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Faith First
William James was an American Apologist. An Apologist is a defender of faith. The term is most often used associated with Christian thinkers who defend the existence of God. William James was taking on a scientific world and risking his own reputation by defending the right to believe in things for which you do not and perhaps can never have direct evidence of. James wrote an essay called “The Will to Believe” that is central to his thinking and is so profound that it demands careful consideration even today.
Essentially James was challenging the philosophical position known as “Logical Positivism.” You and I and almost anyone likely to read this post is probably at heart a logical positivist without even knowing it. In fact for most of us anything other than logical positivism doesn’t make sense – or even terrifies us. Let me explain.
Logical Positivism is a theory of truth; in fact it is the theory of truth that underlies the scientific/modernist worldview. It dictates that something is only true if there is conclusive evidence that demonstrates it to be true. In other words truth has to prove itself before we believe it.
William James was arguing against Logical Positivism. Why do we think that conclusive evidence is the best way to tell what is true? And even more profoundly, is it even possible to wait for conclusive evidence before we believe in something? James thought not. Ultimately truth had to be a matter of faith. Even the position of Logical Positivism was a matter of faith in the end, because the idea that waiting for conclusive evidence is the best understanding of truth is itself taken on faith.
My understanding of what James was getting at is that there are some beliefs that are so fundamental that they have to be believed and acted upon without evidence. If you truly believed in absolutely nothing you couldn’t exist. And beyond that, if you could actually believe in nothing, then you would in reality believe that “you believed in nothing” and that itself is a belief. Once you believe in something then you can start using evidence against that belief to create a worldview, but you need to get the ball rolling with at least something and probably many things that you take on faith. One example that James used was the belief in God. The existence of God has been debated throughout all of history and it has not been solved yet. Still, you either have to believe in God, or believe in no God, or believe you don’t know one way or the other, or some variation of those. So in the end you have to believe in something, and what you believe will affect what you do and who you are.
What I find so profound about this is that most of us, especially if we are modernist (which we all are to a large extent) don’t think that we take anything on faith. We think that we have conclusive reasons to believe what we believe. We don’t think we believe, we think we know what is real. To continue with James’s example, if we believe in God we also believe that we have conclusive reasons for that; if we don’t believe in God we believe that we have conclusive reasons for that.
James was enamored with the idea that these deep beliefs don’t result from evidence, but are choices that we make and stake our lives on. We have all come to some worldview, some fundamental beliefs about what is real and what is important. It might have been handed to us by our culture, it might have been dictated by a religion, or it might have come from some experiences we have had in life – or more likely a combination of all of these. What I think James was saying, and what I also think is true, is that no matter what our worldview is at the very bottom of it there has to be at least one and maybe more presumptions about reality that we accept as true without conclusive evidence perhaps without even realizing it. We are, in the end, guessing at life.
Great post. I agree that we all have to live our life in a way that is somehow based on beliefs or norms. And it is almost terryfying to discover how unconscious we are about it.
But there is something that came to my mind reading this post and also the last one. It is: We have to be careful not to mix inner and outer (maybe Wilber would put it that way). I mean: It is true that if you mix certain ingredients you get a certain result, it be a bomb or some medicine or whatever. That is just facts in an outer reality, not anything we can “believe in”.
Logic positivism perhaps did mix inner with outer “truth”? Many religious beliefs was made on the mistake of mixing inner and outer – like believing that spirit means something like a ghost or anything else of material form.
So dont we have to seperate faith (inner dimention) from the outer dimention?
What I think can be a way to truth for both dimentions is “see for yourself”… Maybe that test can be the unification of both.
PS.sorry for being a bit unclear here, I will write again when I have time for a better description!
—-What I think James was saying, and what I also think is true, is that no matter what our worldview is at the very bottom of it there has to be at least one and maybe more presumptions about reality that we accept as true without conclusive evidence perhaps without even realizing it. We are, in the end, guessing at life.————
I find it hard to separate myself from the old Christian way of thinking, even though I do not believe in Christianity anymore. Laws were made around the Christian faith that I have to abide by. Christian thinking was instilled in me since I was created in my mother’s womb.
When I was 40, I realized exactly how my life and everyone else’s life was made through our thinking. I came to understand why children were starving, being abused, and why there is so much war. That gave me a whole new way of believing about God or no God. Do I really need a God in my life now that I know how to create life for myself?
I say all this as I am watching on TV a Christian pastor in Houston Texas telling his 43,800 congregations, and his 3 million viewers on TV, that if you just change your thoughts to the thoughts of what you need in your life and believe as if you already have it, God will bless you with it. I resonate to this man’s preaching (using all the right ‘Christian’ language) from way down deep inside of me, and what I believe today about your thoughts creating your life exactly as it is. I feel good listening to him.
Humans do not change very easily. We are strange creatures of habit. Our parent’s memory’s are in our DNA, when we are conceived their memories become ours. Everything we have ever been exposed to is in our DNA and we live life from those memories. Every time we learn something new, it is being recorded over old tape. Like the old cassette tapes you could record over, but when you played the new back sometimes you could hear the old stuff coming through the new stuff. The old never goes away.
