Church of the Churchless

Science touches reality. Religion only touches the human mind.

"We've got to get out of our own heads." I really liked this observation by Michael Shermer near the beginning of a podcast interview featuring him and Philip Goff.

Shermer was speaking about how Eben Alexander claimed he went to heaven while in a coma, but actually there's solid evidence that he didn't. Heaven was just a place he made up in his head.

Also, Shermer notes that Sam Harris, the noted atheist neuroscientist, writes in one of his books about taking MDMA (ecstasy) that led to a rather similar mystical experience. Except, Harris never claimed to have experienced a reality outside of his own head, which shows he's much more honest than Alexander.

What I love about science is that it is dedicated to understanding reality as it exists outside of our heads. Yes, science also studies what goes on inside the human brain, but almost always this occurs largely, or entirely, as an effort to comprehend reality as it is, not merely as the human mind considers it to be.

Religion and mysticism, on the other hand, are thoroughly mental pursuits.

Believers in religion or mysticism never get outside of their own heads. They live in a world of concepts, imagination, and other forms of subjective experience. They're never able to demonstrate that they've contacted a reality which isn't the world in which we all live, yet they claim that such exists.

Which gets me to a passage from my new favorite book (until Amazon delivers another book I like even better).

"The Order of Time" by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli is both marvelously written and scientifically fascinating. I started reading it this morning and didn't want to put it down -- but had to so I could go to coffee with a friend, where, not surprisingly, I brought the book and talked about it with him.

Rovelli is an expert on time, which is one of the most mysterious subjects in science.

I'll write more blog posts about the book when I'm further into it. Rovelli does a better job of explaining relativity theory in a way that I can understand and remember than any other book I've read that addresses this subject. And I've read a lot of them.

Anyway, below is a passage from one of the first chapters that I liked a lot.

Rovelli speaks about how scientists often start by coming to an understanding of reality that can't yet be confirmed by observation. In other words -- Einstein is a great example of this -- an understanding begins within the scientist's own head, yet eventually is confirmed by objective reality.

He also observes how things that seem self-evident often are overturned by science. When was the last time, or heck, a first time, religion has done this? Answer: never.

Reading Rovelli's book this morning, I felt embraced by the warm glow of reality, a feeling that wasn't all due to the coffee I was drinking. I find it tough to read books about religion or mysticism these churchless days because they just seem so insubstantial. Like I said, they're all about ideas, concepts, fantasies, imagination. 

I love science because I love reality.

Science gets me out of my own head into the world that exists whether or not I do. Sure, I still meditate after I read for a while, and I enjoy the sense of exploring the nooks and crannies of my psyche. But science books like "The Order of Time" are where I find the most inspiration, mystery, and wonder -- not in so-called spiritual books.

Here's the Rovelli quotation: 

The ability to understand something before it's observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.

In antiquity, Anaximander understood that the sky continues beneath our feet long before ships had circumnavigated the Earth. At the beginning of the modern era, Copernicus understood that the Earth turns long before astronauts had seen it do so from the moon.

In a similar way, Einstein understood that time does not pass uniformly everywhere before the development of clocks accurate enough to measure the different speeds at which it passes.

In the course of making such strides, we learn that the things that seemed self-evident to us were really no more than prejudices.

It seemed obvious that the sky was above us and not below; otherwise, the Earth would fall down. It seemed self-evident that the Earth did not move; otherwise it would cause everything to crash. That time passed at the same speed everywhere seemed equally obvious to us... Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes.

Humankind as a whole does the same.

Stephen Hawking asks "Is there a God?" (Spoiler alert: No.)

Being a big fan of both science and Stephen Hawking, naturally I had to buy his last and most recent book, "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," which was published after he died this year.


So far I've only read up through the first two questions, "Is there a God?" and "How did it all begin?" Since Hawking was an atheist, you can predict what the answers are. But I'll save the details for later in this post.

First, I want to acknowledge Hawking's amazing courage and commitment to truth. He talks about the progression of his ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), which eventually left him only able to control his cheek movements -- but through technology he still was able to communicate via this means. 

I found this paragraph deeply moving.

My illness seemed to progress rapidly. Understandably, I became depressed and couldn't see the point of continuing to research my PhD, because I didn't know if I would live long enough to finish it. But then the progression slowed down and I had a renewed enthusiasm for my work. After my expectations had been reduced to zero, every new day became a bonus, and I began to appreciate everything I did have. While there's life, there is hope.

And in case you're wondering, yes, Hawking was an atheist until the moment he died. Apparently there are rumors to the contrary, but those are false. Like so many other atheists, Hawking found meaning in life without the fantasy of God. 

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist,” Hawking said of the meaning of life. “Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”

Here's how Hawking starts off the chapter in his book that addresses the Is there a God? question. 

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion. Religion was an early attempt to answer the questions we all ask: why are we here, where did we come from? Long ago, the answer was almost always the same: gods made everything.

The world was a scary place, so even people as tough as the Vikings believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses. Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science.

Hawking then makes clear what his overall attitude toward God is.

I do not want to give the impression that my work is about proving or disproving the existence of God. My work is about finding a rational framework to understand the universe around us. For centuries, it was believed that disabled people like me were living under a curse that was inflicted by God. Well, I suppose it's possible that I've upset someone up there, but I prefer to think that everything can be explained another way, by the laws of nature.

This is key.

The laws of nature are universal. So far, it appears that they operate the same way in every corner of the universe. Further, even though many religious people believe in miracles that supposedly defy the laws of nature, there is no demonstrable evidence that miracles exist, either now or in the past.

Thus where is the need for God, if the laws of nature are sufficient to understand the universe? (This understanding is incomplete, and likely always will be; however, science is by far our best means of comprehending the cosmos, since religion does a terrible job with this.)

Hawking then discusses scientific theories about the origin of the universe, as the Beginning of Everything appears to be the only area where religion might have something to say, since the laws of nature do a good job of explaining the current state of the universe.

He writes:

At the moment of the Big Bang, an entire universe came into existence, and with it space. It all inflated, just like a balloon being blown up. So where did all this energy and space come from? How did an entire universe full of energy, the awesome vastness of space and everything in it simply appear out of nothing?

Interestingly, because this was an idea that either I hadn't come across before, or failed to understand properly, Hawking describes how right now the universe is still "nothing" in terms of matter/energy. So nothing became another form of nothing via the Big Bang.

This is an easy to grasp metaphor.

Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the universe. To make this hill he digs a hole in the ground and uses that soil to dig his hill. But of course he's not just making a hill -- he's also making a hole, in effect a negative version of the hill. The stuff that was in the hole has now become the hill, so it all perfectly balances out.

That negative energy now is in space. The positive energy is in mass and energy that comprises stars, galaxies, us. Again, nothing has become nothing in a different form. Hawking says the only question is "What could cause the spontaneous appearance of a universe?"

Here's his answer, which is based on the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity theory.

The laws of nature tell us that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance, like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang. Nothing.

The explanation lies back with the theories of Einstein, and his insights into how space and time in the universe are fundamentally intertwined. Something very wonderful happened to time at the instant of the Big Bang. Time itself began.

Hawking concludes his Is there a God? chapter with this:

When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn't exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It's like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth -- the Earth is a sphere that doesn't have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it's my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.

This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust.

But there's a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that I am extremely grateful.

Now, to my knowledge Hawking doesn't address a question that I love to ponder, but which I admit may be an artifact of the limited human mind: Why is there something rather than nothing?

As we've seen, Hawking says that actually there is still nothing, even though our universe sure appears to be something, since the positive mass/energy is balanced out by the negative energy of space.

However, seemingly there had to be laws of nature within this nothing to allow that balancing to occur. And laws of nature aren't nothing at all, but something within nothing.

I suspect that Hawking looked upon Why is there something rather than nothing? as an uninteresting philosophical question, since there doesn't appear to be any way to answer it, even in theory. The question boggles the mind, but this probably is because our human minds are used to causes and effects happening within time.

If the cosmos always has existed, this takes us outside of time. And also seemingly outside of eternity. We're into a realm of "is'ness" beyond our capacity to envision. As I've noted many times before on this blog, it appears that something must have always existed. 

Religious people typically term this something God. Scientific people typically term this something the laws of nature that allow things to come from nothing. Either way, we're left with mystery, awe, the grand design of the universe which was Stephen Hawking's life work.

Like God, there's also no evidence for a dragon in your garage

Good arguments against the existence of God and the supernatural are worth sharing twice. So here's what I shared a few years ago in "No dragon in the garage. Also, no God in heaven."

This morning I came across this excellent rebuttal to those who ask atheists like me to prove that God doesn't exist in the course of re-reading Paul Singh's book, "The Great Illusion."

As I repeatedly point out on this blog, the burden of proof is on those who claim that God does exist. This should be obvious, but sometimes obviousness needs to be conveyed via an analogy to those who refuse to see the obvious.

Since there's no evidence of a dragon in anybody's garage, fantasized garage-dwelling dragons have no effect on the world or any people other than those who believe they exist. They are a non-entity for everybody else who understands how crazy it is to believe that dragons can inhabit garages.

Likewise, since there's no evidence of God or the supernatural, a belief that these entities exist leads to absolutely no difference to the world or to anyone who doesn't believe in these fantasies. Meaning, a world without a belief in God looks exactly the same as a world with a belief in God.

Again, the only difference a false belief makes is in those whose mind holds the belief.

Sure, some people feel a need to point out the falsity of beliefs, just as fact checkers feel a need to point out the many lies of Donald Trump. But otherwise, a belief in something that doesn't exist has no effect on the world, since that thing doesn't exist except as a mental concept.

(Trump lies do exist, so they have an effect on the world.)

Here's how Singh explains this Carl Sagan analogy.

Carl Sagan's tale of "A fire breathing Dragon lives in my garage" is a perfect example of how those who make scientifically unfalsifiable claims try to shift the burden of proof to others by special pleading at every step of the way.

Someone tells you there is a dragon in his garage. So you take a look in the garage and you don't see any dragon. He tells you the dragon is invisible.

So you decide to spread some flour on the garage floor to detect the dragon's foot prints, but there are none. And so it goes. Your friend will always have an excuse as to why there is no evidence that there is a dragon in his garage.

You tell your friend that there is no evidence that there is a dragon in his garage. But he tells you that you can't prove there isn't. And he is right, you can't prove there isn't a dragon in the garage.

But that is precisely the point of Sagan's tale. The burden of proof is not on you to prove anything. The burden of proof is on the person who makes the claims about the dragon. It is his responsibility to provide evidence for the dragon.

And he can't provide any because there isn't any. And you can't prove his claim wrong because his claim is unfalsifiable. And it is unfalsifiable because it makes no predictions about what you will perceive when you look in the garage. 

Such unfalsifiable claims are nonsense.

This is how all superstition, pseudo-science, and religion works. Believers in such things make extraordinary claims that cannot be falsified. And when they are forced to admit that they don't have any evidence to support their claims, they respond by saying that you cannot prove that they are wrong.

But, again, the burden of proof is on the person making the extraordinary claim about miracles or UFOs or whatever to provide evidence for their claim. The burden of proof is not on the other person to prove them wrong -- something that is absolutely impossible to do given that their claim is unfalsifiable.

The take home lesson is that we should never believe a claim to be true simply because no one can prove it to be false. Theologians are experts at this kind of nonsense. 

Are delusional people making things up? Evidence shows that the human brain is universally delusional in many ways and therefore people who promote superstitions are not particularly more delusional than the rest of us.

It is just that examples of religious delusions are rather classic examples of how the brain creates illusions and delusions. The use of logic and scientific skepticism is a skill that can be used to overcome the limitations of our own brains. 

This skill is like any other skill such as learning to play the piano. It involves training in metacognition as well as basic education in all basic sciences.

Modern science is more mystical than ancient mysticism

For many years, about 37, I was deeply attracted to mysticism. One of the reasons was that I loved how mystic teachings taught the self was an illusion and our sense of free will masked God's overarching control over all things, including human actions.

But gradually I realized the downsides of mysticism. There was no demonstrable evidence that God or anything supernatural existed. And my love of science eventually led me to embrace reality, rather than religion -- of which mysticism is an offshoot.

Now, though, I've come to a pleasing conclusion: modern science actually is more mystical than ancient mysticism, so scientific reality contains a big part of what I found so appealing in supernaturalism.

I've started re-reading Paul Singh's fascinating book, "The Great Illusion: The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self." I was drawn to do this after seeing a mention of the book in a recent comment on one of my posts,  which caused me to order a copy from Amazon.

When the book arrived, it looked familiar.

Indeed, it didn't take me long to find a highly highlighted copy on a bookshelf. So I'm going to give the new Amazon copy to my wife for sharing with members of an atheist/freethinkers discussion group she's organized here in Salem, Oregon.

I decided to re-read the book even though I'd written several blog posts about it in 2016:
No dragon in the garage. Also, no God in heaven.
Free will exists. Freedom of the will doesn't.

I've found that because my views on science, the world, and reality keep evolving (good thing!), often I'll get fresh insights from a book I've enjoyed even if I read it fairly recently. 

Such is happening already with The Great Illusion after re-reading only the Preface and the first chapter, Only God's Will. What struck me today is how modern science is able to dispel illusions (maya, if you like) in a much more powerful and convincing way than mysticism.

Here's how Paul Singh describes himself:

Paul Singh is a biochemist, mathematician, surgeon-physician, and a urogynecologist. He is a scholar of eastern and western intellectual traditions. He is a professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the College of Medicine at the University of Science, Arts and Technology at Montserrat, British West Indies.

And here's some excerpts from his book about how us humans are deceived about the true nature of free will and the self:

My lifelong research has confirmed what modern science has shown -- that free will, consciousness, and the self are illusions... Consciousness is any qualitative first-person experience. The feelings that you get when you pinch yourself, drink a glass of water, or feel bored are examples of consciousness.

Consciousness is certainly a fact (you who are reading this sentence are obviously conscious at this moment), but modern brain research suggests very strongly that consciousness cannot exist without a brain.

...Although it is correct to say that we have barely touched upon the perplexing complexity of the human brain, we have come far enough in our understanding that we can declare with confidence that these three entities -- free will, consciousness, and the self -- do not have any independent existence of their own independent of the human brain. 

Their illusory existence is dependent upon the brain just like a mirage is dependent upon the brain and possesses no independent reality of its own. 

Singh then talks about how evolution has given rise to our sense of individual identity, which includes the false notion of "souls" or "spirits" that supposedly enable our identity to live on even after the death of the physical body. Of course, religious and mystical beliefs also are products of the brain. So the brain generates the illusion that consciousness can exist without the brain.

It's impossible to escape from this hall of mirrors by any means other than modern science. Singh writes:

First, the beliefs, that have been found to be illusions by science, are essential for human survival. Since we cannot think any other way than to believe that we are, somehow, independent of our bodies, such a belief must have played an important role in our evolutionary past.

We don't know where the "I" or "self" resides, but we all feel there is such a self. That is what led philosophers for thousands of years to think there is a "ghost in the machine." Ancient Hindus wrote thousands of treatises on this subject and they are still writing them today. But science has demonstrated that these philosophers and religious thinkers were all wrong.

What scientists discover through the scientific method is often counter-intuitive. In the absence of science, we often draw unwarranted conclusions, based on simple observations, frequently mixing our emotions with our observations... The brain determines subjective experience in exactly the same way it determines all other bodily functions. 

...We like to think of ourselves as being something other than our bodies, but actually, as modern science has shown, we are our bodies, You are your body; you wouldn't be you without your body wired together with your brain. Without your brain, you wouldn't be you. 

Everything about you as a person can be explained by what goes on in your brain. Who you are and what you are like, all of your emotions and every one of your ideas, how you think and what you think about, and our own personal story, come from your brain. You would have no idea of your own existence without your brain.

The body you will leave behind when you die will carry your name, because it was your body, and not someone else's. The very possibility of imagining that you can float free of your body is conceivable only because it is your brain that thinks these things. 

...Your inner self, your soul, and the god you worship are nothing else but your own brain interconnected with the rest of your body.

So what's the way out of this brain maze, which sometimes leads us to a correct understanding of reality, yet also leads us astray when it comes to believing in God, soul, spirit, free will, life after death, and the nature of consciousness? Science!

The brain doesn't have the job of "speaking up" and revealing what it does, and the conscious awareness that the brain does produce cannot automatically seem organic or even physical. Only through studying the brain scientifically can we explain why we aren't normally alerted to innumerable details about what our brains are doing as we go about living our lives.

In a way, projecting what is sensed and thought into an alternative sort of reality was something that the human brain had to do as intelligence grew. 

...Because science arrived late to the human scene, non-scientific explanations had plenty of time to get entrenched in so many stories that humans have been telling themselves, and the concepts in these stories got embedded in the languages we all learn to speak as children,

...For people, "mind" has most of the same meanings that "spirit' had millennia ago, and most people today expect mind to share in the same destiny as spirit. 

But what seems like undeniable common sense, confirmed by our intuitions and assumed by the ordinary words we speak, is really just a built-up web of imaginative notions that developed over the long course of ordinary human events, hardened by regular use as people lived out their mundane paths in life.

Those notions and fabulous stories conveying them have made many people feel extremely special, perhaps so special that it can seem as if the whole of creation is really about them.

Your brain is quite real. What the brain is busily doing in so many special ways must be largely hidden from awareness. Our innate curiosity can raise good questions about what is going on. After that, however, only science can responsibly investigate what the brain actually does and how it accomplishes all the special things it can do.

The true story of the human brain is more amazing than anything imagined before.

Nicely said, Dr. Singh.

What Singh talks about in his book isn't all that different from what I've read in many other books about neuroscience, the illusion of free will, and how consciousness arises in the brain. 

But reading the excerpts I've shared led to a more solid realization in my own brain that all of mysticism, all of meditation, all of religion, all of everything, is the product of nerve cells firing in the marvelously complex cranium of us Homo sapiens. 

Our clear understanding of reality, along with the illusions that confuse us -- all this arises from a single source: the human brain. There is no way a brain can understand itself, since most of what transpires in the brain occurs outside of conscious awareness.

So modern science is the only way to reveal the secrets that lie hidden within us. Not mysticism, because mystics are subject to the same illusions regarding free will, consciousness, and the self that everyone else is. Yes, meditation can result in different brain states. 

But so can drugs, extreme sports, a walk under the night sky, loving someone deeply, and so much else. There's no way out of the maze of the brain except through the collaboration of many brains working together to cut through illusion and reveal reality.

Which is a damn good description of modern science. 

Reality pushes back. This is how science succeeds.

It's taken me a while to write another blog post about Adam Becker's fascinating book, "What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics." 

My first post was "Reality requires a broad scientific look, not narrow mystic visions." This reflects the central theme of Becker's book: observations require an interpretation to make them truly meaningful. 

The "shut up and calculate" view of quantum physics, which is embraced by many, if not most, of those working in this field, is roundly criticized by Becker -- and other like-minded scientists. As you'll read below in a lengthy excerpt from the final pages of What is Real?, science seeks meaningful interpretations, not simply accurate predictions.

A common example is the Ptolemaic versus Copernican view of the solar system. Ptolemy had the Earth at the center, and managed to predict the motions of the planets quite accurately through a complicated system of epicycles (basically, circles within circles). 

Copernicus put the Sun at the center, which turned out to be the accurate conception. But predictions alone weren't able to resolve the question of what entity was at the center of the solar system.

