Something from Nothing: What Do We Mean by Nothing?

Many years ago I took a filmmaking class where to goal was to make a short 5-minute film. One of the caveats of this film project was there was to be no dialogue and it must have only 2 actors. That sure put a crimp initially on my creative juices at the time, but then when I eventually did come up with an idea and look back at the process I realized the constraints really honed me in. It actually gave me a structure to proceed, or otherwise I'd be floundering with all sorts of ideas and approaches to execute it.

It seems like the constraints matter within our creative freedom. We are always more productive when we can focus in on something than when we are scattered about with endless choice. Of course, the idea of endless choice is a misnomer as we are born with constraints just by the fact we have a body with particular gifts and inclinations for a limited period of time. We can't be anything, and if we could be, we would be nothing at all. Diffused energy doesn't create anything, it just drains the process and eventually leads to chaos. Instead, we are bursts of congealing energy with a particular idiom and telos.

The cosmos works with constraints also. We have this notion that the universe could have had many other sorts of outcomes than it did, or there was the potential for many possible worlds and universes. And many believe that already with the speculative theories around multiverses. But when you consider all the practical and well considered constraints that went into the laws of nature that were required to create a universe that could create sentient life on this planet in 13.7 billion years, you soon realize that this is probably the best of all possible universes and there was something behind it. 

Notice I said something, not nothing, and yet it's not a thing in the way we consider things but a sense of being before things. Still, many of the materialist side of the equation still argue that our something came from nothing. It's a silly thought, that does not explain the thought that knows this. Even if you bring it down to the quantum realm, you are dealing with something that set that in motion. There is no escape from first cause! 

I recently read a book by Hugh Ross, where he considers all the possible options we may mean by nothing...

He says, 

It [nothing] can mean a complete lack of: 

(1) matter; 

(2) matter and energy; 

(3) matter, energy, and the three big cosmic space dimensions (length, width, and height); 

(4) matter, energy, and all the cosmic space dimensions (including the six tiny space dimensions implied by string theories); 

(5) matter, energy, and all the cosmic space and time dimensions; 

(6) matter, energy, cosmic space and time dimensions, and created nonphysical entities; 

(7) matter, energy, cosmic space and time dimensions, created nonphysical entities, and other dimensions of space and time;

(8) matter, energy, cosmic space and time dimensions, created nonphysical entities, and other dimensions or realms—spatial, temporal, or otherwise; 

(9) or anything and everything real, created or otherwise.

Oddly, he doesn't mention a lack of turtles. If we consider that every effect must have a cause, it seems (9) is out. If we consider that time and space came into existence at the cosmic creation event, it also must have a cause. Could it be that something beyond space and time be as Source? 

With creation, we can also assume that the outer cosmos mirrors the inner soul of man. We can see both without and from within clues to God's existence. (As W. Norris Clarke astutely says, “to understand is ultimately to unify: it means first to discern the parts of anything clearly, but finally to unify them into a meaningful whole in itself and then with all else that we know.”) When we extrapolate and look within, we can also potentially see something arising from something if we go deep enough. Sure, there are some Buddhist schools that claim it is all ultimately empty (defined as not nothing, but having no inherent nature); yet does everything arise as empty from nothing ultimately real with a nature? 

With inner phenomena, by nothing do we mean a lack in solidity of the:

(1) five senses;

(2) five senses and thoughts;

(3) five senses, thoughts, and self-consciousness;

(4) five senses, thoughts, self-consciousness, and the basis of cognition;

(5) or anything and everything real, experienced or otherwise.

Again, it depends what we mean by nothing. In the beyond-self experience of groundless ground, there is something very vivid and alive that we are part of. We may not be its nature, but we sense a deep participation with it. To claim this is nothing as a lack of anything and everything real, is once again to dismiss the Source of all experience and creation which can not be ultimately empty but remains as the underlying substrate that is in intimate relationship with ALL of EXISTENCE. 

I prefer to not call this nothing.

The Metaverse: A Place Where We Will Be “Either Greater than Kings or Less than Men”

“Ultimately software-based humans will be vastly extended  beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies, foglet projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology.” — Ray Kurzweil

Something has not been created yet, and I'm already lambasting the idea of it. So be it, as I always happy to proved wrong (but let's leave my superego out of this). I may not be able to predict human progress, but I can sort of predict human nature. It was Toqueville who noted that Democratic citizens may someday see themselves “either greater than kings or less than men.” It does look like we have gotten nearly there, with the metaverse probably be the straw that breaks the camel's back. 

Today, we rarely look upward to God, but instead have supplanted any transcendent with manmade ideologies and the political state. We then buffer our world further still by looking inward through our constant barrage of technological distraction that disconnects us from substantive intimacy. And this has led to more isolation without any need for us to look outward towards our fellow citizens—many seen in contempt because they're boxed in to a subcategory of “other” without a shared universal identity. I can't see an easy way out, but moving our worlds further into virtual/augmented realities will probably just heighten our proclivity to dismantle our humanity.

