subconscious habits and skills with only a thin veneer of decision-making at the surface.

Our recollection of specific events is unreliable and subject to further distortion every time we recall them. Our memories of facts and concepts are only marginally better. When asked about how confident we are about the veracity of a particular memory, our estimation bears no relationship to the truth.

We feel like we can learn more and more with no limit, yet intensive training in one type of memory seems to degrade our ability to store some other forms of memory.

Our memories are suboptimal, and yet we hold them close. They feel true and important. They are central to our sense of individuality and agency. The mismatch between how we revere our memories and how often they fail is striking.

Why we should feel more agency than we really have is an interesting and open question. I tend to see it as more of a feature than a bug.

When we feel that we are in charge of our behavior, that we are making decisions based on accurate recollection, this allows for more rapid decision-making in those cases of the "thin sliver of cognitive deliberation" where it is truly required.

In other words, when we don't have to stop and second-guess whether we are in charge, we can be decisive when it really matters.

Sexual orientation. There have now been several large-scale anonymous surveys of sexual orientation performed using random sampling in the United States and Europe.

They indicate that approximately 3 percent of men and 1 percent of women identify as consistently homosexual, about 0.5 percent of men and 1 percent of women as bisexual, and the remainder heterosexual.

...Ask a straight man, "When did you decide to be straight?" and he'll likely answer that it didn't feel like a decision at all, but rather like a deep compulsion that became evident around puberty or before.

Gay and bi men will give the same answer: in one survey in the United States, only about 4 percent of all gay and bi men reported that they chose their sexual orientation -- the rest felt that they were "born that way."

...If sexual orientation had no heritable component, we'd expect that the percentage of twin pairs where both are gay would be roughly the same for fraternal and identical twins. 

Conversely, if sexual orientation were entirely determined by genes, then every gay identical twin would have a gay twin sibling.

The best estimates to date, from a population of 3,826 randomly selected twin pairs in Sweden, indicate that about 20 percent of the variance in sexual orientation in women is determined by genes; in men, it's about 40 percent.

...The conclusion is that genetic variation is one factor in determining sexual orientation, but it is far from the whole story and it is a somewhat stronger effect in men than in women.

As always, it's important to remind ourselves that these estimates of heritability are measures for populations, not individuals. 

It may be that there are some individual women and men who carry gene variants such that their sexual orientation is entirely genetically determined, and others for whom their sexual orientation has no genetic contribution whatsoever.

As with all behavioral traits, there is no single gene that determines human sexual orientation. Rather, many different genes each appear to make a small contribution, and at present we do not have a useful list of these genes. 

Final thoughts on the wonderful irrationality of modern science

Having finished Michael Strevens book, 'The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science," I wanted to close the book on this book, so to speak, by sharing some further ideas about how Strevens' Big Idea applies to us in everyday life.

(My three previous posts about The Knowledge Machine are here, here, and here.)

The Big Idea that makes modern science a highly effective way of generating knowledge is restricting scientific communications -- journal articles, research reports, and the like -- to only empirical evidence. 

So if a scientist wants to argue some point, they must do so on the basis of empirical evidence, not on philosophy, religion, personal beliefs, and so on.

In their non-official life, scientists are free to speculate all they want about whatever they want. Only in their official communications are they limited to what Strevens calls the Iron Law -- the Big Idea in his book.

Most of us aren't professional scientists. 

However, I think we all would benefit from embracing the wonderful irrationality of modern science when this is appropriate in everyday life.

At first I found it difficult to understand the subtitle of The Knowledge Machine, since I've always considered rationality to be a hallmark of science. 

Surely, it is.

But as Strevens discusses, it took a long time for the Iron Law of empirical evidence to take root, because we humans are so addicted to philosophizing, telling stories about our life, finding reasons for why this or that happened that make sense to us.

Giving that up would have seemed crazy to the early Greeks, as to medieval thinkers like Descartes. They wanted to fathom the workings of the entire universe, the cosmos. 

Thus to them the scientific method involved grand conceptual schemes, not data-driven empirical evidence. Hence, the seeming irrationality of the Iron Law.

Given the many examples offered up in The Knowledge Machine about how almost obsessive attention to minute detail is how scientific progress usually occurs, I came away convinced that our everyday lives would also benefit from fewer stories in our heads and more empirical facts.

Here's a couple of examples from my own recent life.

Last night I wrote a post for my Salem Political Snark blog about a controversy over Salem's Mayor, Chuck Bennett, failing to assign a progressive city councilor, Jackie Leung, to any City Council committees other than a single spot as an alternate.

Since Leung is a woman of color, quite a few people commented on Facebook that this showed how racist and sexist Bennett is.

They were outraged that Leung had been treated so badly by the Mayor, since other members of the City Council got three, four, five, or six committee assignemts.

At first I shared some of that outrage, but the more I thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed that racism and sexism explained Bennett's behavior.

So I emailed the Mayor, asking him to explain himself. 

In other words, I sought some empirical evidence in the form of a reply to my message. That reply turned out to be highly believable. Bennett told me that last year Leung hadn't wanted any committee assignments because she was too busy.

When she failed to respond to a request from the Mayor to list her committee preferences for 2021, he figured that once again she wasn't interested in being assigned to some committees. Yet actually she was. 

It turned out, then, that a failure to communicate by Bennett and Leung led to a simple mistake. As far as I can tell, the claims of racism and sexism were just stories people used to explain what the Mayor did.

Here's another more personal example of how a failure to use empirical evidence and attention to detail led to a preventable error.

This morning I got a call from an unknown number on my iPhone that didn't ring, because the caller wasn't in my Contact list. That happens frequently. 

I did what I usually do: click on the "phone" icon on the home screen, so by going to Recents, the red "1" (for one call) above the icon would go away.

But after doing this, or at least believing I'd done this, the red "1" was still there. That made me think that perhaps the caller had left a voice mail message, and that message was creating the "1."

Checking Voicemail, I listened to the top message. I couldn't understand all of it, the gist of it being that Amber wanted me, Brian, to call back at _____ Health. When I Googled the phone number, I saw that it belonged to Salem Health Urgent Care.

Which perplexed me, since I haven't been there for quite a few months.

Still, I wanted to find out what Amber wanted. I called the number on the voicemail and found that I was third in line to have my call answered. I listened to annoying music and repeated messages to be patient because my call was important to them for about ten minutes.

Then I was able to talk with someone. "Amber left a message for me," I said. "Is she there?" "No," I was told, "Amber isn't working today." 

That led to me being asked my name and date of birth so they could look up my records and try to figure out what Amber wanted. Eventually I was asked a simple question, "What time was the voice mail message left?"

"Well, it was February... oops. February 27, 2020. A year ago. Wow, sorry. Last night I deleted a bunch of old voice mail messages and the one from Amber a  long time ago now was at the top. So I thought it was a recent message, having forgotten that I'd deleted other old ones."

The Salem Health Urgent Care person laughed and said that she's done something like that before. That made me feel a bit better, a little less embarrassed. 

Now, in retrospect I should have paid more attention to details rather than jumping to the conclusion that today I'd gotten a voice mail message from Salem Health. I'd stared at the message several times, but never noticed the date of the message, since I'd assumed it was from today.

Not a scientific attitude. If I'd gathered more empirical evidence rather than believing the story I'd told myself, I wouldn't have spent time trying to unravel a mystery of my own making.

Science requires demonstrable evidence. Religion doesn't.

Most mornings recently I've been reading a chapter from Michael Strevens' marvelous book, "The Knowledge Machine." It describes why science is so effective at understanding reality.

I find the book inspiring, both scientifically and spiritually.

Ever since I started this blog in 2004, I've been using the term demonstrable evidence frequently. Often I ask for that -- demonstrable evidence -- when someone makes a supernatural claim.

Maybe they claim to have seen God, or something Godly. Maybe they claim to have experienced a cosmic realm beyond physical existence. Maybe they claim some sort of special power like ESP. 

There are lots of possible "maybe's," because the human mind is capable of imagining all kinds of things that aren't real, yet seem like they could be, or should be.

Strevens makes clear that scientists aren't immune from those sorts of wishful thinking. Scientists are just like everybody else: imperfect, flawed, prone to thinking errors.

But modern science has something that enables it to generate valid knowledge about reality that other fields such as religion and mysticism lack: the iron rule.

I wrote about it in "The iron rule of science is empirical evidence." 

The title of that blog post sums up the iron rule. When scientists argue about whether this or that is true, they must "conduct all disputes with reference to empirical evidence alone."

Now, this doesn't mean that scientists, or anyone else for that matter, can't entertain ideas unfounded in empirical evidence.

So if someone wants to leave a comment on this blog about how they are certain that God exists, I'm totally fine with that. They believe strongly in God. Fine. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs.

However, the moment someone claims that God or some other supernatural entity is objectively real, we have a problem. We also have a problem if someone expects that other people should respect their claim as being valid.

To make the problem a non-problem, I like to ask people, "What is your demonstrable evidence?" In other words, empirical evidence. 

If someone is claiming that they're  privy to secrets about the cosmos that turn upside down the scientific understanding of reality, asking for proof is entirely appropriate.

Sure, I understand the objection religious believers have to this request. This is what I said in my previous post about the Iron Rule.

Now, I realize that religious people say that an experience of God or some other supernatural entity can't be proven, since it takes place within the psyche, not anywhere outside. 

OK. But that means a supposed supernatural experience is akin to a dream. It is available only to the person having the experience, and there's no way to tell whether the experience points to a reality outside of the consciousness of that person. 

So religious believers need to stop claiming that what they experience has any sort of objective truth. Like a dream, the reality is in the consciousness of the beholder, not anywhere else.

Of course, a religious believer can continue to have faith in their supernatural entity, whatever it might consist of, without demonstrable evidence. They just have no right to expect that anyone else will take them seriously if they claim that this entity has any effect in the physical world.

For if there is such an effect, it falls within the domain of science. Thus a miracle or a miraculous capability, such as knowing what is in the mind of someone else, must be demonstrated through empirical evidence. 

Otherwise it is just an unfounded belief. And the world is full of them. Nothing special to see here if there is no demonstrable evidence.

 

Be scientific in your life. Demand evidence of your beliefs.

A few days ago I wrote about the iron rule of science, the subject of a book by Michael Strevens, "The Knowledge Machine." I decided to order the book after reading a review of it.

Today I finished the Introduction. So I've just scratched the surface of what Strevens has to say about the iron rule. Here's how he describes it in the part I read today.

How can a rule so scant in content and so limited in scope account for science's powers of discovery? It may dictate what gets called evidence, but it makes no attempt to forge agreement among scientists as to what the evidence says. 

It simply lays down the rule that all arguments must be carried out with reference to empirical evidence and then steps back, relinquishing control. Scientists are free to think about anything they like about the connection between evidence and theory. 

But if they are to participate in the scientific enterprise, they must uncover or generate new evidence to argue with. And so they do, with unfettered enthusiasm.

I absolutely love this emphasis on evidence. So much so, I wanted to share my ideas about what it means to me even before I've gotten past page 10 of the book. 

My ideas might change as I learn more about how Strevens views the iron rule. That's the nature of scientific progress. He'll present his evidence in the form of the rest of the book, and I'll consider what it means for my theory of how life should be lived. 

All I know at the moment is that I felt really good after pondering the iron rule of empirical evidence more fully today. Evidence cuts through all kinds of worries, anxieties, uncertainties. It grounds us in the expansiveness of reality rather than the confines of our own minds. 