As hard as I want to separate myself from my old way of life, I find it comforting to go back once and a while.
I spend my Sunday mornings worshipping the Spirit within humans with other like-minded people at a Spiritual Center, and I even watch a man from the same affiliated Spiritual Center out of Los Angeles online, because he talks about Hope with charisma.
James is right that humans live life with several perceptions, even if we claim we don’t and that we have only one belief, which just isn’t true.
If we ever crossed on a street corner and you asked me what I thought about Christianity, and how your thoughts create your life, I would refute Christianity venomously. Then I would go home and turn on the TV to watch my favorite Christian pastor in Houston Texas talk about all the good things God has for us, and how I can change my life by changing my thoughts.
That is the truth about me. Like I said, humans are slow to change or maybe, we cannot change completely, because the old tape doesn’t go away and we get comfort from that old way of thinking.
Thanks for this, Jeff.
Yes, we are fundamentally making an assumption, and we can be sure that this assumption that we are making is incomplete. For example, we know for fact that we have changed our basic assumptions over the course of our lives a number of times, realizing the previous ones needed revision. Furthermore, humanity as a whole has changed its assumptions innumerable times. And every time that happens, on both the individual and collective levels, it brings about evolutionary changes.
The built-in obsolescence of our assumptions and basic axioms is the beauty of the whole process, rather than it’s limitation (“it’s a feature, stupid, not a bug.”) We don’t know, and still we create from within ourselves a point of stability out of which we act; and then, when circumstances force us to reformulate it, we do… That basic assumption is the fulcrum that allows us to move, even if it sends us in the wrong direction. It’s the way the process expresses itself through us. Archimedes supposedly said, “give me a fulcrum, and I shall move the world.” And this fundamental axiom or axioms are it.
And even that is axiom laden… But that’s such a quintessential human activity: to have an axiom, and rejoice in building a whole palace on that foundation stone. Then we move in the rooms of that palace and enjoy our own creation… (i.e., respond to what we realized out of those basic axioms). Until a new palace is needed. And yet, it also amplifies the truth that fundamentally, “we don’t know and we’ll never know”—that is the truth of who we are, of who I am.
And when one starts on the spiritual path, then that process is informed more and more by the mystery. At least that’s the idea. “Know that, by which everything else is known” – The Upanishads.
What is the different between spirituality vs. the creative imagination?
If the spirituality is guessing at life, Assumption” ,then the discussion back to square one as if Brian mentioned before “it feeds the creative imagination, soothes life’s suffering, eases death’s unknowns, promises meaning in the face of indifference. There must be something beyond this actual world, beyond space and time, which we cannot detect with our senses. There must be a deeper world, which the intellect ponders and the emotions crave. Here is the opening for the transcendental temptation. Yes, says the imagination, these things are possible. It then takes one leap beyond mere possibility to actuality.”
I have a bold assumption that may be the spirituality is the best creative imagination or the creation human made in order to make sense the reason to live life.
Shizuka said:
—There must be something beyond this actual world, beyond space and time, which we cannot detect with our senses. There must be a deeper world, which the intellect ponders and the emotions crave.—
When I lost my first child, it was due to the placenta pulling away from the uterus. The doctor left me alone in a room and I started hemorrhaging. I died. What happened after that, I will never forget. It is still so vivid in my mind, as if it just happened today instead of 26 years ago.
I remember watching myself from up above in the corner of the ceiling and wall in that hospital room. I remember not having any feelings or emotions for the dead person, me, in the bed. I had no attachments what so ever to my body, life, or the people in the room. I watched while the nurses and doctor worked on me.
I was not at all concern with what was happening to me. I knew I had work to do, and was waiting to know which way I was to go, back down into the body or off to give the information I had, (to whom or what I cannot tell you that), and wait for my next job. I just knew that I had another assignment waiting for me once I got back and gave the information away. I also know that I will be reborn again to parents who will nurture the consciousness I die with in this life time. This gives me even more incentives to keep my consciousness in a state of joy. I really would like to be born into a family that nurtures love, joy, and happy creations in their child.
This was not the first time I experienced death. When I was six years old, it happened to me three times in a roll due to a medicine my mother had given me. I do remember very vividly floating up to the ceiling and turning around to look at my sister and me in the bed. I was not scared. I thought it was fun and could not wait to do it again the next night. I also knew that all I had to do was go through the ceiling and I would disappear for good, and I didn’t want to do that.
I have worked very diligently to clean up my consciousness from all the negative stuff floating around in it these last 10 years. I feel this is the most important part of my life, and the only thing that has any significance to it. I feel that the only reason I am alive is to take what I know about life back with me to something that is waiting for this information.
I can say that most of my life, I have had very little worries about were or how I would live, and where my next meal was coming from. I knew that my most basic needs would be met throughout my life.