After all, it was Stanley Kubrick who believed as we come to rely on technology to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens out. So in other words, artificial intelligence won't come to us, but we will come to it. But what is it about such entrenched artificial medium that lessens our potential for being fully human?

Without any deeper meaning and right praise to the transcendent, it is too easy to fall into despair and to allow ourselves get distracted by entertainment and technology. The burden to cultivate meaning is too much when faith has been lost by the existing institutions. We may dabble in new age modalities, but this will never cultivate the time-tested institutions that have scaled shared practices, community, coherent doctrines, sacrifice, and faith for millennia. And I don't care how much futurists sell us the utopian visions as to how the metaverse will transform our world; it will always fall short of expectations of transforming the person (keep in mind they always toot their horns by their own evaluation criteria, such as material wealth, comfort, convenience, and a trivial enjoyment). 

The truth is the metaverse can never equate real life and existence. Existence is immeasurable and prior to anything created—instead of being an emergent property of manmade creativity. Living out one's life in some abstracted manmade environment can never compensate for real lived experience. Of course there are those who prefer the abstract to the real, such as our leftist managerial class. Allen says the left “do very little with their hands, and so tend to privilege form -- intellectual ideas and theories, design, structural adjustments and so on -- over function, over actually engaging with the real world.” Sounds like the metaverse will be primarily voting one way to its favor, while creating a deeper addiction to the simulation at the cost of real. 

Real life is also embodied, and as much as the metaverse can simulate sensate experience it will always be disconnected. The fully human embodied experience goes beyond superficial sensations on our skin and through our visual and auditory functions, but is a more deeply reciprocal relationship that involves our heart, intuition, intelligibility and the deep subtle sensations that lie beyond our skin. We engage reality with our whole person! Moreover, real life is also an open system allowing one to go beyond oneself while any simulated world is a closed system. There is no God in the metaverse, beyond another simulated limited object.

Offering people the ability the script-write their world leaves one cold towards humanity's significance. We will play god with our simulated life, instead of seeing our place in a cosmological journey where we are fated with limited choices and possibilities. The forthcoming metaverse will get closer to simulating a superficial sensate experience of the real, but in the end it will ultimately dim the person to meet a lesser baseline vitality of one's humanity while he/she is allowed to control a world that offers no meaning.

Unself or Unreal

I've been on blogging break due to the laziness that comes from the summer heat and my cultivation of unselfing a self of self-importance. In other words, I'm getting sick of myself trying to make a point or pontificating here. My inquiry and practice to Truth does not subside, but turns here and there while never straying too far from its unifying principle. But do I have to always write about it? Sometimes, I'd rather let it simmer or even shimmer. 

I have read some recent things that turns my attention to why smart people can be very stupid. While I can never be knowledgeable about everything, I weed out the chaff of books that probably don't need to be read. While I may be drawn to philosophy, I don't think I need to read most philosophers. Here's a good reason...

“...many students who take philosophy degrees have the distinct feeling that they’ve got on the wrong train. They expect to be dealing with the towering mysteries of human existence, they expect to be studying the accounts of the immortals who went before us, who attempted to scale the same heights, they expect to be guided on this odyssey by interesting people who have made the same journey and returned with pristine insights into the path ahead. What they find instead is a cross between a librarian and an accountant piling up items of knowledge like coloured beads then handing them out to confused and bored young people who are expected to categorise them in, at best, a slightly different way to those who preceded them” (Darren Allen).

That's why reading too much without a coherent center can fragment and frustrate the reader. And does it even change you for the better? Collecting all that information inflates the ego, and rarely opens one to being teachable. We know “People don’t first reason their way into their beliefs; they seek beliefs and attitudes which correspond to their felt inner reality, their way of living and their life-in-the-world, then find reasons to accept and defend those beliefs and attitudes; which is why reason cannot change them.” We can only be awakened from our deeper assumptions of reality. But that hurts too much for most.

And then there's the folks who claim street smarts, and like to point to their experience. But what do people really mean they know from experience? 

“Similarly, experience is ordinarily — and philosophically —understood piecemeal, as a series of knowable things that are learnt, remembered or possessed, rather than a totality which is lived. Ego can hardly be said to experience at all, instantly transporting whatever happens into the modal warehouse of the self, where it is stored, evaluated and used to get a better job, lord it over newcomers, or gas on about what it knows or what has happened to it. When people say ‘I have experience’ they nearly always mean that they possess something which is not experience, but the corpse of it.”

So we are always in the way of reality which can truly suck the life out of it. So to self-correct, we chase bigger vistas and thrills without bringing the whole self for the ride. 

