Church of the Churchless

Don't be proud of losing your self. You never had one.

Today I heard Sam Harris say something interesting, yet rather obvious, in a dialog with Loch Kelly on Harris' Waking Up app.

Basically, Harris said that no one should feel proud of having become selfless through their meditation, because they never had a self to begin with.

The self is a mirage. So teaches Buddhism, and so teaches modern neuroscience. It's akin to the illusion of seeing water ahead on a hot desert road. When you get closer, you realize there's no water there at all. It's a mirage.

I've written quite a bit about the illusion of a self. It's common in some religions, being manifested as the illusion of an enduring soul rather than the equal illusion of an enduring self. 

Hinduism falls prey to this illusion. So does Christianity. By and large, Buddhism doesn't. Nor does Taoism. Here's some of my blog posts on this subject.

Self, no-self...what's the difference?
We humans have selfhood without a self
Not-self a teaching of Buddhism, not Hinduism
The self as illusion
Self/Soul is evolution's trick to make us think "I'm important!"
Spiritual illusions are as deceptive as worldly illusions

I also liked how Harris spoke about the importance of making everyday life the touchstone, or test, of whether you're gaining more equanimity through meditation or some other spiritual practice.

He said that back when he actually had to be someplace at a particular time, before the COVID era did away with a lot of traveling, at times he would get irritated when he was late. Then he'd do something unthinkingly, like break a glass while putting it in the sink. Having to clean the mess up would make him even later. And more irritated.

It's easy to have an inflated sense of spiritual progress when you feel all calm and one with the cosmos while sitting cross-legged on a cushion in the morning with no stressors acting on you.

If you can feel that way when things are going to shit in your life, that's a much stronger sign that your meditation is having some positive effects. 

The coronavirus doesn't care what people think of it

Philosophically, the coronavirus (novel coronavirus, actually, since COVID is a new version) has some interesting aspects. Most obviously, the virus is teaching us something important.

It doesn't give a shit what people think of it. It just does what it is designed to do by evolution -- spread between individuals whenever it has a chance. 

You can't pray your way out of getting it. You can't wish your way out of getting it. You can't positive-think your way out of getting it.

The only way to protect yourself is to avoid contact with the virus. Wear a mask. Physically distance from other people. Wash your hands often. Don't touch your face. You know, familiar advice.

Which a whole lot of Americans are ignoring, along with other clueless people around the world. People who believe they are smarter than a dumb virus, even though it's obvious that from the chart above, the virus has the upper hand in the United States right now.

Americans aren't very scientifically literate. And we have a president, Donald Trump, who takes pride in ignoring science, facts, and experts. 

So this country had a moderate decline in COVID cases after a peak in early April. Then people got complacent, figuring they knew more that public health experts, and now we're suffering from a steep unswing in cases. Also, in deaths.

It isn't a coincidence that the United States also is one of the most religious countries in the world. Denial of facts about the physical world goes hand-in-hand with an embrace of fantasies about God, heaven, and such. Too many Americans consider that belief has a magical power.

Actually, it doesn't. Only in the human mind do beliefs have an influence. Nature couldn't care less what people believe. Nature just does what comes naturally: act in accord with the laws of nature.

The coronavirus is immune to human thought. It can only be controlled by preventing its spread through specific physical actions, not by wishing it away. The same is true of global warming.

What's hugely disturbing is how badly the United States is doing at controlling COVID in comparison to Europe,

That's because we never had a unified national response owing to the incompetence and uncaring'ness of Trump, combined with governors and mayors who failed to maintain stay home/shelter in place orders for a long enough time. 

UPDATE: Just came across this tweet that supports what I said above.

So even though the European Union has more people than the United States, our cases have been skyrocketing whiie Europe only has a modest uptick. 

Perhaps some good will come of this. Maybe it will dawn on Americans that science is our best way of understanding the world around us, not religion or other fantasies. Maybe...

Dalai Lama says, "We must listen to scientists."

Hey, I can dream. It'd be great if our science-denying president, Donald Trump, and his fact-phobic Republican colleagues would pay attention to what the Dalai Lama said in the most recent issue of TIME magazine.

Oh, plus religious people who embrace prayer and faith over positive action and reason. The Dalai Lama is speaking to them also. I've boldfaced the parts of what he said that I particularly liked. 

These are timely sentiments from the Daiai Lama, since the United States is experiencing the highest levels of COVID cases since the pandemic began, and Trump, along with some clueless Republican governors, is ignoring public health experts. The Republican Governor of Georgia has even forbidden cities in that state from requiring masks be worn. Astounding, but true.

We must act as one to preserve our world

This planet is our only home. Environmental experts say that over the next few decades, global warming will reach such a level that many water resources will go dry. So ecology and combatting global warming are very important.

For example, my country, Tibet, is the ultimate source of water in Asia. Rivers including Pakistan’s Indus, India’s Ganges and Brahmaputra, China’s Yellow River, as well as the Mekong, flow from Tibet’s plateau. So we should pay more attention to the preservation of Tibetan ecology. This is not only for the interest of 6 million Tibetans but all people in this region.

In the past, when I was flying over Afghanistan, there were clear signs that what used to be lakes and streams were already dry. I feel that Tibet also may become like that soon. Regarding Tibet’s political matters, I have already retired. But regarding Tibet’s ecology and very rich culture, I’m fully committed.

We human beings have these marvelous, brilliant minds. But we are also the biggest troublemakers on the planet. Now we should utilize our brains with compassion, and a sense of concern. This is why one of my commitments is promotion of deeper human values.

From birth, we rely on others, particularly our mothers. From then, each individual’s existence entirely depends on a community, because we are a social animal. Community is the source of our happiness, so we must take care of the community. So now, in modern times, the concept of humanity is one community. East, west, north, south: everyone is interdependent.

The modern economy has no national bound­aries. Therefore, now we need a sense of oneness of all 7 billion human beings. In the past, many problems were created because of too much emphasis on our differences, such as nationalities and religions. Now, in modern times, that thinking is out of date. We should think about humanity, about the whole world.

We must listen to scientists and specialists. Their voices and knowledge are very important. And religious people should pay more attention to scientists rather than just pray, pray, pray.

In the ancient Nalanda Buddhist tradition, which we Tibetans follow, everything is investigated and not accepted by faith alone. If through reasoning we find some contradiction, even in Buddha’s own words, then we have the right to reject them. From childhood, I was always engaged in a lot of debate. Our thinking was based not in faith but reasoning.

Buddha himself was not born in a palace but under a tree. He attained enlightenment under a Bodhi tree. When he passed, it was under a tree. One of the rules during our monsoon retreat is that we should not cut down anything green. So this shows that Buddha himself paid attention to green issues.

Hours, minutes and seconds: time never stands still. We also are part of that nature. The past is important, but already past. The future is still in our hands, so we must think about ecology at the global level.

Eastern Oregon churchgoers thought Jesus would protect from COVID-19. He didn't.

Here's another in the endless supply of reasons not to be religious. Or, if you want to be religious, to not be a fundamentalist. It destroys your ability to engage in critical thinking.

Meaning, using reason to learn how the world works, and to act in accord with that wisdom.

Oregon, where I live, has done much better than most states during the COVID-19 crisis. In large part that's because we have a Democratic governor, Kate Brown, who put in place a stay at home order early on and has managed reopening in a judicious fashion, allowing counties to relax social distancing rules only if they meet certain guidelines.

In the generally wide open spaces of Eastern Oregon, Covid cases have been minimal. But that changed when a massive outbreak occurred in Union County. 

It didn't take long to figure out that the source of the outbreak was a church that defied public health rules that were in effect. Today the Portland Oregonian has a story about the idiocy of the Lighthouse Pentecostal church.
Download Everything we know about the eastern Oregon church at the center of state’s largest coronavirus outb

Apparently members of the church somehow thought that Jesus, or God, would overrule the laws of nature and virus transmission in favor of their true believing selves.

Well, that blind faith didn't work out well for them. I'd like to think that this will make them put more trust in science and reason than in the fantasies embodied in their Pentecostal teachings, but almost certainly this won't come to pass. 

Here's excerpts from the Oregonian story. 

A church in a small eastern Oregon county linked to the state’s largest coronavirus outbreak held worship services in the weeks before hundreds fell ill.

At least 236 coronavirus cases are tied to Lighthouse Pentecostal Church, near La Grande in Union County. The number of cases in Union County increased tenfold, from 22 to 240, in three days after the outbreak came to light. The outbreak led Union County to voluntarily return to Phase 1 of Gov. Kate Brown’s phased reopening plan — the county had been at Phase 2 when the outbreak happened. There are now 258 coronavirus cases in the county of 27,000 people.

Leaders of Lighthouse Pentecostal Church have remained silent for the most part about the outbreak. Yet social media posts and interviews with other faith leaders shed light on how the church came to be at the center of Oregon’s largest coronavirus outbreak, and how it has responded since.

The church, which operates in Island City near La Grande, has held several gatherings since May that appear to have violated Brown’s restrictions to limit the spread of coronavirus.

In a May 22 Instagram post, Lighthouse Pentecostal Church said it would begin in-person services Memorial Day weekend “in accordance” with President Donald Trump’s demands that states allow churches to open. At the time, Union County was still in Phase 1 of reopening, in which religious groups are not allowed to convene in large groups. The governor allowed faith groups to meet in gatherings of 25 people if congregants stayed a certain distance apart.

A Facebook video uploaded May 24 by the church showed hundreds of worshipers in the church dancing, singing and moving around in close proximity. The video was later deleted.

A faith leader at the church wrote in a Memorial Day Facebook post that he was proud to be an American, listing one of the reasons as being “able to attend church in our building.”

...Pastor Dan Satterwhite, who leads an affiliated Lighthouse Church in Pendleton, pointed to a Bible verse that he said may have guided the decision to hold services in Union County: Hebrews 10:25.

The verse instructs Christians to have personal contact with each other in order to live out the faith they proclaim, Satterwhite said. It tells believers how to help each other move toward love and good deeds, “Not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another — and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

...Before the outbreak, the church’s Facebook page published updates nearly every day. The posts included videos of preachers delivering daily devotionals, livestreams of church services and advertisements of free supplies the church offered to people in need earlier in the pandemic.

The church stopped posting on its public Facebook page Wednesday and has deleted all posts from after June 12. On June 17, it created a private Facebook page.

A person who answered the phone at the church June 15 hung up when The Oregonian/OregonLive asked about the Union County coronavirus outbreak. Every day since, the church has not answered the phone or responded to emails.

Three different leaders of the church declined interviews with The Oregonian/OregonLive.

In a now-deleted daily devotional video published June 16 on Facebook, Pastor James Parker appeared to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I appreciate everybody being cooperative with what was decided and doing your best to help,” Parker said. “In the end, our fruit will show that what we’re doing is the right thing, and more people need to do what we did. The more people that do the right thing, the easier it’s going to be for the rest of the world to combat this pandemic that we’re going through.”

Parker did not further explain what “the right thing” is, and the church did not respond to a request for clarification.

Future of brain research is filled with "or's"

Here's some passages from the "Future" chapter in The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience by Matthew Cobb that I've blogged about recently. (See here and here and here for my previous posts about the book.)

I especially like the passage that begins with "A related view" below. Almost certainly the brain isn't at all like a computer, for reasons Cobb describes. 

I also enjoyed the open-ended possibilities of where brain research is heading that concludes Cobb's book -- the last passage i've shared. 

With science, research can go in many different directions. That's a big appeal of science, how it follows truth wherever it might lead. Dead-ends aren't a failure, since they indicate more productive avenues of knowledge.

Here's the excerpts.

These repeated calls for more theory may be a pious hope. It can be argued that there is no possible single theory of brain function, not even in a worm, because a brain is not a single thing (scientists are even hard put to come up with a precise definition of what a brain is).

As Crick observed the brain is an integrated, evolved structure with different bits of it appearing at different moments in evolution and adapted to solve different problems.