Quantum physics is in a roughly similar situation, as noted in my first post.

It isn't at all true that scientists fully subscribe to the New Age'y view that consciousness creates reality at the quantum level. There are several other theories that predict quantum phenomena equally well as the Copenhagen interpretation, which is known for both "shut up and calculate" and "a measurement brings a single reality into being."

As Becker says below, there are various interpretations competing for ascendancy in quantum physics. One of them may turn out to be correct. Or a currently unknown interpretation may turn out to be correct.

What I liked about Becker's book is how clearly he describes both the strengths and weaknesses of science. While it is our best means of understanding reality, hugely better than religion, scientists are prone to the same biases, emotional flaws, and contorted thinking as everyone else is.

Science, though, has self-correcting mechanisms built into it. As Becker notes, reality pushes back against scientific theories. And scientists want reality to do this, as powerfully as possible. 

This is why science steadily progresses, while religion, mysticism, and other forms of supernaturalism don't. There's no demonstrable reality to push back on various dogmas, because there is no evidence that a supernatural realm even exists, much less what it might be like.

So there are thousands of different religions in the world, each claiming that it knows more about a divine reality than the others. They all coexist because there is no way to tell which comes closest to the truth. 

Someone claims to have a vision of God, or of supposedly divine light or sound. OK, fine. Psychotics have similar experiences. So do users of psychedelic drugs. So do people in conditions of sensory deprivation. There's no way to tell if a vision of God reflects some objective reality, or just a purely subjective reality.

Admittedly, currently quantum physics is in a somewhat similar situation, since various interpretations of what quantum reality consists of (or means) are competing with each other. But likely scientists will find a way to determine which interpretation deserves to win out. 

Again, this might well be a fresh interpretation that is totally unknown at the moment. This isn't a weakness of science, though, but rather a strength. Unlike religion, science is willing to discard a cherished theory in favor of one that meshes better with reality.

And that's why I love science, while rejecting religion. Read on for the excerpt from Becker's book.

Prejudices against certain kinds of people as well as certain kinds of ideas, are pervasive throughout science. But the mere existence of these biases doesn't mean that science is identical to all those other spheres of human endeavor or that scientific truth isn't different from ill-informed opinions with no connection to experiment or reality.

Our biases don't fully determine the content of our best scientific theories -- reality pushes back, and we want it to push back as hard as we can allow it.

That pushback constrains the possible hypotheses we entertain as scientists. There's a wide middle ground between "science is Pure and Perfectly Rational" and "science is just some bullshit somebody made up."

There's still plenty of room for humans to interfere in that middle ground, as we've seen throughout the book. But that doesn't mean science isn't to be trusted -- that's as naive as the Sherlock Holmes view of science.

That being said, the story of quantum foundations does seem to call into question how science works.

We've seen how it doesn't work -- it's not about verification or purely empirical statements, as the positivists thought; it's not about falsifiability, as Popper thought; nor is it about being completely independent from the complex historical forces that have buffeted and buoyed the characters we've met over the course of this book.

So how does science work? Echoing the end of Chapter 11, that's a fabulously complex question. The long answer would take another book. 

But the short answer is that science involves a combination of experiment, mathematical and logical reasoning, unifying explanations, and biases that scientists bring to the table from their own lives and the cultures they live in. 

We work to reduce those biases; we don't always succeed, but the explicit attempt to account for and reduce those biases is an important part of the process, properly conducted. The whole edifice of science is geared toward this goal. 

And, given the phenomenal explanatory power and predictive success of science, it would be foolish to the extreme to give scientific truths no more credence than idle speculation, religious articles of faith, or deeply held cultural values. Science, done right, works hard to respect absolutely no authority at all other than experience and empirical data.

It never succeeds entirely, but it comes closer and has a better track record than any other method we apes have found for learning about the world around us, a world we never made.

...So what is real? Pilot waves? Many worlds? Spontaneous collapse? Which interpretation of quantum physics is the right one? I don't know. Every interpretation has its critics (though the proponents of basically every non-Copenhagen interpretation are usually agreed that Copenhagen is the worst of the lot).

Somehow, something is going on in the world that is related to the mathematics of quantum physics. There is a correct interpretation, though it may not be any of the ones that we have yet.

Simply dismissing the quantum world as a convenient mathematical fiction means we aren't taking our best theories of the world seriously enough, and we are hobbling ourselves in the search for a new theory. Stating that the conclusions of the Copenhagen interpretation are "inevitable" or "forced upon us by the mathematics of the theory" is simply wrong.

It is not true that it's meaningless to talk about reality existing independently of our perceptions, that we must think of the world solely as the subject of our observations. Solipsism and idealism are not the messages of quantum physics. 

Instead, we physicists should learn the different interpretations available and keep them all in mind while working. Hold on to them loosely, not dogmatically, and keep a fresh perspective on the work we do. 

...We have a wildly successful theory, an embarrassment of interpretations, and a major challenge in moving past our theory to the next one. Pluralism about interpretations might be the right answer, pragmatically, while we face that challenge. Or, if not pluralism, at least humility.

Quantum physics is at least approximately correct. There is something real, out in the world, that somehow resembles the quantum. We just don't know what that means yet. And it's the job of physics to find out.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awareness is a process, not a thing

I'm aware of typing on my laptop right now.

And after writing those words, I'm also aware that I'm aware of typing on my laptop. This second type of awareness is called meta-awareness, a term I came across in a book I'm reading, "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body."

The authors, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, write:

When we did our first vipassana courses in India, we found ourselves immersed hour after hour in noting the comings and goings of our mind, cultivating stability by simply noticing rather than following where those thoughts, impulses, desires, or feelings would have us go. 

This intensive attention to the movements of our mind boils down to pure meta-awareness.

In meta-awareness it does not matter what we focus our attention on, but rather that we recognize awareness itself. Usually, what we perceive is a figure, with awareness in the background. Meta-awareness switches figure and ground in our perception, so awareness itself becomes foremost.

I consider this a deeply false way of looking upon awareness.

Goleman and Davidson appear to view awareness as a thing, rather than as a process. How else would it be possible for them to say, "we recognize awareness itself"? 

But awareness isn't a thing. It is part of what the mind does, and the mind is the brain in action. So how could awareness either be in the background or the foreground of consciousness, if awareness isn't a thing?

Further, the authors seemingly believe in what neuroscience rejects, that there is a "self" somewhere inside our head that looks out upon the world via the senses like a submarine commander looking through a periscope. 

I say this because of the phrase they use, "...we recognize awareness itself." Who the heck is "we"? It must be someone or something that is separate from awareness, because if it wasn't separate, recognizing awareness wouldn't be possible.

We can recognize objects in the world, or other people, because they aren't us.

But since awareness is closely akin to experience, if not identical with it, I find it difficult to conceive how anyone could be aware of awareness, or have an experience of experience. 

I suspect that Goleman and Davidson are fans of "pure awareness," though so far I haven't come across this term in their book. They do quote Sam Harris in their chapter on Attention, and Harris is a believer in pure awareness. I wrote about this in "Questions I had in Sam Harris' 'Waking Up' meditation chapter."

Talking about himself in meditation, he [Harris] writes:

There were periods during which all thought subsided, and any sense of having a body disappeared. What remained was a blissful expanse of conscious peace that had no reference point in any of the usual sensory channels. 

Many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to one of the five senses -- and that the idea of a "pure consciousness" apart from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. I am confident that they are mistaken.

It's hard to believe this passage made it into Harris' book. I guess he didn't have a good editor. Or maybe any editor. It simply is non-sensical.

Sam, you have a Ph.D. in neuroscience. You also go to sleep every night. So you know about dreaming. We are conscious when we dream, but we don't have a "reference point in any of the usual sensory channels." 

So who are these scientists and philosophers who supposedly believe consciousness always is tied to one of the five senses? Methinks you made them up. Dreaming proves it isn't.

However, this talk of a "blissful expanse of conscious peace" is very different from "pure consciousness" -- unless that term simply means consciousness that isn't aware of, or paying attention to, external sensory inputs.

Obviously Harris' consciousness was impure in this sense: it contained various internal mental objects. Bliss, an expanse, and peace. Harris also had to feel separate enough from this internal feeling to be able to remember it. So some sense of "I" apart from the blissful expanse of conscious peace must have been present also.

Dualism is hard for us humans to give up when it comes to our own minds.

It feels like consciousness, or awareness, is something ethereal, clear, separate and distinct from matter, even "pure." But almost certainly that feeling is an illusion, since there is no evidence that awareness can exist apart from being aware of something.

Again, awareness is a mental process, not a thing. Alan Watts got this right way back in 1951, in one of my favorite books, "The Wisdom of Insecurity." Here Watts gets it exactly correct, in my opinion:

While you are watching this present experience, are you aware of someone watching it? Can you find, in addition to the experience itself, an experiencer? Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it? You will find that, to think about yourself reading it, you must for a brief time stop reading. 

The first experience is reading. The second experience is the thought, "I am reading." Can you find any thinker, who is thinking the thought, "I am reading?"

...When you were thinking, "I am reading this sentence" you were not reading it. In other words, in each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience.

To be aware, then, is to be aware of thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, and all other forms of experience. Never at any time are you aware of anything which is not experience, not a thought or feeling, but instead an experiencer, thinker, or feeler. If this is so, what makes us think that any such thing exists?

Great question.

Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson should have asked it of themselves before claiming that it is possible to "recognize awareness itself." Actually, this isn't possible, as Watts cogently points out.

Awareness always is aware of something, because awareness is a mental/brain process, not a thing. Awareness really is us, not something separate from us, since without awareness we don't exist as conscious beings. 

All statements about the material world are subject to science

"Spirituality" is a word that's difficult to pin down. In my current atheist frame of mind, I consider that the term refers to an attempt to find meaning in life -- this material life, this physical life, this life here on Earth. 

Such is how Daniele Bolelli speaks of the need to rekindle our appreciation of what the senses bring to us. In his book, "On the Warrior's Path," he writes:

Our bodies are the kingdom of lost continents and unknown lands. Columbus, Livingstone, Stanley, Marco Polo, and Neil Armstrong are just Boy Scouts compared to the explorers of the inner space. The first step to unlock the doors of perception and sniff the scent of the Secret is to awaken the five senses from the numbness that normally surrounds them.

When the senses wake up, people talk about altered states, but actually nothing about them is altered. The only real alteration is the sleep into which we often let them fall. Bringing them back to life is the only natural thing we can do. 

It is as if we defined the starting of an engine as an "altered state" only because we consider normal leaving it turned off. The fascination many people have for "supernatural" phenomena is the result of their lack of deep knowledge of what Nature is about.

...Ecstasy is not a faraway, unreachable dimension. It is right here, just a few feet away from the sleep of the senses. As William Blake put it: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." The miracle of ordinary reality is revealed to those who have eyes to see it and ears to hear it. 

But many people -- most, actually, given the popularity of religions -- believe that the spiritual quest is to get in touch with a supernatural domain of reality. God, spirit, soul, angels, heaven, miracles, these are believed to point to a realm beyond physicality, a world of the Absolute.

I've started reading Alan Lightman's engaging book, "Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine." Lightman is a philosophically minded physicist who looks at the marvels of the universe with awe. He had a sense of infinity one night when he turned off the motor of his boat, laid down, and looked up at the stars.

Lightman writes:

I have worked as a physicist for many years, and I have always held a purely scientific view of the world. By that, I mean that the universe is made of material and nothing more, that the universe is governed exclusively by a small number of fundamental forces and laws, and that all composite things in the world, including humans and stars, eventually disintegrate and return to their component parts.

...Yet after my experience in that boat many years later, I understood what Lord Indra of the Vedas must have felt when he first drank soma and could see the light of the gods. I understood the powerful allure of the Absolutes -- ethereal things that are all-encompassing, unchangeable, eternal, sacred. At the same time, and perhaps paradoxically, I remained a scientist. I remained committed to the material world.

Every culture in every era of human existence has had some concept of Absolutes. Indeed, one might group a large number of notions and entities under the heading of Absolutes: absolute truth (valid in all circumstances), absolute goodness, constancies of various kinds, certainties, cosmic unity, immutable laws of nature, indestructible substances, permanence, eternity, the immortal soul, God.

Absolutes sound great, right? I used to strongly believe in them. For many years I was obsessed with the notion of Ultimate Reality, and even believed that one day I would understand it, and maybe even become one with it. So like Lightman, I too understand the appeal of Absolutes.

But here's the catch:

Finally, the tenets of the Absolutes have not been proven, nor can they be proven, certainly not in the way that science has proven the existence of atoms or the law of the pendulum swing. Unprovability is a central feature of all Absolutes. Yet I did not need any proof of what I felt during that summer night in Maine looking up at the sky.

It was a purely personal experience, and its validity and power rested in the experience itself. Science knows what it knows from experiments with the external world. Belief in the Absolutes comes from internal experience, or sometimes from received teachings and culture-granted authority.

...We have found no physical evidence for the Absolutes. And just the opposite. All of the new findings suggest that we live in a world of multiplicities, relativities, change, and impermanence. In the physical realm, nothing persists. Nothing lasts. Nothing is indivisible. Even the subatomic particles found in the twentieth century are now thought to be made of even smaller "strings" of energy, in a continuing regression of subatomic Russian dolls.

So a spirituality founded on a belief in supernatural Absolutes cannot be proven to be correct. We may feel that it is correct, but feelings can lead us astray. We may experience that it is correct, but experiences can lead us astray. We may be convinced that it is correct, but convictions can lead us astray.

This isn't to say that Absolutes have no value. Since billions of people believe in them, clearly they serve some human purpose. Lightman says:

The Absolutes comfort us. Imperfect beings that we are, we can imagine perfection. In search of meaning and how best to live our lives, we can turn to irrefutable precepts and principles. Certain of our material death, we can find solace in the permanence of our ethereal souls.

What's important, though, is to be honest with ourselves.

We need to realize that because Absolutes are unprovable, we have no way of knowing if they have any reality outside of our minds. But this is the case with lots of things: feelings, thoughts, imagination, fantasies, wishes, dreams, and so much else within our psyches exist only as neurochemical traces within our cranium.

If we seek certainty, or rather, near-certainty, it won't be found in Absolutes. It will be found in science, because this is the only means we humans have developed that allows us to say with a high degree of confidence, "This is true not only for me, but is a truth about the world that lies outside of me."

As Lightman puts it:

I respect the notions of God and other divine beings. However, I insist on one thing: I insist that any statements made by such beings and their prophets about the material world, including statements recorded in the sacred books, must be subject to the experimental testing of science.

In my view, the truths of such statements cannot be assumed. They must be tested and revised or rejected as needed. The spiritual world, and the world of the Absolutes, have their own domain. The physical world should be the province of science.

This makes a lot of sense. People are free to believe whatever they want about God and other Absolutes.

But when those beliefs intrude upon this physical world, and obviously this happens with regularity, such as when religious people want their dogmas to be enshrined in governmental policies or cultural institutions, those purported Absolutes need to be challenged vigorously.

"Prove it!" is an entirely reasonable demand if someone wants their personal spirituality to be accepted as universal truth. I do that frequently on this blog, and not surprisingly I've never gotten any demonstrable proof of an Absolute. 

A quest for spiritual liberation can lead to new illusions

Some scientific findings contained in an article in the April 2 issue of The New Yorker, "Are We Already Living In Virtual Reality?" bear on the question of what meditation is all about, and the extent to which meditation liberates us from anything.

The article is about Thomas Metzinger, a philosophically-minded neuroscientist.

As you can read in the excerpt below, Metzinger speaks about our inability to recognize the unconscious mental models that determine how we experience reality. In his book, The Ego Tunnel, which I've read and enjoyed, Metzinger speaks of the walls of the tunnel as being transparent to us. 

Here's links to my blog posts about The Ego Tunnel:

Stuck in "The Ego Tunnel" without a self
What we are: a strange loop in an ego tunnel
My review of "The Ego Tunnel" -- 5 stars
Laying bare how the ego tunnel is dug
Don't worry about yourself. You don't have one (a self).
The self as illusion
Life lessons from a neuroscience discussion

Metzinger says in the book, "Although our brains create the Ego Tunnel, no one lives in this tunnel. We live with it and through it, but there is no little man running things inside our head. The Ego and the Tunnel are evolved representational phenomena, a result of dynamical self-organization on many levels."

Here's the excerpt from The New Yorker article. I've boldfaced portions that particularly appealed to me.

In a Frankfurt cake shop—“They say this is where Adorno took the women he seduced; many historical conversations happened here!”—Metzinger teased out the implications of this view of existence. “Do you know what an ‘illusion of control’ is?” he asked, mischievously. “If people are asked to throw dice, and their task is to throw a high number, they throw the dice harder!” He believes that many experiences of being in control are similarly illusory, including experiences in which we seem to control our own minds. Brain imaging, for example, shows that our thoughts begin before we’re aware of having them.

But, Metzinger said, “if a thought crosses the boundary from unconsciousness to consciousness, we feel, ‘I caused this thought.’ ” The sensation of causing our own thoughts is also just another feature of the self-model—a phantom sensation conjured when a readout, labelled “thinking,” switches from “off” to “on.” If you suffer from schizophrenia, this readout may be deactivated inappropriately, and you may feel that someone else is causing your thoughts. “The mind has to explain to itself how it works,” he said, spreading his hands.

Lately, Metzinger has been thinking about his own experience as a meditator. At the center of the meditative experience is the exercise and cultivation of mental autonomy: when the meditator’s mind wanders, he notices and arrests that process, gently returning his mental focus to his breath. “The mind says, ‘I am now re-directing the flashlight of my attention to this,’ ” Metzinger said. “But the thought ‘I am redirecting my mind-wandering’ might itself be another inner story.” He leaned back in his chair and laughed. “It might be that the spiritual endeavor for liberation or detachment can lead to new illusions.”

He looked at me reassuringly. “This doesn’t mean that nothing is real,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that this is the Matrix—the simulation is running on some hardware. But it does mean that you are not the model. You are the whole system—the physical, biological organism in which the self-model is rendered, including its body, its social relationships, and its brain. The model is just a part of that system.” The “I” we experience is smaller than, and different from, the totality of who and what we are.

It turns out that we do, in this sense, possess subtle bodies; we also inhabit subtle selves. While a person exists, he feels that he knows the world and himself directly. In fact, he experiences a model of the world and inhabits a model of himself. These models are maintained by the mind in such a way that their constructed nature is invisible. But it can sometimes be made visible, and then—to a degree—the models can be changed.

Something about this discovery is deflating: it turns out that we are less substantial than we thought. Yet it can also be invigorating to understand the constructed, provisional nature of experience. Our perceptions of the world and the self feel real—how could they feel otherwise?—but we can come to understand our own role in the creation of their apparent realness. “The compensation of growing old,” Virginia Woolf writes, in “Mrs. Dalloway,” is that, while “the passions remain as strong as ever,” we gain “the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.”

Steven Pinker defends Enlightenment values

My wife, Laurel, belongs to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which publishes an excellent publication, Free Thought Today.

The most recent issue has an edited version of Steven Pinker's speech to the FFRF convention in 2017 where he talks about the message of his new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

You can read the Free Thought Today story, "Knowledge has enhanced human flourishing," online. Here's how it starts out:

It is an honor to speak about my forthcoming book in public for the first time in front of this audience.

We’re going to begin with some big questions.

• Why is the world filled with woe?

• How can we make it better?