“The isolating mind of the sleeping ego is like a blazing torch in the forest, over-illuminating a minute area of the dark, sharply dividing the user from everything else, which thereby seems both darker than the light and more uncannily different. To counter the threat of this obscure otherness, I turn up the torch, brighter and brighter, expanding my view further and further, but the light is so bright it now kills what it is directed at, petrifying the trees, shrivelling up the plants. I can see more and more, but fear of the darkness doesn’t decrease — in being suppressed, quite the opposite — so I turn up the beam higher and higher, looking for life in more and more distant realms, wiping out more and more life with the killing exposure, until, finally, I am left in a super-bright desert, blindingly overlit in every direction, and dead. All along, all I had to do was switch the torch off and grow accustomed to the darkness.”

So once again, we escape, overcompensate, indulge, but we never own our shite? That's because “Ego has two basic modi operandi; that of the physicalist, viewing reality as a matrix of cause and effect relationships, or that of the solipsist, for whom no laws, literal or otherwise, have any validity.” Which is like saying the non-physical aspect of ourselves doesn't have a part in existence or our non-physical selves are the center of existence. Either view fails. But then there are those who make a conscious effort to ‘transcend’ the ego. In this effort, they assume the ego is just a collection of thoughts, when there is so much more unconsciously stirring behind the scenes. So they spend...

“a great deal of time meditating, being mindful, jingo-jangling to DMT or swimming through esoteric oceans, often ends up being an extended psyche-wank which severs one’s participation to the represented world as it is — the shared canvas upon which the social self paints — which slowly becomes less interesting and less real, leaving ‘mystic’, meditating man, hovering round his magic, Romantic mind-realm, feeling tremendously wise and enlightened, while, in reality — the reality we share — he is well and truly up himself.”

This is what Allen terms as “orthophilia” or “compulsive avoidance of consciousness and context by over-focus on one’s emotional life, health or ‘spirituality’.”

Sounds dreadful, but been there and done that. 

In the end, we just need to unself through engaging God and disengaging our vices with an unwavering fanatical-like single mindedness. In seems our ancestors were right, albeit less sophisticated than us clever moderns. They did bear and struggle with it, but in our comforts of endless distraction we seem less willing to do so.

“Love God, with all your heart, and with all your will, and with all your mind, and with all your body, and renounce the devil, and all his works. Now and forever. So be it.”

* All quotes are from Darren Allen's excellent book Self and Unself.

Ain't No Place for Sissies

It was Bettie Davis who coined the phrase “old age ain't no place for sissies.” As someone getting closer to that train stop, relatively speaking she's spot on. Absolutely speaking, I would say seeking God (or allowing God to seek you) tops the list. Too many think they want to find God, wake up, be Self-realized, when it's just ego trying to feel good about what it's doing for itself. (“Those who turn to God for comfort may find comfort, but I do not think they will find God.” — Mignon McLaughlin)

While the journey to God may be simple from a certain vantage point, it's not necessarily all that easy. Just take a look at the path Bernedette Roberts laid out that she went through (assumingly similar for many others also)... 

From Bernedette Roberts “The Christian Contemplative Journey”

Sure, there a some priceless experiences. But there are the dark nights, the voids, and all this ending in an annihilation. What ego—in his/her right, contracted mind—would want to go through this? Mine sure doesn't on some days; it would rather stream Netflix, play out lustful thoughts, and fear the Coronovirus.

I recently read a radically honest book by David Carse. He notes, 

“If you're going to do anything, do this. First, figure out whether this waking up, this enlightenment is really something you want. Do you really want to die? Do you really want for 'you' not to exist; and for living to continue, if it does, not as who you know and love as yourself but as a hollow husk with impersonal Consciousness blowing through it? If this is what you want (how can you possibly?) then you are talking about waking up from the false dream of individuality, and then you can proceed. Your thinking, your praying, your meditating, your asking questions at satsang, whatever you 'do,' will be with the realization that what you think you are is illusory, and with the intent of exploding, obliterating, that illusion called 'you.' Can you 'do' this? Of course not; 'you' is a dream character following its role in the dream. But who knows what that role calls for? If that role calls for this character to wake up, then it has to start somewhere, and the character may find itself engaging in things that will ultimately bring about its own death. Not physical death. These are disposable containers; look around, they're being recycled constantly. Rather, real death, as real as death gets. Death of the one who cares.”

Okay, you've got my attention! Carse continues,

“If you decide that what you really want is something other than this complete and ultimate 'waking up,' then bless you. Have a wonderful life; enjoy the incredible edible banquet of material and spiritual and psychological and New Age goodies that are out there. Grow and expand and change and develop and improve your life immeasurably; evolve and become more mature and deeper and wiser and more beautiful. Discover your higher self and your higher purpose and fulfill them. I mean this absolutely sincerely; and even, I notice, with a touch of delicious wistfulness from what's left of the david thing. This is not in any way some kind of second class status; there is no such thing. Take what the dream has to offer; that's what the dream's there for, to be enjoyed. Consciousness only enjoys it, only perceives it at all, through the dream characters, and there have to be some through which can be experienced enjoyment of the whole panoply of the spiritual marketplace. But in that case don't come here talking about waking up; that just doesn't make any sense at all.”