Philosophers do not get paid much money for their work, but in my mind, they have the most important job on earth.
Just to be accurate, Lisa, in response to what you said earlier:
“Our parent’s memory’s are in our DNA, when we are conceived their memories become ours. Everything we have ever been exposed to is in our DNA and we live life from those memories. Every time we learn something new, it is being recorded over old tape. Like the old cassette tapes you could record over, but when you played the new back sometimes you could hear the old stuff coming through the new stuff. The old never goes away.”
There is no evidence that this is true. DNA simply passes itself on, and any chromosomal mutations that have occurred due to biological or other events (e.g., cosmic rays, chemically caused damage, or other things that cause genetic mutations). And the characteristics that last over generations are those that are selected by consequences either because they positively contribute to survival of those who inherit those biological characteristics, e.g., special sensory or motor capabilities or features such as height, or because they at least do not cause the organisms to be at a disadvantage and therefore perish.
There is no evidence that individual learning is passed on by means of DNA.
The principles of variation and selection by consequences operate at the genetic, cultural, and individual behavioral levels, but they are different at each level. Genetically determined characteristics are different from collective behavior selected through cultural consequences/learning, which are different from individual behavior which is only passed on from one person to another through modeling, explicit teaching, or some other type of learning process.
To Carl
Your comments about DNA bring up the good-old nature/nurture question, which is totally relevant when we consider the sources of our conditioning and our unquestioned assumptions and beliefs.
Where do the boundaries between genetic influences stop and cultural influences start? It’s very blurry, and therefore interesting to explore. Genetic research in recent years has shown, for example, that cultural changes can and do sometimes lead to genetic changes over only a few generations.
For example, Darwin speculated that hairlessness of the human ape (that’s us!) developed through female preferences of hairless males as mates. Obviously, hairless males would then beget more children, and the chromosome that codes for less hair would gain an advantage. (It is, of course, a speculation, although researchers in recent years have found that so many of the the old man’s speculations were right-on-the-money by that one has to at least consider this plausible)
Likewise, in Papua New Guinea it was found, that men who was known by the tribe to have killed an enemy from another tribe would have 2.5 more wives than other men (statistics allows you to have half a wife… 🙂 ). So if there is a gene or genes that code for tendency for violence, for physical strength, for faster reaction time and for physical self-confidence, that gene would be passed on to many more kids over the course of a few generations.
And that can change over just a few generations as well. Elizabeth Debold asked the question in her article about Scandinavian males, “where are the Vikings?”. From a genetic point of view, something must have happened at one point that being violent stopped being attractive to Nordic women, while being super-sensitive, subservient and all the rest did. Give it a few generations, and genes that support such behavior become stronger in the culture and genes that codes for violent behavior are pushed aside.
Of course, that becomes very complicated nowadays, when so many people don’t have children, and when societies are getting so intermixed.
In the context of our discussion, one would have to ask how many of our deeply held beliefs are a result of our biological makeup, as a result of the fact that our cultural biases have been favored and have therefore been imprinted into our biology. Which makes the whole issue of cultural conditioning, which Andrew has been emphasizing so strongly, all the more vital for us to consider.
Carl,
Explain why it is when children are adopted out of their families that they grow up with characteristics of their biological parents. They like the same foods, have the same body posture, same diseases (all disease is caused from wrong beliefs), same type of friends, and so on.
Then you have twins who are adopted out of their families and into separate families. Those twins like the same, foods, colors, clothes, friends, speak the same, have the same body posture, diseases, and even experience life the same. They even marry people who are like one of their biological parents, not their adoptive parents.
These people were never around their biological parents long enough to learn these behaviors by watching them. Therefore, these behaviors must be in their DNA.
There are things we cannot see and understand about life here on earth. Research is helping to piece things together in order that we can see patterns occurring in the unseen. Anyone can make assumptions about the research according to their beliefs. Science does not know the unknown or unseen. They only know the seen.
Lisa, these are not learned tendencies. They are biologically determined ones.
Igal,
Your examples of the interaction of what Skinner called “genetic endowment” and “environmental history” are quite interesting. Even without culture (principles of variation and selection applied to collective or shared behavior), those interactions are always interesting. It becomes clear in such examples as individuals with sensory or physical capabilities based on their genetics (e.g., height) who then try activities that take advantage of those characteristics (e.g., basketball) and make contact with very positive consequences that make it more likely they will continue. Or musical prodigy. Or cognitive capabilities, and so on.
One of my favorite examples of biological features leading to selection of behavior by consequences is reflected in the data showing a very high proportion of professional athletes who were relatively old for their classes when they entered school. Unlike kids who barely made it into the first grade (with birthdays in August or September), the children who have birthdays in December, for example, are relatively older and more physically coordinated and mature at the beginning of their first years in school than other classmates. They join athletic teams, show some advantage due to their physical maturity, the coaches notice that and then spend more time with them, and so on. The net effect is that those students receive more coaching earlier on in their athletic lives than other students and are more likely to become star athletes through learning. So an initial physical/biological advantage leads to greater opportunities for learning.
