Steve Patterson

Category: Religion and Ethics

  • Theoretical Pluralism and Chess

    I am drawn to a weak form of religious pluralism. 

    The strong form says, “All paths lead to the same God. All approaches are equally valid. There is no right or wrong way.”

    The opposite extreme says, “There is exactly one denomination of one religion which is the correct path to God. All other paths are heretical and wrong.”

    I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. Many paths do lead to the same God; many approaches work, but the different paths are not equally true or sophisticated. Some paths you can sprint down; other paths are dangerous and will take you in the opposite direction of truth.

    In other words, there are indeed many ways to skin a cat. But there are many more ways to do it wrong. Chess provides us with a great analogy.

    There are different schools of thought in chess, different theoretical perspectives. Around a century ago, there was a notable tension between the classical (or “modern”) school and the hypermodern school. On a few critical points, the moderns and the hypermoderns had radically different perspectives.

    Perhaps the key disagreement was this: how should you exert influence over the center of the board in the opening? The classical approach says that you should occupy the center with your pawns. Here’s an example of the Queen’s Gambit Declined, where black has responded to 1. d4 with … 1. d5, putting his own pawn right in the center.

    The hypermoderns took a different approach. They said the center can be influenced indirectly, from the flanks and from distant pieces. They even invited their opponent to occupy the center, so they could undermine their pawn structure later. Here’s an example of the same opening from white, but a very different approach from black in the Queen’s Indian Defense:

    Notice that black has no pawns in the center and is instead exerting influence with his knight and bishop. These are two very different approaches. So who is right?

    The answer is: it depends. There is truth in both perspectives. Even though the principles are opposite of one another, they both work when skillfully executed. Right now, it looks like the most advanced chess theory is some hybrid of modern and hypermodern (perhaps the “hyper-hyper-modern”?) Both modern and hypermodern openings are still used today at the highest levels.

    Returning to the question of pluralism. It would be an obvious mistake to conclude, “Since the modern and hypermodern openings work, there is no truth in chess! All openings are equally good and valid!”

    Just like it would be a mistake to conclude, “There is only one opening that works. All other openings are wrong and lead their users to hell.”

    The truth is somewhere in the middle. Many different openings work. In fact, with the usage of AI in chess, openings that were recently considered broken are being resurrected.

    Different chess principles and theories can also work, even if they are directly opposed to each other. And yet, despite this degree of pluralism, there are still obviously superior and inferior chess moves. There are openings with objectively higher levels of success than others.

    There really is truth to be discovered in chess. These truths might eventually be synthesized into the One True Theory, which explains the nuances of why the classical and hypermodern openings work and when they don’t. Some day, we might even have powerful enough technology to solve chess and tell us, once and for all, whether White can force mate from the opening, or whether perfect play ends in a draw.

    But chances are, for the foreseeable future, we are not going to have the One True Chess Theory. We’re instead stuck with lesser theories which vary in their level of sophistication.

    So it is, I claim, with philosophical, religious, and scientific theories. A weak form of pluralism is the right approach to capture the most truths.

  • Things I Like About Christianity

    I do not separate religion from philosophy. Religious ideas can be rationally analyzed like any other philosophical idea—even the esoteric and mystical ones. From my perspective, religious ideas do not have to come in whole packages—as if Christianity or Buddhism are trademarked and it’s illegal to mix them together. I say we pick and choose the best religious ideas and discard the bad ones.

    I’ve really been enjoying thinking about Christian philosophy and wanted to share some highlights. I don’t know enough to say which of these ideas are heretical and which are canon, so I can’t say whether these are “really” Christianity.

    The Primacy of Love

    Love is the meaning of life. It’s the whole point of everything. There’s a whole bunch of religious blabbering in the world, but if you triangulate from all the beliefs, they point towards love at the center. When asked which commandment was the most important, Jesus says:

    “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

    And, “Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”

    Sounds right to me. The point of the religious laws is to get closer to love.

    Love is Divine

    Divinity is a good concept. There are forces which exist “above” humans, “governing” their affairs. Love is a real part of our universe, but it does not exist as a biological entity. It can be instantiated by biological entities. It’s a force so powerful that it can totally control your life, whether you like it or not.

    To humans, love can be a more powerful force than death—those possessed by love will give up their lives for it. And it’s worth dying for.

    You are not responsible for the love you feel, for the love you have been shown, or for the love you show. We do not give ourselves the power to love. There is a system outside of ourselves which generates love.

    The fact that we live in a universe which generates love—when it could have been otherwise—is so extraordinary that it borders on the absurd.

    The Relationship between Suffering and Love

    Cause has effect. Actions have consequences, which means at some point, somebody is going to suffer.

    Like most people, I see madness in the world. Anger, hate, lies. I also observe that people spend enormous amounts of energy trying to avoid the consequences of their action. They have bad habits (say, alcoholism), and they try to escape the consequences of their bad habits by indulging more.

    Insecure men who were abused and berated by their fathers repeat the pattern on their own children. People who experience the pain of sexual abuse are more likely to abuse others—as if they are trying to escape their pain by inflicting it on somebody else.

    So perhaps here’s the principle: the only way to break the cycle of suffering, necessarily, is by some people bearing the suffering without inflicting it on anybody else. Quiet suffering, to stop it from spreading.

    In the story of Jesus, he predicts and ultimately accepts his suffering. The society at the time was corrupt—the religious leaders were a lying “brood of vipers”—and somebody will eventually bear the consequences. Jesus accepted that his fate was to be crucified. The man went around telling the truth, and for that, he was crucified.

    Why would Jesus accept his own unjust crucifixion? Because of love. That’s the output of the love-mindset. His love was so great that he accepted the worst form of torture.

    The Divine Logos

    In the Old Testament, Moses has an encounter with God at the burning bush and asks for his name. God responds:

    “I Am that I Am.”

    Or other translations say “I will be what I will be.”

    In my own interpretation, I understand this as saying, “I am existence itself.” Or, “I am reality.” Or, “I am the being.”

    That’s a very nice philosophical idea. There’s a lot of things in the world that don’t seem to be fundamental—e.g. physical objects are composed of molecules, which are compose of atoms, which are composed of sub-atomic particles, etc. The question is: is there anything fundamental?

    Plenty of things might not exist; is there anything that must exist?

    Yes, and that thing is God. It is the fundamental thing that is. The necessary being.

    If this is true, then God has a certain logic to him. As I say in Square One, logic and existence are inseparable. Everywhere there is something, there is something logical—there is something that is. It is logical, because it is itself.

    That sounds a whole lot like the “Logos” idea philosophers have been talking about for a while.

    An Individualist Relationship with God

    In Christianity, individuals have a direct connection with God/the truth/Jesus/love. The connection does not need to be mediated by a priest.

    This seems true. The connection between you and the truth is more important than any other connection. There is nothing more sacred, nothing more personal, and it does not involve anybody else. If you are skeptical of organized religion, this is wonderfully anarchic.

    There are no human authorities that come between me and God/reality/the truth. Human authority is nothing in comparison to the real authority “in heaven” (i.e. compared to the power of Nature outside ourselves; the system in which we live; the rules that govern reality). This perspective makes it easy to refuse to kiss the ring, no matter who wears it.

    An Individualist Relationship with “Jesus”

    For purposes of this article, let’s say that “Jesus” is “the mindset of love.” There was a human that walked around 2000 years ago, possessed by this mindset. The human person of Jesus embodied the mindset of love.

    That mindset still exists and possesses people today. To the extent you embody love, you are embodied by the same spirit that embodied the human Jesus.

    Jesus Christ—the mindset of love—can be treated as a person within your own psyche, and you can develop a relationship with “him.” That’s a very good thing to do.

    So, when people say, “I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” I can interpret that as, “I allow myself to interact with the mindset of love, as if it’s a person I can consult.”

    Consider the famous passage from Jesus, where he says:

    “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well.”

    We can rephrase this to:

    “[The mindset of love] is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to [knowledge of God] except through [this mindset]. If you really know [love], you will know [truth].”

    And later he says:

    “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”

    We can rephrase to:

    “On that day, you will realize that [the mindset of love] [comes from God/Nature], and you are [within my love], and [the same mindset of love] is within you.”

    The Value of the Individual Human Life

    Every individual is made in the image of God and therefore has non-zero value. The person of Jesus interacts with everybody from every social position. He heals the sick, helps the poor, dines with prostitutes, and argues with priests. He is not a man impressed with our social hierarchies.

