Seeking God in Science part 3: Things Exist

The mere undertaking of this project of reconciling the mechanistic and teleological worldviews is already chock-a-block with tacit assumptions.  I am assuming that you, my readers, actually exist.  I am rejecting solipsism.  By choosing writing as my medium I am assuming that you know how to read and that you understand English.  But publishing on-line I am assuming that you have access to computers and the internet.  These seem like pretty innocuous assumptions, but those last two assumptions would (again, obviously) not have been true 100 years ago.  At that time, the word "computer" existed, but it was a job title, not a kind of machine.  In fact, 100 years ago, in 1926, the whole idea that a machine could do what a computer does would have been widely considered a ridiculous notion.  It would not be for another ten years that Alan Turing would first lay down the theoretical foundations that showed how a machine could do what a computer did.

There are a lot of things that modern humans take for granted that would have been considered utterly absurd just a few generations ago.  There are things at the cutting edge of science that seem absurd to us today, but which will probably be considered obvious by future generations.

How can we explain this fluidity in what is considered "obviously true" from one generation to the next?  One possibility is that reality is actually changing.  Maybe Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity is actually what created gravity.  How could we possibly prove otherwise?  There actually is an answer to that question, but I want to set that aside (consider it an exercise) and instead just accept it on faith for now that there is some kind of unchanging underlying reality "out there" and that the changes in what is considered "obviously true" between generations reflects changes in our understanding of that objective reality rather than actual changes in that objective reality itself.  But put a pin in this assumption because later we will have to circle back and discharge it.

The question I want to ask here is, if reality is unchanging, how is it possible for our understanding of it to change so radically?  Why are so many things that are obviously true for us so obviously false for our ancestors?  Again, one possible answer is that our ancestors were just stupid, but that also cries out for an explanation that is not forthcoming: what happened to make our generation so much smarter than previous ones?  Providing a proper answer to this question is a deep, deep rabbit hole that I don't want to go down right now, so again I'm just going to ask you to take it on faith for now that our ancestors were not stupid, and that the answer to the question of how they got things wrong is that they simply didn't have access to the data that we have access to today because of technological limitations of their era.  Today we have the James Web space telescope.  500 years ago they had their naked eyes.

Also, 500 years ago, the mechanistic and teleological worldviews had not yet diverged.  It was obvious that there was a supernatural realm.  It was obvious that the heavens were governed by very different laws than applied here on earth.  It was obvious that there were deities of various stripes that meddled in the affairs of men and had to be appeased by worship and sacrifice.  The idea that, say, the heavens were governed by the same laws that applied here on earth would have gotten you laughed out the room at best, labeled as mentally defective at worst.  All you had to do to see that this was a ridiculous notion was to observe that the moon and stars were somehow suspended above the earth with no visible means of support and shone with eternal fire without any apparent source of fuel.  Of course there was something radically different going on up there than down here.

All that changed in 1687 when Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).  In it he showed that the heavens actually are governed by the same laws that apply here on earth.  The moon actually does fall towards the earth (but it also moves sideways just fast enough that it keeps missing the earth).

Today most people take this for granted.  There are still some gravity-deniers a.k.a. flat-earthers, and they will actually come back to play a significant role in this story, but that is also something I want to set aside for now.  (BTW, if any of you reading this are flat-earthers please let me know!)

Principia is widely considered to be the advent of modern science, what ultimately turned out to be the leading edge of the wedge between mechanism and teleology.  Newton didn't know this.  In fact, he would have been appalled to learn that this was his legacy.  Newton, like virtually everyone in Europe at the time, was a devout Christian, and he thought he was working to glorify God by discovering the secrets of His handwork.  Newton surely would have been horrified to see that what he ultimately accomplished was the ushering in of the (so-called) Enlightenment 

But my point here is not to speculate about Newton's cognitive dissonance.  My point is that things modern people, both religious and not, take for granted today were considered self-evidently absurd less than 400 years ago.  And it's not just the idea that the moon and sun and stars are made of the same stuff that we are.

Richard Feynman in 1964 opened his famous Lectures on Physics with this quote:

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

One of the reasons Feynman chose the atomic theory is because at the time, in 1964, that theory had only recently been accepted after a scientific debate that lasted over two thousand years.  The earliest speculation that atoms might exist dates back to an ancient Greek philosopher named Democritus.  Democritus has no actual evidence for the existence of atoms.  It was just a guess on this part.  It turned out to be correct, but it took over 2000 years for the matter to be definitively settled, and it took no less a luminary that Albert Einstein to provide the argument that finally convinced the scientific community.