The word “instinct” applied to behavior patterns was demythologized by lab experiments years ago showing that baby ducks, who were supposed to have the “instinct” to follow their mothers, instead of having this behavior as a built-in tendency, actually have a genetic proclivity to have their behavior reinforced by getting closer to the first moving being that they see after birth. So they could “imprint” on humans if the humans were the first beings they saw out of the egg, and they would follow or walk on a treadmill or even press a little bar if it brought them closer to that human (or to their mother, in most cases, since mother is usually the one they see first at birth). It was NOT an “instinct” to follow their mothers, but a relatively strong reinforcing value for being close to whatever being they first saw — which makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary point of view. Those baby birds that stay close to the first being they see upon birth (Mom in most cases) are probably more likely to survive.
Thanks, Carl, for this.
Your comments brings another point to my mind: science has managed to unveil these mechanisms so precisely. But where is consciousness in all of this? The ruling paradigm is the scientific one. And our minds, being products of culture, are totally immersed in it. Even those of us who are spiritual — who, like Shizuka, feel that there must be something beyond this natural physical phenomena — see things very materially (I speak for myself, here, I don’t in anyway suggest that Shizuka or anyone else is necessarily seeing things in this manner).
I have this fantasy, that just as we look at generations past and marvel at how little they knew in comparison to ourselves, so in about 50 or, at the most, 100 years people will look back at our age and marvel at the fact that we managed to explain everything by pushing consciousness out of the picture, focusing only on matter. Sort of like marveling at how Ptolmay managed to explain the motion of stars to such a great precision even though the basic premise about the structure of the solar system–and the universe, for that matter–was erroneous.
My set of beliefs, my set of fundamental axioms, is that consciousness is real, and however incapable the zeitgeist is of speaking about it systematically and coherently in a manner that transcends and includes the present scientific paradigm, we’re heading into an age in which things will be turned on their head.
This may be some wishful thinking of a a not-so-learned boomer… Still, I feel that it would be great to explore this (as Peter Russel has tried to do).
I think the problem I have with all this talk of “materialism” is that the very word seems to push consciousness out of the picture. It is dualistic, as in the primitive dualism of Aristotle’s “matter and form.”
My experience is nothing but consciousness and the objects that arise in it, subjective or so-called objective (Skinner called them overt and covert). I certainly understand that the common day-to-day perception — whether influenced by science or by simple experience in life — seems to ignore the fact that there is only one field of awareness for any of us and that everything arises in that. But understanding the mechanisms of what arises within that consciousness does not to me seem to deny awareness of the field itself, even though we tend to forget it and many of us just don’t even notice it at all — we just notice the things that arise within it. As Ramana Maharshi’s analogy of the movie theatre made clear, we often become so engrossed in the movie that we forget the screen, the projector, the space in which the movie is arising.
I do not understand why a scientific exploration of the mechanisms and causal relationships within nature is in any way opposed to or contradictory to or irreconcilable with an awareness of consciousness itself. Yet many of the comments seem to suggest that our deepening scientific understanding of our world, and of ourselves — including how awareness, self-awarness, choice, and all the rest of it have evolved — is somehow opposed to or ignorant of consciousness itself. What am I missing here?
Carl,
Thanks for this interesting question.
But I do think you may have a very particular, and not so common, interpretation of the congruence between science and spirituality. The more common scientific understanding, as far as I understand it, is that only matter is real, and consciousness, to the extent that it exists, is an epiphenomenon, a sort of accidental by-product that no one knows how it really arose but surely, it was a fluke.
Professor David Chalmers, a renowned philosopher of science, even coined the term “The Big Problem of Consciousness.” As far as I understand it, it says: ‘How could a material, non-conscious thing as the body give rise to a non-material, conscious thing such as consciousness?”
I think it may be naive to not see that the present scientific paradigm does not know how to speak of consciousness. And I also think that science owes its progress to being materialistic–to completely eliminating non-measurable, intangible things from its exploration. “Materialism”, as such, is not derogatory; it’s a term that allows me to understand the perspective that science is coming from, which is interpreting reality as if only matter is real. Is that not true that this is what the scientific method is about? Does the scientific method have means of deal with subjective, intangible phenomena such as the experience during a retreat or an intersubjetive communion during a discussion group? That’s what I mean by materialism.
I just finished a book called “Before the Dawn,” a marvelous account of what we know about the prehistoric origins of our society not just from archeological and paleontological evidence, but mainly as a result of discoveries in population genetics. It analyzes everything from the perspective of genes and matter, including the emergence of religion.
The book is very well written, very entertaining, full of fantastic and inspiring information, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I learnt a lot. But to me it seems clear (again, as a result of my basic assumptions, which are based also on my personal experience) that it is limited in its scope, because there is a whole range of my experience — my spiritual experiences — that it does not know how to deal with.