    The story about Jesus’s sacrifice (which I’ll get to later) is about your personal redemption. It’s not about a group or a nation. It’s about his personal suffering on your personal behalf. Powerful, and further affirmation of the value of the individual.

    Scathing Criticism of Corrupt Religious Authorities

    Jesus is epitome of love and compassion. Yet, the guy was highly disagreeable in the psychological sense. He railed against the corrupt, hypocritical religious authorities of his time. Maximum scathe directed towards them, including this classic line:

    You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?

    And as the story goes, the religious and political authorities were indeed so corrupt, they had him tortured and killed.

    The Story of Persecution

    Jesus preached a love that was so extreme, it was (and still is) destabilizing to political and religious authorities. So they naturally, inevitably, persecuted him.

    To borrow a phrase from my interview with Isaac Deitz about Christianity, the story of Jesus—regardless of the historical veracity of the events—is the story of what happens in our world when Mr. Truth comes to town. Truth and worldly authorities are frequently locked in a battle to the death. In the short run, the authorities often win, but in the long run, truth and love win out.

    The historical story of Christianity is a microcosm of this. The early Christians also experienced terrible persecution, and yet, they eventually won. Now the religion is the largest in the world.

    Jesus Didn’t Cash In

    I’ve been researching about cults lately. You could make the case that Jesus had a cult around him, and yet, he never cashed in. Jesus didn’t become a warlord, a sex cultist, a politician, a consultant, or even gain material wealth. I can’t say that about any other cult leader I have researched. They all cash in at some point.

    This wasn’t because of a failed plan. He had the ability to cash in—see the story of his temptation—but he chose not to. He predicted that his fate was to be killed, and he accepted it as part of a divine plan.

    The Eternality of Jesus

    According to Christian orthodoxy, Jesus existed before his earthly incarnation. He existed as a divine person—that is, a divine pattern—before he was born into humanity.

    It makes sense to me. The same can be said for love—it is a divine, eternal, real pattern—that gets instantiated into humans. The pattern itself is not human; it cannot be killed, but the people who embody it can be.

    Is Jesus coming back? Well, if he’s a divine person, he never really went away. But he might be instantiated again in the future. (And I’d say, to the extent we manifest love ourselves, that’s the same thing as manifesting the pattern of Jesus.)

    The Resurrection

    I do not think that the Resurrection is an essential part of Christianity. Jesus’s teaching stands alone without it, but wow, what an awesome conclusion to the story!

    So the corrupt authorities end up killing Jesus, as he predicted, and God resurrects him from the dead. At the very least, if we stick to the metaphorical interpretation, we can confidently say that the pattern of Jesus conquered death. There’s no question; we’re still talking about the guy two millennia later.

    In the real world, love conquers death. When a parent sacrifices themselves for their children, the pattern of love continues—the child lives and might love, only to sacrifice himself and continue the process. The ultimate fate of this world is life, thanks to love, not death. Life wins, in the end.

    Metaphor aside, I keep open the possibility of a metaphysical resurrection. I take a position of radical ignorance about the laws of physics. The world is terrifyingly complex, and I don’t know what happens after you die. Humans are stupid little apes that know approximately nothing about our universe.

    I definitely cannot say what happens to you after leading a life like Jesus. N=1. Love is a wild thing when experienced, and it changes your brain. We already know that meditation and psychedelics make real physical changes to your body. What happens when somebody has been tripping on Love for their entire life, then dies in an act of profound love? I don’t know. We might live in a universe where resurrection can happen in a non-metaphorical sense.

    There’s more to say, but I will return to the subject later. Merry Christmas!

  • Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

    For the last fifteen years, I’ve been researching a wide range of subjects. Full-time for the last seven years. I’ve traveled the world to interview intellectuals for my podcast, but most of my research has been in private. After careful examination, I have come to the conclusion that we’ve been living in a dark age since at least the early 20th century. 

    Our present dark age encompasses all domains, from philosophy to political theory, to biology, statistics, psychology, medicine, physics, and even the sacred domain of mathematics. Low-quality ideas have become common knowledge, situated within fuzzy paradigms. Innumerable ideas which are assumed to be rigorous are often embarrassingly wrong and utilize concepts that an intelligent teenager could recognize as dubious. For example, the Copenhagen interpretation in physics is not only wrong, it’s aggressively irrational—enough to damn its supporters throughout the 20th century.

    Whether it’s the Copenhagen interpretation, Cantor’s diagonal argument, or modern medical practices, the story looks the same: shockingly bad ideas become orthodoxy, and once established, the social and psychological costs of questioning the orthodoxy are sufficiently high to dissuade most people from re-examination.

    This article is the first of an indefinite series that will examine the breadth and depth of our present dark age.  For years, I have been planning on writing a book on this topic, but the more I study, the more examples I find. The scandals have become a never-ending list. So, rather than indefinitely accumulate more information, I’ve decided to start writing now.

    Darkness Everywhere

    By a “dark age”, I do not mean that all modern beliefs are false. The earth is indeed round.  Instead, I mean that all of our structures of knowledge are plagued by errors, at all levels, from the trivial to the profound, periphery to the fundamental. Nothing that you’ve been taught can be believed because you were taught it. Nothing can be believed because others believe it. No idea is trustworthy because it’s written in a textbook.

    The process that results in the production of knowledge in textbooks is flawed, because the methodology employed by intellectuals is not sufficiently rigorous to generate high-quality ideas. The epistemic standards of the 20th century were not high enough to overcome social, psychological, and political entropy. Our academy has failed. 

    At present, I have more than sixty-five specific examples that vary in complexity. Some ideas, like the Copenhagen interpretation, have entire books written about them, and researchers could spend decades understanding their full history and significance. The global reaction to COVID-19 is another example that will be written about for centuries. Other ideas, like specific medical practices, are less complex, though the level of error still suggests a dark age. 

    Of course, I cannot claim this is true in literally every domain, since I have not researched every domain. However, my studies have been quite broad, and the patterns are undeniable. Now when I research a new field, I am able to accurately predict where the scandalous assumptions lie within a short period of time, due to recognizable patterns of argument and predictable social dynamics. 

    Occasionally, I will find a scholar that has done enough critical thinking and historical research to discover that the ideas he was taught in school are wrong. Usually, these people end up thinking they have discovered uniquely scandalous errors in the history of science. The rogue medical researcher that examines the origins of the lipid hypothesis, or the mathematician that wonders about set theory, or the biologist that investigates fundamental problems with lab rats—they’ll discover critical errors in their discipline but think they are isolated events. I’m sorry to say, they are not isolated events. They are the norm, no matter how basic the conceptual error.

    Despite the ubiquity of our dark age, there have been bright spots. The progress of engineers cannot be denied, though it’s a mistake to conflate the progress of scientists with the progress of engineers. There have been high-quality dissenters. Despite being dismissed as crackpots and crazies by their contemporaries, their arguments are often superior to the orthodoxies they criticize, and I suspect history will be kind to these skeptics. 

    Due to recent events and the proliferation of alternative information channels, I believe we are exiting the dark age into a new Renaissance. Eventually, enough individuals will realize the severity of the problems with existing orthodoxies and the systemic problems with the academy, and they will embark on their own intellectual adventures. The internet has made possible a new life of the mind, and it’s unleashing pent-up intellectual energies around the world that will bring illumination to our present situation, in addition to creating the new paradigms that we desperately need.

    Why Did This Happen?

    It will take years to go through all of the examples, but before examining the specifics, it’s helpful to see the big picture. Here’s my best explanation for why we ended up in a dark age, summarized into six points:

    1. Intellectuals have greatly underestimated the complexity of the world.

    The success of early science gave us false hope that the world is simple. Laboratory experiments are great for identifying simple structures and relationships, but they aren’t great for describing the world outside of the laboratory. Modern intellectuals are too zoomed-in in their analyses and theories. They do not see how interconnected the world is nor how many domains one has to research in order to gain competence. For example, you simply cannot have a rigorous understanding of political theory without studying economics. Nor can you understand physics without thinking about philosophy. Yet, almost nobody has interdisciplinary knowledge or skill.  

    Even within a single domain like medicine, competence requires a broad exposure to concepts. Being too-zoomed-in has resulted in a bunch of medical professionals that don’t understand basic nutrition, immunologists that know nothing of virology, surgeons that unnecessarily remove organs, dentists that poison their patients, and doctors that prolong injury by prescribing anti-inflammatory drugs and harm their patients through frivolous antibiotic usage. The medical establishment has greatly underestimated the complexity of biological systems, and due to this oversimplification, they yank levers that end up causing more harm than good. The same is true for the economists and politicians who believe they can centrally plan economies. They greatly underestimate the complexity of economic systems and end up causing more harm than good. That’s the standard pattern across all disciplines.