Fair enough. But the issue is once we get a taste or intuition of something more, we can never go back and be the same. It's as if you're selling yourself out for who you're really not. We may enjoy the finite rewards at times, but the restless heart will always endure until the search is over for the infinite. We will always have a felt sense of, what David Walsh calls, “the unspoken irritant of all our aspirations” in the background. 

As such, I'm willing to suffer and sacrifice myself for what is.

⁂

As a reminder to myself, Sister Wendy Beckett (from Spiritual Letters) offers this precious insight:

“Patience is far more profound and more all-embracing than it appears to be. To enter deeply into patience means accepting our lowliness and, equally, his power and will to transform us.

Reality is his message and patience leads straight to it. We seem to see our shabbiness and conclude we are getting absolutely nowhere. It may not be so at all. We long to push ahead, to ‘take it by violence’. But helplessness, accepting the ordinariness of our day is the divine means of purification: all this is painful. So my first word is patience. Affirm his power; wait in trust. And my second is to remind you that pure love is usually experienced as nothingness. If all is his, what is there left for self? So never seek to judge from how it ‘feels’. To go on and on and never see anything ‘happening’: what trust we need!”

As It Is

For most of us, grace does not always spontaneously reveal itself and we need to pick ourselves up from our own Buddhastraps. One way to do this is to immerse yourself in S.N. Goenka's 10-day Vipassana course which I've heard about for years but was always hesitant to take on. I somehow thought it was too simple in its dharma and approach. What I found out is there is an elegance to its simplicity.

There is the technique of scanning the body for sensations, distilled from the Buddha's original Pāli Canon which was preserved as a practice in Myanmar (Burma). With awareness of gross, subtle and very subtle sensations, the saṅkhāras (formations/impurities) can begin to be cleared away. Otherwise, the mind just becomes a stick in the mud craving this or averting that. And I definitely experienced the mud! As the sediment of the mind is churned up through the depths of the practice, those waters can become very murky for a while. As they say, it gets worse before it gets better. 

While there were moments of utter agony where my ego was shouting at me, there were also many moments of ecstatic bliss that lured me down the wrong way. In either case, I was always applying effort to come back to what is experiencing all this experience. Eventually this allows for a posture of equanimity which sees experiences with non-attachment; not an aloof detachment, but more like an “holy indifference” that is intimately sober. Goenka kept going back to the core of the teaching: to see reality as it is, and not the way we want it to be. 

That bears repeating: to see reality as it is. If we could take that teaching all the way in and out, the timbers to man would not be so crooked. We would not continuously wannbe, but just be. Even chasing enlightenment is a wannabe'ing away from being. The problem is always not seeing the mirage as a mirage.

There was the bottom-up approach to the technique, but in the end it culminated for me with top-down love. What made the difference with the practice is I ultimately fell in love with Goenka which came in a tearful, joyful moment.

While possessing a magnetic presence, Goenka also had a grandfatherly decency and pragmatism about him that sweetly resonated with me. God finds all sorts of interesting conduits. In the 1991 discourses, Goenka talks about the dangers of idolatry. If devotion arises, it should be devotion for the good qualities of character you see in another. While that may an astute point, it's never feasible to detach qualities from the overall goodness and beauty of the man. It's in the integration of personhood where it all comes alive! And for me, he did breathe life into the structure of the retreat.

Siddhārtha Gautama said there were four types of people: those who come from the darkness and move toward more darkness, those who come from lightness and move toward darkness, those who come from lightness and move towards more lightness, and those who come from darkness but move their way to lightness. I am probably in the latter category based on the low bar of wisdom I came in to this world with. But I always had a sense there was more. And these retreats are the times when that more is confirmed as a direct encounter — an encounter with the mystery and reality as it is. 

“All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good.

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,

One truth is clear, 'Whatever is, is right.”

― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

Minding the Gaps

Career opportunities for evolutionary biologists are pretty good these days, but there must be a nagging feeling that comes on to them every so often – assuming they are intellectually honest. I am not sure what in natural selection gave us a brain (and mind) far more sophisticated and superfluous than what was needed for survival, but it really screwed up. I mean, just think of the overhead required that catapulted us to have Shakespeare plays written, compose Bach music, or send us off to the moon. We didn’t need it. We also don’t need to be chasing after Truth, or having mystical experiences for that matter. It just gets us into all sorts of trouble, when we should be hunting boar (and not writing code) to get the girl!

It also seems there are these transitional spaces where natural selection doesn’t offer a great explanation. The Cambrian explosion is still a mystery where all these species appear fully developed with no alteration since that period. The move from primates to Homo Sapiens seems like quite a leap too, when although we were quite strong for a significant period of time, at some point the evolutionary process decided to make us weaker and give us the capacity for language and the awareness to know when we're acting like arseholes.