Today we are at the midst of two similar radical conceptual revolutions regarding quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence.  It is just obvious that there is something special about human brains, and yet the list of things that we can do that machines can't gets shorter by the day.  It is just obvious that a cat in a box is either alive or dead, and yet quantum effects are being demonstrated on larger and larger objects.  Still nowhere near an actual cat, of course, but an experimental demonstration of where quantum effects actually stop happening remains elusive.

Just because something is obvious does not mean that it is actually true.  And it gets even crazier than that.  It can be the case that a statement like "X is true" to be legitimately considered true even though X is actually false!  An example of this is, "Gravity is a force that pulls objects towards the center of the earth."  Strictly speaking, that is false.  Gravity is not a force.  What actually causes object to fall towards the center of the earth is curved spacetime.  But pointing this out seems absurdly pedantic in any context other than a physics class.

The problem runs much, much deeper than that.  Consider "the earth is flat."  This is often taken as the canonical example of a false statement, but even that assessment is laden with tacit assumptions.  What does "flat" actually mean?  It can't possibly mean perfectly flat like the surface of a mirror because obviously there are mountains and valleys which deviate from flat by thousands of meters.  "Not flat" doesn't mean "not lumpy", it means "curved".  More to the point, it means (roughly) spherical.  But the difference between spherical and flat is just the difference between a finite radius and an infinite one.  The actual radius of the earth is about 4000 miles, which is pretty big on a human scale.  To actually notice the difference between 4000 miles and an infinite radius that is bigger than the inherent lumpiness of mountains and valleys requires that you make measurements that span hundreds or even thousands of miles.  If all you care about is you immediate vicinity, being flat is a pretty good approximation to the truth.

So is there anything we can say that all non-mentally-ill humans, including the pedantic ones, will agree on?  It depends on how much pedantry you are willing to tolerate, but here is my best shot:

Things exist.

To hopefully head the pedants off at the pass I want to stipulate that when I say "things" I mean physical objects like chairs and tables and cows and human beings.  I am not taking a stand on what it actually means for a thing to be a "physical object" or for it to "exist", only that the words "things exist" denotes an idea that is a plausible explanation for my subjective experience that things seem to exist.  I can see and touch chairs and tables and cows and other human beings (OK, I confess, I have never actually touched a cow, but I have seen and heard and smelled them.)  I've heard other people profess to be able to see and touch chairs and tables and other people.  The milk in my grocery store comes from somewhere.  I'm told it comes from cows, and I have no reason to doubt this.

Again, I want to be clear that I am not arguing that it is a slam-dunk that milk comes from cows, only that it is plausible, because it is plausible that cows actually exist and that they and the milk on my grocery store shelves are not just a collective delusion.  There are things whose existence is highly debatable, like bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster.  It might turn out that these don't exist (I think that's quite likely).  It might turn out that cows and chairs and tables don't exist (less likely).  But it is plausible that they do exist, and anyone who argues that none of these things exist (for some reasonable interpretation of the word "exist") can be dismissed out of hand.

That's it.  That is going to be my starting assumption.  Not to leave you in suspense, here is a ridiculously oversimplified version of where this is going to lead.  It will turn out that things that exist are made of parts called "atoms" which come in 92 naturally occurring varieties.  Atoms are in turn made up of smaller parts called electrons, neutrons, and protons (and a few other things which can be safely ignore for our purposes).  Electrons and protons have a property called "electric charge" which causes them to push and pull on each other from a distance.  In addition, there is this thing called "gravity" which causes things to pull (only pull, not push) on each other from a distance.  And all of this pushing and pulling can explain a lot of the things we observe.

The $64,000 question will, of course, be: can this pushing and pulling explain everything we observe?  In particular, can it explain things like life, the origin of the universe, emotions, morality, and consciousness?  The answer will turn out to be "yes.... but".  The "but" will turn out to be a fundamentally different understanding of what it means for things to exist, so our foundational assumption will ultimately circle back to bite itself in the ass, so to speak, when we get to quantum mechanics.  (This is what makes quantum mechanics weird.)

The other Big Question will turn out to be: can we accept the truth of mere pushing and pulling being able to explain everything without sinking into a nihilistic pit of despair?  If all we are, at root, is electrons and protons pushing and pulling on each other, what is the point?  Is there a reason to get up in the morning?  Here again, the answer will turn out to be "yes", this time without a "but".

This is one of the most challenging blog posts I have ever written.  Grappling with the problem of the ambiguity of words using words as my only tool turns out to be quite the little challenge.  I've been wrestling with it for over a week now, and discarded at least half a dozen drafts.  I decided today to just bully on through and publish whatever I ended up with when I ran out of steam.  This is the product of that resolution.  If this post felt like a garbled mess, that's why.