    2. Specialization has made people stupid.

    Modern specialization has become so extreme that it’s akin to a mental handicap. Contemporary minds are only able to think about a couple of variables at the same time and do not entertain variables outside of their domain of training. While this myopia works, and is even encouraged, within the academy, it doesn’t work for understanding the real world. The world does not respect our intellectual divisions of labor, and ideas do not stay confined to their taxonomies. 

    A competent political theorist must have a good model of human psychology. A competent psychologist must be comfortable with philosophy. Philosophers, if they want to understand the broader world, must grasp economic principles. And so on. The complexity of the world makes it impossible for specialized knowledge to be sufficient to build accurate models of reality. We need both special and general knowledge across a multitude of domains.

    When encountering fundamental concepts and assumptions within their own discipline, specialists will often outsource their thinking altogether and say things like “Those kinds of questions are for the philosophers.” They are content leaving the most important concepts to be handled by other people. Unfortunately, since competent philosophers are almost nowhere to be found, the most essential concepts are rarely examined with scrutiny. So, the specialist ends up with ideas that are often inferior to the uneducated, since uneducated folks tend to have more generalist models of the world.

    Specialization fractures knowledge into many different pieces, and in our present dark age, almost nobody has tried to put the pieces back together. Contrary to popular opinion, it does not take specialized knowledge or training to comment on the big-picture or see conceptual errors within a discipline. In fact, a lack of training can be an advantage for seeing things from a fresh perspective. The greatest blindspots of specialists are caused by the uniformity of their formal education.

    The balance between generalists and specialists is mirrored by the balance between experimenters and theorists. The 20th century had an enormous lack of competent theorists, who are often considered unnecessary or “too philosophical.” Theorists, like generalists, are able to synthesize knowledge into a coherent picture and are absolutely essential for putting fractured pieces of knowledge back together.

    3. The lack of conceptual clarity in mathematics and physics has caused a lack of conceptual clarity everywhere else. These disciplines underwent foundational crises in the early 20th century that were not resolved correctly.

    The world of ideas is hierarchical; some ideas are categorically more important than others. The industry of ideas is also hierarchical; some intellectuals are categorically more important than others. In our contemporary paradigm, mathematics and physics are considered the most important domains, and mathematicians and physicists are considered the most intelligent thinkers. Therefore, when these disciplines underwent foundational crises, it had a devastating effect upon the entire world of ideas. The foundational notion of a knowable reality came into serious doubt.

    In physics, the Copenhagen interpretation claimed that there is no world outside of observation—that it doesn’t even make sense to talk about reality-in-some-state separate from our observations. When the philosophers disagreed, their word was pitted against the word of physicists. In the academic hierarchy, physicists occupy a higher spot than philosophers, so it became fashionable to deny the existence of independent reality. More importantly, within the minds of intellectuals, even if they naively believe in the existence of a measurement-independent world, upon hearing that prestigious physicists disagree, most people end up conforming to the ideas of physicists who they believe are more intelligent than themselves. 

    In mathematics, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries undermined a foundation that was built upon for two thousand years. Euclid was often assumed to be a priori true, despite the high-quality criticisms leveled at Euclid for thousands of years. If Euclid is not the rock-solid foundation of mathematics, what is? In the early 1900’s, some people claimed the foundation was logic (and they were correct). Others claimed there is no foundation at all or that mathematics is meaningless because it’s merely the manipulation of symbols according to arbitrary rules.

    David Hilbert was a German mathematician that tried to unify all of mathematics under a finite set of axioms. According to the orthodox story, Kurt Godel showed in his famous incompleteness theorems that such a project was impossible. Worse than impossible, actually. He supposedly showed that any attempt to formalize mathematics within an axiomatic system would either be incomplete (meaning some mathematical truths cannot be proven), or if complete, the system becomes inconsistent (meaning they contain a logical contradiction). The impact of these theorems cannot be overstated, both within mathematics and outside of it. Intellectuals have been abusing Godel’s theorems for a century, invoking them to make all kinds of anti-rational arguments. Inescapable contradictions in mathematics would indeed be devastating, because after all, if you cannot have conceptual clarity and certainty in mathematics, what hope is there for other disciplines? 

    Due to the importance of physics and mathematics, and the influence of physicists and mathematicians, the epistemic standards of the 20th century were severely damaged by these foundational crises. The rise of logical positivism, relativism, and even scientism can be connected to these irrationalist paradigms, which often serve as justification for abandoning the notion of truth altogether. 

    4. The methods of scientific inquiry have been conflated with the processes of academia.

    What is science? In our current paradigm, science is what scientists do. Science is what trained people in lab coats do at universities according to established practices. Science is what’s published in scientific journals after going through the formal peer review process. Good science is what wins awards that science gives out. In other words, science is now equivalent to the rituals of academia.

    Real empirical inquiry has been replaced by conformity to bureaucratic procedures. If a scientific paper has checked off all the boxes of academic formalism, it is considered true science, regardless of the intellectual quality of the paper. Real peer review has been replaced by formal peer review—a religious ritual that is supposed to improve the quality of academic literature, despite all evidence to the contrary. The academic publishing system has obviously become dominated by petty and capricious gatekeepers. With the invention of the internet, it’s probably unnecessary altogether.

    “Following standard scientific procedure” sounds great unless it’s revealed that the procedures are mistaken. “Peer review” sounds great, unless your peers are incompetent. Upon careful review of many different disciplines, the scientific record demonstrates that “standard practice” is indeed insufficient to yield reliable knowledge, and chances are, your scientific peers are actually incompetent.

    5. Academia has been corrupted by government and corporate funding.

    Over the 20th century, the amount of money flowing into academia has exploded and degraded the quality of the institution. Academics are incentivized to spend their time chasing government grants rather than researching. The institutional hierarchy has been skewed to favor the best grant-winners rather than the best thinkers. Universities enjoy bloated budgets, both from direct state funding and from government-subsidized student loans. As with any other government intervention, subsidies cause huge distortions to incentive structures and always increase corruption.  Public money has sufficiently politicized the academy to fully eliminate the separation of Science and state.

    Corporate-sponsored research is also corrupt. Companies pay researchers to find whatever conclusion benefits the company. The worst combination happens when the government works with the academy and corporations on projects, like the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. The amount of incompetence and corruption is staggering and will be written about for centuries or more.

    In the past ten years, the politicization of academia has become apparent, but it has been building since the end of WWII. We are currently seeing the result of far-left political organizing within the academy that has affected even the natural sciences. Despite being openly hostile to critical thinking, they have successfully suppressed discussion within the institution that’s supposed to exist to pursue truth—a clear and inexcusable structural failure.

    6. Human biology, psychology, and social dynamics make critical thinking difficult.

    Nature does not endow us with great critical thinking skills from birth. From what I can tell, most people are stuck in a developmental stage prior to critical thinking, where social and psychological factors are the ultimate reason for their ideas. Gaining popularity and social acceptance are usually higher goals than figuring out the truth, especially if the truth is unpopular. Therefore, the real causes for error are often socio-psychological, not intellectual—an absence of reasoning rather than a mistake of reasoning. Before reaching the stage of true critical thinking, most people’s thought processes are stunted by issues like insecurity, jealousy, fear, arrogance, groupthink, and cowardice. It takes a large, never-ending commitment to self-development to combat these flaws.

    Rather than grapple with difficult concepts, nearly every modern intellectual is trying to avoid embarrassment for themselves and for their social class. They are trying to maintain their relative position in a social hierarchy that is constructed around orthodoxies. They adhere to these orthodoxies, not because they thought the ideas through, but because they cannot bear the social cost of disagreement. 

    The greater the conceptual blunder within an orthodoxy, the greater the embarrassment to the intellectual class that supported it; hence, few people will stick their necks out to correct serious errors. Of course, few people even entertain the idea that great minds make elementary blunders in the first place, so there’s a low chance most intellectuals even realize the assumptions of their discipline or practice are wrong.

    Not even supposed mathematical “proofs” are immune from social and psychological pressures. For example, Godel’s incompleteness theorems are not even considered a thing skepticism can be applied to; they are treated as a priori truths to mathematicians (which looks absurd to anybody who has actually examined the philosophical assumptions underpinning modern mathematics.) 