Here's a concrete example from my own life.

Since last February, about eleven months, I've been dealing with sciatica pain in my right leg. I don't have back pain. An X-ray of my lower back showed normal wear (or degeneration) for someone my age, 72. I don't know what the cause of the sciatica is. 

It's much better now, but it still bothers me -- particularly in the morning. I've been wondering if some of the exercises and stretches I do every day are making the sciatica worse, rather than better. 

This isn't a new idea; it just hit me more strongly after reading the Introduction this morning.

What I need to do is eliminate certain exercises that appear to be the most likely culprits for exacerbating my sciatica, stretches where I bend at the waist, either standing or sitting, while keeping my knees locked and trying to touch my toes. Doing those stretches the past few months has increased my flexibility.

The question is, have those stretches also slowed down my sciatica recovery? Well, the best way to tell is to collect evidence via an experiment. I've stopped doing those stretches and will see how this affects my sciatica. 

If it gets better, great. I'll then start doing the stretches again and see if the sciatica worsens. 

Now, I realize this sounds like common sense. But until today I hadn't realized how much sense doing this is. Instead of worrying about whether I'm doing the right thing, exercise-wise, I now have a pretty dependable way of finding out. That made me feel relieved, like evidence had replaced my competing beliefs about doing those sorts of stretches.

Are they good for my sciatica, or bad for my sciatica? 

Thinking about that question, about those alternatives, wasn't getting me anywhere. Based on what I've read about sciatica, I could find arguments for either good or bad. 

This seems to be what Strevens is getting at in the subtitle of his book, How Irrationality Created Modern Science. 

Evidence isn't rational. So I guess we could call it irrational. Rationality is me trying to find reasons for why stretching by bending at the waist could make my sciatica better or worse. Irrationality is me collecting evidence to see what happens when I stop doing the stretches, then when I start doing them again.

Sure, I need to use reason to interpret the meaning of the evidence I collect, which is very simple evidence compared to what is collected in a genuine scientific inquiry. 

But the evidence speaks for itself, in a sense.

Not in a logical way. In a way that is separate from how I think about the evidence. How I interpret the evidence of my possibly altered sciatica pain is akin to the arguing Strevens mentions in the quote above. I need to make sure that the evidence forms the basis for my conclusion about the value of stretching at the waist in my daily exercise routine.

I'll have more to say about the iron rule of empirical evidence after I get further into "The Knowledge Machine." That word, empirical, is key to how evidence is used in various areas of inquiry: scientific, personal, spiritual, ethical, and such.

Basically, empirical evidence makes it possible to find truth that is greater than the truth available to any person based on their own individual experience. I know for a fact that I enjoy the taste of raspberries more than the taste of blueberries. However, this isn't an objective fact. It's a subjective fact.

If we want to know whether humanity as a whole likes raspberries or blueberries more, we'd have to collect empirical evidence in the form of taste tests involving a large number of people. Yet me liking raspberries more is a genuine fact. For me. 

Religious believers need to understand the difference between objective and subjective evidence. But that discussion will wait for another blog post.

I'll end with an example of how I sometimes (well, often) don't use empirical evidence in my life. A few weeks ago my wireless color laser printer, which I keep in my office, said a software update was available. I clicked on "update" without much thought, even though the printer had been working fine.

A few days later I wanted to print something from my laptop upstairs. But nothing happened. The printer wasn't available. I tried turning the printer off, then on again, which often resolves a wi-fi connection problem. Not this time.

I had the printer do a wireless connection test. That came out fine. But no matter what I did, I couldn't get my laptop to connect with the printer.

I got frustrated. I told my wife, "I never should have done the printer update. It's screwed things up." My mind was convinced that the update was the problem, because I'd had no problem printing before the update was installed.

Then, in the course of checking the printer wi-fi settings one more time, it hit me.

A few hours before, our always slow DSL "broadband" (if you can call it that) had slowed even more, to the degree I could hardly do anything on my laptop. I'd decided to switch the wi-fi connection from the Google Nest that we'd been using for quite a while back to the original CenturyLink router's wi-fi network.

Oops. I'd completely forgotten that my laptop was on one wi-fi network, and the printer was on the Nest wi-fi network. As soon as I switched my laptop back to the Nest wi-fi, the printer worked fine, unsurprisingly.

My point in sharing this tale is to show that the beliefs we hold -- in this case, why my printer wasn't working -- are only as good as the evidence the beliefs are based on. I'd fashioned a totally believable story in my mind about how the printer update had messed things up, whereas actually it was me changing the wi-fi network that had caused the problem.

If I'd taken some deep breaths, settled back, and thought about any possible changes I'd made to my laptop, rather than focusing on the change to the printer, I would have saved myself a lot of time and trouble. No amount of reasoning about why the printer wasn't working would have solved the problem, because I wasn't aware of the crucial bit of evidence -- the changed wi-fi network.

But it can be tough to recognize when we're going down the wrong belief path, if we've convinced ourselves that we're on the right path. Evidence can get us back on track, if we're wise enough to collect it, or recognize it.

The iron rule of science is empirical evidence

For thirty-five years I belonged to a religious organization that called itself, among other names, the "science of the soul." I liked this name at first, but eventually I began to wonder if the organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), really understood what science was all about.

After breaking away from RSSB in 2005, I kept asking on this blog if religious believers could provide demonstrable evidence of God, spirit, soul, heaven,  higher realms of reality, or any other supernatural entity.

So far, I've gotten no such evidence. 

Which isn't surprising, because if there was solid evidence of anything supernatural, this would be amazing news. Everyone would be talking about it. Arguments about the validity of religious experience would have an empirical foundation.

Since this hasn't happened, I've become highly dubious of claims that it is possible to have a scientifically-based religion. A book review by Joshua Rothman in the October 5, 2020 issue of The New Yorker, The Rules of the Game: How Does Science Really Work?, helped confirm this attitude of mine.

The book discussed in the review is "The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science" by Michael Strevens. The author is a philosopher of science at New York University. He makes the case that the core of science is something he calls the iron rule.

Here's passages from the review that explain what the iron rule is.

The allocation of vast human resources to the measurement of possibly inconsequential minutiae is what makes science truly unprecedented in history. Why do scientists agree to this scheme?

...Strevens thinks that they do it because they have no choice. They are constrained by a central regulation that governs science, which he calls the "iron rule of explanation." 

The rule is simple: it tells scientists that, "if they are to participate in the scientific enterprise, they must uncover or generate new evidence to argue with"; from there, they must "conduct all disputes with reference to empirical evidence alone."

Compared with the theories proposed by Popper and Kuhn, Strevens's rule can feel obvious and underpowered. That's because it isn't intellectual but procedural.

"The iron rule is focused not on what scientists think," he writes," but on what arguments they can make in their official communications." Still, he maintains, it is "the key to science's success," because it "channels hope, anger, envy, ambition, resentment -- all the fires fuming in the human heart -- to one end: the production of empirical evidence."

Makes sense. Before modern science, Rothman says, thinkers like the ancient Greeks and more recently, Descartes, for example, tried to come up with all-encompassing views of the cosmos that were founded in logic (roughly speaking) rather than evidence. 

Religions always have done this sort of thing, of course. They come up with interesting stories, then package them in holy books like the Bible, Koran, and such. There's a certain internal logic to the stories, but no way to test their truthfulness. 

Thus the value of philosophies, like religions, can be debated without end, because they lack the empirical evidence of modern science. I'm well aware of this, since I've gotten over 61,000 comments on this blog during the 16 years of its existence.

Religiously-minded commenters have been saying the same things for all of those years.

Which is fine. I like philosophical debates as much as anyone, even if there is no end to them. However, I'm also a lover of science -- because science makes progress in finding truths about the world due to its requirement that anyone who makes a truth claim has to provide evidence to back up the claim.

Now, I realize that religious people say that an experience of God or some other supernatural entity can't be proven, since it takes place within the psyche, not anywhere outside. 

OK. But that means a supposed supernatural experience is akin to a dream. It is available only to the person having the experience, and there's no way to tell whether the experience points to a reality outside of the consciousness of that person. 

So religious believers need to stop claiming that what they experience has any sort of objective truth. Like a dream, the reality is in the consciousness of the beholder, not anywhere else.

Christof Koch presents a good analysis of near-death experiences

Are near-death experiences purely physical, or do they provide a glimpse into a mystical realm beyond ordinary awareness? 

The June 2020 issue of Scientific American has an article by Christof Koch that delves into this question. "Tales of the Dying Brain" is well worth a read regardless of how you look upon near-death experiences.

Koch makes clear his basic stance on this subject, one that I heartily agree with.

I accept the reality of these intensely felt experiences.

They are as authentic as any other subjective feeling or perception. As a scientist, however, I operate under the hypothesis that all our thoughts, memories, percepts and experiences are an ineluctable consequence of the natural causal powers of our brain rather than of any supernatural ones.

That premise has served science and its handmaiden, technology, extremely well over the past few centuries. Unless there is extraordinary, compelling, objective evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon this assumption.

Koch then acknowledges the power a near-death experience can have for the person who comes close to dying.

The challenge, then, is to explain NDEs within a natural framework.

As a long-time student of the mind-body problem, I care about NDEs because they constitute a rare variety of human consciousness and because of the remarkable fact that an event lasting well under an hour in objective time leaves a permanent transformation in its wake, a Pauline conversion on the road to Damascus — no more fear of death, a detachment from material possessions and an orientation toward the greater good. Or, as in the case of Hemingway, an obsession with risk and death.

Psychedelic experiences bear a resemblance to NDEs.

Similar mystical experiences are commonly reported when ingesting psychoactive substances from a class of hallucinogens linked to the neurotransmitter serotonin, including psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), LSD, DMT (aka the Spirit Molecule), and 5-MeO-DMT (aka the God Molecule), consumed as part of religious, spiritual or recreational practices.

There's still a lot to learn about near-death experiences. However, Koch makes a case for how they should be viewed.

Modern death requires irreversible loss of brain function. When the brain is starved of blood flow (ischemia) and oxygen (anoxia), the patient faints in a fraction of a minute and his or her electroencephalogram, or EEG, becomes isoelectric — in other words, flat. This implies that large-scale, spatially distributed electrical activity within the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, has broken down.

Like a town that loses power one neighborhood at a time, local regions of the brain go offline one after another. The mind, whose substrate is whichever neurons remain capable of generating electrical activity, does what it always does: it tells a story shaped by the person’s experience, memory and cultural expectations.

Given these power outages, this experience may produce the rather strange and idiosyncratic stories that make up the corpus of NDE reports. To the person undergoing it, an NDE is as real as anything the mind produces during normal waking. When the entire brain has shut down because of complete power loss, the mind is extinguished, along with consciousness. If and when oxygen and blood flow are restored, the brain boots up and the narrative flow of experience resumes.

This is how Koch concludes his piece.

More than 150 years later neurosurgeons are able to induce such ecstatic feelings by electrically stimulating part of the cortex called the insula in epileptic patients who have electrodes implanted in their brain. This procedure can help locate the origin of the seizures for possible surgical removal. Patients report bliss, enhanced well-being, and heightened self-awareness or perception of the external world.

Exciting the gray matter elsewhere can trigger out-of-body experiences or visual hallucinations. This brute link between abnormal activity patterns — whether induced by the spontaneous disease process or controlled by a surgeon’s electrode — and subjective experience provides support for a biological, not spiritual, origin. The same is likely to be true for NDEs.

