The Bridge: A Science and Spirituality Resource

Did Meditating Make Us Human? -- by Matt J. Rossano

2010-11-23T10:50:00.000-08:00

Matt Rossano’s article provides an interesting contrast to our previous two posts extracting Thomas Metzinger’s article on out of body experiences. Altered states here are seen as a prelude to the evolutionary development via Baldwinian selection of working memory and eventually the ability to symbolize, which characterizes modern humans. Rossano is a professor of Psychology at University of Southeastern Louisiana University. He is a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post (Link). His recent book is SUPERNATURAL SELECTION : HOW RELIGION EVOLVED, and a list of his recent publications can be found here. The original article contains more extensive citations.

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The thesis of this article is that this commonplace activity, which I will call campfire rituals of focused attention, created an important selective pressure in the evolution of the modern human mind. Ritualized gatherings before an open fire — repeated night after night, generation after generation for thousands of years — contributed significantly, though not necessarily exclusively, to the evolution of the enhanced working memory capacity required for symbolic thinking.

The scenario is grounded in the following five propositions.

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1. Convincing evidence of symbolism in the form of ceremonial tools, artwork and grave goods appears late in the archaeological record (largely after 50,000 bp) and post-dates the emergence of anatomically modern humans.

Late emergence of symbolism

In this article, ‘symbolism’ is Peirce’s definition, arbitrary referents based on cultural convention. Peircian symbolism is what appears to have arrived late in the archaeological record and it is this that required enhanced working memory. Genetic and fossil evidence points to the emergence of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) somewhere between 200,000 and 150,000 years bp in Africa . Some have argued that the relatively sudden appearance of sophisticated tools, burial with grave goods, and image-making in the European Upper Palaeolithic signifies a ‘revolution’ in human thought and behaviour . Peircian symbolism most likely did not occur until the Upper Palaeolithic, when grave goods, sophisticated tools, image making and what appear to be purely ceremonial artifacts arrive on the archaeological scene. For the purposes of the current model, what is pivotal is that the evidence for this‘higher-level’ symbolism emerges late and post-dates the arrival of anatomically modern humans.

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2. Recent work combining cognitive science and archaeology has built a compelling case for explaining the late emergence of symbolism as the result of a fortuitous genetic mutation (or combination of mutations) that enhanced human working memory capacity.

Fortuitous Mutation (s)

The ultimate mechanism [responsible for symbolism] must come down to a fortuitous genetic mutation that reorganized brain structure and function, thus giving Homo sapiens a cognitive advantage over other archaic hominin forms . While Klein typically talks in terms of a single genetic mutation (terminology, which for simplicity’s sake, I will retain), this change could have involved a series of mutations that affected the interaction of genes and, or, their manner of expression. Coolidge & Wynn (2001...) have elaborated on Klein’s proposal, arguing that the most likely target of this mutation would have been an enhancement of working memory capacity. In this context, working memory capacity refers to the ability to hold information in mind, especially information about behavioural procedures and intended goals, in spite of interfering stimuli or response competition .

Enhanced working memory capacity, however functionally envisioned, is a prerequisite to the emergence of symbolism. Our ancestors had an enhanced capacity to recall, consciously retain and manipulate information. This enhanced working memory capacity was essential to crossing the threshold to purely arbitrary or convention-based symbolism . To understand this level of purely arbitrary reference, one must be able to hold in mind both what the signifying image is perceptually and what it means conceptually, while at the same time understanding that these two are not the same.

The exact time of emergence is less important than when this change became widespread, which, I would argue, was not until around 50,000 bp, immediately prior to the emergence of symbolism.

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3.Evolutionary developmental biology indicates that genetic adaptation can sometimes follow somatic adaptation (the Baldwin effect). Put another way, environmental conditions that require bodily adaptation (such as high-altitude conditions which require the production of more red blood cells) simultaneously create selection pressure for genetic mutations that more permanently establish the adaptive phenotypic state.

The Baldwin effect updated

Environmentally induced somatic modifications (resulting from either learning or physiological adaptation) ... become heritable changes. According to this principle, acquired traits do not directly affect genes but these traits could create or importantly contribute to selective conditions that would, in time, genetically establish them in the population.... In other words, an initially environmentally induced trait eventually became encoded and transmitted genetically. .

This could provide a model for how hominins acquired increasingly complex cognitive skills. These skills may first have appeared as novel acquired traits induced by atypical environmental demands. Then, as those demands persisted, a Baldwinian process could have led to the traits becoming genetically heritable and stabilized. Over the course of hominin evolution, the atypical environmental demands were increasingly products of hominins themselves.

Wright (2004) has recently reviewed a range of studies providing support for the process of ‘stress-directed mutagensis’, where feedback mechanisms within the organism allow environmental stressors to target specific genes that must mutate in order to surmount the stress. Though a great deal is still to be learned about how mutations arise, it is becoming increasingly clear that dismissing them as simply random is too simple.

Modifications are more likely to arise in those systems that are under selection pressure — where the adaptive range of a physiological system is under stress. Any mutation or genetic reassortment that resets the range of a physiological system to a more adaptive level would then be positively selected by environmental conditions. Thus, a population of humans relocated to higher altitudes is biased toward the expression of any mutation that permanently resets their baseline levels of red blood cell production.

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4. Neuroscience studies indicate that meditation produces short-term and long-term effects on both the structure and function of those areas of the brain closely associated with working memory and focused attention such as the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex.

Meditation and the brain

Recent brain-imaging and EEG studies have shown that areas in the frontal lobe of the brain associated with working memory and focused attention, especially the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate, are activated during meditation . [For example,] Newberg et al. (2001) found increased activation in the dorsolateral and orbital prefrontal cortices, anterior cingulate cortex, and the sensorimotor cortices of the brains of eight meditating subjects. [Moreover,] Carter et al. (2005) found that Tibetan monks experienced at one-point meditation (a type that involves focused attention on a single object) were able to exert conscious control over a typically automatic phenomenon of attention, binocular rivalry.

This accumulating body of research indicates that meditation produces long-term changes in those areas of the brain involved in attention and working memory. These areas are critical for the enhancement of working memory capacity. This enhancement may have given Homo sapiens a competitive edge over other hominins and produced the emergence of symbolism about 50,000 bp. However, it can rightly be pointed out that it seems quite unlikely that our ancestors of 100,000 years ago or more were engaging in one-point or compassionate meditation. While true, numerous other studies have shown that far more mundane memory and attention tasks also activate the same brain areas.

Numerous other studies with similarly simple cognitive demands have indicated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to be an important high-level filter of attention, sustaining cognitive energy on relevant information while suppressing the processing of and responding to irrelevant signals.

Campfire rituals practiced by our hominin ancestors need not have been as disciplined as those of Tibetan monks to have activated the brain regions important for attention and memory. However, they were probably more intensive than the tests used in typical neuroscience studies. Those most susceptible to the rituals’ physical and psychological healing effects reaped the greatest survival and reproductive advantage — a Baldwinian process. Finally, there is evidence to suggest that these conditions were unique to Homo sapiens and not a regular part of the social worlds of Neanderthals and other archaic hominins.

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5. Hypnotizability, or the ability to achieve a ritually-induced, health-enhancing, suggestibility-prone conscious state, is individually variable and heritable; and would have been fitness-enhancing in our ancestral past.

Shamanistic healing rituals

Strictly speaking, shamanism is a practice confined to cultures of the higher latitudes of Eurasia where the term originated. More broadly, however, the shaman is anyone who uses consciousness-altering ritual as a means of connecting with the spiritual world for the purpose of individual or community healing.

There is considerable evidence that shamanism (broadly defined) is humanity’s oldest form of religion. It is found in nearly all traditional societies. An increasing number of scholars agree that some of the Upper Palaeolithic cave art and artifacts reflect shamanistic rituals and, or, experiences . If so, they also suggest that shamanism pre-dates the Upper Palaeolithic, since the depiction reflects an already present system.

McClenon (1997; 2002) has marshalled considerable evidence indicating that those of our ancestors who were most susceptible to the beneficial physical and psychological effects of shamanistic rituals had a selective advantage over others in surviving illness or injury, overcoming debilitating emotional states and enduring the rigours of childbirth. Ritual healing is often highly effective for a range of maladies where psychological factors are involved, such as chronic pain, burns, bleeding, headaches, skin disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, and the discomforts and complications of childbirth .

Furthermore, only minimal verbal expression is required (if any at all) to add to the persuasive impact of the ritual (‘relax’, ‘heal’ etc.). Indeed, part of the power of spiritual healing is that it is something beyond words and logic. What is required for spiritual healing appears to be well within the behavioural and cognitive repertoire of our hominin ancestors: a belief in a healing spiritual power accessible through conscious-ness-altering ritual.

More than likely, it was the immediate positive psychological (ecstatic emotions/social bonding) and physical (placebo benefits, ‘miracles’) effects of these rituals that provided the motivation for enactment. What is critical is that these rituals required focused attention which activated those areas of the brain associated with attention and working memory.

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What made humans different?

These rituals may have been one of the few activities that consistently differentiated Homo sapiens from other contemporary hominins.

When Homo sapiens moved into Europe around 40,000 bp, it was for good. Neither Neanderthals nor cold conditions stopped them from laying claim to the entire continent. Whatever it was that changed them did not similarly affect Neanderthals. So what was the difference?

The evidence suggests that a capacity for symbolism was present in some nascent or measured form in Neanderthals and, under certain environmental conditions (such as close contact with Cro-Magnons), this capacity flowered; but apparently those conditions were not a regular aspect of the Neanderthal world prior to the Upper Palaeolithic. This again emphasizes the fact that something was different about the Homo sapiens world, something generally not present in that of other hominins.

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Why Neanderthals did not meditate

If the critical difference between Homo sapiens and other hominins was campfire rituals of focused attention, then why did Neanderthals not engage in this activity? Were they and other archaic hominins not just as likely to have been singing, chanting and encountering healing spirits around their campfires? Odd as it may seem, the answer to this seems to be no. Evidence suggests that Neanderthals had neither the time nor the energy to engage in such activities. They lived hard lives— harder, apparently, than Cro-Magnons’.

They did not invest as much as Cro-Magnons in home bases and the activities associated with them, including (and especially) communal ones involving a central fire.

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Notes

Intensified or altered states are characterized by increasingly non-rational processing and internally-directed focus ranging from fantasy to hypnagogic imagery to sensory hallucinations.

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Out-of-Body Experiences as the Origin of the Concept of a "Soul" Part Two - Thomas Metzinger

2010-01-05T16:34:00.000-08:00

This is Part 2 of a two-part post extracting Metzinger’s article. Part 1 characterizes out of body experiences and explores their relationship to the experience of self. In the passages in this post, Meztinger places out of body experiences in a historical context, considers their scientific explanation, and examines their relationship to dualism. Like Pim Van Lommel’s article on near-death experiences we extracted below, Metzinger's article considers an unusual phenomenon within a scientific framework that is rigorous but at the same time open.