    Individuals who consider themselves part of the “smart person club”—that is, those that self-describe as intellectuals and are often part of the academy—have a difficult time admitting errors in their own ideology. But they have an exceptionally difficult time admitting error by “great minds” of the past, due to group dynamics. It’s one thing to admit that you don’t understand quantum mechanics; it’s an entirely different thing to claim Niels Bohr did not understand quantum mechanics. The former admission can actually gain you prestige within the physics club; the latter will get you ostracized.

    All fields of thought are under constant threat of being captured by superficial “consensus” by those who are seeking to be part of an authoritative group. These people tend to have superior social/manipulative skills, are better at communicating with the general public, and are willing to attack any critics as if their lives depended on it—for understandable reasons, since the benefits of social prestige are indeed on the line when sacred assumptions are being challenged.

    If this analysis is correct, then the least examined ideas are likely to be the most fundamental, have the greatest conceptual errors, and have been established the longest. The longer the orthodoxy exists, the higher the cost of revision, potentially costing an entire class their relative social position. If, for example, the notion of the “completed infinity” in mathematics turns out to be bunk, or the cons of vaccination outweigh the benefits, or the science of global warming is revealed to be corrupt, the social hierarchy will be upended, and the status of many intellectuals will be permanently damaged. Some might end up tarred and feathered. With this perspective, it’s not surprising that ridiculous dogmas can often take centuries or even millennia to correct.

    Speculation and Conclusion

    In addition to the previous six points, I have a few other suspicions that I’m less confident of, but am currently researching:

    1. Physical health might have declined over the 20th century due to reduced food quality, forgotten nutritional knowledge, and increased pesticides and pollutants in the environment. Industrialization created huge quantities of food at the expense of quality. Perhaps our dark age is partially caused by an overall reduction in brain function.

    2. New communications technology, starting with the radio, might have helped proliferate bad ideas, amplified their negative impact, and increased the social cost of disagreement with the orthodoxy. If true, this would be another unintended consequence of modernization.

    3.  Conspiracy/geopolitics might be a significant factor. Occasionally, malice does look like a better explanation than stupidity.

    In conclusion, the legacy of the 20th century is not an impressive one, and I do not currently have evidence that it was an era of great minds or even good ideas. But don’t take my word for it; the evidence will be supplied here over the coming years. If we are indeed in a dark age, then the first step towards leaving it is recognizing that we’ve been in one.

  • Understanding God as Nature or The Universe

    It’s taken me a couple of decades, but I’m finally starting to make sense of the concept of God. I was raised in an Evangelical Christian household, but the ideas never fully made sense to me at the deepest level. When searching for clarity about God, the people I spoke with would appeal to mystery and faith rather than explain a concept I could rationally grasp. Finally, after investigating for more than twenty years, I have a concept of God that I can understand. The idea is one of the oldest in existence, and it turns baroque theological claims into true and important insights.

    We can define “God” as “all of existence,” “the entirety of the universe,” or “reality itself.” God is the whole-thing-together. God’s parts include all of the objects, their relations, and their rules for interaction. God is the biggest conceivable existent, which is the totality of existence itself. In a word, God is Nature. Not “nature” referring to trees and shrubs and rocks, but “Nature” referring to the entire system, the universe, in which we live.

    With this definition, many theological claims start to make concrete sense. I have a suspicion that this is what Christians mean (or meant) when talking about “God the Father.” In this article, I will go through and demonstrate just how powerful the concept of God is when equated with Nature or The Universe. We’ll take a couple dozen religious claims about God and turn them into something reasonable and profound by translating “God” into “Nature,” “the universe,” “existence,” or “reality.” 

    Now whether, in addition to the universe, there is a Divine Person we can call “God” is a separate question. I’m not sure the answer, but regardless, it doesn’t change the profundity of the truths we can state about the universe.

    Omni-Qualities

    We’ll start with the traditional omni-qualities of God. Take the simplest example, the claim that:

    “God is omnipresent.”

    Meaning, God is everywhere at the same time.

    If God is a person, it’s hard to understand how he can be omnipresent. If God is the Universe, then it suddenly because obvious, even necessarily true, that God is omnipresent. The Universe is everywhere. Existence is everywhere. If something exists, it’s part of reality, therefore part of God. There is no corner of the universe that’s somehow not part of the universe. You can’t separate yourself from the universe – or to sound theological, you can’t separate yourself from God. Not only is this claim true, but it also hints at a real relationship between the universe and you. There is some kind of remarkable connection between “the whole thing” and “you as part of it.” 

    Next, take the claim,

    “God is omnipotent” or “all-powerful.”

    The universe is indeed all-powerful. There is definitely nothing more powerful than it, since it doesn’t really make sense to talk about something in the universe that’s more powerful than the universe. Every thing that acts is acting within the rules of existence. The system itself is categorically more powerful than any object within the system. To put it into religious terms, everything in existence is playing by God’s rules, therefore God is all-powerful.

    Next, the claim,

    “God is omniscient.”

    Meaning, God knows everything. There’s no information that God doesn’t have. This is a true statement about the universe. There’s a sense in which all states of the existence are “known” by the universe – though not necessarily implying a conscious state of knowing. Rather, all of the information about the universe is within the universe. You cannot “hide” information from the universe. You can’t trick Nature or be somewhere that Nature can’t see you. Every state that you’re in is itself a state of the universe. Therefore, the universe cannot lack knowledge of your existence, in a similar sense that the laws of physics cannot lack knowledge of your existence.

    If you think of information as being a key part of how the laws of physics operate – part of the “universal function”, as I theorize in this article – then it makes sense to talk about the universe as “knowing” present states in order to render future states. 

    Universal Substance and Being

    Let’s examine a Biblical quote:

    “God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”

    If God is a person, it’s unclear what this means or how it’s true. But if God is the Universe, then in the most literal sense, God is indeed the Alpha, Omega, and everything in between. You could also call God “the Father” of everything, which is essentially the same idea as being the Alpha and the Omega.

    How about the claim,

    “God maintains our existence every minute.”

    This is also true. The universe maintains our metaphysical existence from second to second. We don’t choose to continue being; Nature chooses for us, and if Nature stopped sustaining our existence, we would cease to be.

    Next, take the common claim that:

    “Humans are made in the image of God,” or as it’s sometimes phrased, “Every individual has a spark of the divine.”

    There is again a literal sense in which humans are an image of Nature. They are stamped with an impression of the entire universe. If you agree with the story of modern cosmology, then humans are little bits of the Big Bang, aged a few billion years. In a real sense, Nature created humans. We are inescapably of Nature – of God. You are not separate from reality. The universe is part of you, and you are part of the universe. So when you’re looking at a human, or looking at anything for that matter, you’re looking at a bit of Nature itself. Thus, if God is the Universe, then humans literally look like a part of God, and if existence is divine, then every individual has a spark of the divine.

    Take the claims that:

    “We’re all God’s creation,” and the more poetic, “God formed man from dust.”

    Just like the claim that “God made man and woman”, this is literally true. We are a creation of the universe – but not necessarily a creation in the intentional conscious sense. The material building blocks of humans are of the universe. Humans are a particular composition, a structure, that’s been created – or if you prefer, has emerged – from the universe. Again in a literal sense, the universe formed man from dust.

    Take a claim that I used to hear from Evangelicals growing up:

    “God made man and woman,” or more generally, “Things are the way they are because God made them that way.”

    Again, true and important. Nature has created men and women with different biological and psychological traits. This is a fact of the reality in which we live. It’s foolish and arrogant to pretend otherwise, and it should probably affect the way that we live in the world. 

    Submission, Satan, and Karma

    Consider the popular religious concept of “submission to God.” It makes a great deal of sense. To submit to God is to submit to reality, to Nature. To obey the system and let it operate. To establish God as ”sovereign over everything” is to admit that reality, Nature, the Universe, is king. We have no metaphysical power over the structure of reality. 

    Looking at things from a universal perspective, there’s a very real sense in which your life is not your own. It’s God’s; it’s Nature’s. What happens in your life is not ultimately controlled by you, but rather by greater forces outside of yourself. 

    In this sense, I can agree with religious people when they claim,

    “Western culture needs to submit to God!”

    Western culture does need to acknowledge the existence of objective reality and live in accordance with it. Perhaps when theologians say “humans should live by God’s law”, they’re really saying “humans should not pretend they live in an alternative universe; they should live by the laws of Nature and accept reality as it is.”