• How do we give meaning and purpose to our lives?

These may seem like unanswerable questions, but all too many people have answers to them.

For example, “Morality is dictated by God and holy scriptures; the world will be better when everyone obeys his laws.” “The world’s problems are the fault of a certain kind of evil people who must be defeated and punished.” “One tribe of people is inherently worthy. It should have power and prestige, implemented by a strong leader who channels its authentic virtue and experience.” “At some time in the past, there was a well-ordered state, then alien forces subverted its harmony and led to decadence and degeneration. Only a heroic vanguard with memories of the old ways can restore the society to its golden age.”

Well, what about the rest of us?

The point of my book, Enlightenment Now, is that there is an alternative system of beliefs and values, namely the ideals of the Enlightenment, also sometimes known as classical liberalism, secular humanism, or the Open Society. In a sentence, it’s that we can use knowledge to enhance human flourishing.

Other ideologies have passionate advocates, and I believe that Enlightenment values need a positive defense and an explicit commitment as well. The Enlightenment values center on four themes: reason, science, humanism and progress.

Four themes

It all begins with reason, with the conviction that traditional sources of belief are generators of delusion — including faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, conventional wisdom, gut feelings, subjective certainty and the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts. In place of these generators of error, we must rely on reason.

To be sure, human beings are not particularly reasonable. Cognitive science tells us that people are apt to generalize from anecdotes, to seek confirming evidence and to ignore disconfirming evidence, to project stereotypes onto individuals, and to be overconfident about their own knowledge, wisdom and rectitude.

However, people are capable of reason, and there are norms and institutions that can refine our puny powers — norms such as free speech, open debate and criticism, logical analysis, fact checking and empirical testing.

That brings me to the second of the Enlightenment values: science. The underlying conviction of science is that the world is intelligible; that we can understand the world by formulating possible explanations and testing them against reality. Science has proven to be our most reliable means of understanding the world, including ourselves.

Science also provides fundamental insights about the human condition. One is naturalism, the discovery that the laws of the universe have no goal or purpose related to human welfare. Another is entropy. In a closed system,  one that is without input of energy, disorder increases because there are vastly more ways for things to go wrong than for things to go right. Yet another is evolution: Humans are products of a competitive process which selects for reproductive success, not for well-being.

That leads to the third Enlightenment ideal: humanism.

Humanism is the value that the ultimate moral purpose is to reduce the suffering and enhance the flourishing of humans (and other sentient beings) — maximizing their life, health, happiness, knowledge, beauty, love, friendship and social connectedness.

This may seem obvious and uncontroversial, but there are distinct alternatives to humanism, such as that the ultimate good is to enhance the glory of the tribe, nation, race, class or faith; to achieve feats of heroic greatness, including martial conquest; to advance some mystical force or dialectic or struggle or pursuit of a utopian or messianic age; or to obey the dictates of the divinity and pressure others to do the same.

Humanism is feasible because people are endowed with a sense of sympathy, an ability to have a concern for the welfare of others. Now, our circle of sympathy, as given to us by evolution, is rather small. We naturally apply it only to kin, friends, allies and cute little fuzzy baby animals.

But our circle of sympathy can be expanded through forces of cosmopolitanism: education, journalism, art, mobility and even reason, the realization that there can be nothing special about me just because I’m me and you’re not.

And that leads to the fourth of the Enlightenment ideals: progress.

If we apply knowledge and sympathy to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing, we can gradually succeed. How is this progress possible? The Enlightenment thinkers proposed that much of the answer comes from benevolent institutions.

These institutions deploy energy and knowledge to combat entropy, and they magnify the positive parts of human nature — the better angels of our nature, as Abraham Lincoln put it, such as reason and sympathy — while marginalizing the negative aspects — our biases, illusions, susceptibility to magical thinking, tribalism, dominance and vengeance.

Small causes can have big effects

Somebody emailed me some questions and observations about karma, and the notion of "equal and opposite reactions." Here's what they said, followed by my reply.

Hi Brian,

Thank you for your reply and further insights. A follow up question then. Keeping reincarnation issue aside and following the thread of vegetarianism and law of karma, with your new understanding, insights do you still believe that that aspect of law of karma is a valid postulate.

 

Meaning on a physical, mental, and thought level do you still believe what we sow that we reap, our actions good or bad invite an equal and opposite reaction?

 

This is the aspect I struggle to grapple with. On a physical level we see very often that a bad behavior or an action not necessarily punished and people intentionally committing bad or evil acts roam around freely on the same token people committing good acts not necessarily are saved from hardships. If there is no reincarnation where balances and retributions can happen then this argument that action leads to an equal and opposite reaction also seems difficult to hold the firm ground?

 

And if this is on a physical level then for mental or at a thought level we have no way to trace what happens to a thought once it is generated and subsided so it seems hard for me to hold that that subtle level of karma also is in action. I got more confused when I read a statement somewhere that Universe is vast and varied so it is apt to presuppose that at some point some where retribution happens. Of course today with science we can testament that Universe is vast and varied but we have no way to know that retribution or say balancing act of karma happens.

 

Your insights and guidance would be very much appreciated.

Thank you again for your time and help.

My reply:

The older I get, the more I’m attracted to science as the best explanation for how the world works. We know that causes and effects govern the world, aside from (possibly) at the quantum level. But those causes and effects are hugely complicated, and usually they don’t operate in a linear fashion. Meaning, a small cause can have a big effect, and a big cause can have a small effect.

So even though events are caused — which is the simplest way to describe karma — this doesn’t mean that happenings occur in a predictable or “fair” fashion. As you observed, good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people.

 

I don’t believe there is any grand balancing force in the universe other than the laws of nature. And those laws don’t really care about human concerns.

 

This may sound harsh, especially from the viewpoint of religion, but to me it is the truth about reality. Thus we shouldn’t expect that the world is going to appear just or fair. Sure, we should do our best to to do the right thing. However, to expect that everything will work out fine in our lives if we do this is to deny the reality of complex causes having unpredictable effects. 

 

The idea of an “equal and opposite reaction” assumes a linear, predictable way that things work. We all know in our everyday lives how small things mushroom into larger things. For example, maybe we leave too late for a job interview, then we can’t find a place to park, then we find that we’ve got the wrong address, and it turns out that the interview was cancelled, preventing us from making a career change. 

 

I can think of many small events in my life that led to big changes. Some of these were positive changes, some were negative changes. None were “equal and opposite.” To give another example, in college I overheard a conversation between two people, one of whom had just gotten a B.A. in Psychology, as I was about to get. His friend advised him to get a Master’s Degree in Social Work, because this could be obtained more quickly and easily than a Ph.D. in Psychology.

 

So I went to the library and found that Portland, Oregon had a School of Social Work. I applied, was admitted, graduated, and ended up working in Oregon after I graduated, where I still live about 47 years later. Thus an overheard conversation changed the course of my life.

 

I no longer think this was destiny, fate, or karma. It was just an example of how small events can have big effects.

 

   — Brian

This is the essence of Chaos Theory, of course.

Deterministic systems can be highly unpredictable, owing to our inability to specify both the initial conditions of a complex system and how small changes can multiply into big effects. Theoretically, a butterfly flapping its wings in China can lead to a tornado in Kansas.

 

Free will and religion are both comforting fantasies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We would be wise not to hold our breath.

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

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

Life of a carbon atom fills me with irreligious awe

Here's a scan of a page from a wonderful book by Caleb Scharf, "The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing."

After I highlighted the section in yellow, I wound my way through the nineteen steps in the scientifically-valid journey of a carbon atom that begins 10 billion years ago inside a massive star, and ends today with the eating of a potato. 

Coincidentally, I ate a baked (OK, microwaved) potato for dinner tonight. 

When I read the page below this morning, I found it surprisingly moving. Sure, I was familiar with the idea that we are all made of stardust, since the heavier atoms arise from stellar explosions.

But tracing the history of one of the countless carbon atoms in my body left me with a feeling of cosmic awe. Even though I'm hugely limited in time and space, my atoms have a history that spans much of the universe.

If they could talk, what a tale they could tell.

People turn to religion in order to feel like their lives have meaning. Well, science can fill that role also. And the beauty of science is that it is true. 

What follows is a creation story. One without any need for God. 

zzzz

Good Jerry Coyne piece about free will (the lack thereof)

I'm a big fan of writings that debunk free will. (Just can't help myself.)

Here's a good piece by Jerry Coyne that appeared on his Evolution is True blog: "Dawkins and Krauss on free will." It makes the same points that I've made in my own writings about free will, albeit in a clearer fashion. 

Here's an excerpt. But you really should read the entire post. 

If you don’t believe in libertarian free will, then the concept of moral responsibility becomes problematic, though the problem of responsibility itself is not problematic. What changes is how we reward and, especially, punish people.

Think about it: if people really couldn’t have chosen otherwise, and had to behave as they did, then doesn’t that have any implications for how we deal with bad behavior? After all, the law already takes this into account, somewhat exculpating people if they’re deemed mentally incapacitated or unable to tell the difference between right and wrong.  But all of us are like that, and even if we do know the difference between “right” and “wrong”, we can still act in only one way at a given moment, so that knowledge is irrelevant when determining punishment.

I’ve already discussed what reforms should be made to the penal system under determinism (see here, for instance), and that is not just “something to be discussed by philosophers”. It involves real effects on the lives of men and women, and on society at large. And it leads to more humane treatment of prisoners, treatment that can be based on science (e.g., “What forms of ‘punishment’ are best for deterring others, keeping people away from others until they’re reformed, and how can we best reform them?”)

Further, it can make a difference in your own behavior. In my case, I no longer beat myself up over decisions in my past that, I once felt, I could have made differently.  I couldn’t. Such recriminations are not only mentally sapping, but scientifically untenable.

What does it mean if you are, because you have to be?

The title of this blog post sounds like a theological or philosophical question. Actually, it is an outgrowth of a scientific theory, that of eternal inflation. 

Which doesn't mean that the price of stuff keeps going up forever. In this context it means universes being created without end. So in an infinity of universes, there is room for anything and everything to happen. 

However, even though the question of meaning in an inflationary universe has a scientific origin, physicist Brian Cox says that answers to this question can arise from anyone, which naturally includes you and me. 

Here's an excerpt from Cox's book, "Human Universe." Note that he uses the word probably to describe eternal inflation. This is a theory, not a proven scientific fact. 

And so we reach the end. Defining the Big Bang as the initial hot, dense phase of our observable universe that gave rise to the CMB [Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation] 380,000 years later, we understand what happened before.

There was a period of inflationary expansion, which could have been driven by a scalar field in accord with the known laws of physics. That inflationary expansion is probably still going on somewhere, spawning an incalculable number of universes as we speak, and it will continue doing this forever.

We live in an eternal universe, in which anything that can happen does happen. And we are one of the things that can happen. 

Did the whole universe have a beginning, an essential external cause in the spirit of Leibniz's God? We still don't know. Possibly there was a 'mother of all Big Bangs', and if so, we will certainly need a quantum theory of gravity to say anything more.

What does this mean? 

The wonderful thing for me is that nobody knows, because the philosophical and indeed theological consequences of eternal inflation have not been widely debated and discussed. My hope is that in trying to summarize the issues, regrettably briefly and necessarily superficially in the television series and in a little more depth here, these ideas will be accessible to a wider audience and stimulate discussion.

This is desirable and necessary, because ideas are the lifeblood of civilisation, and societies assimilate ideas and become comfortable with their implications through understanding and debate.

If eternal inflation is the correct description of our universe, it will be the artists, philosophers, theologians, novelists and musicians, alongside the physicists, who explore its meaning.

What does it mean if the existence of our universe is inevitable? What does it mean if we are not special in any way? What does it mean if our observable universe, with all its myriad galaxies and possibilities, is a vanishingly small leaf on an ever-expanding fractal tree of universes? What does it mean if you are, because you have to be? 

I can't tell you. I can only ask -- what does it mean to you?

My atheist sources of awe: existence, evolution, consciousnessI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out:
Evolution is sacred, religion is profane

(3) Consciousness allows us to feel awestruck 

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

Check out:
Float gently on a stream of consciousness
"I Am a Strange Loop"-- a book that beautifully explains consciousness, soul, and I-ness
Consider a cosmos with no consciousness

It isn't all about us. Humans aren't special.

We have no option but to use our human ways of knowing to understand the universe. However, this doesn't mean that us Homo sapiens possess the capability of accurately answering all the questions about the cosmos that come to mind. 

Or even being sure that we're able to ask the proper questions. 

More and more, I'm embracing the conclusion that human consciousness likely isn't capable of grasping the Great Big Questions (notably including why the universe exists at all), much less the answers to them.

Here's a letter from the June 2017 issue of Scientific American on this subject. I've also included the "Imagine No Universe" piece referred to in Dave Bolton's letter.

THINKING OF NOTHING

In “Imagine No Universe” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer explores attempts to answer the question of why there is “something rather than nothing” in the universe and the difficulty in defining “nothing.”

Why do we assume we have the potential brainpower to ever explain such mysteries? Could there not be aspects of the universe our human intelligence is unable to reach at the present time? Consider this: A dog travels in your car. Can it ever understand motor mechanics or geography? Your cat watches television. Has it any knowledge of electronic communications?

Why do we, just one of the species in existence, assume our brains are capable of knowing why we exist and what there is beyond infinity? This should not inhibit us in striving to understand the purpose of life, and so on. But we should accept that it may take a millennium of human development to know everything. Perhaps then we will become gods!

DAVE BOLTON
Essex, England

-------------------------
Why Humans Prefer to Be the Center of the Universe

Michael Shermer

Imagine nothing. Go ahead. What do you see? I picture dark empty space devoid of galaxies, stars and planets. But not only would there be no matter, there would be no space or time either. Not even darkness. And no sentient life to observe the nothingness. Just ... nothing. Picture that. You can't.

Here we face the ultimate question: Why is there something rather than nothing? I have compiled several responses from a number of sources, including a 2013 book by John Leslie and Robert Lawrence Kuhn entitled The Mystery of Existence (Wiley-Blackwell) and Lawrence M. Krauss's 2017 book The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far (Atria Books).

Nothing is nonsensical. It is impossible to conceptualize nothing—not only no space, time, matter, energy, light, darkness or conscious beings to perceive the nothingness but not even nothingness. In this sense, the question is literally inconceivable.

Nothing is something. It is a logical fallacy to talk about “nothing” as if it were a “something” that ceases to exist. Here we bump up against the problem of defining what we mean by “nothing” and the restrictions that language imposes on the problem. The very acting of talking about “nothing” makes it a “something.” Otherwise, what are we talking about?

Nothing would include God's nonexistence. In Leslie and Kuhn's taxonomy of “nothings,” they list what categories of things might be included in “something” that would be negated by “nothing”: physical, mental, platonic, spiritual and God. If by “nothing” is meant no physical objects or matter of any kind, for example, there can still be energy from which matter may arise by natural forces guided by the laws of nature. Physicists, for example, talk about empty space as seething with virtual particles, from which particle-antiparticle pairs come into existence as a consequence of the uncertainty principle of quantum physics. From this “nothingness,” universes may “pop” into existence.

Nothing excludes creation ex nihilo. If by “nothing” is meant that there is no physical, mental, platonic or nonphysical entity of any kind, then there can be no God or gods, which means that there cannot be anything outside of nothing from which to create something. This negates the Christian theologian argument that God created the universe ex nihilo, or “out of nothing,” based on the English translation of Genesis 1:1 that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This is misleading. Recent scholarship has suggested that the Hebrew word for “creation” in Genesis 1:1 is bara (ברא)—a verb that more accurately translated means to “separate” or “divide.” Genesis 1:1 should read, “In the beginning God separated the heavens and the earth.” Separated from what is not indicated.

Nothing is unstable; something is stable. Asking why there is something rather than nothing presumes “nothing” is the natural state of things out of which “something” needs an explanation. Maybe “something” is the natural state of things, and “nothing” would be the mystery to be solved. In his sweeping narrative, The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far, a sequel to his 2012 book A Universe from Nothing, Krauss notes that “Einstein was one of the first physicists to demonstrate that the classical notion of causation begins to break down at the quantum realm.” Although many physicists objected to the idea of something coming from nothing, he observes that “this is precisely what happens with the light you are using to read this page. Electrons in hot atoms emit photons—photons that didn't exist before they were emitted—which are emitted spontaneously and without specific cause. Why is it that we have grown at least somewhat comfortable with the idea that photons can be created from nothing without cause, but not whole universes?”

One answer has to do with our discomfort with the Copernican principle, which holds that we are not special. We prefer religious and anthropic explanations that the universe was created and fine-tuned for us because they put humans right back in the center of the cosmos anthropocentrically—it is all about us. But 500 years of scientific discoveries have revealed that it isn't about us. From this fact, we may gain purchase on a perspective that engages both the religious and scientific impulse toward a sense of awe one gains from contemplating nothing.

Experience of conscious will is an illusion

I don't believe in free will. But like most people, I have a feeling that my intention to do something is what causes that thing to happen. 

So we have two things going on:

(1) A scientific world view doesn't support a belief in free will. As I've written about a lot on this blog (type "free will" into the Google search box in the right sidebar to find the many posts), there is no evidence of an immaterial self/soul that somehow floats free of the material/physical goings-on in the human mind. So there's no entity within us which can function freely of causes and effects or the laws of nature.

(2) Yet we humans have a strong sense that our intentions lead to thoughts, actions, and everything else we're capable of doing. After all, I think type an example of a thought and the next thing I do is type "I need to finish writing this paragraph." Who the heck is controlling what I'm doing right now if it isn't my conscious intention?

Well, study carefully this photo I took of a fascinating figure in Daniel Wegner's book, "The Illusion of Conscious Will," and you'll get a very interesting explanation of why the experience of conscious will is indeed an illusion.

Note that there is an "actual" and "apparent" causal path leading to an action. 

The actual causal path flows from an unconscious cause of the action. Meaning, the human brain is doing things below the surface of awareness that cause us to do something.

At the same time, there also is an unconscious cause of thought. This takes an actual causal path in the brain that leads to a thought. 

So the brain is unconsciously causing both an action and a thought.

These two things are actually happening. However, our experience of conscious will -- the feeling that our thought or intention is what causes an action to occur -- is an illusion. This is shown in the "Apparent Causal Path" arrow leading from thought to action. 

Here's a few passages from Wegner's book that explain what is going on here. (Wegner is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.)

The experience of will, then, is the way our minds portray their operations to us, not their actual operation. Because we have thoughts of what we will do, we can develop causal theories relating those thoughts to our actions on the basis of priority, consistency, and exclusivity.

We come to think of these prior thoughts as intentions, and we develop the sense that the intentions have causal force even though they are actually just previews of what we may do. 

Yet in an important sense, it must be the case that something in our minds plays a causal role in making our actions occur. That something is, in the theory of apparent mental causation, a set of unconscious mental processes that cause the action. At the same time, that something is very much like the thoughts we have prior to the action.

...We must remember that this analysis suggests that the real causal mechanisms underlying behavior are never present in consciousness. Rather, the engines of causation operate without revealing themselves to us and so may be unconscious mechanisms of mind.

...The unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview your actions gives us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause what we do. 

In fact, however, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action, and also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as cause of the action.

So while our thoughts may have deep, important, and unconscious causal connections to our actions, the experience of conscious will arises from a process that interprets these connections, not from the connections themselves.