I don’t think scientific inquiry is opposed to spiritual evolution, but at present, it does not seem to be able to address it in a way that is satisfying to my experience of the field. I hope I’ll be able to glimpse a change of this in my lifetime… That would be great.
Carl please explain what you mean.
They are biologically determined ones.
DNA
The genetic information carried in the molecule called DNA determines every inherited physical characteristic of every living thing. DNA—more formally known as deoxyribonucleic acid—is found inside almost every cell. It controls how the cell replicates and functions, and what traits are inherited from previous generations.
Lisa, what I mean is that DNA does not pass on what an individual has learned by means of interacting with his or her environment to effect its nervous system. It only passes on characteristics that have been determined genetically by its own genetic endowment combining with that of its sexual partner and subject to other events that can affect biological/DNA structure such as cosmic rays, toxic chemicals, etc. There is no data to my knowledge suggesting that individual learning is passed on via DNA.
Igal, I understand your point about being naive, that many scientists seem to have a problem with consciousness. That is why I was and continue to be a student of B.F. Skinner. He had no problem with it whatsoever. He applied the same natural science approach to measuring and understanding “covert” or “inner” or subjective behavior as so-called overt or “outer” behavior because he saw it ALL as simply behavior, events in time that can be measured as frequency over time and that we can understand by seeing their effect on the frequencies of other events or the effect of those events on the behavior’s frequency. There is no dualism, no denial of anything, simply recognition that there are probabilities of events that are ALL behavior (read “events arising in consciousness”) and can be understood by experimentally investigating their functional (causal) relationships. It’s simple, no problem with consciousness whether or not he chose to use that term. This is more nondual than many of the so-called spiritual philosophies that I have seen that complain about “materialism” and somehow divide all of existence into two realms rather than into one.
Carl, what explanation can you give that explains the behaviors, illnesses, and disease’s that adopted people have that are the same as their biological parents?
There is very good research on twins studies, as you have suggested, showing that biological characteristics (e.g., susceptibility to disease, physical stature and posture, and all kinds of other things are inherited. But these things are not individually learned things, they are either physical characteristics or neurological or other potentials for sensory, motor, endocrine, etc. sensitivities, etc. If you look closely, and certainly if you consult the scientific literature, you will find no reputable scientists claiming that individual learning is passed on via dna.
Carl, thank you for answering my questions and being patient with me.
Today, it is not uncommon for women to design their babies. You can request a blue eyed and blond hair girl or a green eyed brown hair boy.
I have not heard of any women going into a sperm bank and requesting an average man in looks, intelligence, and health sperm, to get pregnant with.
Women prefer sperm from a man who has higher education, very healthy, musical, and fairly good-looking and skin, hair, and eye color close to their own. The list goes on and on in the choices of designing your child.
I know of a woman who did exactly that, and her son’s intelligence is even beyond what she requested, and he is a very good looking young man.
Do we really need science to verify that traits in people come from their DNA?
Carl,
I have not read Skinner’s work. My knowledge of him is based on reading articles in Time and Wikipedia, which is not much. It was enough to get a sense that he was a real path-breaker, and pioneer, a true genius, and that a lot of the bad rap that he got was unjustified and unfounded. Have you actually studied with him?
As far as our specific discussion, my question would be: does he have a way of addressing, or acknowledging, the Mystery without reducing it to mechanistic explanations? If so, I will rush to read him right away. But my bet would be, that if that was the case, he would not be considered a good scientist.
There have been scientists who were also mystics, or had a mystical bend. Wilber’s Quantum Questions is a collection of the mystical writings of leading early 20th century physicists. But their mystical “musings” were not part of their scientific work. Their scientific work remained rigorous, which, so far means materialistic (in the sense the I used it earlier), Otherwise it would not be science.
And thanks for staying with this discussion, btw. It’s great to explore together…
Igal,
Yes, I was a doctoral student with Skinner in the early 70’s and had the opportunity to have independent study courses with him for several semesters. Following that, I joined the global community of those involved with his Experimental Analysis of Behavior, and its practical applications. That has been the foundation of my professional life, both in education and in organizational management consulting.
He did not have a way of referring to the Mystery. I’m not sure that it occupied much of his attention, as such. His notebooks, which span an amazing array of topics, were the product of copious daily notes to himselƒ — with pads and pencils to capture ideas near his bed, in his office, in his pocket, everywhere. There is no question that he was occupied full-time with discovering from a natural science perspective how behavior and thought and consciousness occur and how we can use that understanding to improve human life — education, therapy, government, management, you name it. I think he pretty much lived with the view that behavior — our experience, both inner and outer — is all that we know and that his job was to understand the functional relationships among the events in that field of awareness. He broke with his predecessors who declined to consider so-called subjective experience as content for scientific inquiry, seeing “covert” behavior such as imagination, feelings, and so on as part of the same field of experience and study as overt behavior. I once tried to interview him about certain “spiritual” topics, and he really did not see any need for them. Having been raised in a white Protestant America starting at the turn of the century, I think he saw most religion as superstitious and unhelpful, and had something of a bias in that regard.