    This perspective also gives me a comprehensible understanding of “Satan.” Instead of being a really bad supernatural person, he might be the personification of non-reality, falsehood, or rebellion against reality. 

    Imagine we constructed a story about God (reality) versus Satan (falsehood), where both God and Satan were people. We could talk about how seductive Satan is, how tempting lies can be, and how deep delusions run in the human psychology. We could talk about the fundamental arrogance of Satan – the tendency for humans to vociferously proclaim they have the truth when they don’t. We could tell stories about how “listening to Satan” leads to unhappiness, since in the real world, lies and delusions end up harming people.

    With such stories, I would end up advising the same thing as my Christian friends: stay away from Satan! God is what you need! And we could translate this rationally as, “Stay away from lies and delusions! Truth and reality is what you need!”

    Furthermore, I often heard stories in my youth about the burning hatred that Satan has for God. Well, understanding God as reality and Satan as non-reality, I actually see this story play out in people. Humans that are living in delusion have an extreme hatred for anything true – even the concept of truth. Similarly, humans that are doing really bad things – think the Epstein sex ring – do not want the truth exposed. They have a strong preference for darkness and a fear of the light, so to speak.

    After hearing stories about God and Satan for so many years, and never quite grasping them, it’s stunning to see them suddenly make sense by simply translating “God” as “reality” or “existence.”

    This translation also helps make sense of the concepts of “Karma” or “cosmic justice.” Instead of thinking there’s someone personally punishing and rewarding humans for their behavior, we can conceive of the universe as possibly being intrinsically just. Perhaps the laws of physics are also coupled with laws of morality. When something bad happens in the world, perhaps it sets of up a chain of events to correct itself at a future time. “Punishment” might be built into the structure of the universe, rather than something dished out by a person.

    “God will judge you for your sins”

    might be another way of saying “actions have consequences.” 

    Now, whether or not we live in a universe which operates on principles of justice is an entirely empirical and open question. I’m not saying we do. There’s plenty of evidence that seems to suggest otherwise. However, it’s another example of the explanatory power of treating God as existence. We can seriously talk about whether God is just without invoking confusing theological concepts. We can even talk about whether God “has a sense of humor” or God is “loving.” These are all meaningful statements about how the universe operates.

    God and Culture

    Next, let’s examine the cultural criticism you might hear from a cranky old person:

    “Western society has forgotten about God!”

    This statement becomes true and important if we interpret it as, “Western society has forgotten about reality!” Especially in elite society, humans seem to have forgotten that the universe has a structure independent of them. They pretend that all of existence is a mere social construction. They are deluded about the reality of things as they are in the world. One could even interpret the fashionable claim that “there is no objective truth” as “there is no universe” or in this context, “there is no God.”

    To quote Psalms:

    “A fool in his heart says ‘there is no God.’”

    Again true and relevant to my own work. A fool says “there is no universe” or “there is no such thing as reality.” I’ve met plenty of fools and even interviewed a few on my show. Perhaps part of the reason past thinkers believed the existence of God was self-evident is because they were treating “God” as Nature or the Universe. The existence of the universe is essentially self-evident – i.e. the existence of existence – and it probably reflects on some psychological or moral problem to deny that it exists.

    Now take the crotchety old person’s condemnation of his teenager son’s behavior:

    “Don’t rebel against God!”

    It’s actually sound advice if the old man is saying “Don’t rebel against Nature!” Rebelling against reality is vain and counter-productive. You might not like Nature, but you’d better grow up and get over it. Nature is a particular way, and it won’t change just because you don’t like it.

    Instead of “rebellion” against God, I think it would be amazing to live in a society that “worshipped” God. In other words, a society in which truth and reality are sacred. Lying, for example, would be seen as seriously immoral, but at present, Western culture seems completely tolerant of lies and celebrates a myriad of human delusions.

    Next, consider the wisdom of the proverb:

    “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

    That’s wise if we interpret it as “the fear of Nature is the beginning of wisdom.”

    As somebody who has experienced chronic illness for nearly a decade, I can tell you this is true. All pain, suffering, disease, and death comes from Nature. Your mental state – happy or sad, sane or insane – is an output of Nature, and at any moment it can change. Everything can be taken away from you, and this fact is outside of your control. Nature has the ability to eternally torture you or ruin your life in ways inconceivable to you. 

    Next, consider the common practice of “Thanking God” before a meal, for success in life, or for avoiding some tragedy. My old Evangelical community thanked God with the belief that they were thanking a cosmically powerful person who was responsible for their well-being. But there’s another way to understand giving thanks to God.

    In a literal sense, the universe provided you with your meal. The universe was the ultimate cause of your professional success. The universe – forces external to you – were the reason that some particular tragedy was avoided. If you have talents, wealth, or physical looks, the universe gave them to you. And as the saying goes, since the universe gives you everything, it can take everything away from you.  

    A related phenomenon is religious people “giving glory to God” when they perform things at a high level. Say we’re talking about music. Rather than merely celebrate some particular human’s musical creation, it makes sense to celebrate the whole structure that gives rise to the existence of music in the first place! It’s extraordinary that we live in a universe in which sound exists. Relatively speaking, the musician isn’t actually doing much. He’s not creating music ex nihilo. He’s creating music within the system provided to him. In this context, “giving glory to God” makes sense to me.

    These high-performers often say things like,

    “There is a higher power working through me.”

    Again, in this context, that’s true. When somebody accomplishes something, it’s some part of the entire universe operating. The actions of individual humans are just a small part of its operation.

    Now consider a few Biblical quotes. This one is of God speaking:

    “My people are fools; they do not know me. They are senseless children; they have no understanding.”

    Imagine the universe talking. It could truthfully say that humans are “my people,” as humans are constructed out of the universe itself. It could also say that humans are senseless children who have no understanding of reality. That’s also true.

    Now from Corinthians:

    “God makes foolish the wisdom of the world”

    Yes, definitely. The universe makes foolish the “wisdom” of the world. Intellectuals for all of history have been fundamentally mistaken about everything, and the present moment is no exception. The more you learn about the universe, the more you learn that humans know approximately nothing, and the greatest fools are those who profess to understand while being in a state of ignorance.

    Personal or Impersonal

    In theological discussions, whether God is “personal” or “impersonal” seems to be a big deal. Of course it depends on what we mean by these terms, but in this framework, I think God is both personal and impersonal. There’s a sense in which God is the most personal thing in existence. To the extent that there are people in the universe, then God is personal. It’s necessarily part of God’s potential to be personal, since there are people. God is the substrate out of which people are built, including yourself. What could be more personal? To the extent that consciousness is part of the universe, then at least part of God is conscious, too.

    But in this context, God is also bigger than a person. He’s a person and everything else, too, including the laws of physics. He’s the mechanical forces keeping everything in operation. Even rocks and planets are a tiny part of God.

    One of the difficulties I’ve had with thinking of God as a cosmic person is that it seems like he would still be a part of a larger system. He would be bound by the laws of logic, for example. It just seems weird to me to think of a solely-personal God that operates in a system which is larger and more powerful than he is. Instead of God being a person acting in a larger system, it makes sense to talk about God as being the system itself. Nothing is outside of it, larger than it, or more powerful than it. Nothing is higher than God if God is the structure for all of existence.

    That being said, we can also talk as if it has a kind of personality. We can meaningfully say, “God wants you to have children.” In reality, Nature pushes organisms towards procreation. You can talk about Nature having a “purpose”, as new states and structures are continually coming into existence. The universe is constructed in such a way to generate living things that have the capacity to love. That’s remarkable – staggering and absurd, really when you think about it – whether you attribute it to a Divine Person or not. You can talk about God having a “will” or a “plan.” When something happens, it was “God’s will.” In other words, everything that happens is a kind of unfolding of the entire universe towards a future state, with all parts relating to one another. Any event is merely a step towards some future state – a part of “God’s plan.”

    Now don’t get me wrong: it might be possible that the entire universe is a person. Perhaps God is all of existence, and if you put together all of existence, you get a person. That would be remarkable indeed. I don’t want to rule it out, but I have a very hard time making sense of it, so this article won’t make a claim either way. Even if the universe is ultimately unified into a person, it doesn’t change the various, true things we can say about it.

    Little Greek Gods

    This way of understanding God can also apply to lesser gods. Say we’re talking about Greek or Roman gods. Suddenly, they make sense if they are understood as real, abstract forces and patterns in the universe, rather than supernatural people. The god of Love, for example – the real force of love in the world – can be spoken about as if she had a personality. The god of Wine makes people do silly things. The god of War has his own destructive personality. There’s even a way of talking about the interplay between the god of Wine and War – as if the two gods speak to each other. I’m sure there’s a real connection in the universe between alcohol, violence, and war.