...The nature of the brain -- simultaneously integrated and composite -- may mean that our future understanding will inevitably be fragmented and composed of different explanations for different parts. After all, as Marr put it, the brain is composed of 'a whole lot' of information-processing devices.

...The metaphors of neuroscience -- computers, coding, wiring diagrams and so on -- are inevitably partial. That is the nature of metaphors, which have been intensely studied by philosophers of science and by scientists, as they seem to be so central to the way scientists think.

But metaphors are also rich and allow insight and discovery. There will come a point when the understanding they allow will be outweighed by the limits they impose, but in the case of computational and representational metaphors of the brain there is no agreement that such a moment has arrived.

...A related view of the nature of consciousness turns the brain-as-computer metaphor into a strict analogy. Some researchers view the mind as a kind of operating system that is implemented on neural hardware, with the implication that our minds, seen as a particular computational state, could be uploaded onto some device or into another brain. 

In the way this is generally presented, this is wrong, or at best hopelessly naive. The materialist working hypothesis is that brains and minds, in humans and maggots and everything else, are identical. Neurons and the processes they support -- which somehow include consciousness -- are the same thing.

In a computer, software and hardware are separate; however, our brains and our minds consist of what can best be described as wetware in which what is happening and where it is happening are completely intertwined. 

Imagining that we can repurpose our nervous system to run different programs, or upload our mind to a server, might sound scientific but lurking behind this idea is a non-materialist view going back to Descartes and beyond. It implies that our minds are somehow floating about in our brains and could be transferred into a different head or replaced by another mind. 

It would be possible to give this idea a veneer of scientific respectability by posing it in terms of reading the state of a set of neurons and writing that to a new substrate, organic or artificial.

But to even begin to imagine how that might work in practice, we would need both an understanding of neuronal function that is far beyond anything we can currently envisage and would require unimaginably vast computational power that precisely mimicked the structure of the brain in question.

...Every cell is not like a binary switch that can be turned on or off, forming a wiring diagram. Instead, the main way that the nervous system alters its working is by changes in the pattern of activity in networks of cells composed of large numbers of units; it is these networks that channel, shift, and shunt activity.

...When we extend this insight to understanding the brain, the key implication is that, as the title of a 1997 article strikingly put it, 'The Brain Has a Body.' And the body has an environment, and both affect how the brain does what it does. 

This might seem trivially obvious, but neither the body nor the environment feature in modeling approaches that seek to understand the brain. The physiological reality of all brains is that they interact with the body and the external environment from the moment they begin to develop.

...Animals are not robots piloted by brains, we are all, whether maggots or humans, individuals with agency and a developmental and evolutionary history. Those factors are all involved with how our brains work and need to be integrated into our models.

...The significance of remembering that brains are in bodies can be seen from the way that brains interact with the gut microbiome. 'Germ-free' mice have no microbes living in their gut, and as a result show altered levels of serotonin in the brain and lower levels of anxious behavior. 

The unlikely causal link between microbes and behaviour was shown when the introduction of a normal microbiome into the mice reversed both these effects: fundamental aspects of brain biochemistry can be affected by the microbes that live in the gut.

...Perhaps the various computational projects will come good and theoreticians will crack the functioning of all brains, or the connectomes will reveal principles of brain function that are currently hidden from us.

Or a theory will somehow pop out of the vast amounts of imaging data we are generating.

Or we will slowly piece together a theory (or theories) out of a series of separate but satisfactory explanations.

Or by focusing on simple neural network principles we will understand higher-level organisation. 

Or some radical new approach integrating physiology and biochemistry and anatomy will shed decisive light on what is going on.

Or new comparative evolutionary studies will show how other animals are conscious and provide insight into the functioning of our own brains.

Or models developed to explain simple brains will turn out to be scalable and will explain ours too.

Or the default mode network identified in humans will turn out to be applicable to other animals and to hold the key to overall function.

Or unimagined new technology will change all our views by providing a radical new metaphor for the brain.

Or our computer systems will provide us with alarming new insight by becoming conscious.

Or a new framework will emerge from cybernetics, control theory, complexity, and dynamical systems theory, semantics, and semiotics.

Or we will accept that there is no theory to be found because brains have no overall logic just adequate explanations of each tiny part and we will have to be satisfied with that.

Or --

There's no reason to doubt that the mind is material

Well, today I got to the chapter in The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience that I was most interested in reading. (See here and here for my previous posts about the book.)

Since the author, Matthew Cobb, is exceedingly well informed about past and present history of research on the brain, I was curious what he would have to say about "Consciousness," the final chapter in the Present section of the book.

Not surprisingly, Cobb says there is no reason to doubt that the mind is material, being the brain in action, basically. Below I've shared excerpts from the chapter about this. 

The first excerpt talks about split-brain patients where the corpus callosum that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain is severed to control severe epileptic seizures. This is done rarely now, but was fairly common in 1962 when Bill Jenkins had the surgery.

Jenkins agreed to participate in what turned out to be a decades-long study by Michael Gazzaniga into how Jenkins' brain functioned after the surgery. The details are fascinating. Here's how Cobb sums them up.

These results were simply extraordinary. It was not only the brain of an animal that could be harmlessly split in two -- the same seemed to be true of a human brain, and the human mind. Each half of the brain was, on its own, sufficient to produce a mind, albeit with slightly different abilities and outlooks in each half. From one mind, you had two. Try that with a computer.

Read on for the excerpts dealing with the material nature of the mind.

The brain does not work as two separate halves, but as an integrated whole. In some way we do not understand, consciousness is unitary by nature, but it can be divided in split-brain patients, with the weird results that Gazzaniga and his colleagues have revealed. These differences between the two hemispheres strongly support the general working hypothesis that the mind emerges from the structure of the brain.

Any non-materialist explanation of the mind-brain link, like Eccle's suggestion that the brain somehow 'detects' the non-material mind, has to explain how, when separated, the two hemispheres enable such different minds to appear.

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

Crick's starting point was a materialist assumption that everything we feel and perceive is 'in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules'. As he emphasised, there was no absolute proof of this hypothesis (there still is not), but there is a lot more evidence in support of it than there is for any of the competing views, all of which view mind as non-material.

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

These amazing results contribute to the growing mountain of evidence that our conscious experiences and the activity of our brains are the same thing and suggest that, eventually, the great mystery of how it all works will be solved. As [Patricia] Churchland pointed out:

Even in this century, some philosophers have grandly announced that consciousness, for example, cannot possibly be a property of the human brain. For all the philosophical finger wagging, however, it is more than modestly auspicious that a few milliamps of current applied to the human mACC [midregion of the anterior cingulate cortex] can spawn a complex cascade of feelings, feelings that vanish with cessation of the current ... So far as anyone knows, non-physical souls do not respond to milliamps of current.

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

[David] Chalmers is one of several modern philosophers who have embraced non-materialist explanations of consciousness, claiming that it does not obey the physical laws of the universe, and that new laws of physics will be necessary if we are ever to understand it.

This possibility cannot be logically excluded, but at the moment there is no reason to support this view, beyond frustration at our current perplexity and the desire for something novel.

For scientists to abandon the materialist approach that has got us so far, and which provides experimental tools for investigating mysterious phenomena such as consciousness, we would need far stronger motivations, such as inexplicable experimental results that contradict the materialist working hypothesis.

No such data have been forthcoming.

Memory is material, yet still quite mysterious

Whenever a person claims to have experienced something mystical or supernatural, the memory of that experience which enables them to make the claim is thoroughly material. 

I remember that this thought came to mind while I was reading the "Memory" chapter in Matthew Cobb's fascinating book, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. (See here for my first post about the book.)

But that could be a false memory, though I don't believe it is, since I finished the chapter just a few days ago.

My wife, a retired psychotherapist, learned about false memories during a period in the United States, and maybe elsewhere also, when women, mostly, would recollect being sexually abused as a child in decidedly strange ways, such as at a Satanic ritual.

Eventually it became clear that false memories could be implanted in a person's brain when a counselor, say, would ask leading questions about being abused. 

Since there is no way for us to tell if a memory is true or false other than comparing the recollection to some sort of objective standard, or perhaps by asking others who had the same experience, sometimes accusations against supposed child abusers were made that had no basis in fact.

This is very much in line with what Cobb writes about at the end of his "Memory" chapter, which I've shared below.

The definition of "engram" is: a hypothetical change in neural tissue postulated in order to account for persistence of memory. Here's an explanation of the reference to Penfield. 

At the beginning of the chapter Cobb relates how, from the 1930s onwards, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield carried out hundreds of brain operations in an attempt to relieve chronic debilitating temporal-lobe epilepsy. 

He'd stimulate conscious patients with delicate electrodes to determine what part of the brain was a candidate for removal, if stimulating that part indicated a seizure was imminent.

Cobb writes:

This procedure revealed something rather eerie: sometimes the stimulation led the patient to relive very precise events. These experiences were vivid and detailed, like a waking dream.

... These strange sensations would occur only when the relevant area was being stimulated; if the electrode was removed, or if the patient was told that stimulation was occurring when it was not, nothing happened.

Now, here's how Cobb concludes the "Memory" chapter.

The research on the cellular basis of memory highlights what many psychological studies has previously demonstrated: memory is malleable. It is not simply a recording of ongoing events, it is constructed, and it can be false.

Above all, however, it has a material basis. 

We have found elements of the engram, and it is not like memory on a hard disk in a computer. Biological memory is rich, unreliable and highly interconnected, with access to it taking place via multiple routes, not through a single address.

The link between our ordinary sense of how we remember things and precise memories that could be evoked by Penfield is not clear. 

We do not appear to be perpetually recording our whole lives and yet those experiments reveal that highly specific and apparently inconsequential moments can be recalled, either by some external event, or by the pulse of an electrode.

The engram has given up a few of its most basic secrets, but we are still far from understanding what is happening when we remember.

Our brains might be like a computer in terms of how they sometimes process information, but the way we store and recall our memories is completely different. We are not machines -- or rather, we are not like any machine we have yet built or can currently envisage.

These advances in identifying the physical basis of memory raise the question of how sensory information -- the stuff of memory -- is processed by the brain in the first place.

Memories are held in particular sets of neurons, but that does not explain how the brain is able to work out what is in the world, and what exactly is being remembered. 

The last paragraph is an introduction to the next chapter, "Circuits."

History of ideas about the brain shows how clueless religions are

I've got a new favorite book: The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. It's beautifully written by Matthew Cobb, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester. 

l love reading books about neuroscience, because the brain fascinates me. And indeed, it is me.

No brain, no me. Also, no brain, no you. Without a brain we're nothing. Yes, the body can be kept alive if someone is brain-dead, or nearly so. But there's nobody home inside the body, since the mind is the brain in action, and without a mind there's no conscious awareness.

But I wasn't sure that I'd enjoy this book, since half of it -- the half that I've finished -- deals with the history of how humans have viewed the brain. I was worried that this part would be boring. However, actually it is gripping reading.

What Cobb shows is how over the centuries, thousands of years really, humans have steadily come closer to understanding the brain. The chapter titles in the "Past" section reflect this: Heart, Forces, Electricity, Function, Evolution, Inhibition, Neurons, Machines, Control.

There's little mention of religion in Cobb's book, because religion almost universally either has nothing to say about how reality is, or gets reality wildly wrong. Obviously this makes religious teachings about the brain and consciousness laughably irrelevant. Western and Eastern religions alike were founded in a pre-scientific time when the brain was a mystery.

So it isn't surprising that dualistic notions of the mind or soul being separable from the body were so much in fashion in Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and other religions. Ignorance of the brain led people to assume that because consciousness feels ethereal, it actually is.

Now, of course, we know better. No neuroscientist that I'm aware of believes in mind/body dualism. There simply is no evidence in support of dualism, and plenty of evidence in opposition to it.

Which doesn't mean that we in the 21st century fully understand the brain, consciousness, and such. That, I'm pretty sure, is going to be a central theme of the second part of this book that deals with the Present. Chapter titles in this section: Memory, Circuits, Computers, Chemistry, Localisation, Consciousness. 