What is the “proto-concept of mind”? In many cultures we simultaneously find prescientific theories about a “breath of life”, e.g., the Hebrew ruach, the Arabic ruh, the Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma or the Indian prana and the five koshas, respectively, etc. (for historical details and further references see Verbeke 1974, Schrott 1974). Typically this is a spatially extended entity, keeping the body alive and leaving it during phases of unconsciousness and after death. It has a material aspect, though more subtle than that of the physical body. (58)

The Western history of the concept of mind can be read as a history of a continuous differentiation of a traditionalistic, mythical, sensory proto-theory of mind which gradually led to a more and more abstract principle. Finally, culminating in Hegel, mind is conceived as devoid of all spatial and temporal properties. (57)

… In non-scientific contexts, we all know what we mean by a “soul”: Our soul is the innermost and essential part of ourselves; it is the prime candidate for the “true self”; it is the phenomenal locus of identity; it bears a deep relation to the emotional layers of our self-model, to the emotional core of our personality. For many of us it is something of which we secretly hope that it may survive physical death, because it is not identical to our body. (58)

...There is a well-known class of phenomenal states in which the experiencing person undergoes the untranscendable and highly realistic conscious experience of leaving his or her physical body, usually in the form of an ethereal double, and moving outside of it. (59)

These states correspond to a class (or at least a strong cluster) of intimately related phenomenal models of reality characterized by a visual representation of one’s own body from a perceptually impossible, externalized third-person perspective (e.g., lying on a bed or the road below oneself) plus a second representation of one’s own body, typically (but not in all cases) freely hovering above or floating in space. This second body-model is the locus of the phenomenal self. It forms the “true” focus of one’s phenomenal experience and also functions as an integrated representation of all kinesthetic qualia and all non-visual forms of proprioception. Such experiences are called out-of-body-experiences or OBEs…(59)

It is not at all inconceivable that there are physically or emotionally stressful situations, in which an information-processing system is forced to introduce a “representational division of labor” by distributing different representational functions into two or more distinct self-models (in what was previously called “multiple personality disorder”, see Metzinger 2003a, section 7.2.4). The OBE may be an instance of transient functional modularization, of a purposeful separation of levels of representational content in the PSM. (69)

For instance, if cut off from somatosensory input, or if flooded with stressful signals and information threatening the overall integrity of the self-model as such, it may be advantageous to integrate the ongoing conscious representation of higher cognitive functions like attention, conceptual thought and volitional selection processes into a separate model of the self. This may allow for a high degree of integrated processing, that is, for “mental clarity,” by functionally encapsulating and thereby modularizing different functions like proprioception or attention and cognition in order to preserve at least some of these functions in a life-threatening situation. Almost all necessary system-related information is still globally available, and higher-order processes like attention and cognition can still operate on it as it is presented in an integrated manner. (69)

Blackmore, … explicitly operating under the information-processing approach and analyzing the representational needs and resources of persons undergoing OBEs,… arrives at a theory describing OBEs as episodic models of reality, constructed by brains cut off from sensory input during stressful situations and having to fall back to internal sources of information. For instance, she draws attention to the remarkable fact that visual cognitive maps reconstructed from memory are organized from a bird’s eye perspective in the majority of subjects. She also points out an important phenomenological feature of intended bodily motion in the OBE-state: frequently, the way in which OBE subjects move around in the currently active model of reality is not smooth, as in walking or flying, but occurs in discrete jumps from one salient point in the cognitive map to the next. Blackmore’s observation emphasizes that, whatever else OBEs are, they certainly are internally simulated behavioral spaces. This phenomenological observation indicates that frequently these behavioral spaces, typically simulated by a brain under great stress, are spatially underdetermined – i.e., they are coarse-grained internal simulations of landmarks and salient spots in certain perceptual scenes that were seen and acted upon at an earlier stage in life. (72)

However, taking a more careful look at abstract, non-spatial aspects of the phenomenal self in these states, one discovers how it is not completely empty. An attentional and cognitive subject engaging in selective processing is modeled, and actually in existence: OBE subjects generally have good control over their attentional and their thought processes as such, even if almost all the contents of these processes may be hallucinatory. (73)

Let me point to a logical possibility, which is rarely noticed: OBEs may, at the same time, be both confabulatory states or complex hallucinations and information-bearing states correctly representing certain aspects of the environment. (78)

… OBEs show that self-models are not necessarily subject-models: You can represent something as your own body, without representing it as an agent with which you are identical, and you can do so under a perceptual model of the subject-object-relation. OBEs are like a “perceptualized” variant of reflexive self-consciousness. OBEs constitute a strong argument for the thesis that, while an accompanying bodily self-model may be fully “confabulated” by subpersonal mechanisms fighting for global coherence, the phenomenal locus of the self is always where the locus of cognitive and attentional agency is (see section 3.1). Interestingly, this is not true of bodily agency (recall the example of the marathon runner above). It is easy to conceive of systems that are not cognitive, but only attentional agents (for instance, animals) and nevertheless have OBEs. Therefore, the experience of attentional agency may be the core of phenomenal selfhood and perspectivalness and the origin of all consciously experienced intentionality. (77)

… It is as if, in situations where the self-model can no longer be anchored in internal somatosensory input or a low-level egocentric frame of reference (see Metzinger 2003a, section 5.4), higher cognitive functions like attentional processing or categorical thought simply take over in centering the global model of reality. In this way some persons undergoing an OBE truly are disembodied, thinking selves in a neurophenomenologically reduced version of the original Cartesian sense. However, it is not subjectively available to them that all this is just a model of reality generated by their central nervous system. (77)

…Even if a reductive explanation of all types of OBEs as deviant configurations of the human PSM should be achieved in the future, and even if the hypothesis about the history of the concept of a soul presented here is correct, it still remains logically possible that souls do exist. We would then not need the concept of a soul any more for the purposes of science or philosophy, because it would not play an explanatory role in any rational, data-driven theory any more. We would also have a deeper understanding of its genesis in human culture. But from a strictly logical point of view it remains possible that one day we discover a sense in which it is not an empty concept at all. (76)

This again leads to a number of issues of a more general philosophical interest. For anyone who actually had that type of experience it is almost impossible not to become an ontological dualist afterwards. In all their realism, cognitive clarity and general coherence, these phenomenal experiences almost inevitably lead the experiencing subject to conclude that conscious experience can, as a matter of fact, take place independently of the brain and the body: what is phenomenally possible in such a clear and vivid manner must also be metaphysically possible or actually the case. Although many OBE reports are certainly colored by the interpretational schemes offered by the metaphysical ideologies available to experiencing subjects in their time and culture, the experiences as such must be taken seriously. Although their conceptual and ontological interpretations are often seriously misguided, the truthfulness of centuries of reports about ecstatic states, soul-travel and second bodies as such can hardly be doubted. (78)

In conclusion, first-person reports about OBEs are available in abundance not only from all times, but also from many different cultures. There is a culturally invariant core to the phenomenon which obviously forms a coherent cluster of properties. The experience of a soul-like entity, an ethereal or astral body leaving the physical body during sleep, after accidents and in death can be called a “phenomenological archetype” of mankind. (79)

The functional core of this kind of phenomenal state is formed by a culturally invariant neuropsychological potential common to all human beings. Under certain conditions, the brains of all human beings, through specific properties of their functional and representational architecture, which have yet to be empirically investigated, allow for this set of phenomenal models of reality. (79)

Phenomenal states such as OBEs, which indicate a commonality in the neurofunctional architecture underlying the process of conscious human self-modeling, are the historical root of the proto-concept of mind. The proto-concept of mind eventually developed into Cartesian dualism and idealistic theories of consciousness. In short, the particular phenomenal content of OBEs led human beings to believe in a soul.(Let us simply call this the “soul-hypothesis.”…Given the epistemic resources of early mankind, it was a highly rational belief to assume the possibility of disembodied existence. And it was the PSM of homo sapiens which made this step possible.) (79)

The history of the concept of mind is a history of increasing differentiation and abstractness. Initially there was a theory of something concrete, an ethereal and spatially extended double, a breath of life. Eventually we find something entirely unworldly, an abstract, ideal principle. It is remarkable how the best theories of mind available today again turn it into a concrete process, fully endowed with temporal and spatial properties. However, in the light of contemporary cognitive neuroscience it is even more remarkable how, at the beginning of human theorizing about mind and consciousness, we find a very similar basic motive across very different cultural contexts: the idea of a “subtle body” which is independent of the physical body and the true carrier of higher mental functions like attention and cognition (Mead 1919). (80-81)

Taken as an ontological metaphor, the phenomenology of OBEs inevitably leads to dualism, and to the concrete idea of an invisible, weightless, but spatially extended second body. This, then, may actually be the folk-phenomenological ancestor of the soul, and of the philosophical proto-concept of mind: The soul is the OBE-PSM. (81)

Centuries of phenomenological reports describing it as a subtle body pointed in the right direction, and now we begin to see how it actually is a purely informational structure modeling bodily self-experience in cases of absent or disintegrated somatosensory/vestibular input. (81)

Out-of-Body Experiences as the Origin of the Concept of a "Soul" Part One - Thomas Metzinger

2010-01-05T15:54:00.000-08:00

Philosopher Thomas Metzinger argues that out of body experiences are “the proto-concept of mind;…they are what led human beings to believe in a soul.” We have extracted his essay, originally published in the journal Mind and Matter in 2005, into two consecutive posts. This the first characterizes out of body experiences and explores their implications with respect to the experience of self. We have rearranged some of the material to fit our two post format. The numbers in parenthesis correspond to the page numbers in article. Metzinger is the head of the Theoretical Philosophy Group at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz Germany. His most recent book is The Ego Tunnel. (Reprinted with permission)

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The bus to the train station had already been late. And now you have even queued up in a line at the wrong ticket counter! Nevertheless you manage to reach your train just in time, finding an empty compartment and, completely exhausted, drop into the seat. In a slightly unfocused and detached state of mind you are now observing the passengers sitting in the train on the other side of the platform. Suddenly you feel how your own train starts to move, very slowly at first, but accompanied by a continuous acceleration, which you can feel in your own body. Two or three seconds later, with the same degree of suddenness, your bodily sensation disappears and you become aware that it actually is the other train, which has now started to slowly leave the train station (see also Metzinger 1993, p. 185f). (65)

Such an experience is a very rudimentary form of an OBE, a hallucinated bodily self. The center of your global model of reality was briefly filled by a kinesthetic and proprioceptive hallucination, a non-veridical model of the weight and acceleration of your body, erroneously activated by your brain. The dominating visual model of your environment, largely formed by the input offered through the “picture frame“ of the train window, was underdetermined. In the special input configuration driving your visual system it allowed for two coherent interpretations: either it is the other train, or it is the train in which you are sitting, which has just started to move. The visual model of reality allowed for two equally consistent interpretations. At the same time there was a state of general physical and emotional arousal, accompanied by an unconscious state of expectancy about what is very likely going to happen next, and very soon. (61-62)

The information-processing system, which you are, selected one of the two possible interpretations in accordance with constraints imposed by a preexisting internal context and, as a system that always tries to maximize overall coherence, “decided” to simultaneously activate a suitable self-model, one that can be integrated into the new phenomenal model of the world without causing any major problems. Unfortunately, the chosen model of the world was wrong… A possibility was depicted as a reality. (61-62)

They frequently occur during extreme sports, for instance in high-altitude climbers or marathon runners (Alvarado 2000, p. 184):

A Scottish woman wrote that, when she was 32 years old, she had an OBE while training for a marathon. “After running approximately 12–13 miles . . . I started to feel as if I wasn’t looking through my eyes but from somewhere else. . . . I felt as if something was leaving my body, and although I was still running along looking at the scenery, I was looking at myself running as well. My ‘soul’ or whatever, was floating somewhere above my body high enough up to see the tops of the trees and the small hills.” (65)

They also frequently occur during sleep.