    We can make sense of the Greeks saying things like,

    “The gods might strike you with madness.”

    That’s just another way of saying “the universe, the many forces outside your control, might strike you with madness.” These gods should be feared. They are powerful and immortal. Humans can’t “kill” them. 

    With this context, you can see how clever it is to build stories about the gods – their personalities, relationships among themselves, including their various marriages, children, and partners, and about the relationship between the gods and humans. It makes sense to say,

    “The gods don’t care about the affairs of humans.”

    Contemporary minds might say “the laws of nature do not care about the affairs of humans.” 

    These lesser gods are different from the Big God. Lesser gods are specific forces and patterns in reality. They are themselves deferent to the Big God – the totality of reality itself.

    Monotheism versus Polytheism

    This way of thinking also helps me make sense of the debate between monotheists and polytheists. Are there multiple gods, or just one? I think there’s a sense in which both monotheism and polytheism could be true. Polytheism makes sense when understood in the Greek god example. There are many powerful, immortal forces that control what happens on Earth. 

    Monotheism makes sense when talking about the biggest-possible picture. We don’t need to posit the existence of multiple existences. We can say, “If something exists, it’s part of the totality of existence. Therefore, there is only one universe, one reality, one God.”

    Pantheism vs Panentheism

    Is this Pantheism? Is it Panentheism? I don’t know. I haven’t studied theology, and I’m not sure of the nuances between Pantheism and Panentheism. I don’t really care how my ideas are labeled, but from what I can tell, they are similar to both.  Pantheism is the idea that everything is divine or of God. Panentheism is the idea that everything is within God, but not everything is divine, and God might be bigger than the universe. To me, since I don’t have a theological dog in the fight, it seems to be more of a semantic distinction.

    There’s an obvious sense in which I’m saying “the universe is God”, which sounds like Pantheism, but it depends on what we mean by “the universe.” If “the universe” is restricted to four-dimensional spacetime, then I would be a Panentheist, because I believe existence is much bigger than four dimensional space. The universe studied by Physics might only be a small part of God. If, however, we treat “the universe” as “all of existence in every form”, then I would be a Pantheist, since there couldn’t be anything “outside” of existence in the biggest picture. If all parts of existence are in God, then they are still of God – as something in existence is a part of existence, from what I can tell. Regardless, I’ll let theologians handle the taxonomy.

    No Faith

    The picture I’ve just painted requires no faith to appreciate. It comes with no religious dogma. It’s just philosophy. It’s by no means an exhaustive list of religious claims that make sense if you translate “God” to “existence.” Nearly every time I encounter claims about God, I can make sense of them in this context.

    Regardless of whether there’s a Divine Person in addition to everything else, we can say really remarkable things about the universe. You are part of the entire universe; the universe is part of you. You are made up of the universe. If Nature were a painter, you would be a small part of its painting.

    As my Evangelical community was fond of saying,

    “God can fill a hole in your heart.”

    In other words, reality – the truth – can seriously fulfill you. If you don’t have it, it’s what you’re missing. Life without truth is aimless and fuzzy. This is a true statement about human psychology. People really are restless when they don’t have any grasp of reality.

    The universe provides everything for you. It is sustaining you right now. It’s been churning through various states for billions of years, with unbelievably powerful forces working together, and it’s finally reached the point of producing you at this present moment. It’s responsible for all of your positive and negative qualities. To the extent you learn, it’s always teaching you a lesson. To the extent that you are conscious, then the universe is conscious. To the extent that you love or are loved, then the universe loves. These truths seem profound to me. I believe this is the beginning of a rational theology.

  • Mind-Body Dualism | Solving the Interaction Problem

    Dualism is an attractive philosophy with an Achilles’ heel. Mind and body seem to be fundamentally separate things, yet dualists since Descartes have never been able to solve the famous problem of interaction. If mind and body are in different ontological categories, then how could they possibly interact with each other, even in principle?

    Descartes didn’t give a good answer, nor has any other dualist I’ve ever encountered. They tend to respond, “Well, we don’t know how mind and body interact, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible!” This is not a satisfying answer, even though I agree with them, and lots of philosophers don’t find it compelling at all. In fact, many have claimed the problem of interaction is so severe, it’s a refutation of dualism. They think the problem can’t be solved even in theory.

    I disagree. I’ve been trying to figure out a plausible mechanism of interaction for many years, and finally, I’ve got one. I have a working resolution to the mind-body problem that solves the problem of interaction. It not only supports substance dualism, but substance pluralism, which doesn’t restrict the amount of ontological categories to only two. If you’re sympathetic to dualism, or are familiar with its history, this is the type of theory we wanted Descartes to figure out a few centuries ago.

    I call it a theory of indirect interaction. Mind and body do not directly interact, but they effectively interact – i.e. the state of one affects the state of the other. This theory has many favorable properties:

    1) It gives a plausible mechanism for interaction between objects in any ontological category – not just mental and physical. Even if there are a hundred more categories, the mechanism could still work.

    2) It allows for two-way causality. Physical states can affect mental states; mental states can affect physical states.

    3) It is free-will-agnostic. There is a clear opening for the role of free will, but the system works perfectly fine without it.

    4) It doesn’t break the laws of physics – or perhaps more precisely, it doesn’t break the laws of causality. It might simply broaden the scope of the laws of physics.

    The purpose of this article is not to claim that “This is the way things actually work in the world!” Rather, it’s to demonstrate that in principle there could be a mechanism for things in different ontological categories to effectively interact with each other. Whether or not I’ve discovered the “real” mechanism is a separate question.

    Examining Causality through Billiards

    The best way to illustrate the theory is by first taking the mind out of the equation and analyzing purely physical phenomena. By breaking down physical phenomena into their most fundamental form, it will elicit the concepts necessary to understand indirect interaction.

    My favorite example of “purely physical phenomena” is the motion of balls on a billiard table. Let’s take a simple scenario. Imagine that there are only two balls left on the table – the white cue ball and the black 8-ball. Imagine the cue stick strikes the white ball, the white ball rolls forward and hits the 8-ball, then the 8-ball rolls into a pocket.

    Let’s break this scenario down as thoroughly as possible. What are we really talking about when we reference “pool balls”? What exactly are such objects? What are we describing when we say, “The 8-ball rolled into a pocket”?

    Rather than give an extended analysis of the metaphysical status of pool balls (which you can read about in my article “No, Chairs Do Not Exist”), let me give you one plausible position. What a “pool ball” really is is “units of matter arranged in a particular way in a particular part of space.” Let’s call those units “atoms.” Some philosophers might put it, “A pool ball is really just atoms arranged ball-wise.”

    Let’s consider this phrase:  “The 8-ball rolled into a pocket.” What exactly are we describing? What is this “rolling” phenomenon? If the pool ball is just atoms, then we can rephrase it this way: “Some particular atoms changed their positions in space.”

    Another way to understand it would be to say, “At Time 1, atoms were in Position 1. At Time 2, atoms were in Position 2.” In fact, that’s a pretty good description of motion in general.

    That’s an abstract way to understand pool balls rolling on a table. Now let’s ask two interesting, yet difficult questions:

    1) When the white ball hits the 8-ball, why does the 8-ball start moving?

    2) Why does the 8-ball move on its particular path rather than some other path?

    Notice that when we reduced the phenomenon of motion to “atoms changing position,” it doesn’t actually communicate an extremely important piece of information:

    The changes in position are not random.

    We didn’t say, “At Time 1, the white ball struck the 8-ball, and at Time 2, the 8-ball started orbiting Jupiter.” No. There is a pattern to the motion. A predictable, observable pattern.

    Why?

    Why isn’t the motion of the 8-ball completely random? Why should the motion be predictable at all? Hell, why doesn’t the universe just spontaneously fall apart when the balls collide? What holds all of these objects into the same coherent, predictable system?

    One plausible answer is this: There are laws of the universe. Physical laws keep the whole thing together. They make motion predictable. The reason that the 8-ball rolls into its pocket instead of orbiting Jupiter is because there are laws of physics which govern the behavior of objects. These laws have a real existence.

    That’s a nice-sounding answer – and physicists might like it – but it provokes many more questions. For example:

    Are the laws of physics physical themselves? Do the laws of physics take up space or weigh anything?