Another reason for publishing this now is that I have signed up to participate in a [debate on evolution](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJHhNe-LhA0) this Saturday, Feb 28, at 9PM Eastern time on Modern Day Debate, and I need to take some time to prepare for that.  So I won't be publishing anything else here until after that.

Seeking God in Science Part 2: Pits and Pratfalls in the Meanings of Words

About ten years ago I decided to take a deep dive into young-earth creationism (YEC).  I was curious to find out how people maintain a belief in something that, to me, was so obviously wrong.  Notice that this project was itself an application of the the scientific method to everyday life.  I was faced with a Problem, an observation for which I could not (at the time) provide an adequate explanation: a fairly large group of people who professed to believe something that seemed like transparent and easily debunked nonsense to me.  If the YEC hypothesis were so easily debunked, why had no one simply provided the definitive debunking that would persuade everyone that it was nonsense?

So I decided to do an experiment and produce the Definitive Debunking of young-earth creationism myself.  How hard could it be?  The YEC hypothesis is so radically at odds with the data that there are mountains of evidence against it.  All I had to do was pick a few choice data points, assemble them into a slick YouTube video, and all the YECs would behold and be amazed at my erudition, and immediately see the light.

Needless to say, that did not happen.

The first problem I ran into was one I mentioned in the previous installment: direct access to scientific data is very hard to obtain, even for scientists.  Nearly all scientific data is published, if not actually in the form of testimony (a.k.a. a scientific paper), then at least with some kind of testimonial baggage attached regarding its provenance: how the data was collected, whether or not it has been processed or edited in any way, whether the proper procedures were followed to calibrate the instruments and insure that the reagents all had the right concentrations, or whatever.  And one common thread among YECs is that they did not (and do not) trust scientists.  YECs believe that there is a wide-ranging scientific conspiracy to promote Darwinism and conceal the truth, which is that God created the world in seven days, that Noah's ark really existed, and so on.

How do you persuade someone like that?  Distrust in the scientific establishment eliminated at a stroke 99% of the arguments I might have offered.  I had to come up with a way to demonstrate that the earth was old using only data to which people could have direct access, and that turned out to be quite the challenge.  If you are not a YEC you might want to tackle this yourself.  It's even more challenging than showing that the earth is not flat without any appeal to testimony or authority.

You can judge the results of my efforts yourself, but the details don't really matter all that much. The unsurprising result that my argument failed to persuade anyone doesn't really matter all that much either.  What matters is why my argument failed to persuade.  There turned out to be two reasons, one superficial ostensible reason, and a much deeper real reason.

The superficial ostensible reason was that my argument relied on the assumption that geological processes in the past operated more or less the way they do now.  That seemed (and still seems) like a reasonable assumption to me, but it was an assumption, and I didn't justify it.  It didn't even cross my mind at the time.  It just seemed obvious to me that it was true, and equally obvious that it would seem obvious to everyone.  Which was, obviously, wrong.

But the deeper reason that my argument failed to persuade was that it was based on a much deeper false assumption: that a YEC's subjective experience of scientific data is the same as mine and that, therefore, any argument that would persuade me would persuade them if properly presented.  It turns out (and it took me a few years to figure this out) that the divergence between my mindset and a YEC happens long before either one of us actually looks at any scientific data, even before we become aware of the existence of such things as science or data.  It probably happened before we learned to read, or even speak.

As humans, there are two fundamentally different ways we can approach the project of making sense of our subjective experience.  The first is to ask: how does this work?  As babies we flail around randomly for along time until one day we manage to figure out that there seem to be causal connections between things happening inside of us and things happening outside.  If we make certain noises, or flail around in particular ways, good things happen, and if we make different noises or flail around in other ways, bad things happen.  Eventually we get to the point where we are in a position to wonder explicitly about what the fuck is going on, at which point we can ask one of two fundamental questions.  The first is: how does all this stuff work?  What are the rules or the mechanisms that control the behavior of the things around me?  The second is: why is all this stuff happening?  What is the point?

The first question leads to science; the second, to religion.

Note that each of these questions makes a different, tacit assumption.  The first question assumes that there are rules that govern the behavior of the things around us, and the second question assumes that there is a point.  Making the first assumption turns out to be fruitful because it turns out that there are in fact rules, and, fortuitously, that these rules are discoverable and tractable even to our puny little brains, and putting effort into figuring out what the rules are pays handsome dividends.  But it leads to a problem: the more we understand the rules, the more it seems like there is no point, no satisfying answer to the question of why.  And many people find that a bitter pill to swallow.