Why the mind should experience the struggle to sustain its operations in the face of loss of blood flow and oxygen as positive and blissful rather than as panic-inducing remains mysterious.

It is intriguing, though, that the outer limit of the spectrum of human experience encompasses other occasions in which reduced oxygen causes pleasurable feelings of jauntiness, light-headedness and heightened arousal — deep-water diving, high-altitude climbing, flying, the choking or fainting game, and sexual asphyxiation.

Perhaps such ecstatic experiences are common to many forms of death as long as the mind remains lucid and is not dulled by opiates or other drugs given to alleviate pain. The mind, chained to a dying body, visits its own private version of heaven or hell before entering Hamlet’s “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

Humans are animals. Religions should accept this fact.

Frans de Waal has written a fascinating book about animal intelligence, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?"

I'm only a little ways into the book, but what I've read so far has gotten me to thinking about how religions view humans -- as animals, or as a non-animal species?

Here's a passage from the prologue that makes clear how de Waal looks upon this question.

In all this, we love to compare and contrast animal and human intelligence, taking ourselves as the touchstone. It is good to realize, though, that this is an outdated way of putting it.

The comparison is not between humans and animals but between one animal species -- ours -- and a vast array of others. Even though most of the time I will adopt the "animal" shorthand for the latter it is undeniable that humans are animals. 

We're not comparing two separate categories of intelligence, therefore, but rather are considering variation within a single one. I look at human cognition as a variety of animal cognition. 

Naturally this is true. Humans are indeed animals of the primate variety. We're close relatives to chimpanzees, with whom we shared a common ancestor about six million years ago. 

Genetically, we share more than 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos. From this perspective, chimpanzees are mostly human and vice versa. But, in genetics, some changes matter more than others. That 1-plus percent of DNA that differs between our species has obviously led to some fairly significant changes.

Yet religions usually look upon humans as separate and distinct from other animals. Supposedly we are made in God's image, while chimps aren't, even though scientifically-minded religious believers have to grapple with the notion that God created chimps with 98% of our DNA.

As de Waal says in the passage above, there isn't human intelligence and animal intelligence. There is just intelligence, which comes in lots of different forms depending on what a species needs to know in order to survive and prosper. Here's another passage from the book. 

But why stop at the primates when we are considering cognition? Every species deals flexibly with the environment and develops solutions to the problems it poses. Each one does it differently.

We had better use the plural to refer to their capacities, therefore, and speak of intelligences and cognitions. 

This will help us avoid comparing cognition on a single scale modeled after Aristotle's scala naturae, which runs from God, then angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom. 

Comparisons up and down this vast ladder have been a popular pastime of cognitive science, but I cannot think of a single profound insight it has yielded. All it has done is make us measure animals by human standards, thus ignoring the immense variation in organisms' Umwelten [worldview].

It seems highly unfair to ask if a squirrel can count to ten if counting is not really what a squirrel's life is about. The squirrel is very good at retrieving hidden nuts, though, and some birds are absolute experts.

The Clark's nutcracker, in the fall, stores more than twenty thousand pine nuts, in hundreds of different locations distributed over many square miles; then in winter and spring it manages to recover the majority of them.

That we can't compete with squirrels and nutcrackers on this task -- I even forget where I parked my car -- is irrelevant, since our species does not need this kind of memory for survival the way forest animals braving a freezing winter do.

So we need to stop looking at animals as being inferior to humans. They are different from us, not inferior. This is one reason we shouldn't eat them.

I've been a vegetarian for over fifty years, with my last bite of another animal species coming when I looked at a prawn on my plate while I was in college and  realized, "That used to be swimming around in the ocean, enjoying its prawn life, until it was killed so I could eat it." 

At that moment I felt a kinship with my fellow animals that caused me to vow never to eat fish or meat again. Which, I haven't. 

What is versus what might be -- a rationale for atheism

There are several reasons why I'm a proud atheist. For example, atheism is firmly grounded in reality, since there is no demonstrable evidence that a god exists. Hence the "a" before theism. 

Atheism also is humble. I'm not saying that all atheists are humble, just that not believing in a god is inherently humble, since there is no way to feel that you're part of a god's chosen people if you don't believe in a god.

Here's another reason. 

Atheism is focused on what is, not what might be. In contrast, religions have the opposite focus, on what might be rather than what is. Now, obviously this is closely tied to the first reason above, the grounding of atheism in reality.

Mostly I hang out with other atheists. This isn't a conscious choice. It is just a natural outcome of the sort of friends and family I have. They're mostly people who embrace science and facts, in addition to the many other possible things people embrace, like art and politics. 

In our conversations, obviously there is zero talk of what happens after death or an afterlife. Religious believers, though, love to talk about heaven, reincarnation, spending eternity with God, and so on. 

The fact that there's no good reason to believe in this stuff doesn't bother them. Hey, it might be true, and that's good enough for people who value fantasy and wishful thinking over what is -- indisputable reality.

Of course, us atheists, along with everybody else, have to strike a balance between attending to what is versus what might be. Planning for the future is as much a part of being human as living in the now is. They're both essential for a fulfilling life.

To offer up an example from my life, a few days ago I wrote a post on one of my other blogs, "My geeky search for the perfect winter tire." As I said in the post, the first question I faced was whether I should get winter tires for the 2020 Subaru Crosstrek that I bought last February. 

That was easy for me to answer.

My wife and I live in a part of Oregon where it can be snowy or icy in late fall, winter, and maybe even early spring. We don't get a lot of snow and ice, none at all the last two years, but when it happens, it's tough to drive around. We live in the south Salem hills, so some roads, along with our driveway, are steep.

And often the temperature is close to freezing when snow or ice hits. That makes roads more slippery than the dry snow common in the mid-West, which also is quite flat. 

So based on my experience of what has been, a close cousin of what is, I decided to order a set of winter tires yesterday -- a new Michelin model, the X-Ice Snow. I recalled how we haven't been able to get up our driveway in the snow with an all-wheel-drive car that had all-season tires, whereas a front-wheel drive car with winter tires did just fine. So an all-wheel drive car with winter tires will be super-fine.

But it would be crazy for someone to buy winter tires if they lived on a place near the equator where it never has snowed or been icy. In this case the odds of needing winter tires to drive around is close to zero. Possible, but extremely unlikely.

That's comparable to religious people planning for an afterlife when it is extremely unlikely that they'll have one.

There's a cost to religiosity, to acting on the basis of a very low probability of might be. Whereas the cost of winter tires is monetary, the cost of religious belief is using one's limited lifetime for activities that aren't based on clear and present reality.

I'm going to feel good when the winter tires are put on my Crosstrek, because I have a solid factual basis for believing there might be snow or ice in our area in the next four or five months. However, no one has a solid factual basis for believing there might be an afterlife, because those facts don't exist.

They might exist someday, though.

Just as if global warming continues to increase, there could come a time when winter tires are needed in Western Oregon just as much as they're needed now at the equator -- never. Keeping an open mind to new facts enables us to preserve a healthy relationship between what is and what might be.

Here's a passage from a recent issue of New Scientist that bears on this.

One of the special things about science is its inbuilt system of self-correction. There is no such thing as scientific truth, just a set of provisional truths that are subject to revision or rejection when new information comes in. That process isn't always quick or peaceful, but it usually gets an answer in the end. The result is scientific progress.

Don't be proud of losing your self. You never had one.

Today I heard Sam Harris say something interesting, yet rather obvious, in a dialog with Loch Kelly on Harris' Waking Up app.

Basically, Harris said that no one should feel proud of having become selfless through their meditation, because they never had a self to begin with.

The self is a mirage. So teaches Buddhism, and so teaches modern neuroscience. It's akin to the illusion of seeing water ahead on a hot desert road. When you get closer, you realize there's no water there at all. It's a mirage.

I've written quite a bit about the illusion of a self. It's common in some religions, being manifested as the illusion of an enduring soul rather than the equal illusion of an enduring self. 

Hinduism falls prey to this illusion. So does Christianity. By and large, Buddhism doesn't. Nor does Taoism. Here's some of my blog posts on this subject.

Self, no-self...what's the difference?
We humans have selfhood without a self
Not-self a teaching of Buddhism, not Hinduism
The self as illusion
Self/Soul is evolution's trick to make us think "I'm important!"
Spiritual illusions are as deceptive as worldly illusions

I also liked how Harris spoke about the importance of making everyday life the touchstone, or test, of whether you're gaining more equanimity through meditation or some other spiritual practice.

He said that back when he actually had to be someplace at a particular time, before the COVID era did away with a lot of traveling, at times he would get irritated when he was late. Then he'd do something unthinkingly, like break a glass while putting it in the sink. Having to clean the mess up would make him even later. And more irritated.

It's easy to have an inflated sense of spiritual progress when you feel all calm and one with the cosmos while sitting cross-legged on a cushion in the morning with no stressors acting on you.

If you can feel that way when things are going to shit in your life, that's a much stronger sign that your meditation is having some positive effects. 

The coronavirus doesn't care what people think of it

Philosophically, the coronavirus (novel coronavirus, actually, since COVID is a new version) has some interesting aspects. Most obviously, the virus is teaching us something important.

It doesn't give a shit what people think of it. It just does what it is designed to do by evolution -- spread between individuals whenever it has a chance. 

You can't pray your way out of getting it. You can't wish your way out of getting it. You can't positive-think your way out of getting it.

The only way to protect yourself is to avoid contact with the virus. Wear a mask. Physically distance from other people. Wash your hands often. Don't touch your face. You know, familiar advice.

Which a whole lot of Americans are ignoring, along with other clueless people around the world. People who believe they are smarter than a dumb virus, even though it's obvious that from the chart above, the virus has the upper hand in the United States right now.

Americans aren't very scientifically literate. And we have a president, Donald Trump, who takes pride in ignoring science, facts, and experts. 

So this country had a moderate decline in COVID cases after a peak in early April. Then people got complacent, figuring they knew more that public health experts, and now we're suffering from a steep unswing in cases. Also, in deaths.

It isn't a coincidence that the United States also is one of the most religious countries in the world. Denial of facts about the physical world goes hand-in-hand with an embrace of fantasies about God, heaven, and such. Too many Americans consider that belief has a magical power.

Actually, it doesn't. Only in the human mind do beliefs have an influence. Nature couldn't care less what people believe. Nature just does what comes naturally: act in accord with the laws of nature.

The coronavirus is immune to human thought. It can only be controlled by preventing its spread through specific physical actions, not by wishing it away. The same is true of global warming.

What's hugely disturbing is how badly the United States is doing at controlling COVID in comparison to Europe,

That's because we never had a unified national response owing to the incompetence and uncaring'ness of Trump, combined with governors and mayors who failed to maintain stay home/shelter in place orders for a long enough time. 

UPDATE: Just came across this tweet that supports what I said above.

So even though the European Union has more people than the United States, our cases have been skyrocketing whiie Europe only has a modest uptick. 

Perhaps some good will come of this. Maybe it will dawn on Americans that science is our best way of understanding the world around us, not religion or other fantasies. Maybe...

Dalai Lama says, "We must listen to scientists."

Hey, I can dream. It'd be great if our science-denying president, Donald Trump, and his fact-phobic Republican colleagues would pay attention to what the Dalai Lama said in the most recent issue of TIME magazine.

Oh, plus religious people who embrace prayer and faith over positive action and reason. The Dalai Lama is speaking to them also. I've boldfaced the parts of what he said that I particularly liked. 