The process of detachment started at the fingertips, in a way that could be clearly felt, almost with a perceptible sound, a kind of crackling. It was precisely the movement which I actually intended to carryout with my physical hands. With this movement, I detached from my body and floated out of it with the head leading. I gained an upright position, as if I was now almost weightless. Nevertheless I had a body consisting of real limbs. You have certainly seen how elegantly a jellyfish moves through the water. I could now move around with the same ease. I lay down horizontally in the air and floated across the bed, like a swimmer, who has pushed himself from the edge of a swimming pool. A delightful feeling of liberation arose within me. But soon I was seized by the ancient fear common to all living creatures, the fear of losing my physical body. It sufficed to drive me back into my body.(64)

A 29-year-old woman has had absence seizures since the age of 12 years. The seizures occur five times a week without warning. They consist of a blank stare and brief interruption of ongoing behavior, sometimes with blinking. She had an autoscopic experience at age 19 years during the only generalized tonoclonic seizure she has ever had. While working in a department store she suddenly fell, and she said, “... the next thing I knew I was floating just below the ceiling. I could see myself lying there. I wasn’t scared; it was too interesting. I saw myself jerking and overheard my boss telling someone to ‘punch the timecard out’ and that she was going with me to the hospital. Next thing, I was in space and could see Earth. I felt a hand on my left shoulder, and when I went to turn around, I couldn’t. Then I looked down and I had no legs; I just saw stars. I stayed there for a while until some inner voice told me to go back to the body. I didn’t want to go because it was gorgeous up there, it was warm – not like heat, but security. Next thing, I woke up in the emergency room.” No abnormalities were found on the neurological examination. Skull CT scan was normal. The EEG demonstrated generalized bursts of 3/s spike-and-wave discharges. (66)

The prevalence of OBEs ranges from 10% in the general population to 25% in students, with extremely high incidences in particular subpopulations like, to take just one example, 42% in schizophrenics (Blackmore 1986; for an overview and further references see Alvarado 1986, 2000, p. 18p, and Irwin 1985, p. 174p). However, it would be false to assume that OBEs typically occur in people suffering from severe psychiatric disorders or neurological deficits. Quite the contrary, most OBE-reports come from ordinary people in everyday life situations. (64)

At present it is not clear whether the concept of an OBE possesses one clearly delineated set of necessary and sufficient conditions. The concept of an OBE may in the future turn out to be a cluster concept constituted by a whole range of diverging (possibly overlapping) subsets of phenomenological constraints, each forming a set of sufficient, but not necessary, conditions. On the other hand the OBE clearly is something like a phenomenological prototype. There is a core to the phenomenon, as can be seen from the simple fact that many readers will have already heard about in one way or another. (59)

One can offer a representationalist analysis of OBEs by introducing the concept of a “phenomenal self-model” (PSM; for more on the concept of a PSM, see Metzinger 2003a). APSM is an integrated, conscious representation of the organism as a whole, including not only its spatial features, but also those of its own psychological properties to which it has access. An important feature of the human PSM is that it is almost entirely transparent. This means that we, as the organisms activating the PSM in their own central nervous system, cannot recognize it as a model: We become naive realists with regard to its content, the transparent representational content of the PSM is simply what we experience and later refer to as “our” conscious self. (59-60)

Given this conceptual background, we can analyze OBEs a class of deviant self-models. On the level of conscious self-representation a prototypical feature of this class of deviant phenomenal self-models seems to be the coexistence of (a) a more or less vertical representation of the bodily self, from an external visual perspective, which does not function as the center of the global model of reality, and (b) a second self-model, which according to subjective experience largely integrates proprioceptive perceptions – although, interestingly, weight sensations only to a lesser degree – and which possesses special properties of shape and form that may or may not be veridical. Both models of the experiencing system are located within the same spatial frame of reference (this is why they are out-of -body-experiences). (60)

…You see your own body, and you recognize it as your own, but presently it is not the body as subject, the body as the locus of knowledge and of lived, conscious experience. (67) OBEs, phenomenologically, are not states of disembodiment. On the contrary, there always seems to be a spatially located phenomenal self, even if its embodiment is reduced to a pure spatial point of visuo-attentional agency. (68) In general it seems safe to say that prototypical OBEs are fully transparent states. The model of reality generated during the experience is not experienced as a model, although in experienced subjects and practitioners this fact may well be cognitively available during the episode. It is precisely the transparency of OBEs, which has led generations of experiencers and theoreticians in many cultures and for many centuries in the past to naive-realistic interpretations of this deviant form of phenomenal self-modeling. However, many OBE subjects also report a “dreamlike quality, as if being awake in a dream”. (68)

The physical body viewed from an external perspective is very rarely distorted or changed in shape and size. However, the subject component of the intentionality-relation modeled in these states may vary greatly (note how just the opposite principle holds for ordinary waking states). Some OBE subjects see or feel themselves in a weightless replica of their original body, others experience themselves as being in no body at all or in a kind of indeterminate form, such as a ball of light or an energy pattern (Alvarado 1997, p. 18; Green 1968) or even as “pure consciousness” (Alvarado 2000, p. 186). (70)

This may indicate that spatial content is not strictly necessary in realizing the function fulfilled by the second self-model for the system as a whole. In other words, those higher functions such as attention, cognition and agency, which are integrated by the “dissociated” self, now are only weakly embodied functions. In order to be carried out they do not need the integration into a spatially characterized, explicit body image. Arguably, attentional and cognitive agency can functionally be decoupled from the process of autonomic self-regulation and the spatial self-representation necessary for generating motor behavior. Conceptually, this is an important insight about the human mind. As it is plausible to assume that also non-cognitive creatures like animals could undergo the type of fully disembodied OBEs described above, we may conclude that attentional agency actually is one of the essential core properties underlying the conscious experience of selfhood. Spatial self-representation and cognitive self-reference are not necessary for selfhood. (70)

Medical Evidence for Near Death Experiences: A Reply to Shermer - by Pim van Lommel

2009-11-03T14:18:00.000-08:00

Dr. Pim van Lommel, one of the presenters at the Conference on Neuroscience, Consciousness, and Spirituality that was the subject of our last post, is a clinician who studies near death experiences. He and his colleagues published a landmark study in The Lancet in 2001 entitled “Near-death experiences in survivors of cardiac arrest; a prospective study in the Netherlands.” Michael Shermer, in his article "The Demon-Haunted Brain" in Scientific American, wrote that the Lancet study ‘delivered a blow’ to the view that consciousness and the brain are separable. The following post is an abridged version of Dr. van Lommel’s response to Shermer. Dr. van Lommel’s book, ENDLESS CONSCIOUSNESS will be published in English in 2010. (The references refer to the original article. Reprinted with permission of the author.)

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We performed our prospective study in 344 survivors of cardiac arrest to study the frequency, the cause and the content of near-death experience (NDE). A near-death experience is the reported memory of all impressions during a special state of consciousness, including specific elements such as out-of-body experience, pleasant feelings, and seeing a tunnel, a light, deceased relatives, or a life review. In our study 282 patients (82%) did not have any memory of the period of unconsciousness, 62 patients (18%) however reported a NDE with all the “classical” elements. Between the two groups there was no difference in the duration of cardiac arrest or unconsciousness, intubation, medication, fear of death before cardiac arrest, gender, religion, education or foreknowledge about NDE. More frequent NDE was reported at age younger than 60 years, more than one cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) during hospital stay, and previous NDE. Patients with memory defects after lengthy and complicated CPR reported less frequent NDE.

There are several theories that should explain the cause and content of NDE. The physiologic explanation: the NDE is experienced as a result of anoxia in the brain, possibly also caused by release of endomorphines, or NMDA receptor blockade.

In our study all patients had a cardiac arrest, they were clinically dead, unconscious, caused by insufficient blood supply to the brain because of inadequate blood circulation, breathing, or both. If in this situation CPR is not started within 5-10 minutes, irreparable damage is done to the brain and the patient will die. According to this theory, all patients in our study should have had an NDE, they all were clinical dead due to anoxia of the brain caused by inadequate blood circulation to the brain, but only 18% reported NDE.

The psychological explanation: NDE is caused by fear of death. But in our study only a very small percentage of patients said they had been afraid the seconds preceding the cardiac arrest, it happened too suddenly to realize what occurred to them. However, 18 % of the patients reported NDE. And also the given medication made no difference.

We know that patients with cardiac arrest are unconscious within seconds, but how do we know that the electro-encephalogram (EEG) is flat-lined in those patients, and how can we study this?

Complete cessation of cerebral circulation is found in cardiac arrest due to ventricular fibrillation (VF) during threshold testing at implantation of internal defibrillators. This complete cerebral ischaemic model can be used to study the result of anoxia of the brain.

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In cardiac arrest global anoxia of the brain occurs within seconds. Timely and adequate CPR reverses this functional loss of the brain because definitive damage of the brain cells, resulting in cell death, has been prevented. Long lasting anoxia, caused by cessation of blood flow to the brain for more than 5-10 minutes, results in irreversable damage and extensive cell death in the brain. This is called brain death, and most patients will ultimately die.

In acute myocardial infarction the duration of cardiac arrest (VF) on the CCU is usually 60-120 seconds, on the cardiac ward 2-5 minutes, and in out-of-hospital arrest it usually exceeds 5-10 minutes. Only during threshold testing of internal defibrillators or during electro physiologic stimulation studies will the duration of cardiac arrest hardly exceed 30-60 seconds.

From these studies we know that in our prospective study of patients that have been clinically dead (VF on the ECG) no electric activity of the cortex of the brain (flat EEG) must have been possible, but also the abolition of brain stem activity like the loss of the corneareflex, fixed dilated pupils and the loss of the gag reflex is a clinical finding in those patients. However, patients with an NDE can report a clear consciousness, in which cognitive functioning, emotion, sense of identity, and memory from early childhood was possible, as well as perception from a position out and above their “dead” body. Because of the sometimes reported and verifiable out-of -body experiences, like the case of the dentures reported in our study, we know that the NDE must happen during the period of unconsciousness, and not in the first or last second of this period.

So we have to conclude that NDE in our study was experienced during a transient functional loss of all functions of the cortex and of the brainstem. It is important to mention that there is a well documented report of a patient with constant registration of the EEG during cerebral surgery for an gigantic cerebral aneurysm at the base of the brain, operated with a body temperature between 10 and 15 degrees, she was put on the heart-lung machine, with VF, with all blood drained from her head, with a flat line EEG, with clicking devices in both ears, with eyes taped shut, and this patient experienced an NDE with an out-of-body experience, and all details she perceived and heard could later be verified. (8)

Credit: NASA, ESA, T. Megeath (University of Toledo) and M. Robberto (STScI)
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/nebula/pr2006001q/

There is also a theory that consciousness can be experienced independently from the normal body-linked waking consciousness. The current concept in medical science states that consciousness is the product of the brain. This concept, however, has never been scientifically proven. Research on NDE pushes us at the limits of our medical concepts of the range of human consciousness and the relationship between consciousness and memories with the brain.

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Interrupting the electrical fields of local neuronal networks in parts of the cortex also disturbs the normal function of the brain, because by localized electrical stimulation of the temporal and parietal lobe during surgery for epilepsy the neurosurgeon and Nobel prize winner W. Penfield could sometimes induce flashes of recollection of the past (never a complete life review), experiences of light, sound or music, and rarely a kind of out-of-body experience. These experiences did not produce any transformation.(15-16) After many years of research he finally reached the conclusion that it is not possible to localize memories inside the brain. Olaf Blanke also recently described in Nature a patient with induced OBE by inhibition of cortical activity caused by more intense external electrical stimulation of the gyrus angularis in a patient with epilepsy (17).