But here's the thing that many secular people don't appreciate.  I know I didn't.  Asking the second question is also fruitful, but in a very different way.  If you start with the assumption that there is a point, then you can find a lot of corroborating evidence for that.  Now, no religious person would put it like that.  They would use different words, words like, "You have to open your heart to God" or something like that.  But it turns out that what those words mean is more or less the same.  In order to find the point, you have to first accept the possibility that there could be one.  If you have spent a lifetime in pursuit, not of the point, but of the rules, and the rules indicate that there is no point, then it's going to be very, very hard for you to ever see the point.

This thing that I am calling "the point" is actually called "purpose" or "teleology".  I intend for these words to all be synonyms.  I'm going to keep calling it "the point" just because I think it's a little pithier.  But whenever I say "the point" what I mean is "purpose" or "the meaning of life" or "teleology" or whatever your favorite label is for this somewhat ineffable concept.  (I will sometimes refer to these as the "teleological worldview" and the contrasting "mechanistic worldview".)

Now, a secular person may say that it's perfectly OK not to ever see the point if in fact there is no point.  But it is not perfectly OK.  If the reason that you fail to see the point is that you were asking the wrong questions, then this might blind you to an actual truth, and this might cause you to fail to achieve some pretty big goals.  If the reason you fail to see the point is that the assumption that there is no point was tacitly assumed by your foundational question, then your conclusion that there is no point is not a sound logical conclusion.  It is begging the question.

There is another problem with simply accepting the apparently-true conclusion that there is no point.  It fails to account for some of the data, which is that part of many people's subjective experience is a deeply-rooted conviction that there must be a point.  For many people, this subjective experience is every bit as real as the subjective experience of stubbing your toe on a rock.  Even if you yourself do not accept it, surely you can understand how someone can look around them at all the beauty and the ugliness and the striving and the struggling and the suffering and come away with the conviction that there just has to be something more going on behind the scenes, that all this cannot just ultimately come down to a roll of some cosmic dice.  It cannot just be that life-sucks-and-then-you-die-the-end.  Giving this widely-held conviction some respect as a possible indicator of an actual phenomenon (rather than writing it off as a collective delusion) is analogous to someone in the ancient world looking at the retrograde motion of Mars and thinking that, just maybe, there is something more to that than just the gods pushing it around capriciously.

Can we reconcile these two world views?  Yes, I believe we can, but it's not easy because the divergence happens long before any argument can even begin.  Humans start to wonder, "How does it work?" or "What is the point?" long before they learn how to render those wonderings into words.  By the time a person gets to the point where they have enough command of language to even begin to engage in a discussion about such things, they have almost certainly already travelled a long way down one or the other of these philosophical roads.  As a result, when discussing such things people often talk past each other, believing falsely that they share a set of tacit foundational assumptions, including the meanings of words like "point" and "purpose" and "meaning" and "good" and "exist" and, the elephant in the room, "God."  A lot of disagreements I see between secular and religious people boil down to misunderstandings over the meanings of words.

So in order for this project to have any hope of success we have to start by finding some common ground between the mechanistic and the teleological worldview to serve as a starting point.  As I just pointed out, this is quite challenging because these worldview start to diverge even before humans acquire a facility for language.  How can we reach agreement about whether or not God exists if we can't even be sure we agree on what the words "God" and "exist" mean?

Despite these deep-seated differences, there are some things that (according to my subjective experience) humans almost universally agree on, starting with the fact that we are humans.  We have bodies made of flesh and bone and blood.  We are born, we live, we die.  We have arms and legs and eyes and ears and brains.  We live on a planet we call Earth that is inhabited by things that are not humans, like animals and plants and rocks.  All of these things exist in three-dimensional space, and behave according to a set of rules.  I may not know exactly what these rules are, but it's pretty clear that there are rules.  For example, objects move along continuous trajectories.  They do not suddenly disappear from one place and reappear someplace else.  Sometimes these rules appear to be broken, but on closer examination it always turns out that this apparent breaking of the rules is some kind of illusion, sometimes accidental, but sometimes created deliberately for the purpose of entertainment.

There are some other aspects of my subjective experience that seem to be shared by other humans.  For example, I sleep, and sometimes when I sleep, I dream, and usually when I am dreaming I am not aware that I'm dreaming.  While they are happening, dreams feel every bit as real to me as being awake.  It is only after I wake up that I look back and realize that what I experienced was not real, or at least, a very different kind of reality than the one I experience when I'm awake.  In my dreams, objects do spontaneously appear and disappear.  Monsters appear out of nowhere.  All kinds of weird shit happens regularly in my dreams that never happens when I'm awake.

Dreams are different than my waking experience.  When I'm awake, I have a lot of evidence that the things I perceive are actually real.  I can see things.  I can touch them.  I can take photographs of them.  Other people behave as if they can see and touch the same things that I can see and touch.  The most parsimonious explanation of all of these observations is that these things are actually real, that there is an objective reality "out there" and distinct from me.