That being said, he had one of the most simple attitudes of “wonder” toward everything that I have ever seen. He was simply amazed and enthralled by the wonder of nature. His death was very peaceful and serene, after having blood cancer for a couple of years. His last word, spoken to his daughter who is a friend of mine, was, “Marvelous!” — seemingly in response either to the wonder of the life he had experienced and the taste of water she had just given him, or perhaps in response to what he saw in his passing moments. We’ll never know, but certainly his final moments were serene and relaxed, not the behavior of a man holding on fearfully to the known.
Wow, Carl–this sounds awesome. He must have been a great man to be with. You’re lucky to have worked with him…
One of the most inspiring things about some of the really great scientists is their incredible sense of wonder towards the perfection of creation. Einstein even said that both science and religion have a common goal–to inspire a sense of awe and wonder in their practitioners.
But many of those scientist are decidedly, openly, and sometimes even fanatically materialistic–Richard Dawkins, for example. He expresses a deep sense of wonder at creation, but feels vehemently–almost violently–that any attempt to explain any phenomena in non-materialistic terms is, for lack of a better word, sacrosanct. I know he’s extreme and Skinner was not such a fanatic (few are), but I would classify Skinner under that camp. That does not mean that he was a bad person, or even that spiritual people are in anyway better than him. We both know that this is not the case, that being spiritual in itself does not make someone in anyway better that someone who is not.
You may remember that during the retreat that we just had with Andrew, he spoke about his conversations with scientists, some of whom say things like “why do you need a spiritual explanation or a purpose? Isn’t the thing itself wondrous enough?” And indeed, nature is wondrous and awe inspiring. But there’s more to spirituality than a sense of awe and wonder.
* * *
Next time we are on the same side of the ocean, let’s go out for coffee. I’d like to hear some Skinner stories…
So when we say that something or someone is “materialistic,” what do we mean? The concept seems inherently dualistic to me.
Carl ,Thank you .I’m really intrigued by”subjective experience as content for scientific inquiry, seeing “covert” behavior such as imagination, feelings, and so on as part of the same field of experience and study as overt behavior. ”
Becuase I see the space ,possibility of evolution of consiousness and potential of the integration of science & spirituality.
“Unknown ,mistery” and “wonder.why?”are like soul mate;)
Carl, you wrote: So when we say that something or someone is “materialistic,” what do we mean?
I don’t know who you mean by “we”, but I’m glad you asked the question because it forces me to define for myself what I mean by the word.
I think the first place to start is to define what my fundamental axiom, or belief system is, from which I speak. My belief system is fundamentally religious, in the sense that I do believe in the existence of a transcendental principle that precedes creation and is its source. Furthermore, I accept as axioms the statements of mystics in the past 2,500 years that that transcendental principle is the ultimate nature of who we are, as expressed in the Upanishadic Statement Aham Brahmasmi (I am Brahman), in Jesus’ declaration I and the Father are One, in Al-Hallaj’s declaration anal’-haqq (I am The Truth [The Truth being one of the 99 Names of Allah]), etc.
I also accept as an axiom that “creation”—i.e., the physical universe—arose out of that ultimate, transcendental principle, and that evolution is the mechanism through which that transcendental principle becomes immanent. I also believe that the nature of that transcendental principle is consciousness. I see directionality in the process of creation, namely that of expression more and more of the nature of consciousness in the world of manifestations.
Seen from this perspective, with all its biases, materialism is any philosophical approach which, implicitly and/or explicitly, takes matter to be primary and consciousness as its manifestation, or even that consciousness is somehow located in the body and is individual. Materialism is not “bad,” it’s just a different set of axioms and assumptions. And we all operate (or are supposed to operate) according to our fundamental axioms.
I think the emergence of materialism is strongly connected with the emergence of what Spiral Dynamics calls “Orange Meme”—the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, etc. It was an incredibly evolutionary step. It was spearheaded, interestingly enough, by people who were not materialists themselves: Galileo, Kepler, and Newton were deeply religious people—not to mention Descartes, who was a priest—but a new meme was pushing through them: a need to know what’s really true, which demanded isolating matter in order to study it in a way that’s unencumbered by dogma and intangibles. Kepler sang praises the “secrets of the will of God” that were revealed to him through his research; Newton devoted more time to theology and alchemy than to science. However, most leading scientists today adopt the materialistic viewpoint as their viewpoint about EVERYTHING, including non-material phenomena.
So where does that put Skinner? Again, not knowing him or his work, based on what I have read and what you have written, I think he would qualify as a materialist. Would he have accepted the existence of a transcendental field which precedes creation and gives rise to it? Would there be any notion in his writing or thinking that indicated the life was more than the event between birth and death? If not, from my perspective he is a materialist. That’s the lens he viewed the world through.