These are timely sentiments from the Daiai Lama, since the United States is experiencing the highest levels of COVID cases since the pandemic began, and Trump, along with some clueless Republican governors, is ignoring public health experts. The Republican Governor of Georgia has even forbidden cities in that state from requiring masks be worn. Astounding, but true.

We must act as one to preserve our world

This planet is our only home. Environmental experts say that over the next few decades, global warming will reach such a level that many water resources will go dry. So ecology and combatting global warming are very important.

For example, my country, Tibet, is the ultimate source of water in Asia. Rivers including Pakistan’s Indus, India’s Ganges and Brahmaputra, China’s Yellow River, as well as the Mekong, flow from Tibet’s plateau. So we should pay more attention to the preservation of Tibetan ecology. This is not only for the interest of 6 million Tibetans but all people in this region.

In the past, when I was flying over Afghanistan, there were clear signs that what used to be lakes and streams were already dry. I feel that Tibet also may become like that soon. Regarding Tibet’s political matters, I have already retired. But regarding Tibet’s ecology and very rich culture, I’m fully committed.

We human beings have these marvelous, brilliant minds. But we are also the biggest troublemakers on the planet. Now we should utilize our brains with compassion, and a sense of concern. This is why one of my commitments is promotion of deeper human values.

From birth, we rely on others, particularly our mothers. From then, each individual’s existence entirely depends on a community, because we are a social animal. Community is the source of our happiness, so we must take care of the community. So now, in modern times, the concept of humanity is one community. East, west, north, south: everyone is interdependent.

The modern economy has no national bound­aries. Therefore, now we need a sense of oneness of all 7 billion human beings. In the past, many problems were created because of too much emphasis on our differences, such as nationalities and religions. Now, in modern times, that thinking is out of date. We should think about humanity, about the whole world.

We must listen to scientists and specialists. Their voices and knowledge are very important. And religious people should pay more attention to scientists rather than just pray, pray, pray.

In the ancient Nalanda Buddhist tradition, which we Tibetans follow, everything is investigated and not accepted by faith alone. If through reasoning we find some contradiction, even in Buddha’s own words, then we have the right to reject them. From childhood, I was always engaged in a lot of debate. Our thinking was based not in faith but reasoning.

Buddha himself was not born in a palace but under a tree. He attained enlightenment under a Bodhi tree. When he passed, it was under a tree. One of the rules during our monsoon retreat is that we should not cut down anything green. So this shows that Buddha himself paid attention to green issues.

Hours, minutes and seconds: time never stands still. We also are part of that nature. The past is important, but already past. The future is still in our hands, so we must think about ecology at the global level.

Eastern Oregon churchgoers thought Jesus would protect from COVID-19. He didn't.

Here's another in the endless supply of reasons not to be religious. Or, if you want to be religious, to not be a fundamentalist. It destroys your ability to engage in critical thinking.

Meaning, using reason to learn how the world works, and to act in accord with that wisdom.

Oregon, where I live, has done much better than most states during the COVID-19 crisis. In large part that's because we have a Democratic governor, Kate Brown, who put in place a stay at home order early on and has managed reopening in a judicious fashion, allowing counties to relax social distancing rules only if they meet certain guidelines.

In the generally wide open spaces of Eastern Oregon, Covid cases have been minimal. But that changed when a massive outbreak occurred in Union County. 

It didn't take long to figure out that the source of the outbreak was a church that defied public health rules that were in effect. Today the Portland Oregonian has a story about the idiocy of the Lighthouse Pentecostal church.
Download Everything we know about the eastern Oregon church at the center of state’s largest coronavirus outb

Apparently members of the church somehow thought that Jesus, or God, would overrule the laws of nature and virus transmission in favor of their true believing selves.

Well, that blind faith didn't work out well for them. I'd like to think that this will make them put more trust in science and reason than in the fantasies embodied in their Pentecostal teachings, but almost certainly this won't come to pass. 

Here's excerpts from the Oregonian story. 

A church in a small eastern Oregon county linked to the state’s largest coronavirus outbreak held worship services in the weeks before hundreds fell ill.

At least 236 coronavirus cases are tied to Lighthouse Pentecostal Church, near La Grande in Union County. The number of cases in Union County increased tenfold, from 22 to 240, in three days after the outbreak came to light. The outbreak led Union County to voluntarily return to Phase 1 of Gov. Kate Brown’s phased reopening plan — the county had been at Phase 2 when the outbreak happened. There are now 258 coronavirus cases in the county of 27,000 people.

Leaders of Lighthouse Pentecostal Church have remained silent for the most part about the outbreak. Yet social media posts and interviews with other faith leaders shed light on how the church came to be at the center of Oregon’s largest coronavirus outbreak, and how it has responded since.

The church, which operates in Island City near La Grande, has held several gatherings since May that appear to have violated Brown’s restrictions to limit the spread of coronavirus.

In a May 22 Instagram post, Lighthouse Pentecostal Church said it would begin in-person services Memorial Day weekend “in accordance” with President Donald Trump’s demands that states allow churches to open. At the time, Union County was still in Phase 1 of reopening, in which religious groups are not allowed to convene in large groups. The governor allowed faith groups to meet in gatherings of 25 people if congregants stayed a certain distance apart.

A Facebook video uploaded May 24 by the church showed hundreds of worshipers in the church dancing, singing and moving around in close proximity. The video was later deleted.

A faith leader at the church wrote in a Memorial Day Facebook post that he was proud to be an American, listing one of the reasons as being “able to attend church in our building.”

...Pastor Dan Satterwhite, who leads an affiliated Lighthouse Church in Pendleton, pointed to a Bible verse that he said may have guided the decision to hold services in Union County: Hebrews 10:25.

The verse instructs Christians to have personal contact with each other in order to live out the faith they proclaim, Satterwhite said. It tells believers how to help each other move toward love and good deeds, “Not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another — and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

...Before the outbreak, the church’s Facebook page published updates nearly every day. The posts included videos of preachers delivering daily devotionals, livestreams of church services and advertisements of free supplies the church offered to people in need earlier in the pandemic.

The church stopped posting on its public Facebook page Wednesday and has deleted all posts from after June 12. On June 17, it created a private Facebook page.

A person who answered the phone at the church June 15 hung up when The Oregonian/OregonLive asked about the Union County coronavirus outbreak. Every day since, the church has not answered the phone or responded to emails.

Three different leaders of the church declined interviews with The Oregonian/OregonLive.

In a now-deleted daily devotional video published June 16 on Facebook, Pastor James Parker appeared to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I appreciate everybody being cooperative with what was decided and doing your best to help,” Parker said. “In the end, our fruit will show that what we’re doing is the right thing, and more people need to do what we did. The more people that do the right thing, the easier it’s going to be for the rest of the world to combat this pandemic that we’re going through.”

Parker did not further explain what “the right thing” is, and the church did not respond to a request for clarification.

Future of brain research is filled with "or's"

Here's some passages from the "Future" chapter in The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience by Matthew Cobb that I've blogged about recently. (See here and here and here for my previous posts about the book.)

I especially like the passage that begins with "A related view" below. Almost certainly the brain isn't at all like a computer, for reasons Cobb describes. 

I also enjoyed the open-ended possibilities of where brain research is heading that concludes Cobb's book -- the last passage i've shared. 

With science, research can go in many different directions. That's a big appeal of science, how it follows truth wherever it might lead. Dead-ends aren't a failure, since they indicate more productive avenues of knowledge.

Here's the excerpts.

These repeated calls for more theory may be a pious hope. It can be argued that there is no possible single theory of brain function, not even in a worm, because a brain is not a single thing (scientists are even hard put to come up with a precise definition of what a brain is).

As Crick observed the brain is an integrated, evolved structure with different bits of it appearing at different moments in evolution and adapted to solve different problems.

...The nature of the brain -- simultaneously integrated and composite -- may mean that our future understanding will inevitably be fragmented and composed of different explanations for different parts. After all, as Marr put it, the brain is composed of 'a whole lot' of information-processing devices.

...The metaphors of neuroscience -- computers, coding, wiring diagrams and so on -- are inevitably partial. That is the nature of metaphors, which have been intensely studied by philosophers of science and by scientists, as they seem to be so central to the way scientists think.

But metaphors are also rich and allow insight and discovery. There will come a point when the understanding they allow will be outweighed by the limits they impose, but in the case of computational and representational metaphors of the brain there is no agreement that such a moment has arrived.

...A related view of the nature of consciousness turns the brain-as-computer metaphor into a strict analogy. Some researchers view the mind as a kind of operating system that is implemented on neural hardware, with the implication that our minds, seen as a particular computational state, could be uploaded onto some device or into another brain. 

In the way this is generally presented, this is wrong, or at best hopelessly naive. The materialist working hypothesis is that brains and minds, in humans and maggots and everything else, are identical. Neurons and the processes they support -- which somehow include consciousness -- are the same thing.

In a computer, software and hardware are separate; however, our brains and our minds consist of what can best be described as wetware in which what is happening and where it is happening are completely intertwined. 

Imagining that we can repurpose our nervous system to run different programs, or upload our mind to a server, might sound scientific but lurking behind this idea is a non-materialist view going back to Descartes and beyond. It implies that our minds are somehow floating about in our brains and could be transferred into a different head or replaced by another mind. 

It would be possible to give this idea a veneer of scientific respectability by posing it in terms of reading the state of a set of neurons and writing that to a new substrate, organic or artificial.

But to even begin to imagine how that might work in practice, we would need both an understanding of neuronal function that is far beyond anything we can currently envisage and would require unimaginably vast computational power that precisely mimicked the structure of the brain in question.

...Every cell is not like a binary switch that can be turned on or off, forming a wiring diagram. Instead, the main way that the nervous system alters its working is by changes in the pattern of activity in networks of cells composed of large numbers of units; it is these networks that channel, shift, and shunt activity.

...When we extend this insight to understanding the brain, the key implication is that, as the title of a 1997 article strikingly put it, 'The Brain Has a Body.' And the body has an environment, and both affect how the brain does what it does. 

This might seem trivially obvious, but neither the body nor the environment feature in modeling approaches that seek to understand the brain. The physiological reality of all brains is that they interact with the body and the external environment from the moment they begin to develop.

...Animals are not robots piloted by brains, we are all, whether maggots or humans, individuals with agency and a developmental and evolutionary history. Those factors are all involved with how our brains work and need to be integrated into our models.

...The significance of remembering that brains are in bodies can be seen from the way that brains interact with the gut microbiome. 'Germ-free' mice have no microbes living in their gut, and as a result show altered levels of serotonin in the brain and lower levels of anxious behavior. 

The unlikely causal link between microbes and behaviour was shown when the introduction of a normal microbiome into the mice reversed both these effects: fundamental aspects of brain biochemistry can be affected by the microbes that live in the gut.

...Perhaps the various computational projects will come good and theoreticians will crack the functioning of all brains, or the connectomes will reveal principles of brain function that are currently hidden from us.

Or a theory will somehow pop out of the vast amounts of imaging data we are generating.

Or we will slowly piece together a theory (or theories) out of a series of separate but satisfactory explanations.

Or by focusing on simple neural network principles we will understand higher-level organisation. 

Or some radical new approach integrating physiology and biochemistry and anatomy will shed decisive light on what is going on.

Or new comparative evolutionary studies will show how other animals are conscious and provide insight into the functioning of our own brains.

Or models developed to explain simple brains will turn out to be scalable and will explain ours too.

Or the default mode network identified in humans will turn out to be applicable to other animals and to hold the key to overall function.