Being a life-long admirer of science and the scientific method, I'm enjoying Cobb's detailed descriptions of how people (almost entirely men) have looked upon and studied the brain, starting with the 4,000 year old Epic of Gilgamesh and the 3,200 year old Indian Rigveda. Both religious texts viewed the heart as the source of thought -- a view shared by ancient Jews.

Common sense and everyday experience is a lousy substitute for rigorous scientific investigation. Cobb writes:

Heart-centred views correspond to our everyday experience -- the heart changes its rhythm at the same time as our feelings change, while powerful emotions such as anger, lust or fear seem to be focused on one or more of our internal organs, and to course through our bodies and change our way of thinking as though they are transported in, or simply are, our blood.

This is why those old phrases about being 'down at heart' and so on have persisted -- they correspond to the way we perceive an important part of our inner life. Just as with the appearance that the sun goes around the earth, everyday experience of being human provided a simple explanation of where we think -- our hearts. People believed this idea because it made sense.

Of course, that viewpoint appears ridiculously wrong to us today. But Cobb lays out the reasons now-discredited ideas about the brain were held at various points in human history. In retrospect it's easy to see why they were wrong. Yet we need to remember that future humans will look upon how the brain was viewed in 2020 as ridiculously wrong.

That's the beauty of science: it progresses. Sure, often in fits and starts, and sometimes even by going backwards for a while. Cobb shows, though, that over the centuries incorrect ideas about the brain fell out of favor, to be replaced by ideas that were closer to the truth, albeit still incorrect by modern standards. 

As I often note on this blog, religions don't make progress in knowing the truth about reality. Only science does. One big reason for this is that scientists engage in vigorous debate, subjecting competing theories to intense scrutiny, demanding solid evidence for their correctness. Religions, on the other hand, are big on faith and not questioning authority.

Which is why I liked this passage in Cobb's book. I've boldfaced part of it for emphasis. 

Müller had a relatively brief academic career -- he died in 1858, apparently having committed suicide at the age of fifty-seven -- but he attracted a remarkable array of brilliant students and researchers, including some of the greater figures in nineteenth-century science. These included Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Haeckel, as well as less well-known but equally significant individuals such as Rudolf Virchow and Emil du Bois-Reymond.

These young men, imbued by Müller with a taste for applying the methods and outlook of physics to the study of physiology, formed part of the long academic tradition of students trying to prove their teacher wrong. In this case, they rejected Müller's vitalism in favour of a consistently materialist approach. As du Bois-Reymond and Ernst Brücke put it in a manifesto they wrote in 1842: 'no forces operate in the organism other than those common to physics and chemistry.'

That appears to be true. So the students had a better understanding of reality than their teacher did. This also happens when members of a religion break away from it because they've come to realize how false the religion's teachings are.

So a big thumbs-up to science. It's by far our best way of knowing objective reality. When I finish the second part of The Idea of the Brain, I'll write another post about present-day neuroscience.

"We must accept there is no grand design" -- physicist Brian Greene

There's only good news in the final pages of physicist Brian Greene's new book, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe." (See here, here, and here for my previous posts about the book.)

Yes, there's no evidence for a grand design to the cosmos. No god fashioned our universe. The laws of nature didn't spring out of a divine mind. They just are what they are.

Which leads to another positive yes: So, yes, it is up to us to determine the meaning that we find in our otherwise meaningless universe.

Greene urges us to look inward for that meaning, since it won't be found by looking outward. Here's how Greene ends his book.

Whereas most life, miraculous in its own right, is tethered to the immediate, we can step outside of time. We can think about the past, we can imagine the future. We can take in the universe, we can process it, we can explore it with mind and body, with reason and emotion.

From our lonely corner of the cosmos we have used creativity and imagination to shape words and images and structures and sounds to express our longings and frustrations, our confusions and revelations, our failures and triumphs.

We have used ingenuity and perseverance to touch the very limits of outer and inner space, determining fundamental laws that govern how stars shine and light travels, how time elapses and space expands -- laws that allow us to peer back to the briefest moment after the universe began and then shift our gaze and contemplate its end.

Accompanying these breathtaking insights are deep and persistent questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? What sparked the onset of life? How did conscious awareness emerge? We have explored a range of speculations, but definitive answers remain elusive.

Perhaps our brains, well adapted for survival on planet earth, are just not structured for resolving these mysteries. Or perhaps, as our intelligence continues to evolve, our engagement with reality will acquire a wholly different character, with the result that today's towering questions become irrelevant. 

While either is possible, the fact that the world as we now understand it, remaining mysteries and all, holds together with such a tight mathematical and logical coherence, and the fact that we have been able to decipher so much of that coherence, suggests to me that neither is the case.

We are not lacking the brainpower. We are not staring at Plato's wall, unaware of a radically different kind of truth, just beyond reach, with the power to suddenly provide startling new clarity.

As we hurtle toward a cold and barren cosmos, we must accept there is no grand design. Particles are not endowed with purpose. There is no final answer hovering in the depths of space awaiting discovery. Instead, certain special collections of particles can think and feel and reflect, and within these subjective worlds they can create purpose.

And so, in our quest to fathom the human condition, the only direction to look is inward. That is the noble direction to look. It is a direction that forgoes ready-made answers and turns to the highly personal journey of constructing our own meaning. It is a direction that leads to the very heart of creative expression and the source of our most resonant narratives.

Science is a powerful, exquisite tool for grasping an external reality. But within that rubric, within that understanding, everything else is the human species contemplating itself, grasping what it needs to carry on, and telling a story that reverberates into the darkness, a story carved of sound and etched into silence, a story that, at its best, stirs the soul.

A physicist speaks fondly of art and the stories we tell ourselves

Art and science aren't at odds with each other. They are just different ways of understanding the world, friends rather than foes. Many artists love science. Many scientists love the arts. 

The notion that scientists are cold-blooded creatures who only care about objective reality obviously is ridiculous. But some people believe in that ridiculous notion.

So that's why I'm sharing some passages from physicist Brian Greene's new book, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe."

Here's part of what Greene says about art in his book's Instinct and Creativity chapter.

Art may have had adaptive utility directly at the level of the individual, a perspective I find particularly compelling. The arts provide an arena unbounded by the strictures of flat-footed truth and everyday physical reality, allowing the mind to jump and twist and tumble as it explores all manner of imagined novelty.

A mind that assiduously sticks to what's true is a mind that explores a wholly limited realm of possibility. But a mind that becomes accustomed to freely crossing the boundary between what's real and what's imagined -- all the while keeping clear tabs on which is which -- is a mind that becomes adept at breaking the bonds of conventional thinking. Such a mind is primed for innovation and ingenuity.

...I'm partial to the view that sharpening ingenuity, exercising creativity, broadening perspective, and building cohesion provides a template for how the arts mattered to natural selection.

With this perspective the arts join language, story, myth, and religion as the means by which the human mind thinks symbolically, reasons counterfactually, imagines freely, and works collaboratively. Over the sweep of time, it is these capacities that have given rise to our culturally, scientifically, and technologically rich world.

All the same, even if your view of art's evolutionary role veers toward creamy desserts, we can surely agree that myriad forms of art have been a steady and valued presence throughout human history. Which means that inner lives and social exchanges have embraced modes of engagement that do not place a premium on factual information conveyed through language.

...The most arresting art can induce in us rarefied states of mind and body comparable to those reduced by our most affecting real-world encounters, similarly molding and enhancing our engagement with truth.

Discussion, analysis, and interpretation can further shape these experiences, but the most potent do not rely on a linguistic intermediary. Indeed, even for language-based arts, it is the imagery and sensations that, in the most moving experiences, leave the most lasting mark.

As elegantly described by poet Jane Hirshfield, "When a writer brings into language a new image that is fully right, what is knowable of existence expands."

Nobel laureate Saul Bellow speaks too to art's singular capacity for expanding the knowable: "Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides -- the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can't receive."

And without that other reality, Bellow notes, channeling thoughts set down by Proust, existence is reduced to a "terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life."

Survival rests upon amassing information that accurately describes the world. And progress, in the conventional sense of increased control over our surroundings, requires a clear grasp of how these facts integrate into nature's workings. Such are the raw materials for fashioning practical ends.

They are the basis for what we label objective truth and often associate with scientific understanding. But however comprehensive such knowledge may be, it will always fall short of providing an exhaustive account of the human experience.

Artistic truth touches a distinct layer; it tells a higher-level story, one that in the words of Joseph Conrad "appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom" and speaks instead to "our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation... in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear... which binds together all humanity -- the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

...Make no mistake. We are all bags of particles -- both mind and body -- and the physical facts about the particles can fully address how they interact and behave. But such facts, the particulate narrative, shed only monochrome light on the richly colored stories of how we humans navigate the complex worlds of thought, perception, and emotion. 

And when our perceptions blend thought and emotion, when we feel thoughts as well as think them, our experience steps yet further beyond the bounds of mechanistic explanation. We gain access to worlds otherwise uncharted. As Proust emphasized, this is to be celebrated.

Only through art, he noted, can we enter the secret universe of another, the only journey in which we truly "fly from star to star," a journey that cannot be navigated by "direct and conscious methods."

Although focused on the arts, Proust's perspective resonates with my own long-held take on modern physics. "The only true voyage of discovery," he once said, "would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others."

For centuries, we physicists have relied on mathematics and experiment to reshape our eyes, to reveal layers of reality untouched by generations of the past, to allow us to see familiar landscapes in shocking new ways. 

With these tools, we have found that the strangest of lands have emerged by intently examining the very realms we have long inhabited. All the same, to acquire such knowledge and to utilize the power of science more generally, we must follow the unshakable directive to look past the peculiarities of how each of our distinct collections and cells takes in the world, and home in on objective qualities of reality.

For the rest, the all-too-human truths, our nested stories rely on art. As George Bernard Shaw put it, "You use a glass mirror to see your face, you use works of art to see your soul."

Brian Greene: "Nothing supersedes the laws of physics"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do they differ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life is physics orchestrated.

Religion is bringing out the coronavirus stupid in people

Not surprisingly, the coronavirus pandemic is causing religious people around the world to turn to superstition, fantasy, and unproven remedies. 

Naturally they'd be much better off if they paid rapt attention to the public health experts who are using science and facts in their advice about how to keep from being infected by the COVID-19 virus.

But religion often brings out the stupid in people. Especially when they're afraid of an unseen menace. Like a virus. Or the devil. The difference being that a virus is real, and the devil isn't, along with God and other imaginary supernatural entities. 

Today the New York Times has an interesting story, "In a Pandemic, Religion Can Be a Balm and a Risk." Below are some passages that focus on the risk of believing untrue things.

As I've frequently said on this blog, I have no problem with religious people believing in crazy stuff -- so long as their craziness doesn't adversely affect others. In other words, keep your weird ideas to yourself.

Unfortunately, dealing with the coronavirus requires that everybody follow recommended public health practices that are based on sound science. Just as with immunizations, if too many people fail to do this, then COVID-19 will keep on infecting more people at an exponential rate. 

So this is a great example of religion being a danger to society. There's no way to pray yourself out of getting the coronavirus. But hand washing and social distancing will help. A lot. 

Here's excerpts from the New York Times story.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Down on earth, the coronavirus outbreak was felling lives, livelihoods and normalcy. A nation-spanning blessing seemed called for. So up went a priest in a small airplane, rumbling overhead at an epidemiologically safe distance from the troubles below, wielding a sacred golden vessel from a cockpit-turned-pulpit.

Before his flight over Lebanon, a soldier at an airport checkpoint asked the Rev. Majdi Allawi if he had a mask and hand sanitizer.

“Jesus is my protection,” said Father Allawi, who belongs to the Maronite Catholic Church. “He is my sanitizer.”

Religion is the solace of first resort for billions of people grappling with a pandemic for which scientists, presidents and the secular world seem, so far, to have few answers. With both sanitizer and leadership in short supply, dread over the coronavirus has driven the globe’s faithful even closer to religion and ritual.