The effect of the external magnetic or electrical stimulation is dependent of the amount of energy given. There may be no clinical effect or sometimes stimulation is seen when only a small amount of energy is given, for instance during stimulation of the motoric cortex. But during “stimulation” with higher energy inhibition of local cortical functions occurs by extinction of the electrical and magnetic fields resulting in inhibition of local neuronal networks (personal communication Blanke). Also in the patient described by Blanke in Nature stimulation with higher electric energy was given, resulting in inhibition of the function of the local neuronal networks in the gyrus angularis.

And when for instance the occipital visual cortex is stimulated by TMS, this results not in a better sight, but instead it causes temporary blindness by inhibition of this part of the cortex. We have to conclude that localized artificial stimulation with real photons (electrical or magnetic energy) disturb and also inhibit the constant changing electrical and magnetic fields of our neuronal networks, and so influence and inhibit the normal function of our brain.

In trying to understand this concept of mutual interaction between the “invisible and not measurable” consciousness, with its enormous amount of information, and our visible, material body it seems wise to compare it with modern worldwide communication.

There is a continuous exchange of objective information by means of electromagnetic fields (real photons) for radio, TV, mobile telephone, or laptop computer. We are unaware of the innumerable amounts of electromagnetic fields that constantly, day and night, exist around us and through us as well as through structures like walls and buildings. We only become aware of these electromagnetic informational fields the moment we use our mobile telephone or by switching on our radio, TV or laptop. What we receive is not inside the instrument, nor in the components, but thanks to the receiver the information from the electromagnetic fields becomes observable to our senses and hence perception occurs in our consciousness. The voice we hear in our telephone is not inside the telephone. The concert we hear in our radio is transmitted to our radio. The images and music we hear and see on TV is transmitted to our TV set. The internet is not located inside our laptop. We can receive at about the same time what is transmitted with the speed of light from a distance of some hundreds or thousands of miles. And if we switch off the TV set, the reception disappears, but the transmission continues. The information transmitted remains present within the electromagnetic fields. The connection has been interrupted, but it has not vanished and can still be received elsewhere by using another TV set. Again, we do not realize us the thousands of telephone calls, the hundreds of radio and TV transmissions, as well as the internet, coded as electromagnetic fields, that exist around us and through us.

Could our brain be compared with the TV set that electromagnetic waves (photons) receives and transforms into image and sound, as well as with the TV camera that image and sound transforms into electromagnetic waves (photons)? This electromagnetic radiation holds the essence of all information, but is only conceivable to our senses by suited instruments like camera and TV set.

The informational fields of our consciousness and of our memories, both evaluating by our experiences and by the informational imput from our sense organs during our lifetime, are present around us as electrical and/or magnetic fields [possible virtual photons? (18)], and these fields only become available to our waking consciousness through our functioning brain and other cells of our body.

So we need a functioning brain to receive our consciousness into our waking consciousness. And as soon as the function of brain has been lost, like in clinical death or in brain death, with iso-electricity on the EEG, memories and consciousness do still exist, but the reception ability is lost. People can experience their consciousness outside their body, with the possibility of perception out and above their body, with identity, and with heightened awareness, attention, well-structured thought processes, memories and emotions. And they also can experience their consciousness in a dimension where past, present and future exist at the same moment, without time and space, and can be experienced as soon as attention has been directed to it (life review and preview), and even sometimes they come in contact with the “fields of consciousness” of deceased relatives. And later they can experience their conscious return into their body.

Michael Shermer states that, in reality, all experience is mediated and produced by the brain, and that so-called paranormal phenomena like out-of body experiences are nothing more than neuronal events. The study of patients with NDE, however, clearly shows us that consciousness with memories, cognition, with emotion, self-identity, and perception out and above a life-less body is experienced during a period of a non-functioning brain (transient pancerebral anoxia).

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A Watershed Event: Neuroscience, Consciousness, and Spirituality - by Robert K. Forman

2009-10-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

Conference, July 2-4, 2008, Freiburg, Germany

This article by Robert K. Forman, of The Forge Institute, summarizes a recent and important conference on neuroscience, consciousness, and spirituality. Its purpose was "to explore methodologies of inner experience, and explore consciousness, not only from the neuroscientific point of view but from all points of view, including the transpersonal and the nondogmatic." Many presenters addressed questions that resonate with those raised by the excerpt from His Holiness the Dalai Lama's book in our prior post. For example--- in the context of quantum physics---the previous post asks if the 'apparatus' or what it detects is more real! In the future, we hope to post about some of the work described in the summary of the conference. The article was originally published by the JOURNAL OF CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES, 15, No. 8, 2008, pp. 110–15. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Frieburg (Germany) was far away from my home near New York City, and I was dreading going. I had heard by way of the grapevine that there would be a number of materialistic reductionists there; as the token religionist, I wasn’t looking forward to being bludgeoned or even worse, ignored. But there we were, happily ensconced in our pleasantly courtyarded Freiburg hotel, 30 of us, mostly men, mostly scientists, and mostly non-reductionists. And all open minded about the connections between spirituality, neurophysiology and consciousness.

I was to speak last to this ‘Meeting of Experts’. I was glad, for my planned remarks were aimed primarily at the ‘materialists’ who were not there; I would have been preaching to the choir. So going last encouraged me to listen well throughout and speak to what I was hearing. And I was glad because what I was hearing was as profound, as new, and as inspiring as it was coherent. I was indeed inspired enough to offer an summary of the surprising, exciting consensus I heard over the two days.

We humanists don’t often offer hypotheses, certainly not to august bodies of scientists. But I felt emboldened. After all, the purpose of the conference was to address the questions, ‘Can a modern day neuroscientific, functionalist or emergentist model of consciousness accommodate spiritual experiences? … What would a model of consciousness have to look like that is both true to our modern scientific knowledge and phenomena reported by spiritual traditions?’ As Harold Walach, our kindly and well organized chairman, put it, we were there to explore methodologies of inner experience, and explore consciousness, not only from the neuroscientific point of view but from all points of view, including the transpersonal and the nondogmatic. Or as youthful Antoine Lutz put it, we were there to ‘take subjectivity seriously.’ So that made me, someone who studies spiritual experiences, in as good a position to hypothesize as the next fellow.

So, being welcomed and being last, I offered the following as the emerging consensus I was hearing in the group. Since it was quite well received, I offer it here as a summary of what went on. We make no claims about universality. All positions about consciousness were not represented in the room. We were all folks who are interested in and open minded about spirituality; and God knows not everyone is. So I offer it here more modestly, as an hypothesis perhaps. Or, as clear eyed Jonathan Schooler put it, as a ‘bold thesis for us to consider’.

"Absolution of the Wind", © E. Corbato, 2009 www.ecorbato.com

1. Consciousness is fundamental element of reality, like an additional dimension.

_ Jonathan Schooler, Harold Walach and many folks in private conversations suggested that consciousness may exist in itself.

_ It is outside of time, pre-linguistic, yet somehow witness to time. Pim van Lommel, the belle of the ball, studies Near Death Experiences. He described his meticulous research which found that near death experiences (NDEs) are experienced as outside of time. Ernst Pöppel suggested that consciousness forms impressions that build towards language within a 3 second window; I offered that mystical experiences are experienced as outside of time.

_ As a fundamental element of reality, consciousness is non local or spread out. It is experienced by mystics as just that, non local or spread out. NDEs are experienced as interdeterminately beyond our human body; one experiences oneself as rising beyond the body. Brian Lancaster, in a fetching discussion of the connections between neurophysiology and Kabbalah, suggested that we can move from the personal to the divine indexing system.

_ The field of consciousness is parallel in some way to the quantum vacuum field. The theory of consciousness we were developing as an independent field out of time may connects with the quantum field in some way. Perhaps the connection is on the level of ions flowing in and out of the membranes in the brain, suggested Henry Stapp in a demanding talk on the role of physics in Quantum Collapse. There was no agreement in the room on how consciousness may connect with or parallel the quantum vacuum field.

_ Jonathan Schooler, in what was probably the most creative offering of the conference, showed a video of consciousness as like wave moving through time, and suggested that mystical experiences are like ‘riding a tidal wave of consciousness.’ From what I know of mystical experiences, however, consciousness is experienced by such people as more like a field than a wave. Both Schooler and myself suggest that consciousness is whole and undivided; that for which there is movement.

2. Consciousness is mediated by the brain, not excreted by it.

_ Throughout the conference we heard phrases suggesting that consciousness is a ‘transducer’ or like a ‘radio receiver’ or a ‘relay station’.

_ Pim suggested that the brain is a ‘conveyor not producer’. Jeffrey Schwartz, with his typically vivacious energy, exhorted ‘It ain’t in the brain, it ain’t in the brain!’

_ Matthais Braeunig, a youthful member of our hosting team, said ‘consciousness takes place with the help of the brain, but is not within it. Brains’, he added, ‘are transducing consciousness’.

_ Hartmann Romer was ill; in his presentation, his alter ego suggested that there is a ‘non local correlation between consciousness and the brain’.

_ Mario Beauregard suggested that there is no one sub organ like the thalamus that is active in the spiritual process, but rather there is a complex multi dimensional process. That’s why, suggested Antoine Lutz, that in meditation we see greater coherence across large brain areas, and high ‘amplitude gamma synchronicity’. This implies that the whole brain may be involved in some way in the transducing process.

3. Consciousness is independent of brain processes. (This stems from principle 1 & 2)

_ ‘As the field of consciousness is experienced through consciousness- transducing brains,’ said Matthais Braeunig. ‘Consciousness appears to exist independently of the brain, though it remains unobservable unless transduced by brains.’

_ Most so called anomalous experiences, often ignored or ridiculed by the scientific community, point to the possibility that consciousness is independent of the brain. Distant viewing and predictive (future) viewing, were mentioned.

_ Pim’s research on Near Death Experiences, which are sometimes veridical, clearly suggests that people can have experiences even when there is effectively no brain activity.

_ Thomas Metzinger described his creative studies on Out of Body Experiences (OBEs); they suggest that human beings can have experiences beyond the body.

_ Mystical experiences sometimes carry the sense of being non local or spread out beyond the body. There is brain activity during them, as Mario Beauregard effectively described, but this sense may reinforce the claim that awareness is not limited to our bodies. As Walach suggested, mystics can be aware of themselves and of the infinite, even simultaneously, which reinforces the hypothesis that consciousness is not limited to brain or egoic processes.

4. Our ability to connect with that which is larger may be a normal state of human beings.

_ In one of the most stimulating talks of the gathering, Matt Rossano took us back to the earliest days of hominid life, when Shamans brought people to health by having them focus their attention around the fire. In effect, he said, our ability to connect with that which is larger may have been one of the distinguishing capacities of human beings, as on of the original capacities that gave early human beings an advantage over other species.

_ Over time this ability to focus on that which is beyond led to our ability to hyper-focus.

_ In this hyper focus, we lost sense of the whole as we developed more and more automatized and culturally trained cognitive patterns. Thus enculturation may have overwhelmed our early ability to open to what is larger.

_ Thus as Arthur Deikman points out elsewhere, meditation may serve as a de automatization process, making it a way to recover that which is more fundamentally ours. Metzinger said effectively the same thing when saying that the ‘first step is to let go of all worldviews,’ helping us recover our lost sense of a connection to something larger. Or, as Kabbalah says, according to Brian Lancaster, we should ‘untie the knots from the self, step out of the structure we’ve created.’

Astonishingly enough, I found myself thinking, even surrounded by those hard headed scientists, in religious terms. Brahman, the non dual, panentheistic principle that is one core notion of Hinduism, is said to exist independently of the cosmos and of the person. Like our theory of consciousness, it is its own kind of stuff, a kind of dimension all its own. But, like consciousness, it forms itself into form, and comes to be ‘formed Brahman,’ much as consciousness comes to be formed as an individual. Thus formless Brahman, like the consciousness in this hypothesis, exists simultaneously and hidden within its formed aspect. The ‘formless within form.’ Finally our consciousness, which Hinduism calls Atman, can come to experience its true nature as Brahman; much as one might experience the independent domain of consciousness in certain anomalous experiences.