Or unimagined new technology will change all our views by providing a radical new metaphor for the brain.

Or our computer systems will provide us with alarming new insight by becoming conscious.

Or a new framework will emerge from cybernetics, control theory, complexity, and dynamical systems theory, semantics, and semiotics.

Or we will accept that there is no theory to be found because brains have no overall logic just adequate explanations of each tiny part and we will have to be satisfied with that.

Or --

There's no reason to doubt that the mind is material

Well, today I got to the chapter in The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience that I was most interested in reading. (See here and here for my previous posts about the book.)

Since the author, Matthew Cobb, is exceedingly well informed about past and present history of research on the brain, I was curious what he would have to say about "Consciousness," the final chapter in the Present section of the book.

Not surprisingly, Cobb says there is no reason to doubt that the mind is material, being the brain in action, basically. Below I've shared excerpts from the chapter about this. 

The first excerpt talks about split-brain patients where the corpus callosum that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain is severed to control severe epileptic seizures. This is done rarely now, but was fairly common in 1962 when Bill Jenkins had the surgery.

Jenkins agreed to participate in what turned out to be a decades-long study by Michael Gazzaniga into how Jenkins' brain functioned after the surgery. The details are fascinating. Here's how Cobb sums them up.

These results were simply extraordinary. It was not only the brain of an animal that could be harmlessly split in two -- the same seemed to be true of a human brain, and the human mind. Each half of the brain was, on its own, sufficient to produce a mind, albeit with slightly different abilities and outlooks in each half. From one mind, you had two. Try that with a computer.

Read on for the excerpts dealing with the material nature of the mind.

The brain does not work as two separate halves, but as an integrated whole. In some way we do not understand, consciousness is unitary by nature, but it can be divided in split-brain patients, with the weird results that Gazzaniga and his colleagues have revealed. These differences between the two hemispheres strongly support the general working hypothesis that the mind emerges from the structure of the brain.

Any non-materialist explanation of the mind-brain link, like Eccle's suggestion that the brain somehow 'detects' the non-material mind, has to explain how, when separated, the two hemispheres enable such different minds to appear.

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

Crick's starting point was a materialist assumption that everything we feel and perceive is 'in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules'. As he emphasised, there was no absolute proof of this hypothesis (there still is not), but there is a lot more evidence in support of it than there is for any of the competing views, all of which view mind as non-material.

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

These amazing results contribute to the growing mountain of evidence that our conscious experiences and the activity of our brains are the same thing and suggest that, eventually, the great mystery of how it all works will be solved. As [Patricia] Churchland pointed out:

Even in this century, some philosophers have grandly announced that consciousness, for example, cannot possibly be a property of the human brain. For all the philosophical finger wagging, however, it is more than modestly auspicious that a few milliamps of current applied to the human mACC [midregion of the anterior cingulate cortex] can spawn a complex cascade of feelings, feelings that vanish with cessation of the current ... So far as anyone knows, non-physical souls do not respond to milliamps of current.

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

[David] Chalmers is one of several modern philosophers who have embraced non-materialist explanations of consciousness, claiming that it does not obey the physical laws of the universe, and that new laws of physics will be necessary if we are ever to understand it.

This possibility cannot be logically excluded, but at the moment there is no reason to support this view, beyond frustration at our current perplexity and the desire for something novel.

For scientists to abandon the materialist approach that has got us so far, and which provides experimental tools for investigating mysterious phenomena such as consciousness, we would need far stronger motivations, such as inexplicable experimental results that contradict the materialist working hypothesis.

No such data have been forthcoming.

Memory is material, yet still quite mysterious

Whenever a person claims to have experienced something mystical or supernatural, the memory of that experience which enables them to make the claim is thoroughly material. 

I remember that this thought came to mind while I was reading the "Memory" chapter in Matthew Cobb's fascinating book, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. (See here for my first post about the book.)

But that could be a false memory, though I don't believe it is, since I finished the chapter just a few days ago.

My wife, a retired psychotherapist, learned about false memories during a period in the United States, and maybe elsewhere also, when women, mostly, would recollect being sexually abused as a child in decidedly strange ways, such as at a Satanic ritual.

Eventually it became clear that false memories could be implanted in a person's brain when a counselor, say, would ask leading questions about being abused. 

Since there is no way for us to tell if a memory is true or false other than comparing the recollection to some sort of objective standard, or perhaps by asking others who had the same experience, sometimes accusations against supposed child abusers were made that had no basis in fact.

This is very much in line with what Cobb writes about at the end of his "Memory" chapter, which I've shared below.

The definition of "engram" is: a hypothetical change in neural tissue postulated in order to account for persistence of memory. Here's an explanation of the reference to Penfield. 

At the beginning of the chapter Cobb relates how, from the 1930s onwards, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield carried out hundreds of brain operations in an attempt to relieve chronic debilitating temporal-lobe epilepsy. 

He'd stimulate conscious patients with delicate electrodes to determine what part of the brain was a candidate for removal, if stimulating that part indicated a seizure was imminent.

Cobb writes:

This procedure revealed something rather eerie: sometimes the stimulation led the patient to relive very precise events. These experiences were vivid and detailed, like a waking dream.

... These strange sensations would occur only when the relevant area was being stimulated; if the electrode was removed, or if the patient was told that stimulation was occurring when it was not, nothing happened.

Now, here's how Cobb concludes the "Memory" chapter.

The research on the cellular basis of memory highlights what many psychological studies has previously demonstrated: memory is malleable. It is not simply a recording of ongoing events, it is constructed, and it can be false.

Above all, however, it has a material basis. 

We have found elements of the engram, and it is not like memory on a hard disk in a computer. Biological memory is rich, unreliable and highly interconnected, with access to it taking place via multiple routes, not through a single address.

The link between our ordinary sense of how we remember things and precise memories that could be evoked by Penfield is not clear. 

We do not appear to be perpetually recording our whole lives and yet those experiments reveal that highly specific and apparently inconsequential moments can be recalled, either by some external event, or by the pulse of an electrode.

The engram has given up a few of its most basic secrets, but we are still far from understanding what is happening when we remember.

Our brains might be like a computer in terms of how they sometimes process information, but the way we store and recall our memories is completely different. We are not machines -- or rather, we are not like any machine we have yet built or can currently envisage.

These advances in identifying the physical basis of memory raise the question of how sensory information -- the stuff of memory -- is processed by the brain in the first place.

Memories are held in particular sets of neurons, but that does not explain how the brain is able to work out what is in the world, and what exactly is being remembered. 

The last paragraph is an introduction to the next chapter, "Circuits."

History of ideas about the brain shows how clueless religions are

I've got a new favorite book: The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. It's beautifully written by Matthew Cobb, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester. 

l love reading books about neuroscience, because the brain fascinates me. And indeed, it is me.

No brain, no me. Also, no brain, no you. Without a brain we're nothing. Yes, the body can be kept alive if someone is brain-dead, or nearly so. But there's nobody home inside the body, since the mind is the brain in action, and without a mind there's no conscious awareness.

But I wasn't sure that I'd enjoy this book, since half of it -- the half that I've finished -- deals with the history of how humans have viewed the brain. I was worried that this part would be boring. However, actually it is gripping reading.

What Cobb shows is how over the centuries, thousands of years really, humans have steadily come closer to understanding the brain. The chapter titles in the "Past" section reflect this: Heart, Forces, Electricity, Function, Evolution, Inhibition, Neurons, Machines, Control.

There's little mention of religion in Cobb's book, because religion almost universally either has nothing to say about how reality is, or gets reality wildly wrong. Obviously this makes religious teachings about the brain and consciousness laughably irrelevant. Western and Eastern religions alike were founded in a pre-scientific time when the brain was a mystery.

So it isn't surprising that dualistic notions of the mind or soul being separable from the body were so much in fashion in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and other religions. Ignorance of the brain led people to assume that because consciousness feels ethereal, it actually is.

Now, of course, we know better. No neuroscientist that I'm aware of believes in mind/body dualism. There simply is no evidence in support of dualism, and plenty of evidence in opposition to it.

Which doesn't mean that we in the 21st century fully understand the brain, consciousness, and such. That, I'm pretty sure, is going to be a central theme of the second part of this book that deals with the Present. Chapter titles in this section: Memory, Circuits, Computers, Chemistry, Localisation, Consciousness. 

Being a life-long admirer of science and the scientific method, I'm enjoying Cobb's detailed descriptions of how people (almost entirely men) have looked upon and studied the brain, starting with the 4,000 year old Epic of Gilgamesh and the 3,200 year old Indian Rigveda. Both religious texts viewed the heart as the source of thought -- a view shared by ancient Jews.

Common sense and everyday experience is a lousy substitute for rigorous scientific investigation. Cobb writes:

Heart-centred views correspond to our everyday experience -- the heart changes its rhythm at the same time as our feelings change, while powerful emotions such as anger, lust or fear seem to be focused on one or more of our internal organs, and to course through our bodies and change our way of thinking as though they are transported in, or simply are, our blood.

This is why those old phrases about being 'down at heart' and so on have persisted -- they correspond to the way we perceive an important part of our inner life. Just as with the appearance that the sun goes around the earth, everyday experience of being human provided a simple explanation of where we think -- our hearts. People believed this idea because it made sense.

Of course, that viewpoint appears ridiculously wrong to us today. But Cobb lays out the reasons now-discredited ideas about the brain were held at various points in human history. In retrospect it's easy to see why they were wrong. Yet we need to remember that future humans will look upon how the brain was viewed in 2020 as ridiculously wrong.

That's the beauty of science: it progresses. Sure, often in fits and starts, and sometimes even by going backwards for a while. Cobb shows, though, that over the centuries incorrect ideas about the brain fell out of favor, to be replaced by ideas that were closer to the truth, albeit still incorrect by modern standards. 

As I often note on this blog, religions don't make progress in knowing the truth about reality. Only science does. One big reason for this is that scientists engage in vigorous debate, subjecting competing theories to intense scrutiny, demanding solid evidence for their correctness. Religions, on the other hand, are big on faith and not questioning authority.

Which is why I liked this passage in Cobb's book. I've boldfaced part of it for emphasis. 

Müller had a relatively brief academic career -- he died in 1858, apparently having committed suicide at the age of fifty-seven -- but he attracted a remarkable array of brilliant students and researchers, including some of the greater figures in nineteenth-century science. These included Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Haeckel, as well as less well-known but equally significant individuals such as Rudolf Virchow and Emil du Bois-Reymond.

These young men, imbued by Müller with a taste for applying the methods and outlook of physics to the study of physiology, formed part of the long academic tradition of students trying to prove their teacher wrong. In this case, they rejected Müller's vitalism in favour of a consistently materialist approach. As du Bois-Reymond and Ernst Brücke put it in a manifesto they wrote in 1842: 'no forces operate in the organism other than those common to physics and chemistry.'

That appears to be true. So the students had a better understanding of reality than their teacher did. This also happens when members of a religion break away from it because they've come to realize how false the religion's teachings are.

So a big thumbs-up to science. It's by far our best way of knowing objective reality. When I finish the second part of The Idea of the Brain, I'll write another post about present-day neuroscience.

"We must accept there is no grand design" -- physicist Brian Greene

There's only good news in the final pages of physicist Brian Greene's new book, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe." (See here, here, and here for my previous posts about the book.)

Yes, there's no evidence for a grand design to the cosmos. No god fashioned our universe. The laws of nature didn't spring out of a divine mind. They just are what they are.