This is brilliant. I'm only read about 1/4 of "The Illusion of Conscious Will," but I'm far enough into the book to have gotten a good feel for Wegner's thesis. He provides a lot of evidence to support it, both scientific and philosophical. 

Naturally spiritual (using that word broadly) implications of this illusion are easy to come by. For example, it can be argued that the so-called enlightenment of Zen, Taoism, and such simply is an intuitive seeing-through of the illusion of conscious will. 

Meaning, the illusion that "I" am determining what I do (and also by implication, what happens to me) is somehow experienced as the scientific falsity that it is. Of course, this is just a fact -- assuming Wegner's hypothesis is correct, as it seems to be -- not any sort of supernatural or mystical state of mind. 

It is just our actual state of mind, seen for what it is. It'll take another blog post to explain this more fully.

Compared to science, religion knows nothing about reality

Here's another of my wife's monthly letters to the editor of the Salem (Oregon) Statesman Journal newspaper. Her April offering was titled "Reader prefers science over religion" on the opinion page. 

Me too.

As we were driving around today, talking about this and that, including the ridiculousness of religiosity, Laurel mentioned that nothing in the Bible or any other holy book has led to any new understanding of reality in the way science does all the time.

Meaning, one would think that the prophets, sages, gurus, enlightened beings, divine sons/daughters of God, or whoever would have been privy to some fact about the world unknown to the science of their time. 

After all, religious believers consider that the founders of their faith understood ultimate reality in a profound way -- more completely and accurately than ordinary people. Well, if this is true, why didn't they describe some fact about the universe unknown to supposedly ignorant materialists?

Because, as my wife says below, religion is based on mere belief, while science is based on demonstrable facts about reality.

In science, we have ways of knowing when we are wrong. In religion, there is no way beliefs can be shown to be wrong.

This is because religion is a system of bias and mere belief, where you can rationalize and distort facts to come to the conclusion you want.

The more religious people are, the better they seem to be at rationalizing things away that make no sense.

Good things happen when you pray? Claim God did it. Bad things happen even though you prayed? Claim “it must have been God’s plan and better wisdom.”

Science can show that religious beliefs are wrong.

Religious people know this deep down, and this is why they so often resist science. The more science advances, the more threatened believers get because it keeps proving religious beliefs don’t make sense, are primitive or plain wrong.

There has never been a religious belief that has ever had any influence in promoting the real advancement of science. Instead, religion has impeded science.

In science, faith is a vice, since it can affect good exploration for the real facts. In religion, faith is considered a virtue but leads to false facts about reality.

Laurel Hines
Salem

Have faith that reality is better than any belief

One of my first Church of the Churchless posts, "Just have faith," was written in November 2004. It's still one of my favorites. Re-reading it today, I was pleased that I still agree with just about everything in it. 

The reason: even though thirteen years ago I was more open to the hypothesis of God and life after death than I am now, the method of open-minded scientific faith that should be used to investigate all sorts of hypotheses -- both worldly and spiritual -- rings as true to me today as it did back then. 

My personal research into the nature of reality has led me to the conclusion favored by most other scientifically-minded people: there is no demonstrable evidence for the existence of a conscious being, power, or force we could call "God." 

So I have come to reject the God hypothesis, even though my previous belief that God exists was highly pleasing to me.

This is the power of faith. Real faith. Meaning, faith that whatever reality consists of, knowing this truth, even if it makes us uncomfortable, is preferable to embracing a false comforting belief.

Below is what I said in my "Just have faith" post. Note that in the last sentence I speak of "God" being another name for "ultimate reality." This is a rather unusual use of the word, God, but it makes sense to me.

I still pray to God, even though I'm an atheist. However, when I say "God, show me your true nature," I'm really saying "Reality, I want to know you as you are." 

Just have faith

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

What is faith stripped of thought, emotion, perception, expectation, imagination? Whatever it is, that's what we are seeking. Such is the message at the mystical core of every deep spiritual teaching. A few examples:

Christianity: "Be silent therefore, and do not chatter about God, for by chattering about him, you tell lies and commit a sin....Also you should not wish to understand anything about God, for God is beyond all understanding....If you understand anything about him, then he is not in it, and by understanding something of him, you fall into ignorance." Meister Eckhart (Selected Writings, Penguin Books)

Judaism/Kabbalah: "God is not what we think It is. God is not a thing, a being, a noun....Jewish mystics often refer to It as Ein Sof, which means Endlessness....Ein Sof precedes thought and it even precedes the Nothingness out of which thought is born. Nothingness is viewed as a level of awareness that is the result of the 'annhilation of thought.'" Rabbi David Cooper (God is a Verb, Riverhead Books)

Islam/Sufism: "Anything that has a beginning and an end is a 'shell.'...There is more to the pronouncement of faith than what is said with the tongue because it too has a beginning and an end....We know then that the 'soul' of prayer is not only its external form but also a state of total absorption and unconsciousness during which all these external forms, for which there is no room, remain outside." Rumi (Discourses of Rumi, Threshold Books)

Buddhism: "If you want to reach the other shore of existence, give up what is before, behind, and in between. Set your mind free, and go beyond birth and death....I have conquered myself and live in purity. I know all. I have left everything behind, and live in freedom. Having taught myself, to whom shall I point as teacher?" Teachings of the Buddha (The Dhammapada, Nilgiri Press)

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

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

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

Which door would you choose to walk through?

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

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

This is the faith Henry David Thoreau speaks of in Walden:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living it so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the Devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'" (Where I Lived, and What I Lived For chapter)

Such is a scientific faith, a faith that does not foreclose in advance any possibility about what reality may consist of, a faith not in the unproven pronouncements of some supposedly holy person or book but in one's own direct experience of divinity--or direct non-experience, as the case may be.

Still, there is nothing wrong with belief, so long as our beliefs remain subservient to reality. When reality extends its hand, we should be able to happily surrender even our most cherished beliefs. This will not be difficult if our faith is in the rightness of whatever spiritual experiment we have chosen to undertake, and not in the surety of realizing a particular outcome.

A material scientist adjusts his beliefs, or hypotheses, in accordance with the results of his experiments. He does not design an experiment to produce certain desired findings, for this would not be science. The scientific method is what a scientist has firm faith in; everything else is provisional until proven.

Similarly, the height of spirituality is to just have faith.
Faith that reality is better than any and all beliefs.
Faith that the ultimate reality we may call "God" will be reflected in an open mind...but not a closed one.

 

Without magical thinking, the American flag is just a piece of cloth

Recently KGW, a Portland (Oregon) television station, had a story about a military veteran who was intensely distraught when some people protesting Trump's inauguration burned the American flag. 

Eric Post, who served in the Marines, made an emotional Facebook video that's been viewed over 2.5 million times. His basic argument is that anyone who burns the flag doesn't believe in American ideals, doesn't respect the sacrifices of soldiers, and is a coward. 

Of course, flag burners look upon themselves differently. They consider themselves patriots. They view flag-burning as free speech protected by the Constitution, which the Supreme Court has ruled it is.

There's no objective right or wrong here.

Meaning resides in the human mind, not objects. There is nothing in the cloth of a flag that is any different from the cloth in a t-shirt. In fact, people often wear clothing that has images of the American flag. So why would someone get so emotional about seeing some cloth go up in flames?

This is a difficult question.

Even Eric Post doesn't have an answer to it, because none of us is privy to the complicated workings of the human mind. We can sense our feelings, and be aware of our thoughts, but the source of these mental emanations is only dimly known, even by neuroscientists. 

I just read a fascinating book by Matthew Hutson, "The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking." 

One of the laws is Objects Carry Essences. This seems to be operating in the minds of both people who are bothered by flag-burning and flag-burners themselves. Hutson says:

We all have objects we fetishize or at least take a fancy to for personal reasons. Think of a child's blanky. A wedding ring. An autographed album. What's more human than sentimentality? And yet, sentimentality for particular objects is just as illogical as belief in ghosts.

Nevertheless, you wouldn't be happy with replicas of sacred items, even if the replica was identical in every way. Somehow two things can be physically identical, and yet the original has something else, a nonphysical presence, a special significance beyond the realm of physics or chemistry.

How is it that an object, such as [John] Lennon's Steinway, can carry meaning around with it, independent of its material composition? To attribute personal value -- a subjective property -- to a lump of atoms: that's magical thinking.

Yes, Eric Post seems to consider that burning a piece of cloth, an American flag, somehow is an attack on America itself, or at least on the sacrifices of those who died in the service of their country. Yet he has no way of knowing what was in the minds of those who burned the flag, who, again, probably considered that they also were acting patriotically.

Thus it seems entirely likely, if not probable, that someone angered by the sight of an American flag being burned is under the spell of magical thinking which views the flag as possessing some sort of precious immaterial essence.

Which, of course, it doesn't. "Justice," "patriotism," "respect" and other  concepts are subjective mental abstractions. They reside in the activity of human brain cells, not in any physical object.

Another magical thinking law is Symbols Have Power. In the chapter describing this law, Hutson speaks directly about flag-burning.

Symbolism falls into the second law of sympathetic magic outlined by Sir James Frazer, the law of similarity: like produces like, or an effect resembles its cause..,. we treat "ideal connexions" as real ones: if two things are linked associatively in our heads, we suspect a physical, causal link.

Expecting physical reality to work along the same lines of influence as mental associations is magical thinking.

...Similarly a sports jersey could not be confused with an actual person. And our national flag depicts what it represents with even less visual verisimilitude, but people still feel those stars and stripes demand legal protection from immolation. After all, Old Glory stands for the deaths of young men at war, the struggles for civil rights, the one giant leap for U!S!A!

Flag burning certainly sends a message of disrespect, but if the research on belief in the law of similarity has any bearing, the act does something more than communicate a message: it creates the sense that America is being harmed directly.

In a suggestive study of Americans and Brazilians, 34 percent of young adults said cutting up one's national flag to use as rags for cleaning a bathroom in private called for punishment, and 35 percent said the act was wrong no matter one's country's customs. 

That is, it's hurtful even if there's no audience to offend. Might we see flag-burning, deep down, as a form of voodoo?

Sure.

Magical thinking is deeply ingrained in our psyches. It is almost impossible to root it out entirely. The best we can do is understand our tendency to see the world wrongly: as possessing qualities out there that really exist only in here, in the human mind.

Burning the American flag isn't objectively right or wrong, good or bad. This act is meaningful only to the extent that we give it meaning. 

Without magical thinking, the American flag is just a bit of colored cloth. It isn't alive. It doesn't suffer. It doesn't have feelings. But people possess these qualities, and that's why flag-burning produces such intense emotions.

Reality is a terrible thing to waste -- yet religions and politicians do

What is real? This is one of the most important questions. I've grappled with it for my entire adult life. 

The basic problem I or anyone else faces in answering that question is that we humans are subjective beings who exist in an objective world. 

So subjectivity and objectivity are intermingled in everything we do, which includes grappling with the nature of reality.

Wisdom, in my admittedly subjective opinion, largely lies in recognizing the difference between "I believe," "I feel," and similar I-based views, and "It is true that..." The latter sort of statement refers to an intersubjective reality, which is the closest we can come to objectivity.

Meaning, if several people agree about the nature of something, and have good reasons for arriving at that agreement, this should bring us closer to knowing the reality that exists outside of our individual subjective minds. 

Religious believers usually consider that God is the source of this universal reality. I don't. However, we have some common ground in that a sense of the "sacred" (broadly defined) motivates both secular and religious truth-seekers. 

Traditionally, as in the Middle Ages, science was viewed as a means of revealing the glory of God's creation. That attitude still is prevalent today, so long as we leave out a single word, "God's." Most scientists, and most lovers of science, are awestruck by the marvelous regularities revealed by the laws of nature. 

Also, by the unfathomable vastness of the universe (or universes) as we look outward at the cosmos, and the equal mystery of the infinitesimal quantum realms that lie within every speck of matter/energy.

Even during my true-believing days in an Eastern form of religion, I found it objectionable when my fellow devotees would dismiss modern science, and rationality in general, as a lesser form of knowing. They had been brainwashed into viewing closed-eyed meditation as the only way to grasp ultimate truth.

I had a different view.

Science could tell us a lot about objective reality, but not everything. Our seemingly subjective consciousness could become a means of knowing objective realms of reality beyond the physical, given sufficient training in certain forms of meditation.

Now I'm skeptical that this is the case.

I still meditate every day, but I see this as akin to mental exercise/conditioning and not as a means to escape the bounds of ordinary ways of learning about the world. So even more than before, I've come to view scientific, intersubjective, communal understandings of reality as sacred (in a secular sense of the word).

It deeply bothers me when religious leaders and politicians ignore objective facts in favor of subjective beliefs. For example, human-caused global warming is a fact. Not a 100% certain fact, but an extremely highly likely fact, not much less probable than the fact that the Earth orbits the sun or water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. 

So when Trump cabinet nominees refuse to acknowledge the reality of human-caused global warming, I see this as profane. Again, in a secular sense, the opposite of sacred -- which to me is seeing the world as it objectively is, not as we subjectively would like it to be, or believe it to be.

On climate change, a handful of Trump nominees have broken with the president-elect, who has called global warming “a hoax.” Zinke, Pruitt and Rex Tillerson, the nominee for secretary of state, each acknowledged in their confirmation hearings that the climate is changing, but stopped short of blaming burning fossil fuels. The nominees each employed a version of what Mother Jones called Republicans’ favorite excuse on global warming: “I’m not a climate scientist.”

OK, so you're not a climate scientist. Neither am I. But I accept what climate scientists have learned about global warming, just as I accept what physicists have learned about gravity, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics. 

Reality is a terrible thing to waste. Here we are, living what almost certainly is our one and only life in the one and only universe we can know about, 

I can sort of accept that ordinary individuals have the right to believe untrue stuff about the world, since the consequences of their false understanding of reality usually don't affect other people. 

But when religious leaders or politicians engage in blatant reality-denial, that's a whole other thing, because their utterances and actions do affect other people. Lots of them. Everybody on the planet, really, when it comes to denying global climate change caused by human activities. 

Fighting in defense of reality is essential. It's our sacred duty, whether or not we believe in God. 

"The Simplest Case Scenario" is a must-read for philosophical science-lovers

Scientific. Philosophical. Well-written. Creative. Mind-expanding. 

"The Simplest Case Scenario" by Karl Coryat pushed all of my book-loving buttons.  It's subtitle points to why I liked it so much: How the universe may be very different from what we think it is.

I've believed this for my entire adult life. But for most of that time I thought that the Secret of the Cosmos could only be revealed through mysticism, meditation, philosophical contemplation, enlightenment, psychedelics. 

At the same time, I've always adored science.

I've read countless (almost) books about quantum mechanics, cosmology, neuroscience, cutting edge physics, systems theory, evolution, and such. But I figured that scientific thinking could only go so far, and it was necessary to break out of its boundaries to approach the Meaning of It All.

Well, Coryat has done a damn fine job of melding the facts of modern science with a consciousness-expanding view of what lies at the core of reality.

And he does this without resorting to supernaturalism, religion, God, or anything in the realm of woo-woo -- which is why I like his approach so much better than the many authors like Deepak Chopra who try to make quantum theory into New Age'y "create your own reality" ridiculousness.

Coryat's basis thesis is that the universe is made of information, not stuff.

Physicist John Wheeler's "it from bit" hypothesis supports this contention, but this book goes further than any other scientific writing I've come across in ferreting out the implications of information being the root of reality.

For example, we assume that photons reaching us from a star a billion light years away have been doing their electromagnetic thing for that length of time. Meaning, the photons have been objectively real across that immense span of space-time. However, Coryat persuasively argues that an act of observation essentially brings the photons into being.

This seems counter-intuitive and wrong.

Yet if all we know about the world comes from information, what reason is there to posit a realm of stuff that somehow is both itself and also a source of information about itself? The simplest case scenario, as Coryat puts it, is to understand that "When you look at an object, you aren't actually looking at the object. You're looking at information about the object."

From this simple thread of a premise, the book spins some marvelous webs of conclusions in a convincing manner. My knowledge of quantum mechanics and other scientific subjects is greater than that of most people, but nowhere near professional level.

Still, I feel like I have a pretty good ability to sense bullshit in books that purport to explain the rock-bottom nature of reality, even if I can't pinpoint the factual reasons for my skepticism.

It is a tribute to Coryat's writing ability and obvious extensive background research that my copy of "The Simplest Case Scenario" only contains a few marginal question marks penned in by my highlighter. 

I found his treatment of free will to be overly simplistic and out-of-touch with how this supposed human quality should be defined. Namely, as the ability to choose to act differently even if every particle in the universe, including those that comprise the willing brain, were in exactly the same condition.

In other words, genuine free will requires some sort of supernatural assumption, a liberation of consciousness from universal laws of nature. Coryat doesn't believe such exists, yet he argues for the appearance of intentionality in complex informational systems. Yes, but this isn't free will.

I also couldn't follow his contention that a universe comprised of information, rather than stuff, leaves little or no room for the possibility of advanced alien life forms. He says, "The stumbling block for finding truly alien life is that the history of any other informational systems needs to be consistent with our techno-biological history."

There's a good chance I don't understand the subtlety of Coryat's thinking in this regard.

However, it seems to me that while being able to understand or communicate with an alien life form requires some form of cognitive/perceptual commonality, I don't get why a informational universe demands that only one basic type of observer exist within it. 

This isn't a perfect analogy, but whenever I go on a walk with our dog and she spends several minutes avidly sniffing some blades of grass that hold no interest for me, I'm reminded that she and I exist in the same world, but perceive it in very different ways. 

And what Coryat said in his entry in a Foundational Essays contest -- which formed the basis of this book -- seems at odds with his current position: "Perhaps for an alien race with its own origin and history, the universe would reveal an entirely different set of constants and laws. Indeed, it would be a different universe."

These are minor quibbles, though, and like I said, they might arise from misunderstandings on my part.

My book review bottom line is: READ IT.

Appealingly, to do this you don't even have to buy "The Simplest Case Scenario," though as a habitual reader of printed books, I recommend that you get an Amazon copy on real paper. Alternatively, Coryat is offering a free PDF download of his book at simplestcasescenario.com

Karl Coryat is an interesting guy. Check out his minimalist web site: http://www.pisspoor.com/coryat.html He's a music journalist, a successful Jeopardy contestant, and a comedian. 

He also just might have figured out the Secret of the Universe. Or, not. Read his book and make up your own mind. 

"I Am a Strange Loop" -- a book that beautifully explains consciousness, soul, and I-ness

When I decluttered some bookshelves recently, and gave a bunch of books away, one of the titles in the Absolutely Must Keep pile was Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop." 

This is one of my favorite books.

It does a marvelous job of explaining the nature of mind, soul, consciousness, I-ness, and such. Hofstadter's approach is based on modern neuroscience, but he doesn't focus on brain minutia. Rather, he takes a broad perspective that ties together science, philosophy, and everyday experience in a highly convincing fashion.

I've blogged about "I Am a Strange Loop" before:

If I'm not an "I," what am I?
You're a strange loop (and that's OK)
If there's no "me," I don't have any problems
What we are: a strange loop in an ego tunnel

After picking up the book in the course of my bookshelves decluttering, I've re-read a couple of key chapters. Once again, I'm blown away by how clearly and entertainingly Hofstadter makes his case for embracing material monism rather than spiritual dualism. 

Meaning, for him (and for me), there's just one thing going on: the laws of nature operating in this physical world.