As I said, our emerging hypothesis was well received. We knew, and spoke of, the many, many questions that it opens up. Some that we named were:

- How might the body transduce consciousness?

- Can consciousness exist verifiably outside of brain/person? If so in what sense?

- Might there be any way to measure consciousness outside the brain? We jokingly asked if there might be a ‘consciousness o- meter?’

- Where does the domain of consciousness come from?

There are countless more.

Yet the feeling in the final go round was, I felt, one of sincere satisfaction. We had found a community, many said, always a gratifying sense. We had heard a cascade of excellent talks. One said ‘I did not have a single moment of boredom.’ But even more important, several mentioned that we seemed to be part of a larger movement that may lead to a paradigm shift, one which may lead to a new and fascinating approach to science and our larger worldview. We were encountering the possibility of a science that might take seriously the full range of experiences and in a non-dualistic way.

Jeffrey Schwartz captured the moment’s seriousness and importance that I think we all felt. ‘The implications here are enormous; they are political as well as scientific. And they are important. So as Franklin said when the founding fathers signed the declaration of independence on this day 232 years ago, “Gentlemen, we must all hang together or we will surely hang separately.”’

Whether or not that group turns out to be that important, the gathering was for many of us the first in which a group articulated a fascinating, bold and possibly true new approach that could tie together East and West, spirituality and science, brain and inner experience and could begin to account for anomalous experiences. I was honoured to be part of it.

Emptiness, Relativity, and Quantum Physics - by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

2009-05-21T18:35:00.000-07:00

His Holiness the Dalai Lama provides a somewhat different perspective on the relationship of Buddhism and science than Dr. Donald Lopez, whose book was the subject of our last post. This excerpt is from the chapter "Emptiness, Relativity, and Quantum Physics" (page 64-69) from His Holiness’ book, THE UNIVERSE IN A SINGLE ATOM: THE CONVERGENCE OF SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY. The Buddhist concept of dependent origination posits that all entities are “empty”---or lack independent existence at the deepest level---yet our usual, practical understanding of reality also has its place. He suggests that the “two truths” view developed by ancient Buddhist philosophers can serve as a possible model for the duality suggested by contemporary physics. Quantum mechanics points to a “profound interconnectedness at the heart of physics,” nonetheless objects have individual existence at the macroscopic level. The excerpt is reprinted with permission of the office of His Holiness.

In brief, the principle of dependent origination can be understood in the following three ways. First, all conditioned things and events in the world come into being only as a result of the interaction of causes and conditions. They don't just arise from nowhere, fully formed. Second, there is mutual dependence between parts and the whole; without parts there can be no whole, without a whole it makes no sense to speak of parts. This interdependence of parts and the whole applies in both spatial and temporal terms. Third, anything that exists and has an identity does so only within the total network of everything that has a possible or potential relation to it. No phenomenon exists with an independent or intrinsic identity.

And the world is made up of a network of complex interrelations. We cannot speak of the reality of a discrete entity outside the context of its range of interrelations with its environment and other phenomena, including language, concepts, and other conventions. Thus, there are no subjects without the objects by which they are defined, there are no objects without subjects to apprehend them, there are no doers without things done. There is no chair without legs, a seat, a back, wood, nails, the floor on which it rests, the walls that define the room it's in, the people who constructed it, and the individuals who agree to call it a chair and recognize it as something to sit on. Not only is the existence of things and events utterly contingent but, according to this principle, their very identities are thoroughly dependent upon others.

In physics, the deeply interdependent nature of reality has been brought into sharp focus by the so-called EPR paradox - named after its creators, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen - which was originally formulated to challenge quantum mechanics. Say a pair of particles is created and then separates, moving away from each other in opposite directions - perhaps to greatly distant locations, for example, Dharamsala, where I live, and say, New York. One of the properties of this pair of particles is that their spin must be in opposite directions-so that one is measured as "up" and the other will be found to be "down." According to quantum mechanics, the correlation of measurements (for example, when one is up, then the other is down) must exist even though the individual attributes are not determined until the experimenters measure one of the particles, let us say in New York. At that point, the one in New York will acquire a value-let us say up-in which case the other particle must simultaneously become down. These determinations of up and down are instantaneous, even for the particle at Dharamsala, which has not itself been measured. Despite their separation, the two particles appear as an entangled entity. There seems, according to quantum mechanics, to be a startling and profound interconnectedness at the heart of physics.

Indra's Jeweled Net- Credit: Gail Atkins

Once at a public talk in Germany, I drew attention to the growing trend among serious scientists of taking the insights of the world's contemplative traditions into account. I spoke about the meeting ground between my own Buddhist tradition and modern science-especially in the Buddhist arguments for the relativity of time and for rejecting any notion of essentialism. Then I noticed von Weizsacker in the audience, and when I described my debt to him for what little understanding of quantum physics I possess, he graciously commented that if his own teacher Werner Heisenberg had been present, he would have been excited to hear of the clear, resonant parallels between Buddhist philosophy and his scientific insights.

Another significant set of issues in quantum mechanics concerns the question of measurement. I gather that, in fact, there is an entire area of research dedicated to this matter. Many scientists say that the act of measurement causes the "collapse" of either the wave or the particle function, depending upon the system of measurement used in the experiment; only upon measurement does the potential become actual. Yet we live in a world of everyday objects. So the question is, How, from the point of view of physics, do we reconcile our commonsense notions of an everyday world of objects and their properties on the one hand and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics on the other? Can these two perspectives be reconciled at all? Are we condemned to live with what is apparently a schizophrenic view of the world?

At a two-day retreat on the epistemological issues pertaining to the foundations of quantum mechanics and Buddhist Middle Way philosophy at Innsbruck, where Anton Zeilinger, Arthur Zajonc, and I met for a dialogue, Anton told me that a well-known colleague of his once remarked that most quantum physicists relate to their field in a schizophrenic manner. When they are in the laboratory and play around with things, they are realists. They talk about photons and electrons going here and there. However, the moment you switch into philosophical discussion and ask them about the foundation of quantum mechanics, most would say that nothing really exists without the apparatus defining it.

Somewhat parallel problems arose in Buddhist philosophy in relation to the disparity between our commonsense view of the world and the perspective suggested by Nagarjuna's philosophy of emptiness. Nagarjuna invoked the notion of two truths, the "conventional" and the "ultimate," relating respectively to the everyday world of experience and to things and events in their ultimate mode of being, that is, on the level of emptiness. On the conventional level, we can speak of a pluralistic world of things and events with distinct identities and causation. This is the realm where we can also expect the laws of cause and effect, and the laws of logic such as the principles of identity, contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle-to operate without violation. This world of empirical experience is not an illusion, nor is it unreal. It is real in that we experience it. A grain of barley does produce a barley sprout, which can eventually yield a barley crop. Taking a poison can cause one's death and, similarly, taking a medication can cure an illness. However, from the perspective of the ultimate truth, things and events do not possess discrete, independent realities. Their ultimate ontological status is "empty" in that nothing possesses any kind of essence or intrinsic being.

I can envision something similar to this principle of two truths applying in physics. For instance, we can say that the Newtonian model is an excellent one for the commonsense world as we know it, while Einsteinian relativity-based on radically different presuppositions-represents in addition an excellent model for a different or more inclusive domain. The Einsteinian model describes aspects of reality for which the states of relative motion are crucial but does not really affect our commonsense picture under most circumstances. Likewise, the quantum physics models of reality represent the workings of a different domain-the mostly "inferred" reality of particles, especially in the arena of the microscopic. Each of these pictures is excellent in its own right and for the purposes for which it was designed, but if we believe any of these models to be constituted by intrinsically real things, we are bound to be disappointed.

Here I find it helpful to reflect on a critical distinction drawn by Chandrakirti (seventh century C.E.) in relation to the domains of discourse that pertain to the conventional and the ultimate truths of things. Chandrakirti argues that, when formulating one's understanding of reality, one must be sensitive to the scope and parameters of the specific mode of inquiry. For example, he argues that to reject distinct identity, causation, and origination within the everyday world, as some interpreters of the philosophy of emptiness had suggested, simply because these notions are untenable from the perspective of ultimate reality, constitutes a methodological error.

On a conventional level, we see cause and effect all the time. When we're trying to find who's at fault in an accident, we are not delving into the deeper nature of reality, where an infinite chain of events would make it impossible to place blame. When we accord such characteristics as cause and effect to the empirical world, we are not working on the basis of a metaphysical analysis that probes the ultimate ontological status of things and their properties. We do so within the boundaries of everyday convention, language, and logic. In contrast, Chandrakirti argues, the metaphysical postulates of philosophical schools, such as the concept of the Creator or the eternal soul, can be negated through the analysis of their ultimate ontological status. This is because these entities are posited on the basis of an exploration into the ultimate mode of being of things.

In essence, Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti are suggesting this: when we relate to the empirical world of experience, so long as we do not invest things with independent, intrinsic existence, notions of causation, identity, and difference, and the principles of logic will continue to remain tenable. However, their validity is limited to the relative framework of conventional truth. Seeking to ground notions such as identity, existence, and causation in an objective, independent existence is transgressing the bounds of logic, language, and convention. We do not need to postulate the objective, independent existence of things, since we can accord robust, nonarbitrary reality to things and events that not only support everyday functions but also provide a firm basis for ethics and spiritual activity. The world, according to the philosophy of emptiness, is constituted by a web of dependently originating and interconnected realities, within which dependently originated causes give rise to dependently originated consequences according to dependently originating laws of causality. What we do and think in our own lives, then, becomes of extreme importance as it affects everything we're connected to.

The paradoxical nature of reality revealed in both the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness and modern physics represents a profound challenge to the limits of human knowledge. The essence of the problem is epistemological: How do we conceptualize and understand reality coherently? Not only have Buddhist philosophers of emptiness developed an entire understanding of the world based on the rejection of the deeply ingrained temptation to treat reality as if it were composed of intrinsically real objective entities but they have also striven to live these insights in their day-to-day lives. The Buddhist solution to this seeming epistemological contradiction involves understanding reality in terms of the theory of two truths. Physics needs to develop an epistemology that will help resolve the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the picture of reality in classical physics and everyday experience and that in their quantum mechanics counterpart. As for what an application of the two truths in physics might look like, I simply have no idea. At its root, the philosophical problem confronting physics in the wake of quantum mechanics is whether the very notion of reality-defined in terms of essentially real constituents of matter- is tenable. What the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness can offer is a coherent model of understanding reality that is non-essentialist. Whether this could prove useful only time will tell.