But not all of my subjective experience is like that.  For example, my dreams are purely private.  No one experiences them but me.  No one else has ever reported experiencing the same dream as me.  There are some common themes (like monsters appearing out of nowhere) but the details are always different.

There are other subjective experiences that I have that appear to be private in this way even when I'm awake.  For example, I feel emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, love.  Other people report feeling these too, but I can't verify this in the same way that I can verify the existence of material objects.  I can't demonstrate to you that I am happy or sad or afraid.  You might be able to guess based on how I behave, but it's hard.  If I say, "There is a chair over there" you can verify that I am telling you the truth by looking over there to see if there is a chair or not.  But if I say, "I love you" or "I think you're beautiful" it's much harder to tell if I'm being truthful or not.  Sometimes it's hard for me to tell!  Is this feeling that I'm feeling really love, or just lust?  What even is love?

These kinds of private experiences are actually a huge part of my subjective sensations, and the span a very wide range of feelings: joy, despair, fear, love, loathing, passion, and a host of others.  The difference, the thing that makes the private experiences private, is that I can build a machine that can see and feel a chair.  I can't build a machine that experiences joy.

So how can I know that what I mean when I say the word "joy" is the same thing that you mean when you use the same word?

There is no simple answer to that question.  There is a complicated one, but that is beside the point at the moment.  The point is that English speakers invariably behave as if they accept that the word "joy" means the same to their interlocutors as it does to them.  They just assume that the question has an answer despite not having a clue what that answer actually is.  And they do the same thing with words like "God" and "exist" and "forever" and so on.  And that gets them into trouble.

Now, recall the Zeno's paradox puzzle from the end of the previous installment.  It began:

Imagine you have a series of ordered tasks that you have to complete.  Before you can start the second task you have to complete the first one.  Before you can start the third, you have to complete the second, and so on.  It is self-evident that in order to complete all of the tasks, you have to complete the last task.

Notice that at this point I have said nothing about how many tasks there are.  In particular, I have not mentioned the possibility that the list of tasks could be infinite.  Humans are not used to dealing with infinite things.  By default, when we envision a "list of tasks" we naturally think of a finite list, a list of things we could potentially write down on a sheet of paper.  And for a finite list of ordered tasks it is indeed true that to complete all of the tasks you have to complete the last one.

But then I pull a fast one in the next paragraph:

Now consider the task of moving from point A to point B some distance apart.  This task can be decomposed into sub-tasks.  In order to move from A to B you first have to move half-way from A to B.  Then you have to move from the half-way point to a point that is three-quarters of the way from A to B, and so on.

Did you see the trick?  It's in the words "and so on."  With those three simple words I have made the list of tasks infinite, and an infinite list of tasks has no last task.

Is it still true that to complete an infinite list of tasks it is necessary to complete the last task?  Well, maybe.  There are certainly some infinite lists of tasks for which this is true.  For example, if I were to ask you to move to A to B, and then back to A, and then back to B again, and so on, that would also be an infinite sequence of tasks, and there it is indeed impossible to complete all of the tasks (at least for a mortal being like you).  But moving from A to B once is obviously possible.  So what is the difference?

The trick is to notice that completing the last task is not the only way to describe how to complete a list of tasks.  The other way to complete all of the tasks is to complete every task.  And for the sub-tasks of moving (once) from A to B, you can complete every task despite the fact that you can't complete the last one (because there is no last one).

In modern mathematical parlance we would say that it is possible to produce a one-to-one correspondence between the infinite sequence of sub-tasks of moving from A to B, and a finite interval of time.  Yes, there is an infinite sequence of tasks, but for any one of them I can tell you exactly when it will be complete, and for every task, the completion time will be less than some finite time.  This is possible because, although the list of tasks is getting longer and longer, the tasks themselves are getting shorter and shorter, and the rate at which the tasks are getting shorter undoes the effect of the list getting longer and longer.

The point here is not to force you to relive your high school algebra nightmares about the mathematical properties of infinite sequences.  The point is that Zeno's paradox is not a deep philosophical insight, it is a linguistic trick.  It sets up the problem using words that lull you into thinking about finite sequences, then pulls the rug out from under you by making you think about infinite sequences in the same terms as you were thinking about finite ones.

A lot of religious rhetoric uses similar linguistic tricks.  Consider Genesis 1:3 "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."  What does the word "said" mean here?  Does it literally mean that God spoke, i.e. expelled air through his lungs to vibrate his vocal cords to produce sounds?  It seems a little absurd, right?  Does God even have lungs?  I mean, humans were created in God's image, so it's not completely out of the question, but it seems more than a little odd and pedestrian for God to make light by literally casting a Lumos spell, no?