I used to believe otherwise during the more than three decades I pursued a path of daily meditation aimed at releasing my soul from the cage of my body, and materiality in general. But now I realize that I was on the wrong track.

What led me astray is a feeling that everybody in the world shares: the sensation of being a conscious living "I" that's qualitatively distinct from lifeless matter. It just seems so obvious that my consciousness inhabits a body -- rather than being part and parcel of my physical being.

Hofstadter says that he also senses this illusion. But he refuses to fall prey to it. He does, though, understand the appeal of dualism. In his Epilogue, Hofstadter says:

In Chapter 22, I discussed dualism -- the idea that over and above physical entities governed by physical law, there is a Capitalized Essence called "Consciousness," which is an invisible, unmeasurable, undetectable aspect of the universe possessed by certain entities and not others. This notion, very close to the traditional western religious notion of "soul," is appealing because it conforms with our everyday experience that the world is divided into two kinds of things -- animate and inanimate -- and it also gives some kind of explanation for the fact that we experience our own interiority or inner light, something of which we are so intimately aware that to deny its existence would seem absurd if not impossible.

...Furthermore, the idea that each of us is intrinsically defined by a unique incorporeal essence suggests that we have immortal souls; belief in dualism may thus remove some of the fear of death. It is not very hard for someone who grows up drenched in the pictorial and verbal imagery of western religion [also eastern, I have to add] to imagine a wispy, ethereal aura being released from the body of someone who has just died, and sailing up, up, up into some kind of invisible celestial realm, where it will survive eternally.

However, this view, no matter how appealing it may be, almost certainly is wrong. Most of Hofstadter's book is devoted to demolishing the arguments in favor of dualism. He does this convincingly, perhaps better than anyone else, in my decidedly personal opinion.

In the Epilogue, Hofstadter sums up his central argument: that we humans are "strange loops." Our brains have evolved the capacity to not only be aware, but to be aware of our awareness. We can abstract our experience into increasingly sophisticated concepts. This is the end result, as I quoted Hofstadter in a previous post:

That extremely slight doubt flies in the face of what we all take for granted ever since our earliest childhood, which is that "I"'s do exist—and in most people, the latter belief simply wins out, hands down. The battle is never even engaged, in most people's minds. On the other hand, for a few people the battle starts to rage: physics versus "I."

…My proposal for a truce to end this battle is to see the "I" as a hallucination perceived by a hallucination, which sounds pretty strange, or perhaps even stranger: the "I" as a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination.

Even though I've read all of "I Am a Strange Loop" (parts of it several times), I still have trouble understanding that last sentence. Partly this is because the "I" that feels like me seems so damn real. 

Here's how Hofstadter talks about this in the Epilogue:

A nondualistic view of the world can thus include animate entities perfectly easily, as long as different levels of description are recognized as valid. Animate entities are those that, at some level of description, manifest a certain type of loopy pattern, which inevitably starts to take form if a system with the inherent capacity of perceptually filtering the world into discrete categories vigorously expands its repertoire of categories ever more towards the abstract.

This pattern reaches full bloom when there comes to be a deeply entrenched self-representation -- a story told by the entity to itself -- in which the entity's "I" plays the starring role, as a unitary causal agent driven by a set of desires.

More precisely, an entity is animate to the degree that such a loopy "I" pattern comes into existence, since this pattern's presence is by no means an all-or-nothing affair. Thus to the extent that there is an "I" pattern in a given substrate, there is animacy, and where there is no such pattern, the entity is inanimate. 

OK. I realize those paragraphs aren't going to mean a whole lot to many people. So I'll end with a few more passages from the final pages of Hofstadter's book that offer a somewhat different perspective on his worldview.

You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception -- the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world. When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of physics and when feedback loops come into play, then "which" eventually turns into "who." What would once have been brusquely labeled "mechanical" and reflexively discarded as a candidate for consciousness has to be reconsidered.

We human beings are macroscopic creatures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality.

The "I" we create for each of us is a quintessential example of such a perceived or invented reality, and it does such a good job of explaining our behavior that it becomes the hub around which the rest of the world seems to rotate. But this "I" notion is just a shorthand for a vast mass of seething and churning of which we are necessarily unaware.

...In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we're not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems -- vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

To see ourselves this way is probably not as comforting as believing in ineffable other-worldly wisps endowed with eternal existence, but it has its compensations. What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like "I" is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be.

"Incomplete Nature" shows how life is based on absence

Demonstrating some spousal exaggeration, my wife has been saying that she fears being crushed by a pile of books I've read that are awaiting my blogging attention.

(I made sure to include a chair in this photo for scale; unless Laurel shrinks to two feet tall, I think she has nothing to worry about. However, I will admit that there's another pile behind this one, so combined they could possibly be a risk to wifely health.)

The top light green book, 600 pages thick, seemed like a good place to start on reducing the pile. It is Terrence W. Deacon's densely written, yet provocative, "Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter."

This is one of those books that makes me think, If I can read this sucker all of the way through, and understand a good share of it, that compensates for not doing other senior citizen brain exercises, like the New York Times crossword puzzle.

There were times (well, many times) when I felt like giving up on Incomplete Nature.

But I persevered, even when I'd read a chapter and be perplexed about what the heck Deacon was trying to say. Since he is a professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience and the chair of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, obviously Deacon has impressive intellectual and academic qualifications. 

Bottom line: this book further convinced me that life and consciousness emerged from matter, not some divine or supernatural source. However, it is really difficult for me to summarize Deacon's thesis, because it was so difficult to understand Deacon's writing.

Here's an initial stab at relating what appealed to me the most -- his emphasis on absence. 

Now, this also is a fascination of mine. I've just written about it in a much different way than Deacon has. You'll find lots of posts about absence in the "Wu Project" category in the right sidebar of this blog. My first post on this theme was in 2006, "The Wu Project."

We’re talking here about the real Wu. Which, because it signifies nothing, is pretty darn hard to say anything about. Nonetheless, I’m drawn to try. And even more perhaps: to be.

It’s a dream of mine. To be Wu. Not the Chinese character. Not the various Wu-associations Wikipedia talks about. Something else. What remains when all the somethings that I’m not are negated and just the nothing that I may be remains.

“May be” is the operative word here. There are no guarantees with Wu. It’s the ultimate mystery. You can’t rely on it for anything, because there is no thing there. Or so they say. And I tend to believe them.

Early on in his book, Deacon writes:

Each of these sorts of phenomena -- a function, reference, purpose, or value -- is in some way incomplete. There is something not there there. Without this "something" missing, they would just be plain and simple physical objects or events, lacking these otherwise curious attributes. Longing, desire, passion, appetite, mourning, loss, aspiration -- all are based on an analogous incompleteness, an integral without-ness.

As I reflect on this odd state of things, I am struck by the fact that there is no single term that seems to refer to this elusive character of such things. So, at the risk of initiating this discussion with a clumsy neologism, I will refer to this as an absential feature, to denote phenomena whose existence is determined with respect to an essential absence. 

This could be a state of things not yet realized, a specific separate object of a representation, a general type of property that may or may not exist, an abstract quality, an experience, and so forth -- just not that which is actually present. This paradoxical intrinsic quality of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, but it is a defining property of life and mind. 

A complete theory of the world that includes us, and our experience of the world, must make sense of the way that we are shaped by and emerge from such specific absences. What is absent matters, and yet our current understanding of the physical world suggests that it should not. A causal role for absence seems to be absent from the natural sciences.

This is brilliant. Deacon had me on pages 2 and 3. I was looking forward to him building on this theme, fleshing out the notion of absence being the key to understanding life, mind, and consciousness. 

When I got to the end of his 600 pages, I felt a lack.

Which I guess is appropriate, given his emphasis on absence. I never fully grasped his argument for absential features being the foundation of living beings. But here's a simple, and decidedly incomplete, way of explaining Deacon's creative, detailed, rigorous, yet excessively abstruse take on the world.

Constraint is a concept that runs through his book. It is key to understanding thermodynamic processes. When water boils, steam is released. Without any constraints, steam just bubbles up into the air from a pot of boiling water, like when I make spaghetti. 

But when steam is constrained in certain ways, it can be used to power things, like a locomotive. Or to heat things, like an apartment building. Putting bounds on where the steam goes, restricting its freedom, so to speak, allows people to do useful things with boiling water.

Deacon writes:

But although the specific absences that constitute a constraint do not suffer the epiphenomenality of descriptive notions of organization, they are nevertheless explicitly not anything that is present. This requires that we show how what is absent is responsible for the causal power of organization and the asymmetric dynamics of a physical or living process. 

...The presence of constraint -- the absence of certain potential states -- is a critical factor in the capacity to perform work. Thus, it is only because of a restriction or constraint imposed on the release of energy (e.g, the one-directional expansion of an exploding gas in a cylinder) that a change of state can be imposed by one system on another. 

It is precisely by virtue of what is not enabled, but could otherwise have occurred, that a change can be forced.

A brilliant observation. Also, an obvious one, now that Deacon has pointed it out.

Even though I've read all of his book, I still don't grasp what he says below very well. Others may find the following even more mysterious. Or, perhaps, less so. In another blog post I'll try to explain how his absential outlook relates to mind and consciousness. 

The core insight that guides this book can be grasped by taking the Taoist metaphysics quoted at the beginning of this chapter seriously. We simply need to pay attention to the holes. As rhetorically ironic as this sounds, the thesis of this book is that the answer to the age-old riddle of teleology is not provided in terms of "nothing but..." or "something more..." but rather "something less..." This is the essence of what I am calling absentialism. 

This is the Tao Te Ching passage Deacon alludes to:

Thirty spokes converge at the wheel's hub, to a hole
   that allows it to turn.
Clay is shaped into a vessel, to enclose an emptiness
   that can be filled.
Doors and windows are cut into walls, to provide
   access to their protection.
Though we can only work with what is there, use
   comes from what is not there.
    -- LAO TSU

Free will is a meaningless expression

Here's another episode in my so-far never-ending quest to convince readers of this blog that free will, as normally understood, is an illusion. (For previous attempts, type "free will" in the Google search box in the right sidebar.)

Below is a letter to the editor in the July 30 issue of New Scientist, a British publication. Which explains the weird spelling of "randomize" and "recognize." Damn, can't those Britons speak English correctly, like us Americans do?

Anyway, I digress. 

I thought Carpenter's last paragraph was right-on. Along with reflexes, intuitions seem to be another example of unconsicous brain processes that we aren't aware of being prepared in advance. 

With rational, conscious, deliberative step-by-step thinking, by contrast, we are aware of how the brain is going through the process of making a decision. But awareness of a mechanistic process doesn't make it any less mechanical. 

If the hood (or bonnet) of a car is closed, the existence of an engine isn't obvious. With the hood open, it becomes clearer that when the car moves, it is because of the engine. Closed or open, though, the same mechanical processes are making the car move.

Not a perfect analogy to the brain and our illusory feeling of free will, but sort of close. Here's the letter:

We can see brains randomising choice
From Roger Carpenter

Nial Wareing speculates that the brain might make its decisions probabilistically, and that in some circumstances it might deliberately randomise its actions (Letters, 2 July). It has long been known that this is what it does.

Recordings show that neurons in the brain encode probability and run races with each other to make decisions. A good deal of randomness is gratuitously injected into this process. To an outside observer, the resultant unpredictable responses look like “free will”, and would indeed be highly desirable in predator/prey interactions.

To the owner of the brain, the crucial difference between those responses that we recognise as unconscious – like reflexes – and those that we think we have “willed”, is that we experience the latter being prepared in advance, but not the former. But both are equally mechanistic. Free will is a pretty meaningless expression.

Cambridge, UK

Free will is an illusion: convincing Sam Harris video

Below is a 9-minute video that encapsulates Sam Harris' views about free will.

Which, in short, is that it is an illusion. And that the world would be better off if people recognized this, rather than wrongly believing that humans are able to freely choose what to do at any given moment.

The background music in the video is a bit distracting. But Harris' message is so convincing, and the video is so well done (aside, perhaps, from the music selection), I urge you to watch it.

Now, I realize that some people don't look upon free will in the way that Harris does.

Harris, like me, considers that free will means just that: we are free to will what we want to do. This is how the legal system looks upon free will. It also is how virtually everybody who believes in free will looks upon it: as the capacity to do this rather than that. 

The alternative view of free will makes little, if any, sense. Namely, that while we are not free to choose what we will, if there is nothing constraining us from carrying out that determined choice, then we have "free will." 

Well, this viewpoint simply means that humans have as much free will as a well-functioning computer does. Absent software or hardware problems, a computer is able to carry out the tasks that it has been programmed to do. But does this mean it has free will?

No. Likewise, Harris says that because we live in a deterministic universe, human actions also are determined by all of the influences acting upon us from birth onward (even before birth, of course, given genetic influences). 

If you watch the video and find flaws in Harris' arguments, please leave a comment explaining what you think he got wrong. Like I said, I find the video highly convincing, but I'm open to hearing reasons why free will isn't an illusion. So far, I just haven't come across any convincing ones.

Sam Harris - Free Will from The Inspiration Journey on Vimeo.

"#Pray for Turkey" -- a demonstrably useless gesture

Prayer has no effect on anybody or anything. Except, perhaps, the person praying. There is no scientific or other sort of demonstrable evidence that praying helps make the world better. 

In fact, the largest research study on the efficacy of prayer found that not only was it useless in helping heart bypass patients recover, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slighter higher rate of complications. 

Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and other scientists tested the effect of having three Christian groups pray for particular patients, starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks. The volunteers prayed for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.

The study looked for any complications within 30 days of the surgery. Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.

So when my local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, published an editorial called "We Must Also Pray for Turkey," my first thought (and also my last thought) was that's a stupid idea. 

Stupid, because the point of the editorial was that people should be as concerned about the recent terrorist attack at the Istanbul airport as they were about attacks in Paris and Brussels. 

OK. That's a good point. But it has nothing to do with prayer. 

Along with hundreds of millions of others in the world, I don't believe in praying. Our ranks include atheists, agnostics, humanists, Buddhists, Hindus, and anyone else who doesn't accept the unproven hypothesis of a personal god who responds to entreaties.

I do believe in doing something about problems.

If the editorial had been called "We Must Also Do Something for Turkey," I would have had no problem with it. However, calling for prayer actually is even worse than a useless gesture, because it encourages people to believe that an ineffectual religious practice is doing something about a problem.

Hemant Mehta's short piece in the New York Times, "Prayer is Useless, and Has a Downside," expresses this well. 

While the main purpose of prayer may be to help others, it never demonstrably does that. Prayers benefit only those believers who say or hear them. Prayer gives them comfort. It lets them think they have some control over a situation that may be out of their hands. It’s the last resort of people who have run out of ideas, and the first resort of people who never bothered to think about how they could actually fix the problem at hand.

This is not harmless. There’s a very real downside to praying.

It lulls believers into a false sense of accomplishment. We cannot solve our problems – much less the world’s – through prayer. We often see people with good intentions praying for victims in the wake of a tragedy, but prayer is useless without action, and those actions make the prayers irrelevant. To paraphrase the great Robert Green Ingersoll, hands that help are far better than lips that pray.

I have no problem with “prayer” as an act of meditation. In fact, many atheists can tell you the benefit of silent self-reflection. The delusion occurs when you think someone else is hearing your thoughts and acting on them.

When it comes down to it, prayer is illogical, even in religious terms. If God has a plan, why try to thwart it? If God can be swayed by prayers, what kind of God would allow the horrors we see in the world? And if two devout believers pray for different things, how does God choose the winner? (I'm sure the San Antonio Spurs would love to know the answer to that.)

Prayer is nothing but a powerful placebo. We’d all be better off accepting that.

As evidence of this, there also was a call to pray for Turkey in 2013. A Christianity Today article, "Turkey: What to Know and How to Pray," advised this (I've boldfaced an especially pertinent part):

So, how can you pray? Well, I will share how I am praying. I'm praying:

1. That the protests geared toward the government will lead the people away from increased Islamization and to greater religious freedom.
2. For the safety of "workers" serving there right now.
3. For the safety of Turks and for a just end to the violence.
4. That Turks in Turkey (and the 75 million Turks around the world) will turn to Christ in the midst of the tumult.

Well, praying for Turkey in 2013 didn't stop the violence in 2016. Thus praying for Turkey now will do exactly nothing to help that nation in the future.

Like I said, only doing something concrete and practical will help Turkey. Stop with the prayers; start with the doing. That's the best advice after every natural or human-caused disaster.

Free will exists. Freedom of the will doesn't.

I've written a lot about free will on this blog. To me it seems obvious that free will doesn't exist. At least not in the way most people believe that it does. 

(You can find my numerous posts on this subject by typing "free will" into the Google search box in the right sidebar.)

But after finishing Paul Singh's book, "The Great Illusion: The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self," I realize that when commenters on my posts object to free will being an illusion, they're usually thinking of free will of being something different than how I see it. 

So hopefully this blog post will clear the confusion up. (Yeah, I'm an optimist.)

Singh makes a distinction between Free Will, which does exist, and Freedom of the Will, which doesn't. I agree with him. However, the problem is that when most people think of free will, they're really talking about freedom of the will. 

Free will, in Singh's view, is essentially the philosophical position of compatibilism. Meaning, this definition of free will is compatible with determinism. Wikipedia says:

Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent. Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in situations for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics. They define free will as freedom to act according to one's motives without arbitrary hindrance from other individuals or institutions.

Likewise, Singh writes:

Free will, according to common sense, is demonstrated by the way that a person's actions are as he or she wills their actions to be, and not otherwise. This basic conception of free will is the one built into our moral and legal systems, as we hold people responsible for their freely willed actions.

If you are able to rest content with this common sense conception of free will, then you can continue to speak of "free will" as something real and sensible, without worrying about science someday refuting it.

But this is a very weak view of free will. It just means, say, that when I will or desire to go grocery shopping in my car, nothing is stopping me from starting my car's engine, driving into town, and getting what's on our grocery list.

On the other hand, someone in jail could have the same desire, yet wouldn't have the freedom to carry out the willed actions. Thus they lack free will in this instance, and I don't. Meaning, I am free to do what I will -- go grocery shopping -- and they aren't.

This is far distant from how most people look upon free will. The usual conception of free will is that a person is able to freely choose what to will, and not merely freely carry out a willed action. 

Thus Freedom of the Will is really what's usually meant by Free Will. Singh explains:

Free will defenders agree that a person's willing decision to something should result in the intended action, in order for the person to display liberty of action. What about the liberty of the will itself?... A person's control over an action really isn't like controlling ones' will.

...Defenders of freedom of the will set a requirement along the following lines. A person's will, they say, could have willed otherwise in the moment of willing, if a person's will is truly free. They then design a required test for this "could have willed otherwise" that goes something like this: If a will is free, then at the moment of decision, and with everything exactly the way it is, a will could both decide to do an action and not to do that action.

These requirements go far beyond anything suggested by ordinary free will. We aren't really talking about ordinary free will any more, but rather "freedom of the will." 

...Defenders of freedom of the will treat the will as a mini-person, applying to the will the same sort of criteria for freedom that they apply to the whole person. If a person is free only if nothing outside of the self completely determines what he or she does, then the same must be true of the will itself; a will is free only if nothing outside of it completely determines what it does.

Even if things outside the will inform and influence it, the will must supply something extra to finally decide what is to be done, so that it retains the ability to both choose and change any choice.