Preface of Buddhism and Science - by Donald Lopez

2009-02-04T13:07:00.000-08:00

In BUDDHISM AND SCIENCE: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED, Dr. Donald Lopez critically considers the compatibility of Buddhism and Science. He takes a step back from the generally taken for granted notion that they mesh almost seamlessly---something of which we are also guilty! Lopez writes, “This book surveys the long history of the discourse of Buddhism and Science in an effort to understand why we yearn for the teachings of an itinerant mendicant in Iron Age India, even one of such profound insight, to somehow anticipate the formulae of Einstein.” Dr. Lopez is a Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan.The passage below was excerpted from BUDDHISM AND SCIENCE, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2008 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

In the winter of 1870—71, Ernst Johann Eitel (1838—1908), a member of the London Missionary Society~ delivered a series of lectures on Buddhism at the Union Church in Hong Kong. Eitel was one of the great missionary-scholars of the Victorian period, an accomplished sinologist who also read Sanskrit. His ultimate goal was to demonstrate the falsity of Buddhism. Yet in his third lecture, he enumerated some of the ways in which Buddhism had anticipated science:

Though no Buddhist ever attained to the clearer insight and mathematical analysis of a Copernicus, Newton, Laplace or Herschel, it must be acknowledged that Buddhism fore-stalled in several instances the most splendid discoveries of modern astronomy. Teaching the origin of each world to have taken place out of a cloud, the Buddhists anticipated 2ooo years ago Herschel’s nebular hypothesis. And when those very patches of cloudy light or diffused nebulosities which Herschel believed to be “diffused matter hastening to a world birth” dissolved themselves before the monster telescope of Lord Rosse into as many assemblages of suns, into thousands of other world-systems dispersed through the wilds of boundless space, modern astronomy was but verifying the more ancient Buddhistic dogma of a plurality of worlds, of the co-existence of thousands of chiliocosmoi inhabited by multitudes of living beings.

Eitel invokes five great names in the history of astronomy: Nicolas Copernicus (1473—1543), whose On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium) presented the heliocentric theory of the universe; Sir Isaac Newton (1643—1727), who invented the refracting telescope and explained the role of gravity in planetary motion; Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749—1827), who developed mathematical methods for calculating and predicting the motion of the planets; William Herschel (1738—1822), discoverer of Uranus and cataloger of nebulae; and William Parsons, third Earl of Rosse (1800—1867), who in 1844 built the “Leviathan of Parsonstown,” the world’s largest telescope. Each of these figures would have been well known to Eitel’s expatriate audience in the Hong Kong church.

Laplace and Herschel were associated with the nebular hypothesis, a theory previously propounded by both Emanuel Swedenborg and Immanuel Kant, which postulated that a solar system originated from a mass of incandescent gas—for Herschel it was a shining fluid that he called “true nebulosity”—rotating on an axis, eventually contracting into a mass. The outer rings of this mass broke off to form planets, with the central core becoming their sun. One of the great debates in astronomy in the nineteenth century was whether this incandescent fluid indeed existed or whether it was instead a mass of distant stars. In early 1846, Rosse and his monster telescope showed that the Orion Nebula could in fact be resolved into stars.

These were some of the latest scientific discoveries of Eitel’s day. And he claims that they have been “forestalled” (by which he means “anticipated”) two thousand years ago by the Buddhists. Eitel is referring to a Buddhist account of the origin of the world. Faint winds, impelled by the force of karma, begin to blow in the vacuity of space, eventually converging to form a circle of wind, described as solid and indestructible. A thick cloud forms above the circle of wind, raining down drops of water of various sizes that together become a great ocean, supported on the circle of wind. In this ocean, a thousand golden lotus flowers appear. The churning of the ocean eventually gives rise to a ring of mountains that contains the waters. In the center of the ocean, a great mountain appears, with an island (flanked by two smaller islands) in each of the four cardinal directions. This is a world, and a thousand of these worlds is a Buddhist universe, what Eitel calls a “thousand world” or chiliocosm.

Eitel sees in the Buddhist rain cloud an anticipation of Herschel’s nebulae, and in the Buddhist “thousand world” an anticipation of galaxies, anticipated without the assistance of Rosse’s giant lens.These worlds were inhabited by “multitudes of living beings.” Eitel, in keeping with the views of many astronomers of his day, believed that the planets were populated. Indeed, late in life, Herschel had published a paper arguing that the sun was inhabited, with two layers of dense clouds protecting the inhabitants from the intense light of the luminous shell observed from earth; sunspots may be the peaks of tall mountains rising through the shell.

We see, then, a Christian missionary, almost a century and half ago, making grudging claims for the compatibility of Buddhism and Science. Over the ensuing decades, such claims have continued to be made with a remarkable persistence. This book is a study of that persistence.

Its central claim is a modest one. It is that in order to understand the conjunction of the terms Buddhism and Science, it is necessary to understand something of the history of the conjunction. It might be dated back to the sixteenth century, when Saint Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary to Japan, noted that the Buddhists do not understand that the world is round. It might be traced back to the Reverend Dr. Eitel’s lectures from his Hong Kong pulpit. Or it might be traced to the year 1873, when the Wesleyan minister David da Silva in Sri Lanka held up a globe during a debate with a Buddhist monk and asked him to locate Mount Meru, the cosmic peak that rose from the waters to form the center of the Buddhist world. That these events occurred in the course of Christian missions to Buddhist Asia suggests that Buddhist claims about Science originated in polemic, with Buddhists arguing that their religion is not superstition but science. Yet such claims have persisted after the opponent in that polemic has disappeared, or has at least become less visible. And the claims of compatibility have not always originated among Asian Buddhists. The discourse of Buddhism and Science has been transmitted through networks that crisscross the nebulous boundaries of East and West. Asian Buddhists have argued for the compatibility in order to validate their Buddhism. European and American enthusiasts and devotees have argued for the compatibility in order to exoticize Science, to find it validated in the insights of an ancient Asian sage.

A second assertion of this book is that for more than 150 years, the claims for the compatibility of Buddhism and Science have remained remarkably similar, both in their content and in their rhetorical form. This similarity has persisted despite major shifts in what is meant by Buddhism and what is meant by Science. In the early decades of this history, Buddhism generally referred to what European scholars dubbed “original Buddhism,” the Buddhism of the Pali canon, preserved in the Theravada traditions of Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. In the period after the Second World War, although the Theravada continued to be regarded as “Buddhism” in some quarters, Zen came to the fore. And since the 1990s, Tibetan Buddhism has displaced Zen to become the chief referent of Buddhism in the Buddhism and Science dialogue, largely through the influence of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Still, over the course of almost a century and a half, the Buddha is said to have somehow anticipated the most up-to-date view of modern science as thousands of pages of the calendar have been turned.

The referent of Science is also nebulous. At times, science has meant a method of sober and rational investigation, with the claim that the Buddha made use of such a method to arrive at the knowledge of deep truths about inner and outer worlds. At other times, science refers to a specific theory: the mechanistic universe, the theory of evolution, the theory of relativity, the big bang, whose antecedents are to be found in Buddhist doctrine. At other times, science has referred to a specific technology— the microscope, the telescope, the spectrometer—that has been used to discover what the Buddha knew without the aid of such instruments; as more precise instruments have been developed over the past century, the claims of the Buddha’s knowledge have remained constant. And at still other times, science has referred to the manipulation of matter, with dire consequences for humanity unless paired with the compassionate vision of the Buddha.

From the traditional perspective, the Buddhist truth is timeless; the Buddha understood the nature of reality fully at the moment of his enlightenment, and nothing beyond that reality has been discovered since. From this perspective, then, the purpose of all Buddhist doctrine and practice that have developed over the two and a half millennia is to make manifest the content of the Buddha’s enlightenment. From the historical perspective, the content of the Buddha’s enlightenment is irretrievable, and what is called Buddhism has developed in myriad forms across centuries and continents, with these forms linked by their retrospective gaze to the solitary sage seated beneath a tree. From either perspective, in order to make this “Buddhism” compatible with “Science,” Buddhism must be severely restricted, eliminating much of what has been deemed essential, whatever that might be, to the exalted monks and ordinary laypeople who have gone for refuge to the Buddha over the course of more than two thousand years.

If something is lost, what is gained? This book surveys the long history of the discourse of Buddhism and Science in an effort to understand why we yearn for the teachings of an itinerant mendicant in Iron Age

India

, even one of such profound insight, to somehow anticipate the formulae of Einstein.

Study Suggests Attending Religious Services Sharply Cuts Risk of Death - Albert Einstein College of Medicine

2008-12-11T23:39:00.000-08:00

The following post provides a different slant on the interaction between science and spirituality/religion (see press release). Researchers Eliezer Schnall, Ph.D. and Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, Ph.D. at Yeshiva University and the affiliated Albert Einstein College of Medicine have found that women who attend religious services have 20% longer lifespans than those who do not. This research was a part of the Women's Health Initiative. The article was published in the journal PSYCHOLOGY AND HEALTH (p. 1-15 in the November, 2008 issue). A link to the full journal article can be accessed here, free until December 18, 2008. Although neither of us attends religious services on a regular basis, we found this of interest.

A study published by researchers at Yeshiva University and its medical school, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, strongly suggests that regular attendance at religious services reduces the risk of death by approximately 20 percent. The findings, published in Psychology and Health, were based on data drawn from participants who spanned numerous religious denominations.

The research was conducted by Eliezer Schnall, Ph.D., clinical assistant professor of psychology at Yeshiva College of Yeshiva University, and co-authored by Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology and population health at Einstein, as an ancillary study of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI). The WHI is a national, long-term study aimed at addressing women's health issues and funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers evaluated the religious practices of 92,395 post-menopausal women participating in the WHI. They examined the prospective association of religious affiliation, religious service attendance, and strength and comfort derived from religion with subsequent cardiovascular events and overall rates of mortality. Although the study showed as much as a 20 percent decrease in the overall risk of mortality for those attending religious services, it did not show any consistent change in rates of morbidity and death specifically related to cardiovascular disease, with no explanation readily evident.

The study adjusted for participation of individuals within communal organizations and group activities that promote a strong social life and enjoyable routines, behaviors known to lead to overall wellness. However, even after controlling for such behavior and other health-related factors, the improvements in morbidity and mortality rates exceeded expectations.

"Interestingly, the protection against mortality provided by religion cannot be entirely explained by expected factors that include enhanced social support of friends or family, lifestyle choices and reduced smoking and alcohol consumption," said Dr. Schnall, who was lead author of the study. "There is something here that we don't quite understand. It is always possible that some unknown or unmeasured factors confounded these results," he added.

During WHI enrollment, study participants, aged 50 to79, were recruited on a voluntary basis from a variety of sources, from all over the nation. The women answered questions about baseline health conditions and religiosity and were followed by WHI researchers for an average of 7.7 years, with potential study outcomes of cardiovascular events and mortality adjudicated by trained physicians.

To evaluate the impact of religiosity on mortality and morbidity, the investigators looked at variables including self-report of religious affiliation, frequency of religious service attendance, and religious strength as well as comfort, in relation to coronary heart disease (CHD) and death. It is important to note that the study did not attempt to measure spirituality; rather, it examined self-report religiosity measures (irrespective of the participant's religion). Participants answered three key questions at registration, regarding:

-- religious affiliation (yes or no);
-- how often services were attended (never, less than once per week, once per week, or more than once per week);
-- if religion provided strength and comfort (none, a little, a great deal).

Those attending religious services at least once per week showed a 20 percent mortality risk reduction mark compared with those not attending services at all. These findings corroborate prior studies that have shown up to a 25 percent reduction in such risk.

The study investigators concluded that although religious behavior (as defined by the study's criteria) is associated with a reduction in death rates among the study population, the physical relationships leading to that effect are not yet understood and require further investigation. "The next step is to figure out how the effect of religiosity is translated into biological mechanisms that affect rates of survival," said Dr. Smoller. "However, we do not infer causation even from a prospective study, as that can only be done through a clinical trial.

She added, "There may be confounding factors that we can't determine, such as a selection bias, which would lead people who are at reduced risk for an impending event to also be the ones who attend services."

The investigators are considering doing an analysis of psychological profiles of women in the study to determine if such profiles can help to explain the apparent protective effects of attending religious services.