    What is the relationship between the laws of physics and the objects governed by them?

    What is the mechanism for the laws of physics?

    In other words, how do laws keep objects in order?

    If our explanation for physical phenomena appeals to laws, then we’ve posited the existence of two radically different types of things: physical phenomena and the laws which govern them. Atoms in space, by themselves, are not sufficient to explain why they move in predictable ways. There must be underlying principles, or laws, which determine their behavior. By thinking about “purely physical phenomena” this way, it gets us one step closer to solving the mind-body problem.

    Inputs and Outputs According to Laws

    Let’s break down our billiard example even further. Instead of only identifying what we see, we need to identify exactly what we don’t see.

    Treat the table and balls as a whole system. We see changes in the position of the balls, which means we see the system in different states at different times. But we don’t see the glue between the states. We don’t actually see the laws that we’re appealing to in order to explain the phenomena. We’re simply inferring the existence of laws and causality to explain the patterns in our observation, but we don’t see the laws themselves.

    It’s helpful to keep rephrasing and condensing our language. Instead of saying, “At Time 1, the object was in Position 1, and at Time 2, the object was in Position 2,” we can simply talk about “states.” We can say, “State 1 was followed by State 2.”

    So another abstract way to understand physical phenomena is to say, “There is a series of states. Each state contains a particular arrangement of atoms in space. The changes between states are non-random and happen in accordance with laws.”

    This allows us to re-ask the previous questions:

    1) Why is State 2 the way that it is and not some other way?

    2) Why doesn’t State 2 include the 8-ball orbiting Jupiter?

    The answer:

    Any given state is determined by its previous state. Since State 1 was a particular way, the laws of physics determine that State 2 must follow State 1.

    Or, to put it more succinctly: Preceding states determine future states.

    Let’s consider these states of the universe from another perspective: As “inputs” and “outputs.” Inputs yield outputs. So if we call State 2 an “output,” we could say that State 1 was its “input.”

    What determines that State 2 is an output of State 1 in particular? The laws of physics. If we think about states of the universe as being inputs and outputs, we can understand the laws of physics as a kind of mathematical function – they take inputs and turn them into specific outputs!

    This is a theoretical picture in which the universe is like a gigantic computer that keeps churning out new output states. The outputs are determined by their inputs. Then, those outputs are used as inputs for the next state. The laws of physics are the specific code that determines exactly how inputs relate to outputs.

    So, we can reduce the physical universe to a very abstract formula:

    Input state + laws of physics -> output state.

    Then, that output state is treated as the next input, and the universe churns out a new state.

    Information and State

    We’ve posited the existence of two radically different types of things to explain physical phenomena – spatially-extended atoms in space, and non-spatially extended laws of physics which govern their behavior. Whether or not it’s necessary to give the laws of physics a real existence is an interesting question (and it turns out that it’s awfully hard to explain the regularity of physical phenomena without them!). Regardless, this metaphysical picture allows us to understand how objects in different ontological categories might be able to interact with each other. However, we must go deeper.

    Reduce the physical universe to “atoms in their position in space at any given time.” Those atoms themselves are not enough to determine the future state of the universe. There must also be laws. But that brings up several more difficult questions:

    1) What connects the physical states to the laws?

    Why aren’t the physical states completely separated from the laws? What’s the glue between the laws and the physical states?

    2) How do the laws of physics “know” the state of the universe? Why doesn’t the universe “get it wrong” when determining future states?

    3) How are states treated as inputs? What’s the format?

    All of these questions can be answered by the final piece of the puzzle: Information. The universal mathematical function that takes inputs and turns them into outputs has information about the physical state. This information is itself non-physical. The information is the glue between the laws of physics and the physical states themselves.

    So, what actually gets used as the “input” is information about the physical state, rather than the physical state itself. The subsequent output is another purely physical state, then information about that output is used as the new input state!

    This is an abstract way to understand the mechanics of a physical system. Crucially, it allows for real ontological differences between the physical state, the information about the physical state, and the laws of physics which take that information and generate new output states.

    Think about the relationship between ordinary objects and your knowledge about them. Take your information about chairs. There’s a categorical difference between physical chairs and your information about physical chairs. Chairs take up space, while your knowledge about chairs does not take up space. The concept of a chair is not somehow embedded inside of chairs. Information is not the same thing as what the information is about. Information about physical states does not need to be embedded within physical states.

    In this theory, the physical states are entirely concrete, not abstract. They are reducible to “atoms in space.” Yet, there can be information about those physical states which is abstract and not reducible to atoms in space.

    There’s an interesting question about the metaphysical status of information. It’s “abstract,” but what exactly are abstract things? Are they mental? Platonic? This theory doesn’t require a particular answer, but it should be clarified that it doesn’t necessarily imply consciousness. Your knowledge of chairs is within your mind; you can have a kind of conscious experience of it. The universe doesn’t need to have any internal experience of knowing information about physical states, just like your computer doesn’t have to have an internal experience of “reading and knowing” the state of your hard drive. Information is processed in your CPU without consciousness.

    So, to revise our picture of a physical system one more time:

    We start with atoms in space. The universe has information about the position of the atoms in space. That information is used as an input into a function that we call “the laws of physics.” It then generates a new output state – i.e. atoms change position. The universe has information about this new state, which then gets put back into the function to generate subsequent output states. The universe progresses.

    If this theory works, then we’ve just solved the mind-body problem and the problem of interaction. All we’ve got to do is add mind.

    Mind and Brain

    The picture I’ve just painted includes effective interaction between at least two ontological categories – the laws of physics and the spatially-extended objects that are governed by them. Now, it doesn’t matter how many ontological categories we posit; the same mechanism can still work. Instead of restricting output states to only spatially-extended physical stuff, we can expand the category of output states to include mental stuff as well – feelings, experiences, qualia, etc.

    For example, take the conscious experience of seeing red. It’s a particular kind of mental state. In this system, it’s simply another output that will get generated with the correct input. Whenever the physical universe is arranged in a particular way, the output state of “experiencing redness” is generated. That output state does not need to be physical. It can be in an entirely different ontological category!

    This allows us to expand the laws of physics to include laws of mental representation. Just like particular physical inputs yield particular physical outputs according to laws, the universe can also generate particular mental outputs with the right input. In other words, the universal function includes the informational criteria for generating both physical outputs and mental outputs.

    This theory accords perfectly with the physical mechanics of sight. When physicists talk about “light rays entering the eye, stimulating particular nerves, etc.” they’re simply talking about changes in physical states. As these physical states change, the information going into the universal function also changes, and at some point, when the correct physical state has been reached, mental states start getting generated.

    Notice: it’s not the physical state itself that’s generating mental phenomena. It’s not some mechanism in the brain. It’s information about the physical state which gets used as an input to generate a mental state in a different ontological realm.

    In this theory, brains are not some unique object that “secretes consciousness,” as some philosophers have suggested. Consciousness is not to be found within a skull. There’s nothing intrinsically special about the atoms that compose a brain. What’s important is their arrangement and the corresponding information about them.  If patterns and information about the brain are indeed what generates consciousness, then we also have no need to posit panpsychism, which suggests each atom might be “a little bit conscious” itself.

    The reason that the brain is so closely correlated with conscious states is because it’s precisely the information about the atoms in space that we call a “brain” that yields consciousness. The brain state itself is not enough; it requires brain states plus the laws of physics/mental representation. So it shouldn’t be surprising that when people get brain damage, their conscious experience changes. This isn’t because the brain loses the ability to create consciousness. It never had that ability. It’s because when the brain state changes, information about the brain state changes, which then changes the input and subsequent output of the universal function.

    This is why I call the theory a mechanism of “indirect interaction.” The brain isn’t directly generating consciousness. Instead, it’s the pattern of information corresponding to the physical state of the brain that generates consciousness. The effect is essentially the same. The state of the body affects the state of the mind, but it’s via an abstract mechanism instead of a purely physical or mental one.

    Two-Way Causality

    Our experience of the world suggests that physical states can affect mental states and that mental states can affect physical states. For example, experienced meditators can regulate their body temperatures through deliberate mental focus. Even regular people can make their mouth water simply by envisioning a juicy steak when they’re hungry. Or, take one of the most significant examples of mental states appearing to affect physical states: The placebo effect. How is it possible?

    Well, just like the outputs of the universal function can be mental or physical, so can the inputs! The universe can have information about physical and mental states. So information about mental states might also be used as inputs to generate outputs.