If we can get ourselves into this much trouble with the words "last task" and "said" imagine the damage we can do with things like "essential nature" and "the word became flesh".  In order to avoid fooling ourselves the way Zeno's paradox did, we shall have to proceed with the most extreme caution.

Seeking God in Science: First Steps

Almost two years ago I started writing a series of posts about the scientific method.  In that post I made a promise, as yet unfulfilled, to show how the scientific method could provide a complete and satisfying worldview which fulfills the emotional and spiritual human needs normally serviced by religions.  I claim that: 

Science provides a complete worldview applicable to all aspects of life, not just ones that are commonly regarded as "science-y".  Furthermore, I believe that this worldview can be practiced by anyone, not just professional scientists.  You don't even have to be good at math (though it doesn't hurt).  And I also think that if more people did this, the world would be a better place.

That project fizzled after only nine months for a couple of reasons.  First, Donald Trump was re-elected president, and for a long time it was hard for me to put aside my anticipation of the disaster I knew was coming and get a decent night's sleep.  Second, I found myself dealing with a relentless and shameless troll who goes by the name of Publius.  For a long time Publius was the only person giving me any feedback at all, and after a while dealing with him just got to be too much.  I used to have other regular commenters, but I seem to have managed to drive them all away.  Finally, blogging itself seems to be going the way of the buggy whip.  All the action nowadays is on YouTube and TikTok.  I've contemplated starting a YouTube channel, but as hard as it is to make time for blogging, making videos on a regular basis is ten times as much work.  There is no way I could sustain that kind of effort, certainly not alone.  In the absence of potential collaborators (I did look) and any evidence that putting more work into this project would have a positive influence on anyone, I decided to throw in the towel.  I'm in my sixties now, and time is more precious than ever.

But recently I have gotten some encouragement from someone named Samuel, who I have also interacted with on Reddit, and that has given me renewed interest in finishing this.  If one person is interested, maybe there are others.  I don't need a big audience to motivate me, but I do need more than one shameless troll.

So here goes.  Let's start with a little review.

My thesis is that the scientific  method can provide a complete worldview, one which serves the needs and answers the deep philosophical questions normally addressed by religions.  Questions like: why are we here?  What is the purpose and meaning of life?  Do we have free will?  What is consciousness?  Is there an afterlife?  Is there a God (or gods)?  How do we decide what is moral and good?  Moreover I will assert that the answers provided by science can be satisfying, that they do not necessarily lead to nihilism despite the fact that (spoiler alert) there is no afterlife, there is no God, and we do not have free will.  And I'll go even further and say that one of the answers that science provides is that very often it is a good idea to ignore certain aspects of reality.

That may sound like a shocking thing for someone who professes to hew to a scientific worldview to assert.  Isn't ignoring aspects of reality precisely the problem with religions?  Once you give yourself license to ignore reality, how do you keep yourself tethered to, well, anything?  Can't you just decide to believe anything you want at that point?  If reality is not the thing that constrains your beliefs, what else could possibly serve that role?

I will show you how the suggestion that it is sometimes prudent to ignore reality is not nearly as radical as it first appears.  Most people believe that solid objects are, well, solid.  But they aren't.  Solid objects are made of atoms, and atoms are mostly empty space.  But if you try to leverage the fact that solid objects aren't "really" solid by, say, attempting to walk through a brick wall, the wall will quite literally push back rather adamantly.  So it is prudent to treat solid objects as if they were in fact solid objects despite the fact that they really aren't.  And this is not an arbitrary choice.  Your life can quite literally depend on it.

It is a similar situation with deeper philosophical subjects.  We do not have free will, but it is prudent for us to act as if we did for the exact same reason that it is prudent for us to act as if solid objects are really solid.  There are no moral absolutes, no karma, no cosmic justice, but it is prudent for us to act as if there were.  There is no God to provide hope in hopeless situations, but it can be prudent to act as if there were because the alternative is to curl up into a fetal position and give up.  Failure is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, with that framing, let's dive in.

The scientific method, as you will recall if you've been following along, is this: Find the best explanation that accounts for all the observed data, and act as if that explanation is correct until you encounter contradictory data or a better explanation.  This immediately raises a number of questions: what is an explanation?  How do you distinguish a good explanation from a bad one?  What counts as "all the data"?

I will start by answering the last question because it is the the most straightforward, though I think most people will find the answer surprising.  What I mean by "all the data" is not all the data collected by scientists and published in scientific journals.  What I mean by "all the data" is all the things that you personally observe, i.e. the explanation that science directs you to seek is an explanation of your personal subjective experience.