But what is good for the soul may not always be good for the body.

Believers worldwide are running afoul of public health authorities’ warnings that communal gatherings, the keystone of so much religious practice, must be limited to combat the virus’ spread. In some cases, religious fervor has led people toward cures that have no grounding in science; in others, it has drawn them to sacred places or rites that could increase the risk of infection.

In Myanmar, a prominent Buddhist monk announced that a dose of one lime and three palm seeds — no more, no less — would confer immunity. In Iran, a few pilgrims were filmed licking Shiite Muslim shrines to ward off infection. And in Texas, the preacher Kenneth Copeland braided televangelism with telemedicine, broadcasting himself, one trembling hand outstretched, as he claimed he could cure believers through their screens.

...People may have already unknowingly spread the virus in the name of piety.

Despite New York’s recent bans on large gatherings, several large weddings went ahead in Brooklyn’s Hasidic Jewish communities, which have reported a spike in confirmed cases in recent days.

Iran is home both to one of the world’s worst outbreaks and to dozens of major Shiite Muslim shrines, which have remained open to crowds for weeks even as the coronavirus left the country shellshocked.

...India has so far refused to call off an annual festival that starts Wednesday in honor of the god Ram, also known as Rama. In normal times, it draws as many as a million people to Ayodha, which some believe to be the birthplace of Ram, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

The state has asked devotees to celebrate at home this year. Organizers, however, are carrying on.

“People are getting the opportunity to have glimpses of Lord Rama,” said Vinod Bansal, a national spokesman for the group, Vishva Hindu Parishad. “It’s not appropriate to deprive them of this opportunity.”

...Amid the coronavirus anxiety, it was perhaps inevitable that some would interpret the pandemic as a divine missive. What it said was less clear.

Some Egyptian Muslims expressed certainty on social media that God was smiting non-Muslim countries by giving them the virus, apparently unaware that Egypt has registered nearly 200 cases and may have many more uncounted. Some Islamists, especially supporters of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, cast the outbreak as punishment for the Egyptian public’s support of the military takeover that brought the country’s authoritarian leader, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to power in 2013.

Some sought earthly remedies inspired by higher powers.

Video emerged last week of Hindu activists in India drinking cow urine to stave off the coronavirus. At the Lebanese government hospital where infected patients are being treated, a woman recently arrived carrying a mixture of holy water and dirt dug from the mausoleum of Saint Charbel, who is revered among Lebanese Christians. Some Christians were said to be drinking similar solutions as a precaution.

Don't spread false information about coronavirus

Science can be trusted. Though it isn't 100% perfect, science is way better than other ways of knowing -- especially when it comes to the coronavirus, COVID-19. 

I just discovered that a frequent commenter on this blog left several comments on my HinesSight blog that referenced false information from mythical "Stanford board" advice about dealing with the coronavirus. 

That information has been deleted by me. 

Please, COVID-19 is tough enough to fight without people spreading false information about it. Here's the truth.

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

CNN) — Contrary to what some may think, not everything on social media is rooted in fact.

Case in point: A recent viral coronavirus "simple self-check test," which medical experts say is completely inaccurate.

Written on what appears to be the iPhone notes app, the three-part post falsely claims that people can find out whether they have coronavirus simply by holding their breath for more than 10 seconds. If they can hold their breath without coughing, the test claims they don't have the virus.

The post, which began circulating Twitter, Facebook, and emails last week, was falsely credited to a member of the "Stanford Hospital board." Stanford Health Care spokeswoman Lisa Kim told CNN the "dangerous" post is not affiliated with Stanford Medicine and "contains inaccurate information."

Misinformation about COVID-19 symptoms and treatment falsely attributed to Stanford is circulating on social media and in email forwards. It is not from Stanford. Official information from Stanford is available at http://healthalerts.stanford.edu .

To debunk all the false information included in the post, CNN spoke to Dr. Robert Legare Atmar, an infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine.

Myth: Drinking water will protect you from the coronavirus

CLAIM: "If you don't drink enough water more regularly, the virus can enter your windpipe and into lungs."

Whoever penned the post also wrote that people should drink water "every 15 minutes at least" to wash the virus down through the throat and into the stomach, where the acid will supposedly kill the virus.

REALITY: Atmar said there is no evidence from any other respiratory viruses that proves this approach works.

"Even if it worked at all, which it doesn't, people still breathe in from their nose, not just their mouths," Atmar told CNN. "This would still only protect the mouth and not the nose."

Myth: Gurgling water and salt will prevent the coronavirus

CLAIM: "A simple solution of salt in warm water will suffice."

Along with gurgling a water and salt solution, the post also suggested drinking warm water can kill the virus.

REALITY: Based on data from other respiratory viruses, saltwater "would not be expected to work," Atmar said.

By recommending people to drink warm water, the post implies the temperature of the water inactivates the virus, which Atmar said is entirely incorrect.

Myth: If you can hold your breath for 10 seconds, you're OK

CLAIM: "Take a deep breath and hold your breath for more than 10 seconds. If you complete it successfully without coughing, without discomfort, stiffness or tightness, it proves there is no fibrosis in the lungs, basically indicates no infection."

REALITY: Atmar said this is simply "not correct."

"When someone has an acute viral infection it can be difficult to take a deep breath and not cough because the airways are irritated. That's all it means. It doesn't say anything about fibrosis, even though people with fibrosis might struggle doing it. Being able to hold your breath for 10 seconds also doesn't mean someone doesn't have coronavirus."

Myth: If you have a runny nose, it's just a cold

CLAIM: "If you have a runny nose and sputum, you have a common cold. Coronavirus pneumonia is a dry cough with no runny nose."

REALITY: This isn't completely true, Atmar said. A runny nose can be a symptom of the flu, allergies and other illnesses.

And while many patients of the coronavirus do have a dry cough, those with coronavirus pneumonia also have had or could have a productive, or "wet," cough which produces phlegm (sputum), according to Atmar.

Myth: If you have the coronavirus, you'll get pneumonia

CLAIM: "The virus then blends into a nasal fluid that enters the trachea and then the lungs, causing pneumonia." The post also said the virus first infects the throat, which would give patients a sore throat for three to four days before blending into a nasal fluid.

REALITY: This is also not entirely accurate.

The time sequence for coronavirus symptoms vary from patient to patient, and not all patients will have a sore throat, Atmar said. Not everyone with a sore throat has coronavirus, either, and not all coronavirus patients will develop pneumonia.

Myth: Coronavirus patients will experience a drowning sensation

CLAIM: "The nasal congestion is not like the normal kind. You feel like you're drowning.

REALITY: This isn't true.

"That does not sound like any other respiratory virus people are infected with and many patients with coronavirus have not had nasal infection at all," Atmar told CNN.

Myth: By the time a person with coronavirus is hospitalized, their lungs will have experienced fibrosis

CLAIM: "By the time they have fever and/or cough and go to the hospital, the lung is usually 50% fibrosis and it's too late."

Fibrosis is the irreversible scarring of the lung which can lead to respiratory failure.

REALITY: This is totally incorrect.

"This information is extremely alarmist," Atmar said. "Fibrosis only develops in the minority of patients and 80 percent of coronavirus patients experience only the mild symptoms of the disease, so this is incorrect."

The incubation period for coronavirus, Atmar said, is two to 14 days. Symptoms usually begin with five to six days of exposure, with the first week including a cough, sore throat, fever, and muscle aches. Only the minority of patients will experience the second week of severe respiratory symptoms and may be at risk of fibrosis.

While the coronavirus is an issue everyone in the world should be taking seriously, the spread of false information can be both dangerous and deadly.

If you aren't sure if something you are reading about the coronavirus is correct, the best thing to do to is to check with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or your local health department -- not social media.

Physicist Brian Greene talks about the cold, cruel, wondrous universe

Here's an excerpt from a story in the most recent issue of TIME magazine about physicist Brian Greene and his new book, Until the End of Time. (I've ordered it, naturally.)

I get hugely more inspiration from science books like this one, because they're founded in reality, not fantasy, as religious writings are. I've been there and done that. Now, like Greene, I embrace the cold, cruel, wondrous universe.

There's a lot of satisfaction in such neat solutions to head-cracking problems. But there is an equivalent neatness to the ostensibly dispiriting conclusions Greene reaches in his books and in his research: that unhappy business of a cold universe, an insentient universe, of the individual as just a quantum contraption, behaving as a product not of choice but of probabilities and randomness.

It's where the free-will thing comes in: the universe is guided by quantum probabilities, and your "choices" are simply a part of that, the way a local breeze is part of the global weather system.

"My feeling is that the reductionist, materialist, physicalist approach to the world is the right one," Greene says. "There isn't anything else; these grand mysteries will evaporate over time."

But despite such empirical bravado, Greene says more too -- and whether he likes it or not, it's not reductionist, and if it's written in a book like Until the End of Time, it could be written in the Vedas as well.

"Rather than feeling, 'Damn, there's no universal morality,' 'Damn, there's no universal consciousness,'" he says, "how wondrous is it that I am able to have this conscious experience and it's nothing more than stuff? That stuff can produce Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, that stuff can produce the Mona Lisa, that stuff can produce Romeo and Juliet? Holy smokes, that's wondrous."

The rational physicist with the deeply spiritual brother surely meant the holy as just a figure of speech -- but if so, he picked an apt one.

Evolution shows how we are a small twig on the tree of life

Evolution is a scientific fact. Sure, all facts are subject to being proven wrong. But the chance of that happening to evolution is very slim, because the evidence for evolution is so strong.

Since I love to learn about true things, this is why my pre-meditation reading each morning often consists of a science book. I see no reason to pick up a religious book any more, because my eyes have been opened to the falsity of believing in God or other supernatural entities.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Joseph LeDoux's book, "The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains." 

I'm a habitual highlighter of non-fiction books. I supplement my highlighting with notes in the back blank pages found in most books, where I write down the page numbers of subjects I found most interesting, along with a highly personal system of underlining, circles, question marks, arrows, and other notations that remind me of portions of the book that I considered significant.

Here's some passages from the 432 pages in LeDoux's meaty/tofuy book that garnered significant markings. Before each one I'll briefly explain why I liked them.

I heartily agree with LeDoux that conscious awareness is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to goings-on within the human brain, and likely every other kind of brain. We simply have no clue about what most of our 100 billion neurons with their trillions of connections are up to. He writes:

Behavior did not arise to serve the subjective mind. It came about and persists to enhance fitness -- to keep organisms alive and well so that reproduction can occur. 

This perspective puts the behavior of humans and bacteria, and all organisms in between, on a level playing field, one in which consciousness, in the sense that humans mean by the term in everyday life, has a peripheral role in most of the history of life.

If we commit to the very reasonable assumption that over the long course of evolution behavior has mostly been generated by nonconscious systems, and that behavior, even in humans, should be assumed to be nonconsciously controlled unless proven otherwise, the science of behavior would advance much more smoothly.

And, by the same token, so would the science of consciousness. This is the perspective I will take as I guide you on our ascent of the tree of life in the remainder of this book.

One of the most ridiculous things about religions is that they usually consider humans to have been created by God in God's image. This is clearly not true, given the fact of evolution. Like every species, Homo sapiens is different from other forms of life, but not better or worse than those other forms.

Evolution does not create superior or inferior organs or tissues; it created diversity through divergence (not by accumulation of features).

What works in a given environmental situation is determined by natural selection, but as the environment changes, or the group moves to a new niche, new traits become important and previously useful traits can become detriments.

In trying to understand how changes in brains over the course of vertebrate evolution gave rise to our own behavioral and mental capacities, we thus have to take care to climb the vertebrate tree of life without using Edinger's ladder, and also to be cautious not to overinterpret the differences we encounter.

We are newer and different, but not better.

As I have pointed out, we have to guard against anthropocentric tendencies, but also against anthropomorphic ones. In other words, we sometimes attribute too much to other animals, and sometimes to ourselves. We have to find the right balance, which I strive to do in the coming chapters.