    Let’s take the placebo effect as an example. Simply taking a sugar pill is not enough to generate improvement in one’s symptoms. It also requires belief that the pill will help you. So, in order to generate the desired result, the universal function requires an informational input from both physical and mental states. Having only the correct physical state or mental states is not enough. Both must be in the correct state.

    Two-way causality accords with our experiences, and contrary to the claims of some philosophers, it doesn’t need to break the laws of physics. The laws of physics can simply be expanded to include mental states as well. Instead of calling them “the laws of physics”, perhaps it would be better to call them “the laws of the universe” to include governance over all kinds of phenomena.

    Free Will

    Another benefit of the theory is that it allows for the existence of free will in a rather straightforward way. If mental states are used as inputs into the universal function, then what if some mental states are volitional? If not all mental states are determined by previous states of the universe, it could allow for volitionally-determined mental states. Those volitional states would then be used as an input to generate a particular output.

    For example, whether or not you eat dinner at 6pm or 7pm might not be a predetermined fact. The universe could require a volitional state in order to determine which output gets generated. In other words, information about your choice, whether 6pm or 7pm, will determine what happens. Without your choice, you might not have dinner at all.

    Now, I don’t currently have an answer to the question of free will, but I think it’s a strong benefit of this theory that it can seamlessly allow for its existence. The mechanics of indirect interaction gives us a concrete mechanism for minds to affect the world, whether that mind is controlling its mental states or is merely a predetermined output of the universal function.

    Theoretical Flexibility

    The theory I’ve just explained is extremely flexible. It allows for the existence of arbitrarily many ontological categories. If you think the world is constituted by only physical and mental stuff, it can work. If you think Platonic objects also exist, that’s fine too. If you think there are 100 other categories, all of which interact with each other, that’s fine as well. The ontological categories can be completely separated, so long as there’s a simple fact about them: The universal function has information about their state. That isn’t difficult to imagine, since in this theory, the universal function is the thing outputting the different states into their various ontological categories in the first place!

    Indirect interaction also allows for a plausible story of emergence. If might be the case that the universe began with only physical phenomena and laws. Then, over time, as matter rearranged itself, a pattern of information yielded the very first conscious output. If this actually happened, then other types of emergence might also be waiting to come into existence with the correct informational input.

    The theory works whether the interaction is causally one-directional or two-directional.

    It also allows for the existence of free will.

    It’s also consistent with the modern conception of the relationship between body and mind that views the body/brain as fundamental. It might be that the physical state of the brain entirely determines mental states. Mental phenomena can be purely epiphenomenal. Indirect interaction simply gives a causal mechanism for brain to affect mind. So if stimulating one area of the brain causes changes in mental phenomena, it’s not because some particular gland starts secreting consciousness a bit differently. It’s because the underlying physical structure of the brain changes, which changes the information going into the universal function.

    This mechanism is even consistent with idealism. Even if one rejects the existence of physical stuff completely, the regularity of mental phenomena still requires explanation. If the laws of the universe govern only mental phenomena, because that’s all that exists, it might be that the underlying mechanics are the same: state + information + laws -> output.

    It also explains why the interaction problem has lasted so long. People keep looking in the wrong places. While there’s a tight correlation between brain states and mental states, you’ll never find consciousness within the brain. You’ll only find correlating physical states. The mechanism is not within the skull, because consciousness is simply not a physical phenomenon. You can’t see its generation from the outside. There are no levers, pulleys, glands, or fluids that contain it. That’s because the relationship between brain and mind is abstract. Information about the physical state is not to be found within the physical state.

    There are many parts of this theory that one can object to. Perhaps you think the laws of physics aren’t real, for example. Or perhaps you think the continuity of time makes this story less plausible. The details don’t matter. The point is to paint a picture of at least one conceivable mechanism for objects in different ontological categories to effectively interact with each other. If such a picture exists, then the interaction problem is not a refutation of substance dualism or pluralism.

  • The Crucifixion: A Unification of Love and Hate

    Last Sunday, my wife and I attended an Anglican church service in Bergen, Norway. It reminded me of my childhood church, because the service was vacuous, anti-intellectual, and a complete waste of time. However, I’m glad we went, because it sparked some valuable thoughts about Christianity.

    The building itself was historic, dating back to the 12th century. St. Mary’s Church. It’s beautiful on the inside. Hanging in the middle of the sanctuary is a life-sized replica of the crucifixion of Jesus. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was huge and disturbing, but my eyes kept coming back to it – probably because the actual service was so boring.

    crucifixion

    Growing up in the Christian Evangelical world, I’ve seen many crosses in my lifetime, but never one so realistic. As I stared, it hit me: the crucifixion is profound. Nevermind the theological claims – purely philosophically, it’s a powerful story.

    Demonstration, not Articulation

    I see two central concepts packed into the crucifixion: the Christian conception of love, and their pessimistic view of human beings.

    From the start, you’ll have to forgive my ignorance. I don’t fully understand the significance of the crucifixion in mainstream Christianity. I’ve heard the arguments a thousand times, but I don’t grasp them. So, I can’t say whether my analysis is heretical or orthodox.

    To me, the crucifixion is a demonstration of philosophy. The ideas are shown, not spoken. It’s a demonstration of love, a demonstration of hate, and a demonstration of commitment.

    Love

    As I’ve written about before, love is a mindset, and it radically re-orders your values. Instead of first desiring your own well-being, you first desire the well-being of another – even at the expense of yourself. In my case, the only person I’ve loved is my wife, and experiencing love was life-changing for me.

    Jesus takes this conception of love to the extreme. He doesn’t say, “Love your wife and your family.” He says, “Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. Love everybody, without exception.” In other words, “Value others as highly as you value yourself – even at your own expense.” It’s a radical idea.

    A unique part of this story is Jesus’s commitment to love. Taken to its logical end, his argument implies, “Be willing to die for strangers that hate you.” According to the canonical story, he wasn’t hypocritical about it; he actually died for strangers that hated him. It wasn’t a glamorous death, either. He was mocked, tortured, and executed.

    This is where the replica affected me. Most people don’t see a crucifixion and think, “Now that’s love”. But given my prior experiences, that’s what I thought. In the extreme loving state of mind, I would do anything for Julia. I would even be willing to be crucified. That intensity of love can only be understood once you’ve experienced it. From the outside, I’m sure it looks like insanity.

    crucifixionWhat also struck me is the physical position of the crucified body. It’s in a state of total openness and frailty – arms spread wide, unable to cover or defend itself. It’s a humiliating position, completely vulnerable, without even the ability to protect itself.

    This, too, reminds me of the loving state of mind. You have to be 100% honest and real with your partner, and that means being completely vulnerable, to the point of heartbreak (or worse). When you reach that point, you aren’t in control of what happens. It’s as if your hands are physically nailed apart, and you cannot shield your heart from the other person.

    Hate

    In my analysis, love is one half of the crucifixion. Hate is the other half. Christians have a grim conception of what they call “the world” – i.e. human beings in their default state – where hatred plays a central role in the human psyche. Left to their own devices, humans are selfish, greedy, and barbaric hypocrites who aggressively reject the philosophy and mindset of love.

    This is where you get the central juxtaposition. You have Jesus arguing for extreme, radical, and peaceful love, and he’s been crucified, mocked, spit upon, and hated by “the world” – love and hate, unified by the same act.

    To the Christian, the world can tolerate liars and murderers – but it cannot tolerate true love.

    Again, the physical position of the crucified body strikes me as poignant. It’s meant to mock and torture. Humans are essentially saying, “Oh yeah? Love is so great? How’s it working for you up there, buddy” – the implicit presupposition being, “If a philosophy is correct, it will result in happiness, wealth, and respect.” Therefore, since Jesus’s philosophy demonstrably lead to pain, humiliation, death, and derision, it must be wrong.

    Plausible Analysis

    I don’t know if your average Christian would agree with my analysis, but it seems like the most charitable understanding of the crucifixion without including any theology.

    While I am sympathetic to the Christian conception of love, I remain undecided about their perspective of human nature. Are humans really so bad? I don’t know. Though I admit, I am growing more pessimistic by the week.

    From my own experience, love does seem to polarize people. I’ve been mocked by those who think I’m naïve and deluded. And I expect they would be thrilled to learn if I got divorced, fell out of love, or was even killed.

    As I investigate different religions, one thing is clear: their philosophic/ethical claims can be evaluated without need for any theology or dogma. The crucifixion of Jesus is profound, whether you think it’s a historical event, a supernatural event, or simply a metaphor.