The evolutionary biologists eventually find that organisms can be reduced in complexity only so far. At some point, they bump up against an irreducible complexity. Then they need to explain how it is that complex interacting and interdependent parts of organisms can evolve together without a God to the somewhat brilliant and mostly stupid people we are today. Still, our potential to be real persons is quite excessive from that materialistic perspective. 

So will science fill in the gaps with evidence, or will I fall prey to the God in the Gaps proposition? Neither. I think scientists fall prey to these gaps with just as much religious vigor in their Darwin in the Gaps argument. They even cleverly point to Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium theory as a suitable explanation; however, never explaining the mechanism that made that even happen. And while I’m not going to say God lent a hand with these leaps, I’m also not willing to concede that there may be cosmic nudges happening here and there. Are these miracles? Or is it that existence, life, and mind are all miracles in themselves?

I will at least open myself to Intelligent Design as being one plausible explanation. In the interview below, Stephen C. Meyer convincingly raises some concerns with the neo-Darwinist position; such as, how are we to account for all the discontinuities in evolution; how so-called undirected processes produced the complexity and information needed for life to emerge; and how did we get so lucky with the anthropic fine-tuning required for organic material to appear from inorganic material?

Intelligent Design posits that personal agency (theist or non-theist) is fundamental to the cosmos. It's probably the only input to an open system that can account for the information needed for the origin of existence. But then again, the neo-Darwinist will lock him or herself into an impoverished closed system of scientism, where although the human mind can seemingly grasp things that are true, there can be no intelligibility at the root of it that is source of Truth. Garbage in, garbage out. 

Consider a look at Meyer's line of reasoning here:

What True Self is Self'ing?

We sometimes appear stuck between an existential catch phrase of “be yourself” and a Buddhist-like notion that “there is no-self.” There is a lot of confusion with both concepts.

The relative aspect of self is just a self-organizing narrative that allows us to function in the world. Also, often known as the egoic-self, where there can be healthier and less-healthier forms of this. 

The existentialists would take this one step further by claiming to break the grip of the past by aligning with the choices we make going forward. But this version of self is just replacing one story about oneself with maybe a better story. But our locus of identity is still mostly organized around concepts of our self-conscious doer, albeit with a sense of more autonomy than disposition.

Going a step further, the not-self teaching (anattā/anātman) in Buddhism would claim all concepts about the self are false and that this can be Realized by the practices of emptiness. But there are some misunderstandings here also, as the original teachings did not claim there was no self but where the self was-not. 

The Buddha never denied a self, but that there was no self to be found in the five aggregates: namely translated as corporeality, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and individual consciousness. Yet, ātman remains. The ātman was not impermanent, unlike the aggregates (skandhas) which comprised of a false self.

Still, ātman is seen as universal, which leaves little to room for the particularities around individuality. It would seem to me even Self-Realized persons still act as persons, with particular dispositions, inclinations, and personalities. These are the constraints and gifts that make us human, even as a liberated one. So Buddhism does not definitively speak of finding the true self, but only losing the false one.

By contrast, Christianity revolves around the notion of the Person which is derived from the doctrine of the Trinity. As a Person, we are substance-in-relation. 

The First relation is vertical in sharing in the Infinite. We are receptive of “one’s  own existence from a Source that remains ever transcendent.” 

“Being in a state of grace is the Christian version of what the Buddhist calls the primordial state or essence of mind. It is not passive in the sense of being merely inert, but actively receptive to whatever comes from the Infinite.”

We are not just Consciousness, but we possess consciousness. Therefore, we possess an “inner unity that transcends the flux into which Buddhism would dissolve us—a flux of physical and psychical elements, of individual moments in time generated one after another by karma.”

The Second relation is horizontal in sharing with others in the world. This makes this inner unity paradoxical. Our true center is not just in ourselves, but also outside ourselves. We exist in relationship to others. Therefore, we can’t find our true self just by introspection. Again, we are substance-in-relation!

If we look to the image of the cross, we can symbolically find a paradoxical and Trinitarian true self at its center. This center contains the interaction of these inner and outer modes of being where God, soul, and world are always finely mingled, and in ways which are unique to the individual. This center is universal and particular, dynamic and essential, and is the only true self that can go forward Self’ing as God's mediator in the world.

“You must give up your old way of life; you must put aside your old self, which gets corrupted by following illusory desires. Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution so that you can put on the new self that has been created in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of the truth.” (Ephesians 4:22–4)

(Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from the excellent book The Radiance of Being: Dimensions of Cosmic Christianity by Stratford Caldecott.)

Google Verses Gödel

George Gilder is once again on to something beyond the typical monoculture thinking with super-AI technologists. He knows his Gödel, who claimed “every logical system necessarily depends on propositions that cannot be proved within the system.”