Which leads to another positive yes: So, yes, it is up to us to determine the meaning that we find in our otherwise meaningless universe.

Greene urges us to look inward for that meaning, since it won't be found by looking outward. Here's how Greene ends his book.

Whereas most life, miraculous in its own right, is tethered to the immediate, we can step outside of time. We can think about the past, we can imagine the future. We can take in the universe, we can process it, we can explore it with mind and body, with reason and emotion.

From our lonely corner of the cosmos we have used creativity and imagination to shape words and images and structures and sounds to express our longings and frustrations, our confusions and revelations, our failures and triumphs.

We have used ingenuity and perseverance to touch the very limits of outer and inner space, determining fundamental laws that govern how stars shine and light travels, how time elapses and space expands -- laws that allow us to peer back to the briefest moment after the universe began and then shift our gaze and contemplate its end.

Accompanying these breathtaking insights are deep and persistent questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? What sparked the onset of life? How did conscious awareness emerge? We have explored a range of speculations, but definitive answers remain elusive.

Perhaps our brains, well adapted for survival on planet earth, are just not structured for resolving these mysteries. Or perhaps, as our intelligence continues to evolve, our engagement with reality will acquire a wholly different character, with the result that today's towering questions become irrelevant. 

While either is possible, the fact that the world as we now understand it, remaining mysteries and all, holds together with such a tight mathematical and logical coherence, and the fact that we have been able to decipher so much of that coherence, suggests to me that neither is the case.

We are not lacking the brainpower. We are not staring at Plato's wall, unaware of a radically different kind of truth, just beyond reach, with the power to suddenly provide startling new clarity.

As we hurtle toward a cold and barren cosmos, we must accept there is no grand design. Particles are not endowed with purpose. There is no final answer hovering in the depths of space awaiting discovery. Instead, certain special collections of particles can think and feel and reflect, and within these subjective worlds they can create purpose.

And so, in our quest to fathom the human condition, the only direction to look is inward. That is the noble direction to look. It is a direction that forgoes ready-made answers and turns to the highly personal journey of constructing our own meaning. It is a direction that leads to the very heart of creative expression and the source of our most resonant narratives.

Science is a powerful, exquisite tool for grasping an external reality. But within that rubric, within that understanding, everything else is the human species contemplating itself, grasping what it needs to carry on, and telling a story that reverberates into the darkness, a story carved of sound and etched into silence, a story that, at its best, stirs the soul.

A physicist speaks fondly of art and the stories we tell ourselves

Art and science aren't at odds with each other. They are just different ways of understanding the world, friends rather than foes. Many artists love science. Many scientists love the arts. 

The notion that scientists are cold-blooded creatures who only care about objective reality obviously is ridiculous. But some people believe in that ridiculous notion.

So that's why I'm sharing some passages from physicist Brian Greene's new book, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe."

Here's part of what Greene says about art in his book's Instinct and Creativity chapter.

Art may have had adaptive utility directly at the level of the individual, a perspective I find particularly compelling. The arts provide an arena unbounded by the strictures of flat-footed truth and everyday physical reality, allowing the mind to jump and twist and tumble as it explores all manner of imagined novelty.

A mind that assiduously sticks to what's true is a mind that explores a wholly limited realm of possibility. But a mind that becomes accustomed to freely crossing the boundary between what's real and what's imagined -- all the while keeping clear tabs on which is which -- is a mind that becomes adept at breaking the bonds of conventional thinking. Such a mind is primed for innovation and ingenuity.

...I'm partial to the view that sharpening ingenuity, exercising creativity, broadening perspective, and building cohesion provides a template for how the arts mattered to natural selection.

With this perspective the arts join language, story, myth, and religion as the means by which the human mind thinks symbolically, reasons counterfactually, imagines freely, and works collaboratively. Over the sweep of time, it is these capacities that have given rise to our culturally, scientifically, and technologically rich world.

All the same, even if your view of art's evolutionary role veers toward creamy desserts, we can surely agree that myriad forms of art have been a steady and valued presence throughout human history. Which means that inner lives and social exchanges have embraced modes of engagement that do not place a premium on factual information conveyed through language.

...The most arresting art can induce in us rarefied states of mind and body comparable to those reduced by our most affecting real-world encounters, similarly molding and enhancing our engagement with truth.

Discussion, analysis, and interpretation can further shape these experiences, but the most potent do not rely on a linguistic intermediary. Indeed, even for language-based arts, it is the imagery and sensations that, in the most moving experiences, leave the most lasting mark.

As elegantly described by poet Jane Hirshfield, "When a writer brings into language a new image that is fully right, what is knowable of existence expands."

Nobel laureate Saul Bellow speaks too to art's singular capacity for expanding the knowable: "Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides -- the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can't receive."

And without that other reality, Bellow notes, channeling thoughts set down by Proust, existence is reduced to a "terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life."

Survival rests upon amassing information that accurately describes the world. And progress, in the conventional sense of increased control over our surroundings, requires a clear grasp of how these facts integrate into nature's workings. Such are the raw materials for fashioning practical ends.

They are the basis for what we label objective truth and often associate with scientific understanding. But however comprehensive such knowledge may be, it will always fall short of providing an exhaustive account of the human experience.

Artistic truth touches a distinct layer; it tells a higher-level story, one that in the words of Joseph Conrad "appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom" and speaks instead to "our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation... in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear... which binds together all humanity -- the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

...Make no mistake. We are all bags of particles -- both mind and body -- and the physical facts about the particles can fully address how they interact and behave. But such facts, the particulate narrative, shed only monochrome light on the richly colored stories of how we humans navigate the complex worlds of thought, perception, and emotion. 

And when our perceptions blend thought and emotion, when we feel thoughts as well as think them, our experience steps yet further beyond the bounds of mechanistic explanation. We gain access to worlds otherwise uncharted. As Proust emphasized, this is to be celebrated.

Only through art, he noted, can we enter the secret universe of another, the only journey in which we truly "fly from star to star," a journey that cannot be navigated by "direct and conscious methods."

Although focused on the arts, Proust's perspective resonates with my own long-held take on modern physics. "The only true voyage of discovery," he once said, "would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others."

For centuries, we physicists have relied on mathematics and experiment to reshape our eyes, to reveal layers of reality untouched by generations of the past, to allow us to see familiar landscapes in shocking new ways. 

With these tools, we have found that the strangest of lands have emerged by intently examining the very realms we have long inhabited. All the same, to acquire such knowledge and to utilize the power of science more generally, we must follow the unshakable directive to look past the peculiarities of how each of our distinct collections and cells takes in the world, and home in on objective qualities of reality.

For the rest, the all-too-human truths, our nested stories rely on art. As George Bernard Shaw put it, "You use a glass mirror to see your face, you use works of art to see your soul."

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.

Religion is bringing out the coronavirus stupid in people

Not surprisingly, the coronavirus pandemic is causing religious people around the world to turn to superstition, fantasy, and unproven remedies. 

Naturally they'd be much better off if they paid rapt attention to the public health experts who are using science and facts in their advice about how to keep from being infected by the COVID-19 virus.

But religion often brings out the stupid in people. Especially when they're afraid of an unseen menace. Like a virus. Or the devil. The difference being that a virus is real, and the devil isn't, along with God and other imaginary supernatural entities. 

Today the New York Times has an interesting story, "In a Pandemic, Religion Can Be a Balm and a Risk." Below are some passages that focus on the risk of believing untrue things.

As I've frequently said on this blog, I have no problem with religious people believing in crazy stuff -- so long as their craziness doesn't adversely affect others. In other words, keep your weird ideas to yourself.

Unfortunately, dealing with the coronavirus requires that everybody follow recommended public health practices that are based on sound science. Just as with immunizations, if too many people fail to do this, then COVID-19 will keep on infecting more people at an exponential rate. 

So this is a great example of religion being a danger to society. There's no way to pray yourself out of getting the coronavirus. But hand washing and social distancing will help. A lot. 

Here's excerpts from the New York Times story.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Down on earth, the coronavirus outbreak was felling lives, livelihoods and normalcy. A nation-spanning blessing seemed called for. So up went a priest in a small airplane, rumbling overhead at an epidemiologically safe distance from the troubles below, wielding a sacred golden vessel from a cockpit-turned-pulpit.

Before his flight over Lebanon, a soldier at an airport checkpoint asked the Rev. Majdi Allawi if he had a mask and hand sanitizer.

“Jesus is my protection,” said Father Allawi, who belongs to the Maronite Catholic Church. “He is my sanitizer.”

Religion is the solace of first resort for billions of people grappling with a pandemic for which scientists, presidents and the secular world seem, so far, to have few answers. With both sanitizer and leadership in short supply, dread over the coronavirus has driven the globe’s faithful even closer to religion and ritual.

But what is good for the soul may not always be good for the body.

Believers worldwide are running afoul of public health authorities’ warnings that communal gatherings, the keystone of so much religious practice, must be limited to combat the virus’ spread. In some cases, religious fervor has led people toward cures that have no grounding in science; in others, it has drawn them to sacred places or rites that could increase the risk of infection.

In Myanmar, a prominent Buddhist monk announced that a dose of one lime and three palm seeds — no more, no less — would confer immunity. In Iran, a few pilgrims were filmed licking Shiite Muslim shrines to ward off infection. And in Texas, the preacher Kenneth Copeland braided televangelism with telemedicine, broadcasting himself, one trembling hand outstretched, as he claimed he could cure believers through their screens.

...People may have already unknowingly spread the virus in the name of piety.

Despite New York’s recent bans on large gatherings, several large weddings went ahead in Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jewish communities, which have reported a spike in confirmed cases in recent days.

Iran is home both to one of the world’s worst outbreaks and to dozens of major Shiite Muslim shrines, which have remained open to crowds for weeks even as the coronavirus left the country shellshocked.

...India has so far refused to call off an annual festival that starts Wednesday in honor of the god Ram, also known as Rama. In normal times, it draws as many as a million people to Ayodha, which some believe to be the birthplace of Ram, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

The state has asked devotees to celebrate at home this year. Organizers, however, are carrying on.

“People are getting the opportunity to have glimpses of Lord Rama,” said Vinod Bansal, a national spokesman for the group, Vishva Hindu Parishad. “It’s not appropriate to deprive them of this opportunity.”

...Amid the coronavirus anxiety, it was perhaps inevitable that some would interpret the pandemic as a divine missive. What it said was less clear.

Some Egyptian Muslims expressed certainty on social media that God was smiting non-Muslim countries by giving them the virus, apparently unaware that Egypt has registered nearly 200 cases and may have many more uncounted. Some Islamists, especially supporters of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, cast the outbreak as punishment for the Egyptian public’s support of the military takeover that brought the country’s authoritarian leader, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to power in 2013.

Some sought earthly remedies inspired by higher powers.

Video emerged last week of Hindu activists in India drinking cow urine to stave off the coronavirus. At the Lebanese government hospital where infected patients are being treated, a woman recently arrived carrying a mixture of holy water and dirt dug from the mausoleum of Saint Charbel, who is revered among Lebanese Christians. Some Christians were said to be drinking similar solutions as a precaution.

Don't spread false information about coronavirus

Science can be trusted. Though it isn't 100% perfect, science is way better than other ways of knowing -- especially when it comes to the coronavirus, COVID-19. 

I just discovered that a frequent commenter on this blog left several comments on my HinesSight blog that referenced false information from mythical "Stanford board" advice about dealing with the coronavirus. 

That information has been deleted by me. 