There is no evidence that this sort of free will, "freedom of the will," exists. It goes agains everything science knows about the human brain, determinism, and the laws of nature. Freedom of the will requires a supernatural influence that overrides the physical goings-on in our craniums.

Singh says:

This FoW [Freedom of Will] criterion is commonly accepted among philosophers and theologians who prefer dualism over naturalism, usually for religious reasons. Dualism asserts that a person as a whole, and something within a person as well, cannot be entirely physical in nature and operation.

This non-physicality is manifested in a power to counter-balance and even override what would otherwise happen according to forces and laws. 

...What is clear is that devotion to the FoW criterion drives free will enthusiasm towards the speculation that the will must be entirely unnatural and transcendent. If it were just another cog in the material machine, it wouldn't be able to control the machine by itself.

Freedom of the will calls for freedom from reality.

Which is why freedom of the will doesn't exist, while free will does. Einstein had it right:

“Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).”

    -- Albert Einstein

Science warns: don't get sucked into a black hole of belief

When I was in college forty-six years ago, back in the ancient year of 1970, I was attracted to a Eastern form of mysticism that went by various names, including Science of the Soul. 

I really liked the idea of being able to do a spiritual "experiment." 

Become a vegetarian. Live a moral life. Meditate for several hours a day as instructed by the guru. Observe what happens in meditation. Explore the hypothesis that there are higher non-physical domains of reality. Attempt to enter these via an altered form of consciousness.

For about thirty-five years I diligently conducted that experiment.

When I considered what I'd learned from all that meditating, all that following the teachings of the guru, all that volunteer service I'd put in on behalf of the spiritual organization, I came to a conclusion:

I no longer believed what I'd been told was true. I'd lost faith in the guru and his teachings. I didn't think that reality extended into supernatural realms, there was life after death, or that God existed.

To me, then as now, I viewed my change of heart and mind as completely consistent with my commitment to investigate a Science of the Soul. After all, scientists alter their views as new and better evidence becomes available. Science isn't a fixed set of facts, but a dynamic process of seeking what appears to be the most likely truths about the cosmos.

Below are some quotes from physicist Sean Carroll's marvelous book, "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself." In his Accepting Uncertainty chapter, Carroll talks about the scientific method in a fashion that resonates with me. 

In between the quotations, I've commented on them. First, Carroll speaks about absolute faith. This was something that many of my fellow disciples had. At least, they claimed they had 100% confidence that the Guru was God in human form and his teachings were true.

Me, I was never that sure.

For a long time I felt that the chances were high that it was indeed possible to leave this physical universe behind and enter higher regions of supernatural reality. But I had my doubts about this, even though I did my best to suppress them behind a covering of belief. 

That lingering skepticism probably protected me from being sucked into a black hole of belief, for which I'm grateful. Carroll writes:

The word "faith" is highly charged, and this isn't the place to argue over how it should be defined. Let us merely note that sometimes faith is taken as something that is absolutely certain. Consider these statements from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: [I've just included one of them]

...Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie.

It is this kind of stance -- that there is a kind of knowledge that is certain, which we should receive with docility, to which we should submit -- that I'm arguing against. There are no such kinds of knowledge. We can always be mistaken, and one of the most important features of a successful strategy for understanding the world is that it will constantly be testing its presuppositions, admitting the possibility of error, and trying to do better.

We all want to live on a stable planet of belief, but we want to avoid being sucked into a black hole of belief, where our convictions are so strong that we can never escape, no matter what kind of new insight or information we obtain.

In the next passage, Carroll speaks about a subject that has frequently come up on this blog since I started Church of the Churchless in 2004, disturbed at how the religious right had played a big role in getting George W. Bush re-elected as president. When I disparage blind faith, religious believers often respond with "But Brian, you have your own kind of faith -- faith in the ability of science to uncover the truth about reality."

Here's how Carroll deals with that spurious argument.

You will sometimes hear the claim that even science is based on a kind of "faith," for example, in the reliability of our experimental data or in the existence of unbreakable physical laws. That is wrong. As part of the practice of science, we certainly make assumptions -- our sense data is giving us roughly reliable information about the world, simple explanations are preferable to complex ones, we are not brains in vats, and so forth.

But we don't have "faith" in those assumptions; they are components of our planets of belief, but they are always subject to revision and improvement and even, if necessary, outright rejection. By its nature, science needs to be completely open to the actual operation of the world, and that means that we stand ready to discard any idea that is no longer useful, no matter how cherished and central it may once have seemed.

Then Carroll talks about an important subject, our inability to know anything for certain. It's all a matter of probabilities. That's how my spiritual beliefs (and then the lack thereof) altered over the years: gradually, as I experienced increasing evidence that pointed to naturalism, rather than supernaturalism, being most likely to be true.

Am I completely convinced of this? No.

I'm very much open to the cosmos, or God, proving me wrong. If I come across convincing evidence for life after death, soul travel, and an immaterial divinity, I'd be overjoyed to say, Changed my mind again! 

For now, though, I'm going with what seems much more likely to be true. This is my one and only life; there's no spiritual reality beyond the physical world; consciousness is produced by the brain and ends when the brain does. Carroll says:

Because we should have nonzero credences for ideas that might seem completely unlikely or even crazy, it becomes useful to distinguish between "knowing" and "knowing with absolute logical certainty." If our credence for some proposition is 0.0000000001, we're not absolutely certain it's wrong -- but it's okay to proceed as if we know it is.

...Consider going home tonight and cooking some pasta for dinner. But before you open the lid on that jar of marinara sauce, ask yourself: What if a freak mutation inside the jar has created a deadly pathogen that will be released if and only if you open the lid, spreading through the world and killing all forms of life. Clearly that would be bad; just as clearly, it seems very unlikely. But you can't prove that it won't happen. There's a chance, even if it's very small.

I'm not bothered by the loss of my once-cherished beliefs in God, an afterlife, and zipping around heavenly regions in my astral, causal, and soul-selves. I started out my spiritual quest by wanting to know the truth about the cosmos. I'm still committed to that quest. 

It just has led me to change my beliefs to be in accord with how reality most likely is. I'll keep searching for More Reality, as we all do. Like Carroll says, certainty never happens. 

The resolution is to admit that some credences are so small that they're not worth taking seriously. It makes sense to act as if we know those possibilities to be false.

So we take "I believe x" not to mean "I can prove x is the case," but rather "I feel it would be counterproductive to spend any substantial amount of time and effort doubting x." We can accumulate so much evidence in favor of a theory that maintaining skepticism about it goes from being "prudent caution" to being "crackpottery." We should always be open to changing our beliefs in the face of new evidence, but the evidence required might need to be so overwhelmingly strong that it's not worth the effort to seek it out.

We are left with, not absolute proof of anything, but a high degree of confidence in some things, and greater uncertainty in others. That's both the best we can hope for and what the world does as a matter of fact grant us. Life is short, and certainty never happens.

Stephen Hawking's "Genius" series looks at free will confusingly

Wow! As a big Stephen Hawking fan, I never thought that I'd write a blog post where I took him to task for getting a scientific subject wrong. 

But after watching Episode 3 of Hawking's new "Genius" series, I've got to point out how confusing this Why Are We Here? episode was when it came to free will. 

I've read a lot about free will. I've thought a lot about free will. I've written a lot about free will. (For example, see here, here, and here.)

So I was all eyes and ears as Hawking led three ordinary people -- meaning, non-scientists -- through exercises designed to get them thinking in a scientific way. Clips can be viewed on the PBS web page devoted to Episode 3, along with the entire hour long show. 

We see them marveling at floating plates in a room within an English castle. Not surprisingly, this isn't the result of magic, but magnetism. The lesson learned is that scientific understanding of the laws of nature is the way to comprehend the world, not supernatural explanations.

Then the three Genius explorers tackle a difficult problem: how to knock an olive on a toothpick that's balanced on the edge of a cocktail glass into the drink. Without touching it with their hands.

A pendulum device on a long chain looks promising. The swinging round ball definitely has what it takes, but the scientific students keep either missing short (no contact) or long (too much contact, so the glass breaks). After many tries, and many refills of the drink by a bartender in the room, they figure out what to do.

Use a board with markings to get the ball in a precise spot, and use a button that deactivates a magnet holding the ball in place so the "push" on the ball is exactly the same every time. It doesn't take long for them to find the sweet spot where the olive is gently knocked into the glass. 

And they can do this repeatedly. Lesson: if something is done in exactly the same way, the same thing will happen according to the laws of nature. 

A replication of the famous Libet experiment about conscious vs. unconscious choice gets us directly into questions of free will. The three people are asked to push a button (which sets off fireworks!) at a moment of their choice while staring at a large clock projected onto a castle wall. 

They note the time they consciously chose to push the button. As Libet found, and as other researchers have confirmed, a conscious decision to do something is preceded by unconscious activity in the brain. So this teaches the threesome that free will doesn't really exist, since the sense of "I freely choose to do this" is an illusion.

Actually, brain processes outside of our awareness determine what we choose. Thus they learn that determinism resulting from the laws of nature rules the universe, and us.

I was nodding along agreeably with Episode 3 up to this point. The points Hawking was making seemed eminently justified, being in line with familiar scientific principles I'd read about in numerous books and articles.

But then the episode took a turn.

A Doppelganger challenge featured many people wearing masks of the three Genius explorers. They lined up behind the real person. Then each individual decided to take a step to the right or left when a loud "beep" sounded. Before long these choices resulted in the Original and Doppelgangers being considerably out of step with each other, so to speak.

The lesson Hawking was teaching here struck me as way more scientifically problematic than what had been presented before. This exercise pointed to the Many Worlds (or Many Universes) theory of quantum mechanics. 

As a Wikipedia article discusses, the notion that all possible outcomes occur, that the "universe splits into all possible universes all the time" (as Hawking says near the end of Episode 3) is by no means a settled understanding of science. The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics has a lot of fans, but the article quotes a critic: "And who here believes the laws of physics are decided by a democratic vote?"

Yet Hawking and some other scientists, such as physicist Sean Carroll, speak as if it is virtually certain that every possible action or choice does occur in a parallel universe. 

Now, obviously there's no problem entertaining this hypothesis. It makes a lot of sense, and resolves some difficult questions about the quantum world. My problem is with how Episode 3 related free will to the Many Worlds theory. I failed to see how everything happening that could happen saves free will, as one of the threesome seemed to believe.

After all, Hawking had just led the three people to several understandings: the laws of nature rule the universe, and unconscious brain processes determine our conscious choices.

So someone decides to step to the right when hearing the beep in the Doppelganger exercise. This wasn't a freely willed choice. Yet certainly a different choice -- step to the left -- could have been made by the person's brain, given different causes acting within the brain.

I fail to see how everything that could happen, does happen has any relevance to free will. If anything, the Many Worlds theory points to Determinism Gone Wild. Not only does one thing happen according to the laws of nature, everything happens. 

Assuming the Many Worlds theory of the quantum realm is true. I'm not aware of any empirical evidence that it is. Thus Hawking's conclusion in Episode 3 struck me as poetic and appealing, but not convincing: "The universe you see is the one that gives rise to you out of all possible universes."

A member of the threesome said, "It took a whole universe to make me." OK, granted. The Big Bang can be viewed as the cosmic event that led to the present moment. Another quote from the episode: "We are a product of the universe, but the universe we live in is personal to us."

Well, sure.

We all experience the world through our own subjectivity. And the Many Worlds theory takes this farther, since there supposedly are countless other "me's" having subjective experiences in parallel universes. Naturally the only universe I'm aware of is the one I'm in.

It makes sense for Hawking and his collaborators on "Genius" to end Episode 3 on a semi-uplifting note after effectively putting free will on a skewer and roasting it to death. The basic answer he gives to the episode's main question, Why Are We Here?, is that we are here because we're not in an infinity of other parallel universes. 

Again, how this relates to free will and choice eludes me. But maybe the universe simply has determined that I'm not supposed to understand this.

Sean Carroll's "Planets of Belief" -- ideally constantly changing

I've loving a new book by theoretical physicist Sean Carroll,  "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself." After reading just a few chapters, I felt compelled to leave a laudatory Amazon reader review. Here's part of what I said.

I'm an inveterate consumer of both science and philosophy books. Almost always, the scientists lack the ability to talk about philosophy cogently, and almost always the philosophers are clueless about basic scientific understandings. So each frustrate my desire to simultaneously (1) learn about how the world is, and (2) find meaning in the world, given how it is.

Sean Carroll is the sort of writer I adore. The chapters I just read show that he's marvelously capable of talking about findings of modern science in a philosophically productive (and provocative) way. Meaning, he takes dry facts and infuses them with the moist richness of meaning.

For example, I was blown away by his discussion on p. 32 about determinism: "The universe is resolutely focused on the current moment; it marches forward, instant to instant, under the grip of unbreakable physical laws, with no heed paid to its glorious accomplishments or to its hopeful prospects."

That is freakishly great writing. I've never thought of the universe, or reality, this way before. Sure, I've meditated daily for most of my 67 years. I've been exposed to countless mystics, masters, yogis, and such who talk about living in the reality of the present moment. But I've never come across a scientist who said what Carroll did in his easily understandable way: at the deepest level, every happening of any sort is proceeding because of the present moment.

Today I read Carroll's Planets of Belief chapter. He starts off by asking, "How do we construct a comprehensive picture of how things work that is both reliable and consistent with our experience?"

One way is foundationalism.

A foundation keeps a structure firmly rooted in solid ground. Foundationalism is the search for such solid ground, on which to erect the edifice of knowledge.

Religions use this approach when they ask us to have faith in certain assumptions about God, divinity, supernatural realms, and such. That faith supposedly is the foundation on which all else will be revealed.

Likewise, Carroll cites Descartes. From "I think, therefore I am," the base foundation of Descartes' philosophy, he derived a series of beliefs: (1) God, Omnipotent and Omnibenevolent; (2) Evidence of Our Senses; (3) Science.

But Carroll prefers another metaphor than a foundation established in solid ground.

On the scale of a human being, the ground beneath our feet is unquestionably solid and reliable. If we zoom out a bit, however, we see that the ground is simply part of the planet on which we live. And that planet, the Earth, isn't grounded on anything at all; it is moving freely through space, orbiting around the sun. 

The individual bits of matter that constitute the Earth aren't embedded in an unmoving structure; they are held together by their mutual gravitational force. All of the planets in the solar system formed gradually, as bits of rock and dust accreted together, each collection growing in influence and pulling together what remaining scraps of matter it could.

Without meaning to, we've discovered a much more accurate metaphor for how systems of belief actually work. Planets don't sit on foundations; they hold themselves together in a self-reinforcing pattern. The same is true for beliefs: they aren't (try as we may) founded on unimpeachable principles that can't be questioned.

Rather, whole systems of belief fit together with one another, in more or less comfortable ways, pulled in by a mutual epistemological force. 

This is a diagram that shows the planets of belief for Aristotle, Descartes, and a modern poetic naturalist -- the point of view Carroll takes in his book.

Carroll then goes on to talk more about our planets of belief.

According to this picture, a justified belief is one that belongs to a coherent set of propositions. This coherence plays the role of the gravitational pull that brings together dust and rocks to form real planets. A stable planet of belief will be one where all the individual beliefs are mutually coherent and reinforcing.

Some planets are not stable. People go through life with a very large number of beliefs, some of which may not be compatible with others, even if they don't recognize it. We should think of planets of belief as undergoing gradual but constant churning, bringing different beliefs into contact with one another, just as real planets experience convection in the mantle and plate tectonics near the surface.

When two dramatically incompatible beliefs come into direct contact, it can be like highly reactive chemicals being mixed together, leading to an impressive explosion -- possibly even blowing the entire planet apart, until a new one can be assembled from different parts.

This is a good description of what happened to my own planet of belief (though it was less an abrupt explosion, and more a massive restructuring of the planet). 

I was attracted to an Eastern/Indian form of spirituality often referred to as a science of the soul in part because I adored science. However, eventually the conflicts between understandings of modern science and the philosophy of ancient mystics grew too great. For example, I couldn't accept that consciousness was separable from the body when every bit of evidence showed that the physical brain was necessary for someone to be conscious. 

So I did what Carroll advises: reconstitute my planet of belief to be more in accord with reality. I've never regretted that decision. Reality is too precious to waste on fantastical beliefs that don't hold together.

Ideally, we should be constantly testing and probing our planets of belief for inconsistencies and structural deficiencies. Precisely because they are floating freely through space, rather than remaining anchored on solid and immovable ground, we should always be willing to improve on our planets' composition and architecture, even to the point of completely jettisoning old beliefs and replacing them with better ones.

My (only) big problem with Sam Harris' "Waking Up" book

I'm re-reading Sam Harris' Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.

Having read it first in 2014, I wanted to see if I looked upon the book any differently now -- having altered my views about meditation, consciousness, and such during the past few years.

Well, I'm still having a problem with how Harris looks upon consciousness. It's pretty much the same problem I talked about in "Questions I had in Sam Harris' 'Waking Up' meditation chapter."

It sure seems in the "In fact..." passage that Harris is touting the good that comes from feeling that he is a subject with awareness, who looks upon sadness or fear as a content of the consciousness that he is not, he being consciousness itself.

Well, I have no idea what "consciousness itself" could be like. Yet in various places in his book Harris implies that consciousness isn't just the workings of the mind/brain, even though he also says that no one is sure what consciousness is.

This bothered me. It appeared to bring back a big dose of dualism into "Waking Up" that wasn't much different from the soul-body dualism Harris had decried in earlier chapters.

For now Harris was implying that there is (1) consciousness and (2) what consciousness knows. In order for this to be true, rather than just a belief, seemingly there would have to be demonstrable evidence that consciousness can be separated from any and all objects or contents of consciousness. 

Let's be clear: Sam Harris considers that the brain produces consciousness. He doesn't show any sign of believing in a transcendent non-physical consciousness (like soul or spirit) which exists apart from the brain. So I have no problem with this aspect of Harris' view of consciousness.

But as I said in the previous post, I can't grasp what Harris is getting at when he writes about what he experienced while meditating:

There were periods during which all thought subsided, and any sense of having a body disappeared. What remained was a blissful expanse of conscious peace that had no reference point in any of the usual sensory channels. 

Many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to one of the five senses -- and that the idea of a "pure consciousness" apart from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. I am confident that they are mistaken.

Hmmmm. I'm just as confident that they are not mistaken.  It seems obvious that everyday consciousness isn't limited to sense experiences. Dreaming is a conscious act. It doesn't involve seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching via the five senses. 

Likewise, I can believe that in a state of deep meditation, Sam Harris did indeed lose any sense of having a body, and wasn't thinking in any ordinary sense. But Harris was still conscious of something, right? He speaks of this as "a blissful expanse of conscious peace." 

That doesn't sound like "pure consciousness." It sounds like consciousness of a blissful expanse of conscious peace. No thought. No sensory impressions. But there were contents within Harris' consciousness: bliss, an expanse, peace.

Harris appears to view consciousness as something separate and distinct from what the brain does. Yet Harris makes clear that brains are us. For example:

We know, of course, that human minds are the product of human brains. There is simply no question that your ability to decode and understand this sentence depends upon neurophysiological events taking place inside your head at this moment. But most of this mental work occurs entirely in the dark, and it is a mystery why any part of the process should be attended by consciousness.

This passage makes good sense. Aside from the final part of the last sentence. 

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

Consciousness is a brain process.