However, we humans do possess a marvelously capable brain that has impressive cognitive powers. Yet as LeDoux notes at the end of this passage, human cognition is an outgrowth of capabilities that our evolutionary ancestors possessed.

Our species has survived and thrived not by being bigger, faster, or stronger, but by being clever. We haven't, like most organisms, simply evolved by adapting our Bauplan to the world as it changes; we have used our cognitive abilities to change the world. We do so because we think it might be advantageous to our bodies and way of life, or that it might simply be interesting to tinker with nature.

No other animal, not even our closest primate relatives, can have an idea like building a skyscraper, finding a cure for a disease, composing an opera, or writing a novel, then describe it to a colleague, plan how to execute it, and carry it out.

That human cognition is unique in no way means we are better or more entitled than our ancestors or animals with which we currently share the planet. It just means we are different. Unique though it may be, human cognition emerged by building on cognitive capabilities possessed by our mammalian ancestors.

There's zero evidence to support the idea of a conscious soul separate from the physical brain. Consciousness is one aspect of the brain in action, not something ethereal or supernatural. Research on split-brain patients proves this, since basically their consciousness is divided into two parts -- which couldn't happen if a unitary soul was the source of consciousness.

Because language is usually controlled by the left hemisphere, split-brain patients are able to give verbal reports about information presented to the right half of visual space, which is preferentially seen by the left hemisphere, but cannot name stimuli in the left half of visual space, which is seen by the right hemisphere

They can, however, respond nonverbally to the stimuli seen by the right hemisphere, by pointing toward or grabbing objects with the left hand, which is preferentially connected to the right hemisphere. Similarly, when blindfolded, these subjects can name objects placed in their right hand, but not objects placed in their left hand.

Such findings showing that conscious experience can be isolated in a specific part of the brain by cutting axonal connections provided compelling evidence for something that scientists long believed but could not prove: namely, that consciousness depends on the brain's neural circuits, and is not, as Descartes had said, associated with a separate, nonphysical, soul.

I'm completely open to the fact that people have religious and mystical experiences, in part because I've had those experiences myself. (This doesn't make those experiences objectively true, of course.) But science teaches us that it is wise to be cautious about trusting the accuracy of accounts of any experience recounted by memory, since the brain engages in top-down reformulations of the memory every time it is remembered.

As Gerald Clore, Daniel Kahneman, and others have noted, the closest we ever come to the truth of experience is when we are in the experience. Everything that happens later is a top-down reinterpretation of the memory of the original experience.

In therapeutic situations, such revisionist histories can be revealing of one's psychological tendencies and proclivities, but they can never be as true to a past experience as the experience itself was in real time. The mere act of retrieving a memory can, through the process of memory reconsolidation, change the nature of the memory (this is a natural process through which memories are changed after retrieval, requiring restorage).

The longer the amount of time that passes between the actual experience and the memory of it, the greater opportunity to revise and reconsolidate it upon retrieval of the remembered narrative.

Here LeDoux repeats his contention that we humans are different, not special. We are part of a four-billion-year process of evolution that continues to this day, and will keep on for as long as life exists on Earth. 

Our survival circuits connect us to the survival history of organisms with nervous systems. And the universal survival strategies that survival circuits and behaviors tactically implement connect us to the entire history of life. Separation of the history of emotions and other states of consciousness from the deep history of survival circuits allows us to see our place in this ancient story.

Like all other species, we are special because we are different. Our differences are important to us because they are ours. But they are mere footnotes in a four-billion-year-old saga. Only by knowing the whole story can we truly understand who we are, and how we came to be that way.

Woman who doesn't feel pain shows mind-body connection

I'm 71. I've experienced a lot of pain and anxiety in my life, as has everyone. Well, almost everyone. Because a 72 year old woman who lives in the Scottish Highlands says she has never felt pain or anxiety, and scientists are making progress at learning why.

I learned about Joanne Cameron via a fascinating article in a recent issue of The New Yorker, "A World Without Pain." Here's how it starts out.

Joanne Cameron

We like to think that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, or more resilient, or . . . something. Deeper. Wiser. Enlarged. There is “glory in our sufferings,” the Bible promises. “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” In this equation, no pain is too great to be good. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars,” Dostoyevsky wrote. “The deeper the grief, the closer is God!”

We atheists get in on the action by insisting that the agony of loss elucidates the worth of love. The hours spent staring into the dark, looping around our own personal grand prix of anxieties, are not a waste of time but a fundamental expression of our humanity. And so on. To be a person is to suffer.

But what if our worst feelings are just vestigial garbage? Hypervigilance and pricking fear were useful when survival depended on evading lions; they are not particularly productive when the predators are Alzheimer’s and cancer. Other excruciating feelings, like consuming sadness and aching regret, may never have had a function in the evolutionary sense.

But religion, art, literature, and Oprah have convinced us that they are valuable—the bitter kick that enhances life’s intermittent sweetness. Pain is what makes joy, gratitude, mercy, hilarity, and empathy so precious. Unless it isn’t.

“I know the word ‘pain,’ and I know people are in pain, because you can see it,” Joanne Cameron, a seventy-two-year-old retired teacher, told me, in the cluttered kitchen of her century-old stone cottage in the Scottish Highlands. Cameron has never experienced the extremes of rage, dread, grief, anxiety, or fear. She handed a cup of tea to Jim, her husband of twenty-five years, with whom she’s never had a fight. “I see stress,” she continued, “and I’ve seen pain, what it does, but I’m talking about an abstract thing.”

Because of a combination of genetic quirks, Cameron’s negative emotional range is limited to the kinds of bearable suffering one sees in a Nora Ephron movie. If someone tells Cameron a sad story, she cries—“easily! Oh, I’m such a softie.” When she reads about the latest transgression by Boris Johnson or Donald Trump, she feels righteous indignation.

“But then you just go to a protest march, don’t you? And that’s all you can do.” When something bad happens, Cameron’s brain immediately searches for a way to ameliorate the situation, but it does not dwell on unhappiness. She inadvertently follows the creed of the Stoics (and of every twelve-step recovery program): Accept the things you cannot change.

It's endlessly fascinating to me how the mind and body are so intimately connected.

Of course, the mind is the brain in action, and the brain obviously is part of the human body, so in that sense it isn't surprising at all that the "genetic quirks" mentioned above allow Cameron to go through life in such a blissful fashion.

Some people spend years, decades, or an entire lifetime trying to achieve through meditation and other practices what Cameron has been able to achieve simply by virtue of her genetic inheritance.

This shows that notwithstanding unsubstantiated claims about human consciousness being something immaterial and separable from the body, there's plenty of solid evidence that we are physical beings living in a physical world.

I was tempted to also say, end of story, but that wouldn't have been true. There's so much complexity in the brain, including how the brain interacts and communicates with other parts of the body, that it will be a very long time, if ever, before we understand all of the mysteries of human experience.

Being a fan of marijuana, which is legal here in Oregon, I found this part of The New Yorker article interesting.

Cameron does not have neuropathy: she can feel all the sensations the rest of us do, except pain. The most striking difference between her and everyone else is the way she processes endocannabinoids—chemicals that exist naturally in every human brain. Endocannabinoids mitigate our stress response, and they bind to the same receptors as the THC in the kind of cannabis you smoke.

Normally, they are broken down by an enzyme called fatty acid amide hydrolase, or faah. But Cameron has a mutation on her faah gene that makes the enzyme less effective—so her endocannabinoids build up. She has extraordinarily high levels of one in particular: anandamide, whose name is derived from the Sanskrit word for “bliss.”

About a third of the population has a mutation in the faah gene, which provides increased levels of anandamide. “That phenotype—low levels of anxiety, forgetfulness, a happy-go-lucky demeanor—isn’t representative of how everyone responds to cannabis, but you see a lot of the prototypical changes in them that occur when people consume cannabis,” said Matthew Hill, a biologist at the University of Calgary’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute, who was a co-author of the Cameron paper.

The faah gene, like every gene, comes in a pair. People who have the mutation in one allele of the gene seem a little high; people who have it in both even more so. Jo Cameron is fully baked.

It could be that one day, after much more research, scientists will be able to concoct a drug that mimics what comes naturally to Cameron: a pain and anxiety free life.

However, there's a valid argument that this wouldn't be desirable, since pain and anxiety have some useful functions. 

I asked Matthew Hill—a renowned expert on cannabinoids and stress—if there was any downside to Cameron’s biology, and he laughed out loud. “Yes! From an evolutionary perspective, it would be tremendously destructive for a species to have that,” he said. Without fear, you drown in waves that you shouldn’t be swimming in; you take late-night strolls in cities that you don’t know; you go to work at a construction site and neglect to put on a hard hat.

“Her phenotype is only beneficial in an environment where there is no danger,” Hill asserted. “If you can’t be concerned about a situation where you’d be at risk of something adverse happening to you, you are more likely to put yourself in one. Anxiety is a highly adaptive process: that’s why every mammalian species exhibits some form of it.”

The New York Times had a story about Cameron in March 2019, "At 71, She's Never Felt Pain or Anxiety. Now Scientists Know Why." It's shorter than The New Yorker piece and also is well worth a read. Here's an excerpt.

In retrospect, she sees how her genetic disposition may have aided her at work. After years as a primary-school teacher, she retrained to work with people with severe mental disabilities. Erratic, aggressive behavior never riled her, she said.

But though having this mutation may sound like a dream, there are downsides. One is that she is quite forgetful; prone to losing her keys and her train of thought midsentence. The other is that she’s never felt the “adrenaline rush” that other people talk about, she said.

Why science can be trusted

I'm an admirer of science.

My mother played a big part in fostering this when, in my childhood years, she bought me science kits, chemistry sets, and the like. I fondly remember cramming a card table into my bedroom closet, putting a light bulb over the clothing rod, and happily conducting experiments in my very own "laboratory."

Our home also featured a subscription to Scientific American, which I still get, along with the British science magazine, New Scientist. I rarely read religious or spiritual books anymore, because I'd rather learn about reality instead of myths.

But until I finished reading Naomi Oreskes book, Why Trust Science?, I hadn't given much thought to why science has been so effective in learning truths about the world.

Often on this blog I've extolled the virtues of the scientific method. However, early on in her book, Oreskes -- who is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University -- dispelled this as a reason for why science works so well. She writes:

There is no identifiable (singular) scientific method. And if there is no singular scientific method, then there is no way to insist on ex ante [before the event] trust by virtue of its use.

OK. I'll agree with a Harvard historian of science on this point, since obviously she knows much more about the scientific method, or lack thereof, than I do. 

By the way, some Googling of my own blogs revealed that in 2012 I'd written about Oreskes' previous book, Merchants of Doubt, which is about how mercenary scientists aided tobacco and chemical companies in hiding the scientific truth about the products they were peddling, something that is happening now with the fossil fuel industry's attempts to make global warming denialism look reasonable.

So if the scientific method isn't why we should trust science, what is?

This quotation from Why Trust Science? provides an overview of Oreskes' argument. Which basically is that, as the book jacket says, "the trustworthiness of scientific claims derives from the social process by which they are rigorously vetted."

My arguments require a few caveats. Most important is that there is no guarantee that the ideal of objectivity through diversity and critical interrogation will always be achieved, and therefore no guarantee that scientists are correct in any given case.

The argument is rather that, given the existence of these procedures and assuming they are followed, there is a mechanism by which errors, biases, and incompleteness can be identified and corrected. In a sense, the argument is probabilistic: that if scientists follow these practices and procedures, they increase the odds that their science does not go awry.

Moreover, outsiders may judge scientific claims in part by considering how diverse and open to critique the community involved is. If there is evidence that a community is not open, or is dominated by a small clique or even a few aggressive individuals -- or if we have evidence (and not just allegations) that some voices are being suppressed -- this may be grounds for warranted skepticism.

Oreskes gives examples of where science seemingly has gone wrong. However, it turns out that these examples of bad science actually prove her thesis, because in each case there wasn't a genuine consensus among a scientific community -- just a small number of scientists who loudly claimed that something was true which later turned out to be false.