Please, COVID-19 is tough enough to fight without people spreading false information about it. Here's the truth.

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

CNN) — Contrary to what some may think, not everything on social media is rooted in fact.

Case in point: A recent viral coronavirus "simple self-check test," which medical experts say is completely inaccurate.

Written on what appears to be the iPhone notes app, the three-part post falsely claims that people can find out whether they have coronavirus simply by holding their breath for more than 10 seconds. If they can hold their breath without coughing, the test claims they don't have the virus.

The post, which began circulating Twitter, Facebook, and emails last week, was falsely credited to a member of the "Stanford Hospital board." Stanford Health Care spokeswoman Lisa Kim told CNN the "dangerous" post is not affiliated with Stanford Medicine and "contains inaccurate information."

Misinformation about COVID-19 symptoms and treatment falsely attributed to Stanford is circulating on social media and in email forwards. It is not from Stanford. Official information from Stanford is available at http://healthalerts.stanford.edu .

To debunk all the false information included in the post, CNN spoke to Dr. Robert Legare Atmar, an infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine.

Myth: Drinking water will protect you from the coronavirus

CLAIM: "If you don't drink enough water more regularly, the virus can enter your windpipe and into lungs."

Whoever penned the post also wrote that people should drink water "every 15 minutes at least" to wash the virus down through the throat and into the stomach, where the acid will supposedly kill the virus.

REALITY: Atmar said there is no evidence from any other respiratory viruses that proves this approach works.

"Even if it worked at all, which it doesn't, people still breathe in from their nose, not just their mouths," Atmar told CNN. "This would still only protect the mouth and not the nose."

Myth: Gurgling water and salt will prevent the coronavirus

CLAIM: "A simple solution of salt in warm water will suffice."

Along with gurgling a water and salt solution, the post also suggested drinking warm water can kill the virus.

REALITY: Based on data from other respiratory viruses, saltwater "would not be expected to work," Atmar said.

By recommending people to drink warm water, the post implies the temperature of the water inactivates the virus, which Atmar said is entirely incorrect.

Myth: If you can hold your breath for 10 seconds, you're OK

CLAIM: "Take a deep breath and hold your breath for more than 10 seconds. If you complete it successfully without coughing, without discomfort, stiffness or tightness, it proves there is no fibrosis in the lungs, basically indicates no infection."

REALITY: Atmar said this is simply "not correct."

"When someone has an acute viral infection it can be difficult to take a deep breath and not cough because the airways are irritated. That's all it means. It doesn't say anything about fibrosis, even though people with fibrosis might struggle doing it. Being able to hold your breath for 10 seconds also doesn't mean someone doesn't have coronavirus."

Myth: If you have a runny nose, it's just a cold

CLAIM: "If you have a runny nose and sputum, you have a common cold. Coronavirus pneumonia is a dry cough with no runny nose."

REALITY: This isn't completely true, Atmar said. A runny nose can be a symptom of the flu, allergies and other illnesses.

And while many patients of the coronavirus do have a dry cough, those with coronavirus pneumonia also have had or could have a productive, or "wet," cough which produces phlegm (sputum), according to Atmar.

Myth: If you have the coronavirus, you'll get pneumonia

CLAIM: "The virus then blends into a nasal fluid that enters the trachea and then the lungs, causing pneumonia." The post also said the virus first infects the throat, which would give patients a sore throat for three to four days before blending into a nasal fluid.

REALITY: This is also not entirely accurate.

The time sequence for coronavirus symptoms vary from patient to patient, and not all patients will have a sore throat, Atmar said. Not everyone with a sore throat has coronavirus, either, and not all coronavirus patients will develop pneumonia.

Myth: Coronavirus patients will experience a drowning sensation

CLAIM: "The nasal congestion is not like the normal kind. You feel like you're drowning.

REALITY: This isn't true.

"That does not sound like any other respiratory virus people are infected with and many patients with coronavirus have not had nasal infection at all," Atmar told CNN.

Myth: By the time a person with coronavirus is hospitalized, their lungs will have experienced fibrosis

CLAIM: "By the time they have fever and/or cough and go to the hospital, the lung is usually 50% fibrosis and it's too late."

Fibrosis is the irreversible scarring of the lung which can lead to respiratory failure.

REALITY: This is totally incorrect.

"This information is extremely alarmist," Atmar said. "Fibrosis only develops in the minority of patients and 80 percent of coronavirus patients experience only the mild symptoms of the disease, so this is incorrect."

The incubation period for coronavirus, Atmar said, is two to 14 days. Symptoms usually begin with five to six days of exposure, with the first week including a cough, sore throat, fever, and muscle aches. Only the minority of patients will experience the second week of severe respiratory symptoms and may be at risk of fibrosis.

While the coronavirus is an issue everyone in the world should be taking seriously, the spread of false information can be both dangerous and deadly.

If you aren't sure if something you are reading about the coronavirus is correct, the best thing to do to is to check with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or your local health department -- not social media.

Physicist Brian Greene talks about the cold, cruel, wondrous universe

Here's an excerpt from a story in the most recent issue of TIME magazine about physicist Brian Greene and his new book, Until the End of Time. (I've ordered it, naturally.)

I get hugely more inspiration from science books like this one, because they're founded in reality, not fantasy, as religious writings are. I've been there and done that. Now, like Greene, I embrace the cold, cruel, wondrous universe.

There's a lot of satisfaction in such neat solutions to head-cracking problems. But there is an equivalent neatness to the ostensibly dispiriting conclusions Greene reaches in his books and in his research: that unhappy business of a cold universe, an insentient universe, of the individual as just a quantum contraption, behaving as a product not of choice but of probabilities and randomness.

It's where the free-will thing comes in: the universe is guided by quantum probabilities, and your "choices" are simply a part of that, the way a local breeze is part of the global weather system.

"My feeling is that the reductionist, materialist, physicalist approach to the world is the right one," Greene says. "There isn't anything else; these grand mysteries will evaporate over time."

But despite such empirical bravado, Greene says more too -- and whether he likes it or not, it's not reductionist, and if it's written in a book like Until the End of Time, it could be written in the Vedas as well.

"Rather than feeling, 'Damn, there's no universal morality,' 'Damn, there's no universal consciousness,'" he says, "how wondrous is it that I am able to have this conscious experience and it's nothing more than stuff? That stuff can produce Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, that stuff can produce the Mona Lisa, that stuff can produce Romeo and Juliet? Holy smokes, that's wondrous."

The rational physicist with the deeply spiritual brother surely meant the holy as just a figure of speech -- but if so, he picked an apt one.

Evolution shows how we are a small twig on the tree of life

Evolution is a scientific fact. Sure, all facts are subject to being proven wrong. But the chance of that happening to evolution is very slim, because the evidence for evolution is so strong.

Since I love to learn about true things, this is why my pre-meditation reading each morning often consists of a science book. I see no reason to pick up a religious book any more, because my eyes have been opened to the falsity of believing in God or other supernatural entities.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Joseph LeDoux's book, "The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains." 

I'm a habitual highlighter of non-fiction books. I supplement my highlighting with notes in the back blank pages found in most books, where I write down the page numbers of subjects I found most interesting, along with a highly personal system of underlining, circles, question marks, arrows, and other notations that remind me of portions of the book that I considered significant.

Here's some passages from the 432 pages in LeDoux's meaty/tofuy book that garnered significant markings. Before each one I'll briefly explain why I liked them.

I heartily agree with LeDoux that conscious awareness is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to goings-on within the human brain, and likely every other kind of brain. We simply have no clue about what most of our 100 billion neurons with their trillions of connections are up to. He writes:

Behavior did not arise to serve the subjective mind. It came about and persists to enhance fitness -- to keep organisms alive and well so that reproduction can occur. 

This perspective puts the behavior of humans and bacteria, and all organisms in between, on a level playing field, one in which consciousness, in the sense that humans mean by the term in everyday life, has a peripheral role in most of the history of life.

If we commit to the very reasonable assumption that over the long course of evolution behavior has mostly been generated by nonconscious systems, and that behavior, even in humans, should be assumed to be nonconsciously controlled unless proven otherwise, the science of behavior would advance much more smoothly.

And, by the same token, so would the science of consciousness. This is the perspective I will take as I guide you on our ascent of the tree of life in the remainder of this book.

One of the most ridiculous things about religions is that they usually consider humans to have been created by God in God's image. This is clearly not true, given the fact of evolution. Like every species, Homo sapiens is different from other forms of life, but not better or worse than those other forms.

Evolution does not create superior or inferior organs or tissues; it created diversity through divergence (not by accumulation of features).

What works in a given environmental situation is determined by natural selection, but as the environment changes, or the group moves to a new niche, new traits become important and previously useful traits can become detriments.

In trying to understand how changes in brains over the course of vertebrate evolution gave rise to our own behavioral and mental capacities, we thus have to take care to climb the vertebrate tree of life without using Edinger's ladder, and also to be cautious not to overinterpret the differences we encounter.

We are newer and different, but not better.

As I have pointed out, we have to guard against anthropocentric tendencies, but also against anthropomorphic ones. In other words, we sometimes attribute too much to other animals, and sometimes to ourselves. We have to find the right balance, which I strive to do in the coming chapters.

However, we humans do possess a marvelously capable brain that has impressive cognitive powers. Yet as LeDoux notes at the end of this passage, human cognition is an outgrowth of capabilities that our evolutionary ancestors possessed.

Our species has survived and thrived not by being bigger, faster, or stronger, but by being clever. We haven't, like most organisms, simply evolved by adapting our Bauplan to the world as it changes; we have used our cognitive abilities to change the world. We do so because we think it might be advantageous to our bodies and way of life, or that it might simply be interesting to tinker with nature.

No other animal, not even our closest primate relatives, can have an idea like building a skyscraper, finding a cure for a disease, composing an opera, or writing a novel, then describe it to a colleague, plan how to execute it, and carry it out.

That human cognition is unique in no way means we are better or more entitled than our ancestors or animals with which we currently share the planet. It just means we are different. Unique though it may be, human cognition emerged by building on cognitive capabilities possessed by our mammalian ancestors.

There's zero evidence to support the idea of a conscious soul separate from the physical brain. Consciousness is one aspect of the brain in action, not something ethereal or supernatural. Research on split-brain patients proves this, since basically their consciousness is divided into two parts -- which couldn't happen if a unitary soul was the source of consciousness.

Because language is usually controlled by the left hemisphere, split-brain patients are able to give verbal reports about information presented to the right half of visual space, which is preferentially seen by the left hemisphere, but cannot name stimuli in the left half of visual space, which is seen by the right hemisphere

They can, however, respond nonverbally to the stimuli seen by the right hemisphere, by pointing toward or grabbing objects with the left hand, which is preferentially connected to the right hemisphere. Similarly, when blindfolded, these subjects can name objects placed in their right hand, but not objects placed in their left hand.

Such findings showing that conscious experience can be isolated in a specific part of the brain by cutting axonal connections provided compelling evidence for something that scientists long believed but could not prove: namely, that consciousness depends on the brain's neural circuits, and is not, as Descartes had said, associated with a separate, nonphysical, soul.

I'm completely open to the fact that people have religious and mystical experiences, in part because I've had those experiences myself. (This doesn't make those experiences objectively true, of course.) But science teaches us that it is wise to be cautious about trusting the accuracy of accounts of any experience recounted by memory, since the brain engages in top-down reformulations of the memory every time it is remembered.