Yes, we can't escape metaphysics no matter how we try to deny ourselves in the process. And that's exactly what the materialist-techie types do. They believe “the human mind consists of electrical and chemical components that are unintelligent in themselves”; however, “By using their own minds and consciousness to deny the significance of consciousness in minds, they refute themselves.”

'But you can’t prove consciousness is immaterial', they may say.

Sure, but Gödel already demonstrated that mathematical statements can be true but unprovable. So why deny yourself some Truth too?

This is always the problem with super-AI proponents: they sell up their machines while selling themselves short; when the measure of AI should be the human mind. (Gilder notes: the human mind is “low-power, distributed globally, low-latency in proximity to its environment, inexorably bounded in time and space, and creative in the image of its creator.”)

Such is also the issue with Google. Gilder says, 

“The Google system of the world focuses on the material environment rather than on human consciousness, on artificial intelligence rather than human intelligence, on machine learning rather than on human learning, on relativistic search rather than on the search for truth, on copying rather than on creating, on launching human hierarchies in a flat universe rather than on empowering human beings in a hierarchical universe. It seeks singularities in machines rather than in human minds. The new system of the world must reverse these positions, exalting the singularities of creation: mind over matter, human consciousness over mechanism, real intelligence over mere algorithmic search, purposeful learning over mindless evolution, and truth over chance. A new system can open a heroic age of human accomplishment.”

In the book, Gilder believes the “new system of the world” will be blockchains. Unlike the Markov chains of disconnected probabilistic states that Google uses, blockchains use hashes to preserve history, enhance trust, and extend truth. We would own our information, instead of it being overly centralized with risk to security, privacy, and actual costs.

Blockchains will be the low-entropy carrier to our high-entropy creativity!

Gilder says, “The inevitable conclusion is that machines based on mathematical logic cannot exhaust the human domain; they can only expand it. Every new mechanism frees the human mind for more creative adventures and accomplishments.” The question is whether or not blockchain will be the new mechanism that frees us evermore going forward. 

In the end, I would rather place my bet on a technology that aligns with Gödel than one that tries to play God.

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful. — Jaron Lanier

Know Your (Sacred) Surroundings

In a recent interview, Peter Thiel said we need to look up and not so much around (which just creates a mimetic trap).

He studied under René Girard, so he's aware that the wisdom of crowds can easily devolve into the madness of crowds. It's an easy trap if we don't stand deep and high. So perhaps better to center ourselves vertically, otherwise we just fall into utter horizontal fragmentation that is never unified.

I'm getting this point in another book I'm reading by Jonah Goldberg. His thesis is that civilization is fragile, but works because our pluralism is centered around deeper principles. Once those principles go, we just become pre-modern tribal power mongers trying to subsume or battle everyone else. Watch the news lately?

But maybe there are some things worth being with down here. 

Shall we get a little woo-woo? Well, I suppose this blog often touches on the woo, but hopefully holds on to enough traditional and intellectual rigor to not let the other ‘woo’ come in. We’ll leave that to the Deepak’s of the world.

I found this (white paper)* very compelling. What it shows is how much relational exchange goes on beyond the physical. And not just between us as people but also the objects we come into contact with. We are indeed always transmitting and receiving energy and information with each other.

One profound example, that has been scientifically verified, is that highly-conscious human beings can change the properties of an artifact through focused intention on it. “Not only can properties of inorganic materials such as pH of water be changed in line with the intention, but liver enzyme activity (chemical potential) of alkaline phosphatase (ALP) can be augmented.” This can be tested on any device that is unimprinted to where it becomes an Imprinted Host Device (IHD). This setup is illustrated below, and has been replicated numerous times.

This has huge implications for how we consider sacred relics! Many relics that have been offered virtuous intentions by saints and sages throughout the ages can potentially store and continue to transmit this information to others. I know when I enter some sacred spaces, it's no accident that my state changes immediately. It's as if my contemplation is being done to me.

Moreover, “Another important observation is that the Buddha [sacred] Relics have an aspect of consciousness and one could even say that they have an innate intelligence. It is well observed that relics multiply in reverential environments; they also disappear if kept in what we could consider ‘unholy’ places like trouser pockets! In this sense they are meta-stable. ... A dynamism enters from these higher dimensional intelligences through the Relics.”

The cliché is true: we are all interconnected in more ways than we realize.

We are what we consume, what and who we surround ourselves with, what we think, and who we love, or... 

Mass ↔ Energy ↔ Information ↔ Consciousness

Best to get right with our surroundings above and below!

* All references and illustrations are from the paper “The Sacred Buddha Relic Tour: For the Benefit of All Beings” by Nisha J. Manek, MD, FRCP (UK) and William A Tiller, PhD. Presented at the Annual Toward A Science of Consciousness Conference: Forum on Eastern Philosophy Symposium. University of Arizona Center for Consciousness Studies, Tucson, Arizona, April 9th, 2012.