In the Beginning, 13.73 Billion Years Ago - by Howard Smith

2008-04-28T18:17:00.000-07:00

The following piece by Howard Smith hits a more mystical note than many of our recent posts. Like big bang theorists, it points out, the kabbalists, “…weave an intricate account of the universe created from [an] infinitesimal speck, describing how it expanded and evolved with light and substance into our world.” The article was originally featured in THE FORWARD, a weekly Jewish newspaper, on October 13, 2006. Dr. Smith is an active member of the Boston Jewish community. He is a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and was the chairman of the astronomy department at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. His recent book is LET THERE BE LIGHT: MODERN COSMOLOGY AND KABBALAH, A NEW CONVERSATION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION (New World Library) — http://www.lettherebelightbook.com/. Several of his other recent articles on the topic of science and religion can be found in the Excerpts section of the site.

"B'Resheit" - Hebrew for "in the beginning."

from The Hebrew Bible published by the Society of Jewish Bibliophiles in Germany, the Soncino Gesellschaft, 1933. http://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/guide/hs-intro.html

Since the start of the Hebrew month of Elul in late August, Jews have been examining the year past in search of lessons to apply to the year ahead. Now, as the holiday season winds to a close, the weekly cycle of Torah readings offers another opportunity to examine the past as we return to the study of the very beginning: Genesis and the story of creation. This year, modern science has something new to add.

The medieval commentator Rashi famously asks why the Torah, nominally a book of laws, begins with a seemingly incidental cosmology narrative. He answers, citing a midrash, that the account is included to demonstrate to all the nations that God created the Earth, and that the land of Israel can therefore be given to whomever God chooses. Land belongs not to people, but to the Lord.

Some 500 years after Rashi, the kabbalists of Safed developed their own perspective on the lessons of the Torah’s cosmology. They built on a different midrash on Genesis, one formulated by the first-century rabbi Yonah and cited in the “Beresheit Rabbah.”

Yonah asks, in the name of his teacher, why the Torah begins with the letter Bet — בּ}}. His answer is that this letter is shaped like a bracket — ] — closed behind, above and beneath, so that “we have no permission to discuss what is above or below, in front or in back, only onwards from the moment of creation.”

The first mark in scripture then, after that signifying bracket, is the tiny dot inside the Bet that hardens its sound from “v” to “b.” This dot signifies the primal point of creation, the embryonic universe, what the kabbalists called the “Resheit.” “Beyond this point,” says the Zohar, “nothing is known, and so it is called the Resheit, the first word of all.” The Torah’s literal opening statement is thus, “With the Resheit God created the heavens and the Earth.”

Triangulum Galaxy

the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, N. Caldwell and B. McLeod.
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2006/pr200619.html

The kabbalists weave an intricate account of the universe created from this infinitesimal speck, describing how it expanded and evolved with light and substance into our world. Like Rashi, the kabbalists derive a lesson from their cosmology: Humanity has a role in this drama. They explain that the work of creation has not been completed.

Tikkun olam is humanity’s task — to heal the breaches and injustices of our society, imperfections that were embedded in the very fabric of the newly formed cosmos. The import of these lessons remains as appropriate today as ever, as we educe new interpretations from these old teachings.

There are also new teachings in the cosmological story, and some other lessons to derive as well. This has been another remarkable year for astronomers investigating how the universe was actually created — yes, today we know how the creation really did proceed. Readers may perhaps recall the essence of those ideas; they are expressed in the big bang model.

About 13 billion years ago, the universe as we know it exploded from an infinitesimally small point, much smaller than even an atomic nucleus, in a creative event dubbed “the big bang.” The universe has been expanding from this point and evolving ever since, with its current dimension being approximately 46 billion light-years. The foundations for the big bang description were laid by decades of mathematical thinking and meticulous studies that culminated with Edwin Hubble’s unexpected 1929 observation: Other galaxies are moving away from us with velocities that indicate a systematic recession, but yet, in accord with Albert Einstein’s then recent theory of relativity, the Earth has no privileged position. Hubble’s results shocked people who only a few years earlier thought that our galaxy was the entire universe and that — as Einstein, too, had originally thought — the universe was static and eternal.

Hubble’s data made use of 46 nearby galaxies. This past year, several different teams of astronomers reported progress on their programs to measure the recession velocities of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. Their results — with evidence from galaxies hundreds of times farther away than Hubble’s sample — support Hubble’s conclusion that the universe is systematically expanding.

There was other news as well. The newborn universe was tiny and fantastically hot, and its light was scattered by the plasma of electrons like headlights in a fog. Three hundred and eighty thousand years after the big bang, once the universe had cooled down enough for neutral atoms to assemble, light was finally able to travel through space unimpeded. That light is seen today as the so-called “cosmic microwave background radiation,” and it permeates all of space. It is faint — but it is everywhere.

The cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered in the 1960s, and like the recession of galaxies, it has become one of the essential diagnostic features used to investigate the details of exactly what happened in the beginning. In 1989, NASA launched a small satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer, to measure this radiation more precisely. Just last month, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two astronomers who, with their teams, designed the explorer. NASA now has a newer cosmology satellite in orbit, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. Last month this satellite team announced the results of the first three years of nonstop surveying of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The universe, the probe satellite team reports, is 13.73 billion years old, with a formal statistical uncertainty in that number of only about 1%, or about 150 million years — less time than it took for the dinosaurs to come and go. (The team also measured another half-dozen fundamental properties of the universe with similar precision.) Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and the various galaxy studies have bolstered our confidence in our understanding of the early universe, and solidified ideas that would have seemed completely ludicrous a century ago — ludicrous to scientists, that is, though not to kabbalists.

The same remarkable astronomical research, however, has simultaneously uncovered stunning new mysteries. The universe is not simply expanding, it appears to be accelerating outward into endless oblivion. Astronomers can account for only a paltry 10% of cosmic matter as being in known forms like planets, stars, galaxies or gaseous nebulae. The other 90% of substance is “dark matter,” almost certainly some kind of unknown material.

Einstein’s hoped-for theory to unite gravity and the other three forces of nature remains unrealized. The rigor with which the cosmic age has been determined only lends credence to the profundity of these three mysteries and other ones still remaining.

Like the cosmology of Rashi and the Safed kabbalists, modern cosmology also lends itself to a message and a lesson. The message is that our basic concepts about the universe are well-founded: The universe is not eternal and static; it was born, has evolved and is expanding. Yes, there are deep puzzles remaining, but we have increasing confidence in the scientific methods needed to resolve them.

The lesson comes when applying these realizations to the current political debates that have regrettably presented science and religion as antagonists — evolution, intelligent design, stem-cell research and human behaviors, to name a few. In the case of astronomy, and more generally as well, both science and religion are speaking to the same mysteries. In the arena of cosmology they offer perspectives that, though different, are consonant, not contradictory — as I hope the example of the Kabbalah illustrates.

Science and religion should therefore be partners, not adversaries, in the effort to fashion sensible and fair political solutions. In this coming year of 5767 we owe it to ourselves to be more tolerant of divergent opinions, to abandon defensive and bitter rhetoric in favor of open inquiry and respectful listening, and to become better informed about the marvelous nature of the world which, as per Genesis 1, was created with language, and judged to be “very good.”

Terrence Deacon's "Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel's Hub" - summary by Lois Isenman

2008-01-09T09:10:00.000-08:00

Terrence Deacon’s article, “Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub,” helps bring some clarity to the compelling but poorly defined concept of emergence, which is often used to describe the spontaneous production of order. Deacon describes three hierarchical levels of emergence, and in so doing he provides important scientific context for the Eastern concept of co-dependent arising.The article echoes the previous piece by physicist Paul Davies, which places the origin of the laws of nature within the universe itself.

“Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub” appears in THE RE-EMERGENCE OF EMERGENCE: THE EMERGENTIST HYPOTHESIS FROM SCIENCE TO RELIGION, a book edited by Philip Clayton (see The Emergence of Spirit) and Paul Davies (Taking Science on Faith). Terrence Deacon is a professor of Biological Anthropology and Linguistics at UC Berkeley and is also the author of THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES: CO-EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN.

Causality used to be a much more complex issue than it is today. Aristotle recognized four distinct kinds of causes—material, efficient, formal, and final. Deacon writes, “If we use the example of carpentry, material cause is what determines the structural stability of a house, efficient cause is the carpenter’s modification of materials to create the structure, formal cause is the plan followed in this construction process, and final cause is the aim of the process, that is, producing a space protected from the elements. A final cause is that 'for the sake of which' something is done.”

This rich panoply of causes has been reduced to only one, efficient cause, in our scientific age. Renaissance thinkers such as Descartes and Spinoza took particular offense at the notion of final cause.Deacon says, “As exemplified by the early explanations of the power of vacuums and buoyancy, only 'pushes' [not pulls] seemed allowable as determinants of the efficacy and direction of physical changes."

In contrast, the concept of final causality, or purpose, suggests that ends come first and determine means. This gives the impression that time is running backwards, as does the spontaneous production of order that characterizes many natural processes. By exploring various levels of the spontaneous emergence of order, Deacon aims to recontextualize our sense of final causality, especially as it relates to the evolution of life and to mind.He asks, “Is there someway to identify a real and substantial sense of the 'pull' of future possibilities in terms of 'pushes' from the past?" Such a perspective allows the future, which is an absence from the point of view of the present, to become pregnant with possibility and thus to cause. He quotes from the Tao Te Ching:

“Thirty spokes converged at the wheel's hub to an empty space that makes it useful. Clay is shaped into a vessel, to take advantage of the emptiness it surrounds.Doors and windows are cut into walls of a room so that it can serve some function. Though we must work with what is there, use comes from what is not there.”

Deacon elaborates, "Here we are confronted with a different sense of causality, in the form of an 'affordance': a specifically constrained range of possibilities, a potential that is created by virtue of something missing." Deacon uses this notion of absence, of something being shaped by what is missing, to help unify three different progressively more complex levels of emergence. He calls them non-recurrent, simple recurrent and hyper recurrent, or alternatively, first, second, and third order emergence, or thermodynamic, morphodynamic and teleodynamic emergence.

He defines emergence as "unprecedented global regularity generated within a composite system by virtue of higher-order consequences of the interaction of composite parts." Certain non-canceling regularities of relationship of lower-level constituents reinforce and amplify each other at higher levels. “…[H]igher order properties then can be created that effectively 'drag along' component constituent dynamics, even though these higher order regularities are constituted by lower-order interactions....By means of these circles, nature tangles its causal chains into complex knots in such a way that the global effects can come to resemble a reversal of time.”

With first order, or thermodynamic emergence, higher-order properties emerge from aggregates, for example liquid phenomena—such as surface tension and laminar or turbulent flow—characteristic of water molecules. Numbers matter to emergent properties, in contrast to other molecular properties, such as atomic composition and mass, which are invariant across scale.A single water molecule is not a liquid; liquid properties are due to the relationships between molecules. In repeated interactions, the characteristics of individual water molecules, for example their charge or internal vibration, distribute so as to cancel each other.This leaves only relational properties, or how molecules fit together, which are non-canceling, to characterize the aggregate. Liquid properties are new properties that emerge from the aggregate, even though they can be described in reductive terms.

Many different types of molecules can amass into liquids. There are "... many possible ways that different micro-details of structure and interaction can converge to produce the same higher-order properties. A given higher-order liquid property 'supervenes' on specific lower-order interactions to the extent that the former always entails the latter, but the vast iterative dynamics of these interactions also has a variety-canceling effect that converges to similar results across a wide range of substrates and modes of interaction."