I believe that most of us, spiritual types, are enmeshed in materialistic outlook about life much more than we think, because it is, after all, the existing current paradigm, of which our mind is a product. I am amazed to find, upon reflection, how much of my center of gravity is, in the end, materialistic, even though I believe that the spiritual perspective is more true, more evolved, more inclusive and explains a whole lot more. It’s humbling (or at least it’s supposed to be…). So it if it’s difficult for us, boomers and up, how much more difficult it would have been for someone born in Skinner’s time.
I’ve been watching the comments since Jeff’s last post, leaving Carl to fend for himself. I also went back and looked at my comments over the last several months and noticed I’ve been beating my head against the same wall.
Yes spiritualists are dualists if they believe in spirits/intelligence/consciousness that exist independent of living bodies. I think we can agree on the reality of internal consciousness — but its the subject of external consciousness where I part ways with spiritualists.
Brian, some could argue that the experience of consciousness as “internal” is, in fact dualistic, separating “inner” and “outer.” Where is that “internal” domain where consciousness “is”? In fact, you could resolve that dualism–first philosophically, but eventually experientially if you so desire–by analyzing your experience deeply, and then you may discover that both the “inner” and the “outer” phenomena really occur within the field of consciousness, and that it’s impossible to say where that field starts and where it ends.
That’s, at least, one possible perspective…
Wow – kudos to everyone for digging into this so deeply! I can hardly keep up, I think I need to take an hour to read back thourgh all the comments again to try to get a sense of it all. Thank you all…
Igal, I’m saying there is no “outer”. Only “inner” consciousness that exists as a function of the material brain/body. Hardly dualistic when I am asserting only one and denying the other.
My experience is that there is no consciousness separate from what arises within it, except when nothing is arising in it — the experience of the “ground of being” that we seem to recognize after we have been there, since to “experience” it would imply one who experiences it separate from the experience itself. I don’t think that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter, since I don’t really see how to separate them out. There is only consciousness, since no experience is without it, and the forms/things that arise within it. To me, science is about understanding the causal relationships among things that arise in consciousness, often categorized into different types of “things” such as living things, energies, physical but unliving bodies, etc. The concept of “materialism” as Brian suggests seems to me inherently dualistic, implying that there is something else. If there is something else, then there is “two-ness” as Andrew Cohen would say. And that is not consistent with my experience of only one thing, awareness and the play of its contents like a screen with forms playing on it in the light. Of course I sometimes get so engrossed in the contents that I forget the larger context of awareness itself. So does that make me a materialist or not? By the way, Skinner said that the only thing there is is “behavior” and he meant the experience we have, both inner and outer. For example, “seeing” was to him a kind of behavior, whether it was apparently seeing of an “external” object or inner seeing as in a dream or closed eye vision. All behavior, all part of the same field. I simply would add, “the same field…of which we are aware.”
This might be a bit of a tangent, but I just happened on this quote from Skinner, from a note in 1989.
“No account of what is happening inside the human body, no matter how complete, will explain the origins of human behavior. What happens within a body is not a beginning. By looking at how a clock is built, we can explain why it keeps good time, but not why keeping time is important, or how the clock came to be built in that way. We must ask the same questions about a person. Why do people do what they do, and why do the bodies that do it have the structures they have? We can trace a small part of human behavior, and a much larger part of the behavior of other species, to natural selection and the evolution of the species, but the greater part of human behavior must be traced to contingencies of reinforcement, especially the very complex social contingencies we call cultures.”
I think that our experience of self-awareness, etc. is the product of culture and language, completely intertwined with culture, a collective experience that we only become deeply sensitive to when we learn to come together without the sense of separation. To me the direct experience of collective awareness — the “New Being” as Andrew Cohen called it — is the most telling evidence that our consciousness is truly the result of our collective co-origination.
Even though I agree what Carl wrote”There is only consciousness, since no experience is without it, and the forms/things that arise within it.”
and I was intrigued by what Carl wrote”subjective experience as content for scientific inquiry, seeing “covert” behavior such as imagination, feelings, and so on as part of the same field of experience and study as overt behavior. ”
Because of the possibility of “Why not?,may be inner experience can be as content for scientific inquiry.”.
But I ‘stumble forward again in the face of as the matter of fact, Reality is different from feeling,thought, the dream,creative imagination.
Yet ,I come back to the question again regarding what Brian wrote”It then takes one leap beyond mere possibility to actuality.” Because I assume or believe that it is true and there must be relation between creative imagination(possibility) and the reality and I want to find out as the content for science inquiry.
Brian,
So for you, consciousness is something that results from the activity of the brain and the nervous system. In this approach, matter precedes consciousness, then, right? So how did matter come into being in your view? Is it just a matter of chance occurrence?
Actually, from Skinner’s perspective, “inner” behavior is no different from “outer” behavior, except that in the case of the former only the individual can observe or measure it directly. But we can count and assign ratings on various dimensions to thoughts, feelings and images, which means we can calculate count of events over time (frequency, the best measure we have of probability of behavior) for those inner events.