Freely Willing and Chilling

I’ve always found the materialist position on free will amusing, because to believe in just the material you could not concede that there was an immaterial element to the person making decisions — whether we call it the soul or whatever mediates the natural to the supernatural.  Yet, neuroscience and psychology have come up with some evidence that we are not so free, so maybe it is us more “woo-woo” types who need to (unfreely) make concessions.

I enjoyed Alfred Mele’s book Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will, because he doesn’t go down any “woo-woo” tracks as to what makes free will possible, but instead offers a lucid and decisive refutation to the recent evidence that attempts to undermine it.

Perhaps the best known evidence against free will comes from the experiments conducted by neurobiologist Benjamin Libet. Participants were asked to flex a wrist whenever they felt like doing so, and then to report on when they had become consciously aware of the urge to flex it while being wired to an EEG machine. The results found that that the activity in the motor cortex would begin an average of 300 milliseconds before the participant had a conscious sense of the willing to flex the wrist. So from the materialist view, this proves their case. If free will requires that conscious willing to do something is the cause of doing it, then we don’t act so freely.

Mele posits that there are issues with Libet’s approach: (1) we have no evidence that the specific kind of neural activity really is sufficient for flexing; and (2) the approach is quite artificial since it does not take account for active deliberation by participants.

Moreover, there is some nuance to the idea of free will, and as to whether or not we have it depends on what we mean by free will, and more importantly, where are we coming from? 

Mele admits the following definition raises the bar too high: “(1) Having free will requires making conscious choices that are entirely independent of preceding brain activity, and (2) Having free will requires being absolutely unconstrained by genetics and environment (including the situations in which we find ourselves).”

If you take that as the straw-man argument, then yes, you have to concede that we are soul-less mammals. But truthfully, we can see our actions as being more fluid, in that, we are pre-consciously making choices in each moment as to where we place our attention to act, and consciously deliberating more complex choices during other times. We are both conditioned and unconditioned, with mixed motivations in respects to many of the behaviors we enact.

Again, where are we coming from? There is also the possibility of coming from not our will, but God’s will. There is no “do-er” and yet we individually align to fulfill actions not necessarily of our own making. This is where it gets most interesting, and while Mele does not dare explore such terrain, it makes the contrast of “thy will be done” and “Thy will be done” all the more compelling.

Imaginal Ways (or Shamanic Postmodern Tantra of Alien Communion)

I recently went on a walk on the wildly Gnostic side with my reading, and took on The Super Natural by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey Kripal. Strieber wrote the seminal Communion many years back, which I never read but was aware of. Although I've always have some fascination with the possibility of alien encounters, I think it had more to do with all my exposure to sci-fi entertainment in my childhood. I am not sure if there are or have ever been alien visitors (but neither are the authors).

As Kripal notes early on, “It all comes down to how one believes, not whether one believes.”

That's the side where Kripal lands. He's a contextualist. As a professor of comparative religion, he brings some rigor by interjecting theories around Strieber's explicit adventures. Yet his take on religion verges on the humorous.

Kripal says, “I do not think it is too much of a simplification to suggest that the entire history of religions can be summed up this way: strange super beings from the sky come down to interact with human beings, provide them with cultural, technological, legal, and ethical knowledge, guide them, scare the crap out of them, demand their submission and obedience, have sex with them (often forcefully), and generally terrorize, awe, baffle, inspire, and use them.”

Hmm, not my God.

But I am a sympathizer for Kripal's approach at times. We often need to make sense of the sporadic mysteries of the cosmos. Yet, as Gödel notes, we are going to be either consistent or complete (not both). Kripal sides with the complete, and throws in some tools to help cultivate our notions. 

As he says, “It is very easy to claim a theory of everything if you get to decide what that everything is.”

Kripal finds Henry Corbin's idea of the imaginal useful in this context. That is, there is the empirical/material world and there is the intelligible/rational world. In between is the imaginal world, and this is the space were imagination and symbols coexist. 

Strieber, on the other hand, is the “ordinary man appearing in the middle of an otherwise completely fantastic narrative.” I can't say for sure what has happened to Strieber, but I came to believe that something has happened. And this is nub of the book. Are such experiences Real or all in the head? As Kripal notes, “Plainly, whatever is happening, it is not "all in the mind." Or, if it is... the mind is not all in us.”

Surprisingly, Strieber's take is more humble than expected. He acknowledges his experiences may not simply be real aliens from another planet: but maybe plasma-like energy, something from another dimension, glowing orbs of spiritual bodies, or possible trauma induced trances. 

But he doesn't dismiss it as all mind-stuff, as he has some empirical evidence to back his experiences: implants, injuries, other witnesses. Something is real, but we are also somehow playing a part in it in a quantum-like way.