Another book I'm reading, Paul Singh's The Great Illusion: The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self, has a more accurate way of looking upon consciousness.

Unscientific philosophy has been able to talk about "consciousness" ever since the word was invented during the Middle Ages. For centuries, this consciousness (mind or soul) has been credited with possessing all sorts of unnatural and immaterial features and powers.

Philosophical discussions of consciousness down to this day have a common strategy: start from the claim that this consciousness has key features that aren't simply examples of being aware or sentient or thoughtful about what is going on, and then claim that only a second kind of mental reality can explain those peculiar features.

Philosophers make this claim appear intuitive and hard to deny. It's so easy to convert being "conscious" into "consciousness" just by adding the suffix "ness" to that word. The English language makes it easy to convert an adjective into a noun. What else can the suffix "ness" get attached to, in order [to] make a new thing seem to pop into its own existence?

If that apple looks red, then why can't that apple have redness. Then why can't we just detach that redness and suppose that redness can be its own sort of entity, quite apart from red things like apples? After this linguistic magic, philosophers can then say things like, "I see the red apple in front of me, but I can also be conscious of that redness as well, and that redness is something else besides any apple's color."

And where is this extra redness, if it isn't something in the apple itself?

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

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

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

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

I'm with Singh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The "self" is like a web without a spider

Self... who am I? Will... who controls what I do? Being... do I continue on after death?

These are big questions. Humans have struggled to find answers to them from the beginning of recorded history, and surely long before that. 

Most people accept a view that is common to most religions: I am something other than my physical body; call it soul or spirit. I have free will; so I am responsible for my actions. I possess, or am, a non-material essence that is unaffected by physical death.

Well, maybe. 

But these answers go against the grain of modern science. Including, neuroscience. Granted, the answers are intuitively appealing. This doesn't make them correct, though. 

In the final chapter of "The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why it Matters," psychologists Daniel Wegner and Kurt Gray address the question of The Self. 

Interestingly, answering this question correctly makes the three questions I started with disappear. Or at least, appear much easier to answer. Why? Because if us humans don't have the sort of self we believe we do, what we are is pretty damn obvious:

A web without a spider.

This also is what the cosmos is. In fact, it is what everything in existence is.

Wegner and Gray don't venture into this far-out philosophical territory, but it is a valid conclusion given what science knows about big bang cosmology, evolution, quantum physics, relativity theory, ecology, biology, and many other disciplines.

Here's how The Self chapter of "The Mind Club", and thus the entire book, ends. Wegner and Gray echo the many other books I've read about modern neuroscience and psychology.

It's a beautiful way of looking at the world, once one gets over the resistance to not being a spider, and accepts being simply an integral part of the web.

Daniel Dennett makes an elegant analogy between the self and the center of gravity. Any object with mass -- whether a bowl, a piece of lumber, or even a brain -- has a mathematical center, a precise location that would allow you to balance that object if you were to put it on a pointed stake. 

However, this center of gravity is not a "thing" that exists independently of all the stuff around it, and if you took apart the object, you would never find a separate little object that is the center of gravity.

The self is a lot like that -- it's just the theoretical point that lies at the center of all your mental experiences, memories, thoughts, feelings, sensations, goals, desires, and personal relationships. 

"You" is like a web without a spider, a collection of memories, thoughts, desires, and feelings that is fragile and tenuous and yet still glimmers in the sunshine of perception. 

Or perhaps a better, if less elegant, analogy is that the self is like particleboard, that mainstay of affordable furniture. To all appearances particleboard is hard and very real, and like the self, it can -- metaphorically -- bear the weight of other people, break if struck too hard, and has sharp points that can hurt others.

It is also fundamentally separate from other pieces of of particleboard. However, upon closer inspection you would see that this material is merely a collection of little fibers pressed together and bound with glue. If you placed separate pieces of particleboard in a pool of water, the glue would slowly dissolve until all the fibers separated and floated together, completely intermingling.

In the case of your mind, the glue that binds together your memories -- the fibers of your past experiences -- is the fact that they happened to the same body, the same collection of cells that looks back at you in the mirror every morning.

Despite the ultimate uncertainty surrounding the question of other minds, it is likely that everyone you know has the same powerful emotions and deep thoughts as you do. 

Unfortunately, your own collection of memories, thoughts, and feelings -- your mind -- prevents you from truly appreciating that fact. Being one mind prevents you from truly appreciating the minds of others. This is perhaps the deepest of paradoxes from the mind club.

Being trapped in our own minds prevents us from fundamentally connecting with others, and there is no way to escape our own minds. We are forever a point of view: even if we lose our memories, meditate away our desires, and quiet our constant quest for mental control, we are still a source of perception.

But recognizing this fact provides the secret to transcending ourselves as much as we possibly can. By understanding that we perceive the world instead of understanding it directly, we can realize not only that the self is fragile and that free will is an illusion but also that other minds can be both more and less than they appear. 

Through our odyssey of mysterious minds ranging from dogs to gods, we have seen that all the minds around us -- and our very self -- rest upon perception. 

Nevertheless, these perceptions have the psychological force of raw reality and are what compel us to love and to hate, to harm and to protect. The idea of the "mind club" could be interpreted as meaning that these perceptions of mind are not objectively real, but we suggest that they are the only thing that is real. 

We are perceivers, and from the perspective of perceivers, our perceptions are all we have, and that makes solid the ethereal. As the Buddha said, "Things are not as they are seen, nor are they otherwise." We couldn't agree more.

"Free will isn't. Existence is." My hoped-for TEDx talk.

Well, it's time for my third annual TEDxSalem speaker application.

I was rejected in 2014 and 2015, having pitched Grand Talks About The Cosmos that, obviously, didn't strike the speaker selection committee as being such marvelously interesting topics as I considered them to be.

Noting that the deadline for prospective speakers to apply for the 2016-17 event was coming up on April 18, I decided to pitch another talk idea. This time, Free will isn't. Existence is.

If nothing else, another TEDxSalem rejection will add to my Tortured Artist (or Misunderstood Genius) resume.

In my old age, well, more accurately, my even older age, I can picture myself sitting at the end of a bar, or better, an Oregon cannabis smoking lounge (once they're legal), drowning my tortured artist/misunderstood genius woes with mind-altering substances, telling whoever will listen about my brilliant ideas that have been rejected by an uncaring world not yet ready for The Truth As Known By Me.

Here's how I answered the question, "What would your TEDxSalem talk be about?  What is your 'idea worth spreading?' What revolution do you want to start in our community? Describe your talk."

"Free will doesn't exist." This is a revolutionary neuroscientific fact that hasn't yet been widely embraced. Like Darwin's Theory of Evolution, or Copernicus' sun-centered cosmology, it will take time for the massive implications of this unsettling understanding to be fully understood.

Criminal justice, personal relations, social welfare programs, politics, conceptions of self-awareness -- these all have to be looked at in a new light under the glow of "Free will doesn't exist." And a closely-related fact: The brain is us.

While many people will initially feel chilled when the comforting blanket of illusory free will is taken away by modern science, the warmth of a philosophically unarguable proposition remains: Existence is.

Almost certainly there is no independent conscious will guiding things on either the cosmic or individual level. "Stuff just happens" is a pithy three word encapsulization of the best 21st century understanding of both the world outside and inside of our heads.

But with this realization comes peace of mind, love, interconnectedness, awe at the endless workings of the laws of nature via cause and effect. Once our mind is blown by the fact, "Free will doesn't exist," we are open (not free!) to explore the many positive implications of this revolutionary worldview.

Damn, I'd find this talk super fascinating!

I guess I could just give the talk to myself, if my application is rejected. Or re-read some of my blog posts on the subjects of Free Will Isn't and Existence Is. Here's a sampling:

Free Will Isn't -- here, here, here, and here

Existence Is -- here, here, here, and here

If words sound like spiritual drivel, they probably are

We've all heard lofty sounding spiritual phrases that initially seem like they mean something, but on further reflection are recognized as empty words.

In one of his Scientific American Skeptic pieces,  "The True Meaning of BS," Michael Shermer uses Deepak Chopra as an example.

Example: “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.” This is an actual tweet composed by Deepak Chopra, as quoted by University of Waterloo psychologist Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues in a paper published in the November 2015 issue ofJudgment and Decision Making.

The scientists set out to determine “the factors that predispose one to become or to resist becoming” a victim of what they called “pseudo-profound” BS, or language “constructed to impress upon the reader some sense of profundity at the expense of a clear exposition of meaning or truth.”

I was cited in the paper for describing Chopra's language as “woo-woo nonsense.”

For instance, in a 2010 debate we had at the California Institute of Technology that was televised on ABC's Nightline, in the audience Q&A (http://bit.ly/1PQqk6s), Chopra defines consciousness as “a superposition of possibilities,” to which physicist Leonard Mlodinow replies: “I know what each of those words mean. I still don't think I know….”

The entire essay is well worth reading.
Download The True Meaning of BS - Scientific American

Since I also can't understand what “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation" means on any level besides the obvious superficial one (to type that sentence, I needed to intend to do so while paying attention to where my fingers are on the keyboard of my laptop), this additional quote from the essay made me feel good.

In four studies on more than 800 subjects, the authors found that the higher the intelligence and analyticity of subjects, the less likely they were to rate such statements as profound. Conversely, and revealingly, they concluded that those most receptive to pseudo-profound BS are also more prone to “conspiratorial ideation, are more likely to hold religious and paranormal beliefs, and are more likely to endorse complementary and alternative medicine.”

Not everything that is said refers to something that is true. Words can be empty of meaning beyond the mind of an individual who considers them meaningful.

Religions thrive on this: getting believers to accept that words in a holy book, or uttered by a holy person, point to an objective actually-existent divine reality.

In his book, "Failure: Why Science is So Successful," Stuart Firestein says:

If science is to produce something more than trivial knowledge it must be hard, it must be susceptible to what the late philosopher John Haugeland called the collision between the theoretical and the empirical -- what we thought to be the case and what the experiments indicate is in fact the case.

...T.H. Huxley famously quipped that there is nothing so tragic in science as the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact.

Well, the same is true of beautiful spiritual words. If they don't point to a demonstrable fact about reality, they're attractive to hear but useless as a guide to living. 

Science's "faith" is very different from religious faith

Great timing, Steve. Your comment today on my "Why 'man of faith' is an insult" post came soon after I'd come across a perfect reply. But first, the comment:

Brian, thank you for taking a moment to respond to my post. I understand and agree with both of your references (although I have a special affinity for chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream).

Still, I'd like to understand your perspective on faith just a bit more. You indicate that neither of your examples require religious faith, and I agree with that premise.

My question is this (and expanding upon your examples just a bit): Do self-discoveries based upon personal experience ("I like vanilla ice cream") and scientific discoveries based upon proven methods of objective analysis (evolution, gravity, physics, chemistry, medicine, etc.) negate faith?

Thanks again.

Steve referred to my comment-reply to his previous comment-question, "Are you a person of beliefs or a person of opinions?"

Steve, we all believe in some things that are only subjectively true. Like, I believe that I like vanilla ice cream more than chocolate, based on a lot of previous personal experience.

I also aspire to believing in objective truths, such as those known to science. Like, a big bang brought the universe into being 13.7 billion years ago, and evolution has guided life on Earth.

Neither of these sorts of beliefs requires religious faith. Hopes this points at an answer to your question.

So, yes, I do consider that both self-discoveries based on personal experience and scientific discoveries based on methods of objective analysis negate faith. More exactly, "faith" as it is used in personal experience and science is very different from how this word is used in a religious context.

Jerry Coyne, a biology professor who runs the marvelous Why Evolution is True blog, is able to explain this much better than I can. 

Check out his recent post that I noticed a few days ago, "Another misguided believer claims that science is based on faith." Here's how it starts out.

I guess it was too much for me to hope that my 2013 Slate essay, “No faith in science,” would once and for all dispel the claim that science is just like religion in depending on faith. My point was simple: what “faith” means in science is “confidence based on experience,” while the same term in religion means “belief without enough evidence to convince most rational people.”

It’s the same word, but with two different meanings. Yet religious people mix up those meanings regularly—and, I expect, deliberately. I wish they’d read my goddam essay.

So someone’s done it again: Matt Emerson, a Catholic whose blog says, “I teach theology and direct the advancement office at Xavier College Preparatory in Palm Desert, CA.” He’s also written the book Why Faith? A Journey of Discovery, to be published by Paulist Press this May; it apparently aims to help people maintain and understand faith.

At any rate, Emerson published a short essay in the March 3 Wall Street Journal—”At its heart, science is faith-based too“—that, as usual, conflates the meaning of “faith” as applied to science (but we scientists avoid that word!) versus as applied to religion. Rather than go into detail, I’d recommend you read my Slate piece, and Emerson should have, too!

This got me to read Coyne's Slate "No Faith in Science" essay. It demolishes the argument that "faith" in science, or everyday life, is anything like religious faith. Here's the first part of the piece:

A common tactic of those who claim that science and religion are compatible is to argue that science, like religion, rests on faith: faith in the accuracy of what we observe, in the laws of nature, or in the value of reason.

Daniel Sarewitz, director of a science policy center at Arizona State University and an occasional Slate contributor, wrote this about the Higgs boson in the pages of Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious science journals: “For those who cannot follow the mathematics, belief in the Higgs is an act of faith, not of rationality.”

Such statements imply that science and religion are not that different because both seek the truth and use faith to find it. Indeed, science is often described as a kind of religion.

But that’s wrong, for the “faith” we have in science is completely different from the faith believers have in God and the dogmas of their creed. To see this, consider the following four statements:

“I have faith that, because I accept Jesus as my personal savior, I will join my friends and family in Heaven.”

“My faith tells me that the Messiah has not yet come, but will someday.”

“I have strep throat, but I have faith that this penicillin will clear it up.”

“I have faith that when I martyr myself for Allah, I will receive 72 virgins in Paradise.”

All of these use the word faith, but one uses it differently. The three religious claims (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, respectively) represent faith as defined by philosopher Walter Kaufmann: “intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.”

Indeed, there is no evidence beyond revelation, authority, and scripture to support the religious claims above, and most of the world’s believers would reject at least one of them. To state it bluntly, such faith involves pretending to know things you don’t. Behind it is wish-thinking, as clearly expressed in Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

In contrast, the third statement relies on evidence: penicillin almost invariably kills streptococcus bacteria. In such cases the word faith doesn’t mean “belief without good evidence,” but “confidence derived from scientific tests and repeated, documented experience.”

You have faith (i.e., confidence) that the sun will rise tomorrow because it always has, and there’s no evidence that the Earth has stopped rotating or the sun has burnt out. You have faith in your doctor because, presumably, she has treated you and others successfully, and you know that what she prescribes is tested scientifically. You wouldn’t go to a shaman or a spiritual healer for strep throat—unless you want to waste your money.

Understanding reality (including religion) is a matter of "likely"

After almost a dozen years of writing Church of the Churchless posts, and reading comments on them, I'm familiar with the arguments religious people use to justify their beliefs. 

When I point out that there is no demonstrable evidence supporting a belief in God, heaven, soul, spirit, angels, the afterlife, or any other form of supernaturalism, frequently I'll hear something like this:

Hey, Brian, you can't prove God doesn't exist, so there's no proof for your skeptical view either.  Thus, it's a tie! There's no proof God exists, and there's no proof God doesn't exist, so it's up to each person to decide which "no proof" to accept.

Well, typically I respond by saying that the way both science and common sense works is that we believe in the existence of something when there is good affirmative reasons to say "it exists."

If we demanded proof that something doesn't exist before giving up a belief in it, there would be no end to the absurd views of reality that would result. Such as...

"Fairies make the flowers in gardens grow. I know this because you can't prove fairies don't exist." 

Today I was reading a book I bought recently, "Human Universe" by physicist Brian Cox (it is based on a BBC program). Here's a passage that nicely presents the scientific point of view that I share, but can't express as well as Cox and Richard Feynman did.

Brian Cox writes:

I'll put my cards on the table here. I believe in UFOs. That is to say, I believe that there have been sightings of flying things in the sky that the observers were unable to identify, some of which were objects. 

But I do not believe for a moment that these were spacecraft flown by aliens. Occam's razor is an important tool in science. It shouldn't be oversold; nature can be complex and bizarre. But as a rule of thumb, it is most sensible to adopt the simplest explanation for an observation until the evidence overwhelms it.

My favourite response to the criticism that dismissing the possibility of alien visitations to Earth is unscientific was provided by physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman in his Messsenger Lectures at Cornell University in 1964:

'Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers -- because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said "I don't think there are flying saucers". So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?"

"No, I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely." At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?"

But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. 

To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extraterrestrial intelligence."

It is just more likely. That is all.'

"Higher" states of consciousness actually are lower

I was turned on to an intriguing TEDx talk by neuroscientist Arne Dietrich about Surfing the Stream of Consciousness by a reader of this blog.

His description of the core theme of the 17 minute video starts at about the 13 minute mark, if you want to get the gist in only four minutes.

 

A blog post on The Peaceful Self site, "Flying With the Pixies," includes a transcript of part of Dietrich's talk. 

"Your mind, your soul, your hopes, your dreams, your emotions is about a cantaloupe size of meat crackling with electricity inside your skull. There's nothing sacrosanct about altered states of consciousness.

You've always been told that altered states of consciousness are higher states of consciousness. The hallmark is that altered states of consciousness is the subtraction of all the mental faculties that make us so special in the animal kingdom. Hypofrontality means that the very pinnacle of human evolution, the prefrontal cortex, must be down regulated, which means that you lose these higher cognitive functions that make us so special. 

All altered states of consciousness are lower states of consciousness. You connect to nothing but your own reduced mind.

Some people find the idea repugnant, beneath the significance of the mystical experience and that's alright if you want to hold onto some sort of stone age, medieval sense of spirituality, but I think you will only find this counterintuitive if you hold onto the idea that in those special moments, when you catch a glimpse of some parallel, mental universe, in those very moments, the mind, somehow, can transcend the machinery of the brain, become a ghost in the machine, ride above the fray, and enter some sort of platonian world of eternal truth and beauty in flying off with the pixies."

Dietrich speaks about transient hypofrontality. This is when neural activation in the prefrontal cortex needed to do higher brain functions is much reduced. So you have "no ability to extract yourself from the here and now."

Hence, the feeling of being in a state of consciousness where time slows down and a sense of being at one with the world is experienced.

This is an entirely natural condition, but athletes, meditators, drug users, and other flow-junkies find the feeling so wonderful, often it is viewed as a higher state of consciousness. Actually, from the standpoint of evolution and neuroscience that sense of flow and loss of self is a lower state -- as Dietrich says in the transcript above.

Which doesn't mean transient hypofrontality, a.k.a, flow, isn't a good thing.

Our brains wouldn't have this ability if it wasn't adaptive in many situations -- such as being attacked unexpectedly and needing to fight back with our complete attention in the present moment (thinking about what we're going to have for dinner tomorrow isn't called for when there may be no tomorrow for us).

Nor is recognition of it a new thing.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously wrote about flow many years ago. "The Rise of Superman" is a recent book about optimal physical performance -- in line with the oft-heard advice my marital arts/Tai Chi instructor gives us students, the Yoda-like, No think, just do. 

It is indeed cool that sitting in eyes-closed meditation, smoking marijuana, ingesting a magic mushroom, or walking in nature can bring us to much the same thoughtless, timeless state of consciousness as enjoyed by a big wave surfer or expert skateboarder. 