For example, in 1873 Edward H. Clarke, an American physician, argued against the higher education of women because it would cause their ovaries and uteri to shrink, thereby adversely affecting their fertility. Female physicians argued against this at the time, but since most doctors back then were male, Clarke's ideas were given more credence that they deserved.

Thus Oreskes persuasively argues that diversity in a scientific community is important if scientific findings are to be given a rigorous examination that will make them more likely to be defensible.

Our personal experiences -- of wealth or poverty, privilege or disadvantage, maleness or femaleness, heteronormativity or queerness, disability or able-bodiedness -- cannot but influence our perspectives on and interpretations of the world. Therefore, ceteris paribus [all other things being equal], a more diverse group will bring to bear more perspectives on an issue than a less diverse one.

...Put another way: objectivity is likely to be maximized when there are recognized and robust avenues for criticism, such as peer review, when the community is open, non-defensive, and responsive to criticism, and when the community is sufficiently diverse that a broad range of views can be developed, heard, and appropriately considered.

...The key point here is that often "assumptions are not perceived as such." They are so embedded as to go unrecognized as assumptions, and this is most likely to occur in homogeneous communities.

Of course, religious communities rarely exhibit any of the qualities that make science so successful. 

By nature, they are closed, not open. They resist criticism, viewing faith as superior to reasoned argument. They are defensive when their belief system is challenged. And religions are notably reluctant to change their views. 

On the other hand, says Oreskes:

When we observe scientists, we find that they have developed a variety of practices for vetting knowledge -- for identifying problems in their theories and experiments and attempting to correct them.

While these practices are fallible, we have substantial empirical evidence that they do detect error and insufficiency. They stimulate scientists to reconsider their views and, as warranted by evidence, to change them. This is what constitutes progress in science.

Science rocks at comprehending the universe

When has somebody using the faith-based method of religion made a spectacularly accurate prediction about how reality behaves? Never. Not ever. 

But people using the tools of science have done just that. This is one reason, among many, why science rocks and religion sucks. 

I've finished the marvelously informative and entertaining book about calculus, Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe, that I've written about previously here and here.

Below is an excerpt from the final chapter, where Steven Strogatz, the author, discusses how amazing it is that calculus can be used to make predictions about reality that are as precise as one in a hundred million.

Religion has no choice but to bow down at the feet of science and admit that when it comes to comprehending the mysteries of the cosmos, there's a clear winner. And it sure isn't religion. 

Behold what Strogatz has written. I find this hugely more appealing than any religious text, since I've seen the light and decided that I much prefer truth over fiction, facts over falsehoods, open-minded inquiry over faith-based blind belief.

By wielding infinity in just the right way, calculus can unlock the secrets of the universe. We've seen that happen again and again, but it still seems almost miraculous. A system of reasoning humans invented is somehow in tune with the harmony of nature.

It's reliable not just at the scales where it was invented -- at the everyday scales of ordinary life, with its spinning tops and bowls of soup -- but also at the smallest scales of atoms and at the grandest scales of the cosmos. 

So it can't just be a trick of circular reasoning.

It's not that we're stuffing things into calculus that we already know, and calculus is handing them back to us; calculus tells us about things we've never seen, never could see, and never will see. In some cases, it tells us about things that never existed but could -- if only we had the wit to conjure them.

This, to me, is the greatest mystery of all: Why is the universe comprehensible, and why is calculus in sync with it?

...The first example [of the eerie effectiveness of calculus] takes us back to where we started, with Richard Feynman's quip that calculus is the language God talks. The example is related to Feynman's own work on an extension of quantum mechanics called quantum electrodynamics, or QED for short. QED is the quantum theory of how light and matter interact.

...More important, it's the most accurate theory anyone has ever devised... about anything. With the help of computers, physicists are still busy summing the series that arise in QED, using what are known as Feynman diagrams, to make predictions about the properties of electrons and other particles. 

By comparing those predictions to extremely precise experimental measurements, they've shown that the theory agrees with reality to eight decimal places, better than one part in a hundred million. 

This is a fancy way of saying that the theory is essentially right.

It's always hard to find helpful analogies to make sense of such big numbers, but let me try putting it like this: a hundred million seconds equals 3.17 years, so getting something right to within one part in a hundred million is like planning to snap your fingers exactly 3.17 years from now and timing it right to the nearest second -- without the help of a clock or an alarm.

There's something astonishing about this, philosophically speaking. 

The differential equations and integrals of quantum electrodynamics are creations of the human mind. They are based on experiments and observations, certainly, so they have reality built into them to that extent. Yet they are products of the imagination nonetheless. They are not slavish imitations of reality.

They are inventions.

And what is so astonishing is that by making certain scribbles on paper and doing certain calculations with methods analogous to those developed by Newton and Leibniz but souped up for the twenty-first century, we can predict nature's innermost properties and get them right to eight decimal places.

Nothing that humanity has ever predicted is as accurate as the predictions of quantum electrodynamics.

I think this is worth mentioning because it puts the lie to the line you sometimes hear, that science is like faith and other belief systems, that it has no special claim on truth.

Come on.

Any theory that agrees to one part in a hundred million is not just a matter of faith or somebody's opinion. It didn't have to match to eight decimal places. Plenty of theories in physics have turned out to be wrong. Not this one. Not yet, at least. No doubt it's a little bit off, as every theory always is, but it sure comes close to the truth.

Mindfulness is calculus made spiritual

OK, I'm wading into some deep philosophical waters here, given the title of this blog post, because I only took one semester of calculus in graduate school, and then only because I was forced to by the powers-that-be in control of the Portland State University Systems Science Ph.D program.

I found calculus to be difficult. By contrast, I've gotten back to reading an engaging book by Stephen Strogatz about calculus, Infinite Powers, which I blogged about back in August, noting that it had some spiritual aspects.

This morning, reading a chapter on "The Vocabulary of Change" before I meditated, I was struck by how mindfulness practice -- which basically involves focusing on what's going on here-and-now versus there-and-then -- resembles what Strogatz calls the Infinity Principle. 

Here's how Strogatz described this in the chapter I read today. 

Notice that we are using the Infinity Principle here -- we are trying to make a complicated curve simpler by chopping it into infinitesimal straight pieces. This is what we always do in calculus. Curved shapes are hard; straight shapes are easy, even if there are infinitely many of them and even if they are infinitesimally small. Calculating a derivative in this way is a quintessential calculus move and one of the most fundamental applications of the Infinity Principle.

In his book, Strogatz uses a graph of the length of days to talk about how an underlying mathematical function, in this case the complex motions of the Earth as it revolves around the sun, is used to produce a graph such as the one below that I found via some Googling.

What struck me is that while it's impossible to derive a mathematical function of life, we all have the feeling that our life consists of ups and downs. 

Our most significant "up," of course, is the moment of our birth. And our most significant "down" is the moment of our death. But in-between those moments we experience a wide variety of joys and sorrows, triumphs and disappointments, pleasures and pains.

It's natural to view the present moment in the context of both remembered previous ups and downs, and of imagined future ups and downs. However, this makes more sense when something is genuinely cyclical, as is the case with the amount of daylight (vertical axis in image above).

In our own life, it's often difficult to predict what is going to happen next. And our memory of what's happened in the past is prone to errors, since we tend to remember most clearly the Big Moments in life, not the Ordinary Moments -- even though the latter are much more common than the former.

So there's a lot to like about mindfulness, which I've noted is my current approach to meditation. 

Calculus can deal with curves such as those in the image above because it divides them into an infinity of straight lines. Similarly, mindfulness helps us to deal with the ever-changing circumstances of our life by guiding us to focus on the small things that are happening at this very moment, rather than the largeness of our actual past and potential future.

I'm not saying that mindfulness in any way takes away ups and downs, or pleasures and pains. But just as a portion of a curved line looks almost exactly straight if it is zoomed in enough, so are we able to look upon our life with more equanimity if we're able to be mindful of what is actually occurring to us -- versus what we hope will occur, or are worried will occur.

As a final observation, Strogatz uses Usain Bolt's record-breaking 100 meter dash performance in the 2009 World Championships as an example of how small ups and downs are largely meaningless when looking at a curve that is smooth at a larger scale. He shares a graph based on laser guns that tracked Bolt's speed hundreds of times a second.

The little wiggles on the overall trend represent the ups and downs in speed that inevitably occur during strides. Running, after all, is a series of leapings and landings. Bolt's speed changed a little whenever he landed a foot on the ground and momentarily braked, then propelled himself forward and launched himself airborne again.

...To me, these wiggles hold a larger lesson. i see them as a metaphor, a kind of instructional fable about the nature of modeling real phenomena with calculus. If we try to push the resolution of our measurements too far, if we look at any phenomenon in excruciatingly fine detail in time or space, we will start to see a breakdown of smoothness. 

...Yet if what we care about are the overall trends, smoothing out the jitters may be good enough. The enormous insight that calculus has given us into the nature of motion and change in this universe is a testament to the power of smoothness, approximate though it may be.

in the same way, mindfulness requires an appropriate level of resolution. Our life shouldn't be viewed in such excruciating detail as to miss the big picture, nor in such a broad scope as to miss the reality of what is actually happening at any given moment.

Inference to the best explanation is a wise approach

In the course of reading books about modern science, I frequently come across an appealing phrase: inference to the best explanation.

I like the sound of it. It makes sense to me. It's a foundation of both the scientific method and how we deal with issues in everyday life.

Defining this approach in any detail can lead into some tricky philosophical territory that I'm not much interested in. This article summary from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is good enough for blog post purposes.

Inference to the best explanation is the procedure of choosing the hypothesis or theory that best explains the available data. The factors that make one explanation better than another may include depth, comprehensiveness, simplicity and unifying power. According to Harman (1965), explanatory inference plays a central role in both everyday and scientific thinking.

In ordinary life, a person might make the inference that a fuse has blown to explain why several kitchen appliances stopped working all at once. Scientists also seem to engage in inference to the best explanation; for example, astronomers concluded that another planet must exist in order to account for aberrations in the orbit of Uranus. However, despite the suggestiveness of cases like these, the extent to which we do and should rely on inference to the best explanation is highly controversial.

Highly controversial? Well, maybe to professional philosophers. Choosing a hypothesis that best fits the available data seems not very controversial to me.

Here's two slides from an academic presentation on this subject that I came across via some Googling.

"Comic relief" is a good way of describing how I've come to look upon supernatural religious claims. They're akin to the notion of tracks in the snow being made by a trained monkey wearing snowshoes. Possible, but highly improbable. 

Likewise, it's possible that God exists. It's possible that life after death is a reality. It's possible that consciousness is immaterial rather than being produced by goings-on in the brain. But each of these possibilities is highly improbable, given the evidence.

Thus they don't pass the Inference to the Best Explanation test. Other hypotheses do: God is a fantasy. When we die we're dead and gone forever. Consciousness is produced by the brain.

But here's the beautiful thing about taking a scientific approach to reality.

An open mind is able to adjust to fresh facts with ease. If somehow solid evidence appeared for the existence of God, life after death, or the immaterial nature of consciousness, I'd have no problem changing my mind on these subjects. 

Even more, I'd joyfully change my mind, since I think it'd be great if any or all of those things were true.

How many religious believers, though, can honestly say the same thing? I suspect, not many. Meaning, what if undeniable evidence surfaced that the foundation of their religious faith was false? Could they give up their religious belief as easily as I could surrender my atheism?

I doubt it.

This is the difference between open-minded atheism and closed-minded religiosity. Every atheist I know -- and I know a lot of them -- is open to the possibility of a supernatural side to reality. However, my experience is that most religious people are so attached to their chosen faith, they have great difficulty imagining giving it up.

I'll end by saying that engaging in inference to the best explanation isn't necessary, or desirable, in many areas of life. For example, our personal likes and dislikes. We don't need reasons for liking or disliking broccoli; or rap music; or New York City; or watching baseball; or countless other things.