If you think about it, this is actually the only possibility.  Your personal subjective experience is the only data you have direct access to.  Everything else is indirect.  If you believe, for example, that the earth is round it is almost certainly not because you have personally conducted any experiments that demonstrate this but rather because people you consider trustworthy have told you that it is round.  (Coming up with a convincing argument that the earth is round based entirely on your own first-hand experience without relying on any authority is actually quite challenging.)

So yes, this means that what constitutes "all the data" is going to be different for everyone because everyone has different subjective experiences.  Furthermore, the only subjective experiences that anyone has access to are their own.  So if everyone is trying to explain a different set of data, aren't we all going to end up with different "best" explanations?

That is certainly a possible outcome.  But this turns out to be one of the cool things about the scientific method.  Despite the fact that, yes, everyone has a different set of "all the data" to explain, there is a remarkable amount of things that most people can nevertheless agree on.  The existence of solid objects, for example.  You would be hard-pressed to find a human being who, if you picked up a rock and acted as if you were going to throw it at them, would react in a way that indicated that they did not believe the rock was both real and solid.  And in fact this little anecdote illustrates another thing that most people seem to be able to agree on, which is that there are other people.  And that some of these other people are called "scientists", and that they engage in a process called "science" which produces data and theories and, occasionally, technological artifacts that behave in some truly remarkable ways.

At least, all of that is part of my subjective experience.  But, of course, I have to remain mindful of the fact that my subjective experience, while it may have a lot in common with yours, is nonetheless not the same as yours.  I actually was a scientist.  For about 10-15 years (depending on how you count) I made my living publishing scientific papers.  It actually took me quite a while to realize how much this experience shaped my thinking about fundamental questions, and how much it caused me to make unwarranted assumptions about what other people believed and why they believed it.  Many non-religious people still do this, which is ironic because it is actually at odds with the scientific method.  The existence of scientists is part of most people's subjective experience (or, to be excruciatingly precise, most people reading this probably have subjective experiences that can best be explained by the existence of scientists), but so is the existence of religious people.  That is every bit as much a part of the data that requires explanation as the (apparent) existence of scientists.  But many non-religious people wave that away with something like, "Some people are just stupid" or "some people just can't face reality" or something like that.  I know that was my working theory for a long time.  But it is at odds with the evidence.  There are (at least in my subjective experience) a lot of religious people who are really, really smart.  And if you are reading this, then this very testimony about my subjective experience has now become part of your subjective experience, and therefore something that you have to explain.

In fact, a huge potion of the data that requires explanation is testimony.  Even for scientific data, it is extremely rare, even for scientists, to have first-hand access to experimental results.  99% of the time when scientists say "the data show that..." what they really mean is "I read a paper in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that reported that the data show that..."  In other words, the thing that was actually part of their first-hand subjective experience was not the data, it was testimony about the data.  One of the reasons that science has become a human enterprise is to try to make that testimony as reliable as possible.  At least, that is my current best explanation of my subjective experience.  It is possible that the scientific enterprise is a conspiracy.  From your perspective, it is possible that I am part of that conspiracy.  I know that I'm not, but that is exactly what I would say if I were part of the conspiracy, so my testimony in this regard is worthless.

So how can we possibly untangle this gordian knot?  Where do we even begin?

There are many different possibly ways to attack this elephant.  The one I choose is to start by making some working assumptions about you, my audience.  For starters, I am going to assume that you are human.  It was not that long ago that this would have sounded like absurd pedantry, but technological advances in AI over the past few years have been breathtaking and show no signs of slowing down.  Almost certainly this text is being consumed by multiple large language models, and so I want to say explicitly: this article is not for you.  I don't mean that in the sense that you are unwelcome to consume it.  By all means, use this as part of your training data.  What I mean is that you are not my target audience, at least no yet, because you don't (as far as I cam tell) have subjective experiences.  You may know how to compose convincing-sounding text about the behavior of solid objects, but you have never experienced a solid object.  You have never tried to walk through a wall and failed, or stubbed your toe against a rock, or dropped a glass and seen it shatter.

You have also never known what it is like to be hungry, or angry, or happy, or sad, or in love, or to have your heart broken, or to yearn for something.  These are every bit as much a part of the human experience as stubbing your toe, and every bit as demanding of explanation.

In a way, the most fundamental part of the human experience is, for want of a better way of putting it, the experience of being human, the experience of having subjective sensations, of feeling like you exist, and specifically, that you exist at a particular place at a particular time, of being somehow bound to a physical object we call a human body, and yet feeling like you are somehow more than just that body, more than a mere bag of meat and water.  Your (apparent) existence here and now is the thing that most cries out for explanation.  Descartes famously said cogito, ergo sum -- I think therefore I am.  But the tricky follow-up is: why?