As Gerald Clore, Daniel Kahneman, and others have noted, the closest we ever come to the truth of experience is when we are in the experience. Everything that happens later is a top-down reinterpretation of the memory of the original experience.

In therapeutic situations, such revisionist histories can be revealing of one's psychological tendencies and proclivities, but they can never be as true to a past experience as the experience itself was in real time. The mere act of retrieving a memory can, through the process of memory reconsolidation, change the nature of the memory (this is a natural process through which memories are changed after retrieval, requiring restorage).

The longer the amount of time that passes between the actual experience and the memory of it, the greater opportunity to revise and reconsolidate it upon retrieval of the remembered narrative.

Here LeDoux repeats his contention that we humans are different, not special. We are part of a four-billion-year process of evolution that continues to this day, and will keep on for as long as life exists on Earth. 

Our survival circuits connect us to the survival history of organisms with nervous systems. And the universal survival strategies that survival circuits and behaviors tactically implement connect us to the entire history of life. Separation of the history of emotions and other states of consciousness from the deep history of survival circuits allows us to see our place in this ancient story.

Like all other species, we are special because we are different. Our differences are important to us because they are ours. But they are mere footnotes in a four-billion-year-old saga. Only by knowing the whole story can we truly understand who we are, and how we came to be that way.

Woman who doesn't feel pain shows mind-body connection

I'm 71. I've experienced a lot of pain and anxiety in my life, as has everyone. Well, almost everyone. Because a 72 year old woman who lives in the Scottish Highlands says she has never felt pain or anxiety, and scientists are making progress at learning why.

I learned about Joanne Cameron via a fascinating article in a recent issue of The New Yorker, "A World Without Pain." Here's how it starts out.

Joanne Cameron

We like to think that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, or more resilient, or . . . something. Deeper. Wiser. Enlarged. There is “glory in our sufferings,” the Bible promises. “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” In this equation, no pain is too great to be good. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars,” Dostoyevsky wrote. “The deeper the grief, the closer is God!”

We atheists get in on the action by insisting that the agony of loss elucidates the worth of love. The hours spent staring into the dark, looping around our own personal grand prix of anxieties, are not a waste of time but a fundamental expression of our humanity. And so on. To be a person is to suffer.

But what if our worst feelings are just vestigial garbage? Hypervigilance and pricking fear were useful when survival depended on evading lions; they are not particularly productive when the predators are Alzheimer’s and cancer. Other excruciating feelings, like consuming sadness and aching regret, may never have had a function in the evolutionary sense.

But religion, art, literature, and Oprah have convinced us that they are valuable—the bitter kick that enhances life’s intermittent sweetness. Pain is what makes joy, gratitude, mercy, hilarity, and empathy so precious. Unless it isn’t.

“I know the word ‘pain,’ and I know people are in pain, because you can see it,” Joanne Cameron, a seventy-two-year-old retired teacher, told me, in the cluttered kitchen of her century-old stone cottage in the Scottish Highlands. Cameron has never experienced the extremes of rage, dread, grief, anxiety, or fear. She handed a cup of tea to Jim, her husband of twenty-five years, with whom she’s never had a fight. “I see stress,” she continued, “and I’ve seen pain, what it does, but I’m talking about an abstract thing.”

Because of a combination of genetic quirks, Cameron’s negative emotional range is limited to the kinds of bearable suffering one sees in a Nora Ephron movie. If someone tells Cameron a sad story, she cries—“easily! Oh, I’m such a softie.” When she reads about the latest transgression by Boris Johnson or Donald Trump, she feels righteous indignation.

“But then you just go to a protest march, don’t you? And that’s all you can do.” When something bad happens, Cameron’s brain immediately searches for a way to ameliorate the situation, but it does not dwell on unhappiness. She inadvertently follows the creed of the Stoics (and of every twelve-step recovery program): Accept the things you cannot change.

It's endlessly fascinating to me how the mind and body are so intimately connected.

Of course, the mind is the brain in action, and the brain obviously is part of the human body, so in that sense it isn't surprising at all that the "genetic quirks" mentioned above allow Cameron to go through life in such a blissful fashion.

Some people spend years, decades, or an entire lifetime trying to achieve through meditation and other practices what Cameron has been able to achieve simply by virtue of her genetic inheritance.

This shows that notwithstanding unsubstantiated claims about human consciousness being something immaterial and separable from the body, there's plenty of solid evidence that we are physical beings living in a physical world.

I was tempted to also say, end of story, but that wouldn't have been true. There's so much complexity in the brain, including how the brain interacts and communicates with other parts of the body, that it will be a very long time, if ever, before we understand all of the mysteries of human experience.

Being a fan of marijuana, which is legal here in Oregon, I found this part of The New Yorker article interesting.

Cameron does not have neuropathy: she can feel all the sensations the rest of us do, except pain. The most striking difference between her and everyone else is the way she processes endocannabinoids—chemicals that exist naturally in every human brain. Endocannabinoids mitigate our stress response, and they bind to the same receptors as the THC in the kind of cannabis you smoke.

Normally, they are broken down by an enzyme called fatty acid amide hydrolase, or faah. But Cameron has a mutation on her faah gene that makes the enzyme less effective—so her endocannabinoids build up. She has extraordinarily high levels of one in particular: anandamide, whose name is derived from the Sanskrit word for “bliss.”

About a third of the population has a mutation in the faah gene, which provides increased levels of anandamide. “That phenotype—low levels of anxiety, forgetfulness, a happy-go-lucky demeanor—isn’t representative of how everyone responds to cannabis, but you see a lot of the prototypical changes in them that occur when people consume cannabis,” said Matthew Hill, a biologist at the University of Calgary’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute, who was a co-author of the Cameron paper.

The faah gene, like every gene, comes in a pair. People who have the mutation in one allele of the gene seem a little high; people who have it in both even more so. Jo Cameron is fully baked.

It could be that one day, after much more research, scientists will be able to concoct a drug that mimics what comes naturally to Cameron: a pain and anxiety free life.

However, there's a valid argument that this wouldn't be desirable, since pain and anxiety have some useful functions. 

I asked Matthew Hill—a renowned expert on cannabinoids and stress—if there was any downside to Cameron’s biology, and he laughed out loud. “Yes! From an evolutionary perspective, it would be tremendously destructive for a species to have that,” he said. Without fear, you drown in waves that you shouldn’t be swimming in; you take late-night strolls in cities that you don’t know; you go to work at a construction site and neglect to put on a hard hat.

“Her phenotype is only beneficial in an environment where there is no danger,” Hill asserted. “If you can’t be concerned about a situation where you’d be at risk of something adverse happening to you, you are more likely to put yourself in one. Anxiety is a highly adaptive process: that’s why every mammalian species exhibits some form of it.”

The New York Times had a story about Cameron in March 2019, "At 71, She's Never Felt Pain or Anxiety. Now Scientists Know Why." It's shorter than The New Yorker piece and also is well worth a read. Here's an excerpt.

In retrospect, she sees how her genetic disposition may have aided her at work. After years as a primary-school teacher, she retrained to work with people with severe mental disabilities. Erratic, aggressive behavior never riled her, she said.

But though having this mutation may sound like a dream, there are downsides. One is that she is quite forgetful; prone to losing her keys and her train of thought midsentence. The other is that she’s never felt the “adrenaline rush” that other people talk about, she said.

Why science can be trusted

I'm an admirer of science.

My mother played a big part in fostering this when, in my childhood years, she bought me science kits, chemistry sets, and the like. I fondly remember cramming a card table into my bedroom closet, putting a light bulb over the clothing rod, and happily conducting experiments in my very own "laboratory."

Our home also featured a subscription to Scientific American, which I still get, along with the British science magazine, New Scientist. I rarely read religious or spiritual books anymore, because I'd rather learn about reality instead of myths.

But until I finished reading Naomi Oreskes book, Why Trust Science?, I hadn't given much thought to why science has been so effective in learning truths about the world.

Often on this blog I've extolled the virtues of the scientific method. However, early on in her book, Oreskes -- who is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University -- dispelled this as a reason for why science works so well. She writes:

There is no identifiable (singular) scientific method. And if there is no singular scientific method, then there is no way to insist on ex ante [before the event] trust by virtue of its use.

OK. I'll agree with a Harvard historian of science on this point, since obviously she knows much more about the scientific method, or lack thereof, than I do. 

By the way, some Googling of my own blogs revealed that in 2012 I'd written about Oreskes' previous book, Merchants of Doubt, which is about how mercenary scientists aided tobacco and chemical companies in hiding the scientific truth about the products they were peddling, something that is happening now with the fossil fuel industry's attempts to make global warming denialism look reasonable.

So if the scientific method isn't why we should trust science, what is?

This quotation from Why Trust Science? provides an overview of Oreskes' argument. Which basically is that, as the book jacket says, "the trustworthiness of scientific claims derives from the social process by which they are rigorously vetted."

My arguments require a few caveats. Most important is that there is no guarantee that the ideal of objectivity through diversity and critical interrogation will always be achieved, and therefore no guarantee that scientists are correct in any given case.

The argument is rather that, given the existence of these procedures and assuming they are followed, there is a mechanism by which errors, biases, and incompleteness can be identified and corrected. In a sense, the argument is probabilistic: that if scientists follow these practices and procedures, they increase the odds that their science does not go awry.

Moreover, outsiders may judge scientific claims in part by considering how diverse and open to critique the community involved is. If there is evidence that a community is not open, or is dominated by a small clique or even a few aggressive individuals -- or if we have evidence (and not just allegations) that some voices are being suppressed -- this may be grounds for warranted skepticism.

Oreskes gives examples of where science seemingly has gone wrong. However, it turns out that these examples of bad science actually prove her thesis, because in each case there wasn't a genuine consensus among a scientific community -- just a small number of scientists who loudly claimed that something was true which later turned out to be false.

For example, in 1873 Edward H. Clarke, an American physician, argued against the higher education of women because it would cause their ovaries and uteri to shrink, thereby adversely affecting their fertility. Female physicians argued against this at the time, but since most doctors back then were male, Clarke's ideas were given more credence that they deserved.

Thus Oreskes persuasively argues that diversity in a scientific community is important if scientific findings are to be given a rigorous examination that will make them more likely to be defensible.

Our personal experiences -- of wealth or poverty, privilege or disadvantage, maleness or femaleness, heteronormativity or queerness, disability or able-bodiedness -- cannot but influence our perspectives on and interpretations of the world. Therefore, ceteris paribus [all other things being equal], a more diverse group will bring to bear more perspectives on an issue than a less diverse one.

...Put another way: objectivity is likely to be maximized when there are recognized and robust avenues for criticism, such as peer review, when the community is open, non-defensive, and responsive to criticism, and when the community is sufficiently diverse that a broad range of views can be developed, heard, and appropriately considered.

...The key point here is that often "assumptions are not perceived as such." They are so embedded as to go unrecognized as assumptions, and this is most likely to occur in homogeneous communities.

Of course, religious communities rarely exhibit any of the qualities that make science so successful. 

By nature, they are closed, not open. They resist criticism, viewing faith as superior to reasoned argument. They are defensive when their belief system is challenged. And religions are notably reluctant to change their views. 

On the other hand, says Oreskes:

When we observe scientists, we find that they have developed a variety of practices for vetting knowledge -- for identifying problems in their theories and experiments and attempting to correct them.

While these practices are fallible, we have substantial empirical evidence that they do detect error and insufficiency. They stimulate scientists to reconsider their views and, as warranted by evidence, to change them. This is what constitutes progress in science.