That said, I feel that we still need to keep an open mind to our own predilections, what appeals to us, because we can surprise ourselves.

For example, I've been pondering a replacement for my much-beloved 2017 VW GTI for quite a few months. I enjoy automobile "window shopping." Reading car reviews and watching You Tube reviews is a pleasure for me. Because I'd driven a Mini Cooper S for five years prior to the three years I've driven the GTI, I'd been focused on other small, fast, fun cars.

Yet I'd paid attention to other subcompact cars such as the Subaru Crosstrek. My "inference," so to speak, was that even though I'd never driven a Crosstrek, I wouldn't like it, given its underwhelming engine. 

However, the more I pondered my driving wants and needs, the more I realized that a Crosstrek could make sense as a GTI replacement. After a test drive, I wrote a post on one of my other blogs, "Here's my pitch to be in a Subaru commercial." Excerpt:

Today, though, I drove the GTI to Capitol Subaru to test drive a 2019 Crosstrek Limited. I adore small cars. I'd studied the Crosstrek because I liked its subcompact size and all-wheel-drive (it's just eight inches longer than the decidedly small GTI). 

However, I couldn't get past the reviews that talked about the underpowered Crosstrek engine and lack of driving excitement. A few days ago something changed in my psyche, though.

I began thinking to myself, Maybe at the age of 71 I've had enough of fast cars that handle great. Perhaps it's time for a new phase in my car life. 

A few days ago I put in an order for a 2020 Crosstrek. I waited a while after the test drive to make sure that my change of automotive heart wasn't an impulsive fling. It wasn't. I'd changed. I'd altered my personal inference to the best explanation of what car I wanted.

Such is life. When we're open to change, to fresh facts, to surprising ourselves about what we value and believe.

How the brain fools us into believing consciousness is immaterial

I love it! Because I loved The Matrix movie. There's something wildly appealing about our consciousness being deceived about the nature of reality in such a fashion that it is very difficult to escape the bounds of that deception.

The "it" that I'm loving is a book by Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience is one of the best books I've read about the nature of consciousness, and I've read a lot of them.

Here's a 13-minute video where Graziano describes the key aspects of his Attention Schema Theory. 

And here's some excerpts from his book that provide a pretty good overview of the theory, especially if you watch the video first.

Graziano's approach explains why almost all people believe that they possess, or are, an immaterial consciousness. That just feels so real, so right, so immediately obvious. 

Which is exactly what the Attention Schema Theory predicts. A schema isn't the real thing. It is a simplified version of the thing. Evolution hasn't given us the ability to be aware of what the hundred billion or so neurons in the brain are doing.

Instead, the brain presents us with a view of the world, and of ourselves, that is functional, because it leaves out unnecessary details. Like, how the physical brain produces a metaphysical sense of consciousness and attention.

This passage describes why the Attention Schema Theory is believable. Covert attention refers to "a roving mental focus that can take in information apart from where the senses are pointed, like hearing sirens at a distance or recalling a memory." (from the book jacket)

In my view, the attention schema theory of consciousness has some inevitability to its logic. First, we know that the cortex uses covert attention. Second, we know that it needs to control that attention. Third, we know that the brain must have an internal model of attention in order to control that attention.

Fourth, we know that a detailed, fully accurate internal model is at best wasteful and at worst harmful to the process, and so, this internal model of attention would necessarily leave out the mechanistic details.

Therefore, and fifth, an attention schema would depict the self as containing an amorphous, nonphysical, internal power, an ability to know, to experience, and to respond, a roving mental focus -- the essence of covert attention without the underpinning details.

From first principles, if you had to build a well-functioning brain that had a powerful, cortical style of covert attention, you would build a machine that, drawing on the information constructed within it, would assert that it has a non-physical consciousness.

That cortical machine, of course, would not know that its subjective conscious experience is a construct or a simplification. It would take the nonphysical nature of conscious experience as a reality, because -- somewhat tautologically -- the brain only knows what it knows. It is captive to its own information. 

This passage describes why the attention schema in humans differs from that in computers, at least as they exist currently,

The human attention schema, having been shaped over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, has weird, biologically bumpy content.

It depicts attention as an invisible property, a mind that can experience or take possession of items, a force that empowers me to act and to remember, something that in itself has no physical substance but still lurks privately inside me.

The attention schema is more than a pointer to an object or a couple of lines of code. It builds a rich picture of attention and its predictable consequences. Build a machine with that kind of an attention schema, containing the weird, biologically messy lumps of the real one and you'll have a machine that can claim to be conscious in the same ways that humans do

No major technological hurdle stands in the way of an artificial attention schema. It is, arguably, the easiest and certainly the most circumscribed of all the components to build into the machine. 

And this passage gets at the objective nature of the Attention Schema Theory, in principle.

From the perspective of the attention schema theory, we can know, with objective certainty, whether a machine has the same kind of consciousness that people have. And direct personal experience is not the only way -- it's not even a very good way -- to know about one's own consciousness.

"Of course I'm conscious. I know I am, because I have a direct experience of it."

If that isn't the definition of a circular logic loop, I don't know what is. Consciousness is a direct experience. Therefore, the statement is tantamount to, "I know I'm conscious, because I'm conscious."

As I've said before, the machine is captive to the information it contains.

A particular internal model informs the machine that it has consciousness, and therefore it "knows" that it is conscious. The internal model informs the machine that its consciousness is without physical substance and forever private, and therefore it "knows" that its consciousness is unconfirmable by anyone else.

But an internal model is information, and information can be objectively measured. We don't need to rely on personal affirmation.

In the attention schema theory, to go about determining whether a machine is conscious, we should probe its innards to find out whether it contains an attention schema, and we should read the information within the attention schema.

We will then learn, with objective certainty, whether this is a machine that thinks it has a subjective conscious experience in the same way that we think we do. If it has the requisite information in that internal model, then, yes. If not, then no. All of this is, in principle, measurable and confirmable. 

Quantum theory isn't needed to explain consciousness

If I wasn't an atheist I would have called out Thank God! when i read the following passages in Christof Koch's book, "The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed."

Koch, who is President and Chief Scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, doesn't see any need to invoke mysterious quantum phenomena when attempts to understand consciousness are being undertaken.

As I noted recently, it irritates me when someone -- who almost always isn't a scientist -- tries to inject quantum theory into a discussion of meditation, consciousness, or such. As Koch says below, it is extremely unlikely (though not impossible) that quantum mechanics influences brain functions.

I'm enjoying Koch's latest book and will have more to say about it when I've read more of it. Here's what he had to say on the subject of quantum mechanics and consciousness.

That a conscious observer is required to convert the superposition of states of a quantum system into the single observable outcome has always troubled physicists. If QM [quantum mechanics] is really a fundamental theory of reality, it shouldn't need to invoke conscious brains and measuring devices. Instead these macroscopic objects should emerge naturally from the theory.

Many solutions have been proposed, but none have found acceptance. It is this dilemma at the root of such a successful theory of reality that has prompted Roger Penrose, a brilliant cosmologist, to propose a quantum gravity theory of consciousness that remains popular with the public.

Precious little evidence supports the idea that the brain exploits macroscopic quantum mechanical effects. Of course, the brain has to obey QM, as when photons of light meet retinal molecules inside photoreceptors. Yet the body's wet and warm operating regime is inimical to quantum coherency and  superposition across neurons.

Today's quantum computer prototypes need extreme vacuum and temperatures close to absolute zero to avoid decoherence, when so-called quantum bits disentangle and become regular bits of classical information theory. That's why quantum computers are so difficult to build.

Furthermore, it has never been properly explained why phenomenological aspects of consciousness or its neurobiological substrate require quantum properties.

I see no need to invoke exotic physics to understand consciousness.

It is likely that a knowledge of biochemistry and classical electrodynamics is sufficient to understand how electrical activity across vast coalitions of neocortical neurons constitute any one experience. But as scientist I keep an open mind. Any mechanism not violating physics might be exploited by natural selection.

Science is our best method of knowing reality

Here's a basic fact: science is well-suited to understanding the nature of reality.

Religion, on the other hand, is a very poor way of knowing reality. So religious belief must bow down to the scientific method if a believer makes a claim about God, soul, spirit, heaven, life after death, or some other supernatural subject. 

Below are excerpts from a book that I've finished reading, "The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth From Our Eyes." In a concluding chapter, Donald Hoffman, the author, makes some great points about the primacy of science in separating fact from fiction. 

Because we humans are prone to so many perception and thinking errors, science uses debate, arguments, and reason to distinguish flimsy dogma from solid truth. 

I especially liked how Hoffman demolishes the viewpoint that because some aspect of reality supposedly is beyond the bounds of language and concepts, beliefs about this ineffable something-or-other have to be accepted by other people. Wrong. If something is outside of language, nothing can be said about it.

Including "this is true." Meaning, if someone claims to have experienced the ineffable existence of God, they should say nothing, because there's nothing that can be said about God. 

On the other hand, if this person wants their belief to be adopted by others, then they've entered into the realm of science. Present your arguments for the existence of God. Show us your evidence for God's existence. Engage in debates with people who disagree with you. Refute arguments for the non-existence of God.

Here's the excerpts from the "Community" chapter of The Case Against Reality.

Science, like philosophy and religious practice, is a human endeavor. It is not infallible.

Each of the many attempts to demarcate, from first principles, science from pseuodscience remains, at best, controversial. What science offers is not gold-standard beliefs, but a potent method for winnowing beliefs that derives its power from the way it engages with human nature.

We are a species that argues.

Experiments show, and evolutionary theory explains, that we reason best when we argue for an idea that we already believe, or against the idea of another that we disbelieve. We did not evolve our ability to reason in order to pursue the truth. We evolved it as a tool of social persuasion. 

As a result, our reasoning is plagued with foibles, such as a bias toward information that supports what we already believe. The scientific method exploits all of this.

Each scientist argues for her idea, and against contradictory ideas of other scientists. In this argumentative context, our reason is at its sharpest: each idea garners the best support of reason and evidence its proponents can muster, and each endures the best impalement by reason and evidence its detractors can counter.

Add to this sharpening of reason the demand that ideas be precise -- mathematically precise, when possible -- and the phoenix of science arises from foibles of human nature.

Science is not a theory of reality, but a method of inquiry.

It orchestrates the better angels of our nature to promote reason, precision, productive dialog, and an appeal to evidence. It curbs our proclivity for the vague, deceptive, dogmatic, and imperious. Inquiry into any question that captures the human imagination -- including meaning, purpose, values, beauty, and spirituality -- deserves no less than the full benefit of this orchestration.

Why not deny our best chance to better understand?

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

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

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

Can science describe who we are? I think so, in the sense that we can, by the scientific method, evolve and refine theories of who we are. But if science cannot describe who we are, then imprecise natural languages such as English certainly cannot describe who we are.

We have no better means of crafting explanations than the scientific method. An explanation that descended from on high, but could not be tested and debated, would be no explanation at all.

"The Case Against Reality" seems more right than wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, that seems reasonable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calculus is cool. Spiritual, even. Infinity rocks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give up the illusion of body and mind being different

Here at the Church of the Churchless we worship truth.

I love truth. I sprinkle truth on my cereal every morning. I rinse with truth when I take a shower. I brush with truthpaste three times a day.

That's why I adore science and dislike religion. And why I'm enjoying Susan Blackmore's new book, "Seeing Myself: The New Science of Out-of-Body Experiences" so much. 

Blackmore, a British psychologist, is a spiritual but not religious sort of person. As she notes in the passages from the final Who am I? chapter in her book (which I read first, because the title drew me in) that I've shared below, science and Zen have been her twin passions.

I've read several other books Blackmore has written. I like how she uses her own subjective experiences to cast light on objective neuroscientific understandings of how the mind and body work.

Of course, the mind is the brain in action, and the brain is part of the body, so mind is brain is body. One thing, not several things.

But dualism is how most people see themselves. They wrongly believe in an immaterial soul/mind/consciousness something-or-other than inhabits the body, distinct from physicality.