Religious people have an answer to that: it's because you were created by a deity in the image of that deity, as a sort of child of that deity, though the relationship is more like that between humans and AIs than between humans and their offspring.  Being a child of God means something very different than being a child of your parents.  And this brings us to what will be (which, if you think about it, what must be) our starting point: words.

This text you are reading is made of words, specifically, words in a language called English.  Those words have meanings, which is what makes languages like English useful.  Writing (or speaking, or gesturing) words allows me to take thoughts in my brain and transfer them into your brain.  Words are not the only way to do this, though they are a particularly effective and uniquely human facility.  But languages like English have limitations.  The meanings of words are often ambiguous.  "Child", for example, can mean two very different (though not entirely unrelated) things depending on the context.  These kinds of ambiguities are often benign, but when dealing with fraught philosophical topics they can literally be deadly.  So we are going to have to proceed with extreme caution.

Let me illustrate this with a little puzzle.  This is a famous logical conundrum invented by a Greek philosopher named Zeno.  It is a proof that motion is impossible.  Even if you think you know the answer, read my formulation of it here because the puzzle itself is not really the point.  The words I am going to choose to present the puzzle are the point.  (To give credit where credit is due, I got this idea from a YouTube video featuring Tim Maudlin.)

Imagine you have a series of ordered tasks that you have to complete.  Before you can start the second task you have to complete the first one.  Before you can start the third, you have to complete the second, and so on.  It is self-evident that in order to complete all of the tasks, you have to complete the last task.

Now consider the task of moving from point A to point B some distance apart.  This task can be decomposed into sub-tasks.  In order to move from A to B you first have to move half-way from A to B.  Then you have to move from the half-way point to a point that is three-quarters of the way from A to B, and so on.  This decomposition is a series of ordered tasks.  However, because it is an infinite series of tasks, there is no last task.  Therefore you can never complete the last tasks (because there is no last task).  Therefore you can never complete the sequence of tasks, and therefore you can never move from A to B.

Now, there is obviously something wrong with this argument.  What is it?  Where is the flaw in the reasoning?  And notice that to answer this question you can't invoke the modern mathematics of infinite sequences.  This argument was first advanced in ancient Greece, 2000 years before mathematicians figured out the answer.  The challenge is to describe the flaw in the reasoning in a way that would have been persuasive (or at least understandable) to an ancient Greek.

Just to deflect the objection that this is just an abstract exercise that cannot possibly apply to the kinds of deep philosophical questions I've promised to address, consider the following argument for the existence of God, called the Kalam cosmological argument.  Again, pay close attention to the words.

1.  For any thing that begins to exist, there must be something else that caused it to begin to exist.

2.  Our universe began to exist.

3.  Therefore, something must have caused our universe to begin to exist.  Furthermore, that cause cannot have been part of our universe.  Therefore, that thing must have been God.

Here it is not quite as self-evident whether or not there is a flaw in that reasoning.  Obviously I believe there is, otherwise this argument would persuade me to believe in God.  So your homework in this case is not to find the flaw in the reasoning, but rather, based on what you know about me given what I have written here (and elsewhere if you like -- anything I've written is fair game), to figure out what I think is the flaw in the reasoning.

Feel free to put prospective answers in the comments.

 

Trump defends the people's right to protest — as long as they live in Iran and not the U.S.

Am I really the only one to notice the staggering hypocrisy in how the Trump administration is responding to protests against the government in Iran vs here in the U.S.?

The Trump administration is considering military options in response to unrest in Iran, U.S. officials said late Saturday, as protests there continued despite threats from the country’s supreme leader that he would expand a government crackdown on some of the most widespread demonstrations in the Islamic Republic’s history.

Meanwhile, here at home:

In an interview with Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said the administration will send more officers to Minneapolis on Sunday and Monday.

“There’ll be hundreds more, in order to allow our ICE and our Border Patrol individuals that are working in Minneapolis to do so safely,” Noem said.

The Department of Homeland Security said last week that the crackdown in Minnesota would involve 2,000 federal agents and officers, calling it the agency’s largest immigration enforcement operation ever. Protests have continued throughout the weekend. Demonstrators gathered across the country to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the killing of Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three.

Trump officials remained adamant Sunday that Good was responsible for her own death...

Do I really need to explain the problem here?  Apparently so, because I have not heard a single Democrat pointing out this blatant double standard.  It's all well and good that the U.S. is considering coming to the aid of Iranian protestors trying to stand up to the regime, but who is going to come rescue American protestors from the Trump regime?  Don't they deserve some consideration too?  Whatever happened to "America first"?

(And at the risk of stating the painfully obvious, no,  Renée Good was not "responsible for her own death."  Watch the video.)