I know both clinicians and basic researchers who have studied the relationships between various sort of inner and outer events with feelings, thoughts, etc. and found these functional relationships to be very orderly, open to scientific investigation, prediction and management. It’s akin to the fact that we need a telescope to see nebulae, and not everyone can see them. But that doesn’t mean that the rare individual who has access to a powerful telescope is unable to count and measure such astronomic events. Similarly, it turns out that only the individual can report on or count events that only they can see or feel. So there might be a challenge of reliability of the measurement, with some measurement error, but the data actually show that inner behavior is as orderly as outer behavior as judged by its variability, response to other events, and so on. In practice, clinicians have developed procedures for practicing self-developed imagery to improve relaxation, reward specific overt or covert behaviors, and so on.
In other words, there is no difference between these two “areas” (inner and outer) from the perspective of the science of behavior the laws of behavior that it has discovered. That corresponds to my own personal experience (and I assume yours) that the events that I experience “subjectively” as well as those that I experience or see “outside” occur within my one field of awareness. Why need we make a distinction other than the difference in location of or access to the events?
In College, I noticed that what the Professor talks about in one class will be talked about in my next class, then the next, then the next, irrelevant to the class.
Carl, are we bouncing off of each other thoughts? Are thoughts like radio waves and we are the receivers of those thoughts?
Let me tell you this story about picking up thoughts that are not yours. There was a time I was having suicidal thoughts that were very disturbing to me. I love life, and could not fathom why I would have such thoughts. In a conversation with a person I was living with, he let me know his deep dark secret of ending his life. I was relieved to know that the thoughts I was having about suicide were not coming from me. I was able to point out all the reasons he had to live, and the suicidal thoughts I was having disappeared.
Many times I have finished off sentences of my children’s or close friends, and had the same thoughts of my children’s, and even dream the same dream at the same time they did.
Now that I have written this, I can see how my thoughts do affect someone else.
Igal, To answer your question, in my view matter has always been and always will be. Consciousness arose from matter through evolved life forms.
Brian,
What I think is interesting and a little odd about the discussion abut matter and consciousness is that we would not even be aware of matter were it not for the conscious field in which it arises. So to imagine matter without that consciousness is difficult, although I suppose we can visualize energy and hydrogen atoms without any field of consciousness within which to arise because we weren’t yet here. But it seems to me that what we know now, from our experience now, is that consciousness and its contents arise simultaneously, they co-originate. So I suppose it really is an act of faith to imagine either consciousness without matter or matter without consciousness — a kind of abstraction that somehow makes sense to us. Link back to the topic of Jeff’s blog. I am reminded of Kant’s distinction between noumena (the REAL things that exist) and phenomena (the impressions of those real things in our awareness). You can’t really get “behind” the phenomena to touch the noumena. So how do you know such a distinction exists? Logical, but mysterious at the same time.
Could it be so that there is knowledge and intuition, and that those two is not the same until the day that we know everything about the universe and creation? That intuition or inner experience is still some kind of guessing about the outer as long as we still dont know all answers? Therefore there is a split between what we already know and what is yet to be known, though spiritual experiences can bring intuitions about what we dont know yet. If we put in the theory of Gaia here, it makes sense or brings a picture to help clarity. We could say that the individual is like a cell in the body that is the world. Then sometimes it is possible for that cell to have a glimse of the total body and its instructions…
Thank you Mette
Mette wrote:”there is knowledge and intuition, and that those two is not the same until the day that we know everything about the universe and creation?“ and she wrote”That intuition or inner experience is still some kind of guessing about the outer as long as we still don’t know all answers? Therefore there is a split between what we already know and what is yet to be known, though spiritual experiences can bring intuitions about what we don’t know yet.”
Yes,that’s why I wrote [“Unknown ,mystery” and “wonder.why?”are like soul mate;)] and I define that is “Love”,spirituality meet science,wholeness, Thy know Self.
That’s why it seems too big or crazy attempt,for example Andrew’s “Universe Project”,but like bible say, I believe “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened ” and that’s why I see the potential of quantum leap in Carl’s (through studying Skinner’s perspective) approach.
The word “Faith” carries a lot of baggage which some people intend it to carry but others don’t. Try substituting the term “paradigm” for faith and see if you argument doesn’t work better. I would argue that we do not need “faith” – with all the weird things that implies – in order to function, but we cannot function at all let alone investigate the world, without operating through a paradigm, whether we are aware of the paradigm or not. Paradigms (particularly cause & effect, aka Causality) are built into the animal nervous system.
Logical Positivists, despite the claims of many who argue against it, do NOT argue for “conclusive” evidence or “conclusive” proof, if by “conclusive” you mean “100% certainty” . LP is statistically based, and every scientist or philosophical Logical Positivist will readily acknowledge that all their conclusions are always subject to falsification and can never be conclusive – or in the sense you were using that word – 100% certain. Thus their “conclusions” are not “conclusive” but are “probabilities”; very strong probabilities, one hopes, but probabilities nonetheless.
It’s tantalizing to speculate how Wm James would come down today re: faith and God or if he as a freethinker might espouse that it’s possible to be Good without God.
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