Blackmore's focus in this book is on out-of-body experiences, or OBEs. The first chapter, Leaving My Body, is a detailed description of her OBE, which she misinterpreted for quite a few years, until the truth dawned on her. Blackmore writes:

I was just nineteen when everything I thought I knew was overthrown and my life changed direction. If I had imagined a future in some sensible university job, that was now impossible for I was determined to understand what had happened to me. 

For just a couple of hours I was no longer confined to a slow, heavy, physical body but escaped through a tunnel into a world of flying, exploring the world from outside my body and finally entering the mystical experience of oneness, of unity with the universe.

...I had never heard of tunnel experiences, and the phrase 'near-death experience' (NDE) had not yet been invented. So I jumped to my own conclusions. I was sure that my spirit had left my body and would survive after death. I was convinced that telepathy and clairvoyance must be possible and that ghosts were real. 

I became determined to devote my life to parapsychology and to prove all my closed-minded lecturers wrong.

I failed; of course I failed. The conclusions I had jumped to so quickly were ill-thought-out and superficial. But never mind. The vivid memories of those few hours kept driving me on. 

Nearly half a century later I can look back and see how my intellectual life has been shaped, pushed and pulled by the experience, and how my spiritual life might never have begun had I not found myself disappearing into selflessness without having a clue what that was.

So Blackmore changed her mind. She gave up a false belief in the supernatural and mysticism, choosing demonstrable truth over comforting illusion. 

Here's excerpts from her final Who am I? chapter.

I was surprised, long ago, when my Zen teacher kept going on about the importance of the body... I suppose I thought the body was unimportant, to be transcended or overcome by the mind. Surely, I might have thought, this meditation training is about the mind, isn't it?

Aren't I supposed to practise and practise and practise until I can see clearly through all the mess and worry and fear and hatred and horribleness of my own mind? Enlightenment, if such a thing exists, is surely nothing to do with the itch on my knee or the heaviness of muscle, bone, and subcutaneous fat, is it?

How my ideas have been forced to change -- for two intertwined reasons. One is the science that has transformed our understanding of human nature; the other is the ancient practices of Zen which, curiously enough, have the same effect.

For most of my life I thought these two were separate disciplines; the science was my work and Zen was a private matter, almost a hobby. Yet as it turns out they both lead in the same direction: they both take 'me' down from its pedestal and show it in quite a different light.

...Paying attention clearly and steadily to what is here right now banishes the tangly wool and disarms the slithery monsters. All those disparate thoughts, emotions and worries that otherwise keep running in our heads float through one vast space and seem to lose their power.

This is called 'one mind' or 'one-pointedness' and is quite different from our usual harried, messy confusion. The world comes to seem more and more real and immediate. Body, self and world come together. They are all the same stuff -- there is no longer a conscious me looking out at a real physical world but just all of this -- whatever it is.

This is the slow change from duality to non duality; from a world in which minds inhabit bodies towards one in which minds and bodies are fundamentally the same; from a world in which 'I' am in control of 'my' body towards one in which decisions just happen because they must.

This is a radical change and a scary one. But we can cope!

We can give up our childhood dualism; give up the idea of a unified and continuing inner self who is the wielder of free will and the subject of our experiences, and accept the scary view that neuroscience provides. Just as we have given up thinking of the earth as the centre of the universe, so we can give up our very natural but false intuitions about ourselves.

...Modern children learn about brains at a young age but they still seem to imagine a 'me' whose brain it is and who is helped along by its clever powers.

...Many adults think like this too -- believing that 'I' am the feeling, thinking person in charge. In this way we turn our self into a supreme conscious entity  living in, owning and controlling our bodies. It is no surprise, then, that having an OBE [out of body experience] seems to confirm this ready illusion: 'I' have left my body so I must be an independent thinking and feeling soul.

The reverse may also be true, that throughout the ages OBEs have inspired the idea of the soul. Either way, it's a quick jump to the false belief that the supreme conscious entity called 'me' can leave its bodily shell behind and go travelling. But it cannot: nothing can leave the body in an OBE because there is nothing there that could leave.

To call something an 'illusion' is not to say that it does not exist, it means that it is not what it seems to be. My self seems to be a continuing conscious entity, a subject of experience and possessor of free will, but this is not true. The self is a representation or model of something that does not exist -- but the model itself exists.

...Modern science says the same [as Buddhism]. In one sense there is a self -- or, rather, lots of different selves. They are useful mental models of a continuing conscious entity. In another sense there is no self because these models are ephemeral constructions that arise and fall away, change and decay, and no such continuing powerful and unified conscious entity actually exists.

...We have come a long way from believing that an OBE proves the existence of a soul or a conscious 'me' that can abandon its body and live on without it. Instead, we find that our notions of self and consciousness have been, and are being, transformed. What seems so wonderful to me, after all these years, is OBE's can now contribute to that transformation.

For me it's been a long journey. 

As Metzinger says, 'For anyone who actually had that type of experience it is almost impossible not to become an ontological dualist' and I did. Like so many others who have OBEs I jumped to the obvious conclusion that my soul or astral body had left its physical shell and could think and feel and travel without it.

It has taken a lot of thinking, experiencing, meditating and science for me to travel from that dualism to its utter rejection -- to seeing the duality of body and mind, or physical and mental, as a feature of the way we model the world, not of the world itself.

I no longer think that my soul left my body; that my astral body separated from its physical shell to travel on the astral planes or that my deep and unforgettable experience has anything to do with life after death. Thanks to decades of science and philosophy I have a far better idea of what happened to me during those special few hours back in 1970.

I am alive here and now in a vivid and colourful world.

Science is our best guide to a possible supernatural reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spence,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

little faith, little doubt
great faith, great doubt

and

infinite faith, infinite doubt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buddhists, the mind isn't like a mirror. Science knows better.

In my churchless frame of mind, it's rare that I can get very far into a book with some religious overtones before I start using my highlighter to make question marks in the margins.

The book I'm reading now, As It Is by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, was bought because I was curious to learn more about one of the Dzogchen/Buddhist teachers mentioned in Sam Harris' Waking Up book -- which I like a lot.

(But which also has some question marks in the margins; just a few, though.)

I'll write about what appeals to me in As It Is in another blog post. Buddhism gets a lot right about reality, so long as the supernatural aspects of Buddhist teachings are stripped out. The doctrine of no-self and no-soul is very much in accord with modern neuroscience, for example.

Since Buddhist philosophy emanates from pre-scientific times, it's surprising that Buddhism gets so much right about how the mind works. However, it also gets quite a bit wrong, as evidenced by these quotations from As It Is that I read this morning.

Better to be like a mirror, letting reflections occur in the state of rigpa [knowledge of original wakefulness] without fixating on anything. That is the state of suchness.

...To reflect the pure development stage, first be a bright mirror. First understand, then experience, then realize. Try first of all to be a good mirror, a mind essence mirror, a rigpa mirror. 

Suchness. I don't like that word. Back in 2010 I wrote "My main gripe with Buddhist meditation." Here's some excerpts that apply to the As It Is book also.

Bare knowing. Actually happening. Just as they are. Inner life naked. As they truly are.

Many Buddhists actually believe this stuff, that through their many hours of meditation they're able to enter into an experience of suchness and thus so'ness -- which supposedly is an awareness of things as they are, not as they seem to be to deluded minds like you and I have (I'm assuming you aren't an enlightened Buddhist practitioner; if you think you are, congratulations).

Every human being, without exception, knows reality through his or her own idiosyncratic brain filters. Experience leads us to see things in a certain way, then our seeing feeds back into our experience in a never-ending cycle.

I do believe that meditation and other forms of mental training can help us become more aware of what's going on in both our inner and outer world. However, these awarenesses are of reality as we know it, not reality as it is nakedly, purely, actually.

Nine years later, I believe what I said above even more strongly. This is basic neuroscience: the mind/brain actively constructs reality; it doesn't passively reflect reality.

Recently my wife and I re-watched the first episode of David Eagleman's PBS series, The Brain. That episode is called "What is Reality?"

The description of the episode on the PBS website shows that Buddhism may be correct about many things regarding the mind, but viewing the mind as a mirror isn't one of them.

Dr. Eagleman takes viewers on an extraordinary journey that explores how the brain, locked in silence and darkness without direct access to the world, conjures up the rich and beautiful world we all take for granted. 

‘What is Reality?’ begins with the astonishing fact that this technicolor multi-sensory experience we are having is a convincing illusion conjured up for us by our brains. 

In the outside world there is no color, no sound, no smell. These are all constructions of the brain. Instead, there is electromagnetic radiation, air compression waves, and aromatic molecules all of which are interpreted by the brain as color, sound and smell.   

Cutting edge graphics show that data from the outside are rendered into electrochemical signals inside the brain, which map meaningfully onto physical reality. Our experience of reality is an electrochemical rendition of the world outside. It is not a faithful rendition.

Visual illusions are reminders that what’s important to the brain is not being faithful to ‘reality’ but being able to perceive just enough so that we can navigate successfully through it. The brain leaves a lot out of its beautiful rendition of the physical world, a fact that Dr Eagleman reveals using experiments, and street demonstrations. 

We meet the men and women whose experiences of reality reveal important clues about how the brain constructs our own reality, including the Alcatraz prisoner who was locked in the notorious ‘Dark Hole’ for 29 days, and yet experienced richly colorful moments of reality.

His experience, along with those who have experienced total sensory deprivation show us that even when sensory input to the brain stops, the show still goes on. Why? Because, amazingly, our senses – eyes, ears, skin, nose - only modulate an internally generated simulation of what the brain expects is out there. This so-called ‘internal model of reality’ allows us to move through the world, recognizing it rather than constructing it anew, moment by moment. 

We meet a man who is blind despite the fact that he has eyes that can see. His story reveals that it’s the brain that sees, not our eyes. A woman with schizophrenia, whose psychotic episodes were her reality, emphasizes the fact that whatever our brains tell us is out there, we believe it.

We have no way to get beyond what our brains allow us to perceive. Like the rest of the animal kingdom, we inhabit a miniscule slice of reality, and yet we believe it to be the whole picture. 

Eagleman also explores time, and takes a look at how – and why - the brain alters its perception of time, depending on the situation we find ourselves in. Time, it turns out, is not an absolute to the brain. 

Each one of our brains is different, and so is the reality it produces. What is reality? It’s whatever your brain tells you it is.

Science is never certain. Religion should do the same.

For a little light reading today (I'm being ironic) I picked up my copy of physicist David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes -- and Its Implications."

Thumbing though a chapter I'd already read, The Nature of Mathematics, I came to this passage. It made me wish that religions, mystical paths, and other varieties of supernaturalism were as wise as science.

Mathematicians are rather proud of this absolute certainty [that mathematical proofs are true], and scientists tend to be a little envious of it. 

For in science there is no way of being certain of any proposition. 

However well one's theories explain existing observations, at any moment someone may make a new, inexplicable observation that casts doubt on the whole of the current explanatory structure. 

Worse, someone may reach a better understanding that explains not only all existing observations but also why the previous explanations seemed to work but are nevertheless quite wrong.

Galileo, for instance, found a new explanation of the age-old observation that the ground beneath our feet is at rest, an explanation that involved the ground actually moving. 

Virtual reality -- which can make one environment seem to be another -- underlines the fact that when observation is the ultimate arbiter between theories, there can never be any certainty that an existing explanation, however obvious, is even remotely true.

It isn't difficult to think, "I don't know for sure." Religious believers should give that thought a try, rather than considering that 100% confidence in a faith is the only way to go.

Since religions believe in dogmas that often contradict each other, clearly not all religions can be true. (Of course, my position is that none of them are true.) So it makes sense for followers of a religion to entertain the possibility that what they believe could be untrue.

Science makes progress by embracing challenges to current ways of looking at the cosmos. Unfortunately, religions are locked into rigid belief systems that make it impossible for them to come steadily closer to truth like science is able to do.

That's why I love science and reject religion.  

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.