(He also notes a story where a military General believed that the US government avoided disclosing their knowledge of UFO sightings because “obscure laws of physics might prevent them from entering our reality without first convincing us that they were real, and that official admission might be the tripwire that would enable them come through.”)

Ultimately Strieber counters Kripal's contextualism with some essentialism. There may be an ontological grounding to all this. We aren't just purely creating our Reality, but possibly co-creating it through our interpretive instruments along with a Creator. And that could be the Real that matters — all else is up for grabs in this mysterious story.

All this leads to Kripal believing we need a new story: one that is aware that it's still a story. He ends with a Philip K. Dick quote that concludes, “we are not the artists but the drawings.” To me, the idea of being drawn seems to look back to some older story that may still have its place in our day.

The Experiencer Experiencing Experience!

Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience. — David Bentley Hart

Some books fade over time, but others seem to grow in their significance. It's not that I can remember the details, it's more like this pull to keep going back to them and appreciating the way they convey Truth to me with a deeper richness. I'm sure there's reciprocal relationship going on here; between myself, the author, and the space in between.

I've been watching some videos on David Bentley Hart, and that's what made me revisit his Experience of God. (I also plan to read another book by him very soon.) When I see him on video, I can pick up on the cantankerousness and cynicism at times, but along with the lucid and exalting articulation. So he may not have the transmission of a saint, but I'm okay with that. Moreover, his writing style is so beautifully impactful, that I am willing to give him a pass on his humanity.

Let's look at some highlights. On the idea of alternative facts (before the phrase became fashionable), he makes this interesting quip:

“In the end, pure induction is a fantasy. The human mind could never arrive at an understanding of reality simply by sorting through its collections of bare sense impressions of particulars, trying to arrange them into intelligible and reiterative patterns. It must begin the work of interpretation at even the most elementary of levels, by attempting to impose some kind of purposive meaning upon each datum.”

We can't live on facts alone! Especially when we all have those narratives living our lives. And on those who believe the only things that can be known to be True must be verified: 

“Most of the things we know to be true, often quite indubitably, do not fall within the realm of what can be tested by empirical methods; they are by their nature episodic, experiential, local, personal, intuitive, or purely logical.”

If you really think about it, the things we value the most can't be quantified. And for those that want to believe life is one big random contingency: 

“As a brilliant physicist friend of mine often and somewhat tiresomely likes to insist, “chaos” could not produce laws unless it were already governed by laws.”

Doh! Who created the order in the chaos? And don't tell me it's turtles all the way down! And how about the process/evolutionary types who believe God evolves along with us:

“God cannot change over time, moreover, as he would then be dependent upon the relation between some unrealized potentiality within himself and some fuller actuality somehow “beyond” himself into which he may yet evolve; again, he would then be a conditional being... it means only that his knowledge or bliss or love does not involve any metaphysical change in him, because it is not based on a privation; it is not a reactive but a wholly creative power, not limited by that difference between active and passive states to which finite beings are subject. God’s knowledge of something created is not something separate from his eternal act of creating that thing; so he is not modified by that knowledge in the way that we are necessarily modified when we encounter things outside ourselves.”

I couldn't say it better myself. And on the concept of progress itself:

“But there really is no such thing as general human progress; there is no uniform history of enlightenment, no great comprehensive epic of human emergence from intellectual darkness into the light of reason. There are, rather, only local advances and local retreats, shifts of cultural emphasis and alterations of shared values, gains in one area of human endeavor counterpoised by losses in another.”

I sort of believe this be true at times, and other times not so much. I do appreciate some exterior advancements, but at times I feel we are still the same, old fallible human. And on those who think AI will become conscious: 

“We have imposed the metaphor of an artificial mind on computers and then reimported the image of a thinking machine and imposed it upon our minds.”

And...

“All computation is ontologically dependent on consciousness, simply said, and so computation cannot provide the foundation upon which consciousness rests. One might just as well attempt to explain the existence of the sun as the result of the warmth and brightness of summer days.”

Ha! Also...

“When Kasparov lost his game in 1997, he was defeated not by a machine but by a large alliance of human opponents, himself among them.”

And when he gets to the topic of consciousness...

“Consciousness does not merely passively reflect the reality of the world; it is necessarily a dynamic movement of reason and will toward reality.”

And...

“Individual psychology is complicated, but subjective consciousness is simple.... [It] perfectly possesses the end it desires.”

Beautifully said. And then on God: 

“Whatever image of God one abjures, it can never be more than an idol: a god, but not God... God is the source and ground of being and the wellspring of all consciousness, but also therefore the final cause of all creation, the end toward which all beings are moved, the power of infinite being that summons all things into existence from nothingness and into union with itself; and God manifests himself as such in the ecstasies of rational nature toward the absolute.”

Also... 

“God is known in all experience because it is the knowledge of God that makes all other experience possible.”

I believe that earns a mike drop. Boom!