Dietrich's point still stands, though: this is a subtraction from what makes us peculiarly human, a loss of higher cognitive functions. 

Again, this can be highly pleasant and functional. In certain circumstances.

Transient hypofrontality obviously isn't a condition we'd want to be in permanently, as we pretty much lose the ability to plan for the future or learn from the past. And it isn't a path to enlightenment or some other ethereal altered consciousness.

It's just another way the physical brain works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the passages from a final chapter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neuroscientist David Eagleman: the brain creates our reality

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

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

Really interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max Tegmark: "Consciousness is the way information feels"

I felt unsatisfied after reading Margaret Wertheim's "I feel therefore I am: How exactly did consciousness become a problem?" 

Wertheim, a talented science writer, ably reviewed philosophical and scientific conceptions of consciousness.

But she ended up favoring a mysterian view where subjectivity supposedly is just too different from physical matter to have consciousness explained by particles.

This is all thrilling science, yet a question remains: will any of it explain subjective experience? 

Chalmers, the philosopher, claims that the problem of experience is not mechanistically reducible and he argues that it will ‘persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained’.

In other words, he says, no amount of detail about neuronal potentials and interconnection is going to get us to the essence of subjectivity.

Plenty of neuroscientists, physicists and philosophers disagree with him, but I’m on his side.

She might be right. However, I'm bothered by the insistence by many that the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness -- the nature of subjective experience -- can't be resolved by the currently understood methods of science.

So I did some exploring into the views of one of the non-mysterians Wertheim cited, physicist Max Tegmark.

Some physicists want to be rid of the problem of consciousness altogether, while others are attempting to treat it as a core material phenomenon.

Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, hopes that consciousness will turn out to be another state of matter, like a solid, liquid or gas, and he’s calling for physicists to begin exploring the ‘physical correlates of consciousness’.

What, he asks, are the physical conditions that pertain when consciousness is present?

Below is a video of a 16-minute TedX talk Tedmark gave in 2014. It's interesting and understandable.

As he says near the end of his talk, many people won't like his hypothesis: consciousness is the way information feels when it is being processed by particles moving about in various ways.

Those ways require a certain independence and integration of the conscious entity. Thus consciousness is a result of the structure of information processing, the pattern of particles. 

Tegmark argues that nothing additional is needed to explain consciousness, no "secret scientific sauce." You may not agree, but he makes a persuasive case. Have a look:

 

Physicist Sean Carroll debunks unscientific religious myth-making

My wife is a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, so we get the organization's excellent newsletter. On paper, even!

I just got around to reading the August 2015 issue. It had an excellent piece by physicist Sean Carroll -- the address he gave after winning FFRF's "Emperor Has No Clothes Award." 

You can read "Physicist Carroll: Atoms and Eve incompatible" on the FFRF web site. Or via this PDF file:
Download Physicist Carroll: Atoms and Eve incompatible - Freedom From Religion Foundation

Only the paper version had two interesting graphics. So I took photos of them to share here.

The first shows how the universe evolves from a state of simple order at the moment of the Big Bang to a state of complex disorder some 1 quadrillion years after the Big Bang (meaning, a really long time from now). That's the blue line.

The red line is emergent complexity in the universe. It shows how complexity -- life forms, star systems, etc. -- increases even as disorder/entropy also increases in the universe as a whole. But eventually emergent complexity declines to the simple order that marked the beginning of the universe.

Carroll has an easy-to-understand explanation of this in his acceptance address.

But complexity, the organization of the stuff that is going on, is a completely different thing from entropy. In the beginning, the universe was a very simple place, just hot and dense and smooth. And the end, a googol years from now, the universe will be a simple place once again. It will be empty space. It is between when the entropy is increasing from low to high that the universe became complex, forming planets and stars and galaxies and living organisms.

That behavior is not an accident. That is a universal way that complexity behaves. Entropy just goes up, but complexity first goes up and then fades away once you approach the final state, which we call thermal equilibrium. So the right answer to the creationists is that not only is it allowed by the second law of thermodynamics — that complex structures like living beings arose here on Earth — but the reason why is because of the second of thermodynamics. We are parasitic upon the increase of entropy of the universe.

We are little surfers riding a wave of entropy until we eventually scuttle up on shore, and it'll just be empty space forever. And again, the universe is not special, you can see this in a cup of coffee. You take a cup of coffee with the cream separate, that's low entropy. Highly organized but also very simple. If you mix them together, it is high entropy, everything mixed together but also very simple.

It's the "in between" when you see the tendrils of the cream reaching into the coffee and swirling in little complex patterns. That's when you get the complexity of the universe. These little swirls, these little ethereal bits of complexity that are caught between the simple beginning and the simple end. That's us. That's what we are, temporary eruptions of structure and organization as the universe goes from simplicity to simplicity.

So that explains how complex structure can (and indeed must) arise in a universe that has a simple beginning and simple end.

Carroll's other image is used to explain why life after death isn't possible. It's a nifty, though incomprehensible to most people, set of equations.

Here's what he says about the impossibility of life after death.

Why is that true? The argument is basically the following: The mind is the brain. That's what the mind is, there is nothing else other than the brain that is going on. And the brain is made of atoms. Here is the controversial part — even some of my friends get annoyed when I say this. But it's the truth so I will lay it on you.

We know how atoms work. They are not a mystery to us. And they work in such a way that when you die there is no way for the information that is "you" to persist after death. There is no way for that stuff, that knowledge, that set of beliefs and feelings that made up you, to leave your body. Because it is stuck there with the atoms that are decaying in your tomb or being cremated or whatever your favorite way to be after death is.

We don't know all of the laws of physics by any stretch of the imagination. But we know something about them, and we know enough to make a very powerful claim: there is no room for new laws of physics that would affect how the atoms in your brain actually work.

That's a very subtle statement. I think that Dan mentioned I have three hours to give this talk, so . . . I would get tired if that happened, but I would give the whole explanation for the laws of physics, how they came to be, why we are confident in them.

Instead I will just intimidate you into submission by showing you an equation. In this one equation are summarized all of the laws of physics necessary to understand the atoms in your brain at the energy mass and length scales relevant to your everyday lives. We have quantum mechanics, we have spacetime, we have gravity, we have the other forces, electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. We have matter, the electrons and the quarks you're made of, and we have of course the Higgs boson.

There are plenty of things physicists don't understand, but we know enough to say that if there are any other forces, particles, fields, phenomena, they can't affect the atoms in your brain. If there are new particles and fields that we haven't yet seen (which there probably are), either they're so weak or short-lived that they would not have any affect on what the atoms are doing, or we would have found them in experiments. Those are the only two options.

No one ever understands me when I say this, so I'm going to say the same thing over again. I'm not saying we understand all of physics. I'm not even saying we know how the fundamental laws come together to make complicated things like frogs and ecosystems and spiral galaxies. There are enormous amounts of work to be done in understanding how science works, including physics.

But we have a basic underlying framework, which we call quantum field theory. This framework is either true or false. All the evidence says that it's true, and if it's true then there is no room for new physics that can in any way affect what goes on in the atoms in your brain. We understand what they do. There is therefore no room for the information that you persist after you die.

Read Sean Carroll's entire piece to get the full impact of his message. You may not agree with him, but you'll take a fascinating ride through basic principles of modern science.

Beauty is enhanced by science, not diminished

Here's a great video of physicist Richard Feynman speaking about science and beauty, combined with some gorgeous images. 

Feynman makes some excellent points. 

I've never understood why some wrongly believe that scientists, and the scientifically-minded (I include myself in this group), don't appreciate the beauty in life as much as other people do. 

Feynman points out that scientists look upon the world in the same way as everybody else.

But they also have a deeper factual understanding of certain aspects of reality. This enhances, rather than diminishes, the scientific appreciation of beauty.

Consciousness could be the mind's way to explain unconscious actions

One of my favorite parts of New Scientist issues are the letters. Not surprisingly, given the readership, the letters typically are intelligent, insightful, and creative. 

Below is one from the October 10 issue that grabbed my attention. It just seems like it could be so right, though I'm not sure how anyone could test this hypothesis. 

The letter writer suggests that just as the human mind/brain has an inherent tendency to attribute conscious purpose to other people (basically, "theory of mind"), perhaps that same ability to construct a purposeful agent also is applied inwardly -- to one's own mind.

So when we see ourselves acting, thinking, feeling, and so on, instead of attributing this to the unconscious sources of mental activity, the mind/brain tells itself "A conscious agent -- ME -- is in charge."

This added level of self-consciousness, a feeling that "I" am choosing what to do and think, etc., produces a uniquely human awareness of agency.

Which could very well be an illusion. Free will probably doesn't exist in the way we humans believe it does. However, there must be an evolutionary reason why attributing agency to others, and also to ourselves, is part of our makeup. 

Here's the New Scientist letter:

-------------------
Consciousness, illusion and agency
From Ray Thompson

I’m reminded of Graham Lawton’s observation that humans tend to seek “agents” with purpose (4 April, p 28). There is a survival advantage in always being on the lookout for the causes of things that happen around you. Could consciousness be a constructed “agent” explaining one’s own unconscious actions as things that occur in one’s local environment? This construct would provide a valuable interface with other local conscious “constructs” (that is, people), and allow the establishment of social groups.

Lymington, Hampshire, UK

The weird interwoven world of general relativity

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet nature rarely, if ever, works that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't believe in conscious decisions"

Here's a brilliant letter to the editor in a recent issue of New Scientist. I've read Castaldo's letter several times.

Don't claim to understand it fully. But I love this sentence, particularly: 

I believe that what we call a conscious decision is just an awareness that our myriad subconscious systems have collectively resolved a course of action or state of belief.

This makes a lot of sense. 

Like... yesterday I noticed that my wife had left a page in our local newspaper open to a Best Buy ad. A Labor Day sale was on for televisions. We'd talked a bit about getting a new television, but hadn't made any decision about this.

Suddenly I felt, this is the time. It wasn't like I consciously reasoned my way to this conclusion. It just popped into my mind, seemingly full-grown. Where did it come from?

Obviously from my brain. But what part of my brain?

That's what this letter is getting at. It really isn't talking about anything new, neuroscience-wise. Like I said, I just think this guy has a fresh and interesting take on the relation of conscious and subconscious.

We ended up buying a TV at Video Only, by the way. The process went smoothly, as if it was meant to be. According to my subconscious, I guess it was.

Responsibility and Consciousness
From Anthony Castaldo

David Amodio discusses how unconscious bias can determine our actions in some situations (18 July, p 26). But I believe that every conscious thought is supported by hundreds or thousands of subconscious systems. If I type “insulation” when I meant to type “insolation”, I think the word “no” and correct it: but what neural structure triggered the word “no”? What structure beneath that knows my text is related to solar radiation and did a check in that context?

It is silly to speak about my subconscious as if my conscious mind is independent of it. I don’t believe in conscious decisions; I believe that what we call a conscious decision is just an awareness that our myriad subconscious systems have collectively resolved a course of action or state of belief.

That does leave the possibility that one subsystem might hijack the whole and execute an action, such as shooting a child, that the collective of systems would reject if given time to reach a consensus. But the subsystem is not some alien: if it can seize control of a person then it is that person.
San Antonio, Texas, US

Belief in design of the natural world runs deep in human brain

Here's another bit of scientific evidence showing that false religious belief comes easy, while true secular rationalism requires effort to attain.

The title of the piece, "Even atheists intuitively believe in a creator, study finds" is a bit overblown.

It's more, as you can read below, that humans have an innate bias toward finding design in the natural world, even when something like a tree obviously wasn't intentionally designed.

This helps explain why the vast majority of people on Earth subscribe to religious beliefs. Psychologically, it's the easy way to go.

What's difficult is to carefully assess the evidence of non-directed evolution and other signs that however the cosmos came to be as it is -- many questions remain unanswered, and may aways remain so -- there is no need to posit an "intelligent designer." 

Most people automatically anthropomorphize the world, jumping to the erroneous conclusion that because stuff created by humans has designer, so does natural reality.

Here's the piece:
Download Even atheists intuitively believe in a creator, study finds

Since the discoveries of Darwin, evidence has gradually mounted refuting the notion that the natural world is the product of a deity or other outside designer. Yet this idea remains firmly lodged in the human brain.

Just how firmly is the subject of newly published research, which finds even self-proclaimed atheists instinctively think of natural phenomena as being purposefully created.

The findings ''suggest that there is a deeply rooted natural tendency to view nature as designed,'' writes a research team led by Elisa Järnefelt of Newman University. They also provide evidence that, in the researchers’ words, ''religious non-belief is cognitively effortful.''

In the journal Cognition, Järnefelt and her colleagues describe three studies conducted at Boston University, the first of which featured 352 North American adults recruited online. All were shown a series of 120 photographs, including natural landscapes and human-made artifacts.

They were instructed to assess whether ''any being purposefully made the thing in the picture'' by pressing keys designated ''yes'' or ''no.'' Approximately half of the participants did so under the ''speed condition,'' in which they had no more than 865 milliseconds to respond to each photo.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that ''religious participants’ baseline tendency to endorse nature as purposefully created was higher'' than that of their non-religious counterparts. More importantly, however, they found that non-religious participants ''increasingly defaulted to understanding natural phenomena as purposefully made'' when ''they did not have time to censor their thinking.''

The results suggest that ''the tendency to construe both living and non-living nature as intentionally made derives from automatic cognitive processes, not just practiced explicit beliefs.''

The second study used the same procedure as the first, but the participants were 148 North American adults ''who were recruited via the e-mail lists of atheist and other explicitly non-religious associations and organizations.''

The results mirrored those of the first study, in that atheists ''increased their tendency to endorse nature as purposefully made by some non-human being when judging natural entities under speeded conditions.''

A third study of non-religious people from Finland, a country where atheism ''is not an issue, and where theistic cultural discourse is not present in the way it is in the U.S.,'' produced similar results.

''Design-based intuitions run deep,'' the researchers conclude, ''persisting even in those with no explicit religious commitment and, indeed, even among those with an active aversion to them.''

So ''true non-belief may be even rarer among adults than previously suggested," as Järnefelt and her colleagues put it. This, they argue, helps explain why so many people misunderstand the theory of evolution.

We tend to absorb ''newly learned scientific information'' into our existing belief systems, the researchers note. In this case, such an attempted synthesis leads to the mistaken notion that natural selection is ''a quasi-intentional designing force that gives animals the functional traits that they need in order to survive.''

So members of the new atheism movement shouldn’t get too cocky that their ideas will eventually prevail. And science educators trying to instill the basics of evolutionary theory will have to find a way to do so while acknowledging their students' instinctive tendency to make the leap from creation to creator.

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Misanthropic Principle: Universe is fine-tuned against life

I like this guy's way of thinking. He has a letter in the most recent issue of New Scientist where he points out how ill-suited the universe is for life. 

This is, he says, the Misanthropic Principle -- as contrasted with the Anthropic Principle. It doesn't appear to be his original idea. Googling this term, I found a post by a Jewish astrophysicist, Howard Smith, who says that he coined the term.

 Here's the New Scientist letter:

From Nathaniel Hellerstein

Michael Slezak says that the universe is fine-tuned for life (2 May, p. 32). Balderdash. 

Inspection of the night sky reveals that the universe is almost entirely cryogenic pitch-black irradiated empty space, void of life, or indeed of anything much. To a high order of approximation, the universe resembles a vacuum.

The universe isn't 100 per cent lifeless, but 99.9999999999 per cent lifeless is pretty good fine-tuning. I deduce that the universe is fine-tuned not for life, but against it. I call this the Misanthropic Principle.

San Francisco, California, US

To me, the Misanthropic Principle argues against religious conceptions of the cosmos. Smith, though, says that it can have both secular and sacred interpretations.

The implications for religion are serious: We are blessed (or lucky, if you are an atheist). As I argued at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting, from my Jewish perspective of the Bible, being blessed means that we therefore have responsibilities: to act with humility and charity toward each other and the whole Earth and its inhabitants. As a religious person, I think it is not completely sensible to imagine that our blessed condition is just the result of inevitable chemical reactions.

Well, maybe not completely. But mostly. That's the prevailing scientific view, at least, which I share. So call me a believer in the non-blessed Misanthropic Principle.

Knowledge must be based on facts

Recently I wrote about "Five criteria for a 'God Theory' that religions fail." One of philosopher L.R. Hamelin's criteria related to private knowledge.

If her theory can be tested only by private revelation, not by observations available to everyone, she unjustifiably claims private knowledge.

Someone left a comment on this post, wondering why private knowledge wasn't justifiable. This was my reply:

Here's how I see the issue of "private revelation" and "private knowledge."

Can knowledge be private? Only if we define knowledge in a way that makes it virtually (or completely) synonymous with subjective experience. But then it isn't really knowledge -- something that holds true for more than just a single experiencer.

I feel uplifted when I gaze upon a rushing mountain river in early morning sunlight. (Just did that half an hour ago, actually.) That experience happened to me. But can I call this "knowledge" and expect others to accept it as such?

Well, they can trust that I did indeed have that experience. But there's no way that I, or anyone else, can prove that I really did. Even brain scanners, if one could be hooked up to me on the riverbank, could only show broadly what is happening in my brain, not the experiential feeling associated with this.

So I think the author of that quote was claiming something defensible: a private experience is unjustifiably claimed as private knowledge. Meaning, a person's subjective experience can't be held out as actual knowledge of some objectively real aspect of the world without evidence that is more than private.

Otherwise, what are we left with? Anyone could claim anything to be true, demanding that others accept it as true. I get pulled over by a policeman for speeding. I tell him "God told me that I needed to go that fast, so speeding is part of my religious freedom." He or she should laugh at me.

Yes, satsangis and other religious believers make claims to private knowledge. All the time. So does everyone else. Whenever I say "I feel..." or "I dreamed..." I'm claiming private knowledge. But like I said, this really is a claim to a private experience, which isn't objectionable. 

I can accept that you had a private experience, because I assume you have subjectivity, just as I do. However, if you want me to accept your private experience as something true about the world, you need to bring forth more than just a subjective claim.

Reading on in the book the "private knowledge" reference came from -- Jerry Coyne's "Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible" -- I've found some passages that echo what I said.

What is true may exist without being recognized, but once it is it becomes knowledge. Similarly, knowledge isn't knowledge unless it is factual, so "private knowledge" that comes through revelation or intuition isn't really knowledge, for it's missing the crucial ingredient of verification and consensus.

..."I'm hungry," my friend tells me, and that too is seen as extrascientific knowledge. And indeed, any feeling that you have, any notion or revelation, can be seen as subjective truth or knowledge. What that means is that it's true that you feel that way. 

What that doesn't mean is that the epistemic content of your feeling is true. That requires independent verification by others. Often someone claiming hunger actually eats very little, giving rise to the bromide "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach."

...As William James argued, it is the subjective and revelatory aspects of religion that gives it the most purchase: the feeling of certainty that religious claims are true. But when one has a religious experience, what is "true" is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality.

To determine that, one needs a way to verify the contents of a revelation, and that means science. After all, while some Christians accept the existence of Jesus because they have mental conversations with him, Hindus have mental conversations with Shiva, and Muslims with Allah.

...I've argued that science, construed broadly as a commitment to the use of rationality, empirical observation, testability, and falsifiability, is indeed the only way to gain objective knowledge (as opposed to subjective knowledge) about the universe.