In thermodynamic emergence, the uniformity of the higher order properties leaves no way for biases—or non-canceling regularities—to reinforce complementary biases at lower levels. In contrast in self-organizing, or morphodynamic systems, “…interaction dynamics at lower levels becomes strongly affected by regularities emerging at higher levels of organization.” Thermodynamic emergence becomes unstable; with continuing perturbations, these biases at higher levels can come to overwhelm cancellation. In Bernard cells, for example, water of uniform depth heated from below, under certain conditions, forms regular hexagonal cells of rising hot and falling cool liquid. This bias or higher-level regularity comes about because various other “unstable patterns of convection cancel each other out.” Regular hexagonal cells allow for the most efficient dissipation of heat.

Figure 5.2 from original article: reprinted with permission

Benard cell dynamics. Left: A tracing of a photo of Benard cells forming in a heated dish, showing their approximate hexagonal symmetry (though distorted by the constraints of the circular edge of the dish). Right: A diagram of the convection current pattern for a single Benard cell in stable dynamical configuration.

Snow crystal growth also reflects a self organizing system. Instability here comes about by the continuous addition of similar units. Three factors converge: 1) the hexagonal micro-structural lattice derived from the symmetry of the water molecule, 2) the radial symmetry of heat dissipation, and 3) the complex history of the changing temperature, pressure, and humidity of the developing crystal, as new units are added, as well as the subsequent history of the aggregate.Each prior stage of growth biases the subsequent ones, what Deacon frames as 'compound interest.'

In contrast to a snow crystal’s growth, in which all units added are similar, in autocatalytic reactions different types of molecules interact with each other. In a chemical soup, sometimes one molecule can catalyze another and so on until a closed loop forms. As long as sufficient energy and raw material are available, such an autocatalytic set can strongly influence how the soup is constituted. The potential interaction of the different specific molecules with each other as well as the potential relational properties of the whole have a strong influence on the organization that develops. Cellular metabolism is constituted around many autocatalytic cycles. Together, they "constitute a system dynamics that is 'autopoietic' (literally, 'self-making').”

In each of these examples of second-order emergent phenomena, "we find a tangled hierarchy of causality, where micro-configurational particularities can be amplified to determine macro-configurational regularities and where these in turn further constrain and/or amplify subsequent micro-configurational regularities. … As material and energy flows in, through and out again, form also re-circulates and becomes amplified. In one sense this form is nothing more than a set of restrictions upon and biases towards possible future material and energetic events; in another sense, it is what defines and bounds the higher-order unity that we identify as the system."

In third order emergent systems, in addition to the above, some sort of informational memory is present. "...[N]ot only is there an amplification of the global influences on parts, but also a redundant 'sampling' of these influences which reintroduces them into different realizations of the system over time.” Memory, in the form of genetic material, for example, allows third order emergent systems to enclose morphodynamic systems in another causal loop. This memory or historical encoding means that new forms can now be maintained across chasms of time, space, and energy. Such systems are inherently developmental and/or evolutionary. "…[N]atural selection can be seen as a random or stochastic 'exploration' of variant morphodynamic relationships of reciprocity with respect to environmental regularities."

"...[B]ecause there is a remembered trace of each prior 'self' state contributing to the dynamics of future states, such systems develop not merely with respect to the immediate prior state of the whole, but also with respect to their own remembered past states. This contributes to the characteristic differentiation and divergence from, and the convergence back towards, some 'reference' state, which organisms standardly exhibit."

With third order emergence, purpose emerges. Third order emergent systems and the atoms that compose them "do something for something." Their purpose is forged by their emergent history. The hemoglobin molecule, for example, cannot be completely described by its physics, chemistry or even its biology. Its "... existence must be seen against a backdrop of vastly more numerous molecular forms that were eliminated via natural selection, leaving hemoglobin as the one representative of the set. …Hemoglobin occupies the space of possibilities that was left". Deacon suggests that life is synonymous with third order emergent phenomenon. “It's embedded circular architecture of circular architectures definitely marks the boundary of a unit of causal self-reference that is extended in both space and time.”

This purpose at the center of third order emergence—movement towards some target state by competitive reproductive success—justifies calling these “teleodynamic systems.” Yet this purpose is also a specific absence, just as the void that forms the vessel in the Taoist verse earlier. It echoes and builds on the specific absence in the other two kinds of emergence as well. Each develops around what Deacon calls the least-discordant remainder. Future events are shaped less by determinism than by "what was not cancelled or eliminated.” This leads to an apparent time reversal in the sense that what is not there, the "pull of yet unrealized possibility," becomes efficacious. This pull of unrealized possibility comes to determine "function in biology and purposeful action in psychology.” It is also “the essence of representation, or intentionality: something whose existence is conditional upon something that is not. It is this feature of mental phenomena that has most mystified scholars for millennia: their 'aboutness.’"

Each of the three types of emergence represents a causal topology that is circular or closed. Thus “... while it is technically correct to say that life and mind supervene on chemical processes, it is misleading to say that they are 'merely' or 'nothing but' chemical processes… This collapses the complex levels of emergent relationships that stand in between.”

These causal topologies also help redefine three of Aristotle's causes and interconnect them. Teleodynamic emergence roughly corresponds to final causality. It encircles morphodynamics emergence, which in some sense corresponds to formal causality, which in turn encircles thermodynamic or efficient causality.

At the pinnacle of these causalities rests human consciousness and the subjective experience of self. Deacon writes, “A symbolizing mind has perhaps the widest possible locus of causal influence of anything on earth. …Human consciousness—with its features of autonomous causal locus, self-origination, and implicit 'aboutness’—epitomizes the logic of emergence in its very form. Like something coming out of nothing, the subjective self is, in effect, a constitutive absence for the sake of which new constitutive absence is being incessantly evolved. In this sense, there is some legitimacy to the eliminativist claim that there is no 'thing' that it is. Indeed this must be so. The locus of self is, effectively, a negative mode of existence that can act as an unmoved mover of sorts, a non-thing that nonetheless is the locus of a form of inertia—a resistance to change—with respect to which other physical processes can be recruited and organize."

Taking Science on Faith - by Paul Davies

2007-12-07T13:54:00.000-08:00

Paul Davis feels that both science and religion “fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.” Neither externally imposed (God-given) laws, nor the multiple universe theory, another way to account for the existence of a life in our universe, can satisfactorily account for the origin of life (see Religion vs Science: Bridging the Gap). The “multiverse” theory proposes that many universes with different sets of laws exist and our universe just happens to have a set compatible with life. Davis instead regards “the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system.” This view is consistent with a number of other articles we have posted. (See some of the entries under the Co-dependent Arising and Cosmology labels in the index).

Paul Davies is the director of Beyond, a research center at Arizona State University, and the author of “Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life.” This article was published as an Op-Ed in the New York Times in November 2007.

Study of Clouds by Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich
Этюд Oблаков
reproduced with permission from the Nicholas Roerich Museum of New York City

Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth — and fixed forevermore. Therefore, to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You’ve got to believe that these laws won’t fail, that we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.

Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from “that’s not a scientific question” to “nobody knows.” The favorite reply is, “There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.” The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.

Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world about us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature is a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.

Although scientists have long had an inclination to shrug aside such questions concerning the source of the laws of physics, the mood has now shifted considerably. Part of the reason is the growing acceptance that the emergence of life in the universe, and hence the existence of observers like ourselves, depends rather sensitively on the form of the laws. If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of rules, life would almost certainly not exist.

A second reason that the laws of physics have now been brought within the scope of scientific inquiry is the realization that what we long regarded as absolute and universal laws might not be truly fundamental at all, but more like local bylaws. They could vary from place to place on a mega-cosmic scale. A God’s-eye view might reveal a vast patchwork quilt of universes, each with its own distinctive set of bylaws. In this “multiverse,” life will arise only in those patches with bio-friendly bylaws, so it is no surprise that we find ourselves in a Goldilocks universe — one that is just right for life. We have selected it by our very existence.

The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.

And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.

It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

The Potential of Evolution - by John Stewart

2007-11-16T13:26:00.001-08:00

In the last post, Philip Clayton describes the emergence of spirit from a theistic perspective. The following post instead approaches emergence from a secular perspective, focusing on the emergence of successively higher levels of organization in evolution. John Stewart describes the movement from a collection of “isolated, self-concerned individuals” towards a collective conscious “evolutionary awakening” of our interdependence. It is an extract from his book, EVOLUTION’S ARROW: THE DIRECTION OF EVOLUTION AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY, that was published as an article called “The Potential of Evolution” in the magazine What Is Enlightenment? John Stewart is a senior labor relations policy adviser with the Australian Government and a member of ECCO, the Evolution, Complexity, and Cognition Research Group at the Free University of Brussels.

A major evolutionary transition is beginning to unfold on earth. Individuals are emerging who are choosing to dedicate their lives to consciously advancing the evolutionary process. They see that their lives are an important part of the great evolutionary process that has produced the universe and the life within it, and they realize that they have a significant role to play.

Redefining themselves within a wider evolutionary perspective is providing meaning and direction to their lives. They no longer see themselves as isolated, self-concerned individuals who live for a short time and then die irrelevantly in a meaningless universe. They know that if evolution is to continue to fulfill its potential, it now must be driven consciously, and that it is their responsibility and destiny to contribute to this.

The most meaningful activity in which a human being can be engaged is one that is directly related to human evolution. This is true because human beings now play an active and critical role not only in the process of their own evolution but in the survival and evolution of all living beings. Awareness of this places upon human beings a responsibility for their participation in and contribution to the process of evolution. If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of metabiological evolution consciously, as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age would be born.

Jonas Salk

At the heart of this evolutionary awakening is the understanding that evolution is directional. Evolution is not aimless and random; it is headed somewhere. This is very important knowledge. Once we understand the direction of evolution, we can identify where we are located along the evolutionary trajectory, discover what the next steps are, and see what these steps mean for us, as individuals and collectively.

Where is evolution headed? Contrary to earlier understandings, it is now unmistakable that the trend is toward greater interdependence and cooperation amongst living processes. If humans are to advance the evolutionary process on this planet, a major task will be to find more cooperative ways of organizing ourselves.

The trend toward increasing cooperation is well illustrated by a short history of the evolution of life on earth. For billions of years after the Big Bang, the universe expanded rapidly in scale and diversified into a multitude of galaxies, stars, planets, and other forms of lifeless matter. The first life that eventually arose on earth was infinitesimal—it comprised only a few molecular processes. But it did not remain on this tiny scale for long. In the first major development, cooperative groups of molecular processes formed the first simple cells. Then, in a further significant advance, communities of these simple cells formed more complex cells on a much greater scale.

A further major evolutionary transition unfolded after many more millions of years. Evolution discovered how to organize cooperative groups of these complex cells into multicelled organisms such as insects, fish, and eventually mammals. Again the scale of living processes had increased enormously. This trend continued with the emergence of cooperative societies of multicelled organisms, including beehives, wolf packs, and baboon troops. The pattern was repeated with humans—families joined up to form bands, bands teamed up to form tribes, tribes joined to form agricultural communities, and so on. The largest-scale cooperative organizations of living processes on the planet are now human societies.

This unmistakable trend is the result of many repetitions of a process in which living entities team up to form larger-scale cooperatives. Strikingly, the cooperative groups that arise at each step in this sequence become the entities that then team up to form the cooperative groups at the next step in the sequence.

It is easy to see what has driven this long sequence of directional evolution—at every level of organization, cooperative teams united by common goals will always have the potential to be more successful than isolated individuals. It will be the same wherever life arises in the universe. The details will differ, but the direction will be the same—toward unification and cooperation on a greater and greater scale.

Life has come a long way on this planet. When it began, individual living processes could do little more than influence events at the scale of molecules. But as a result of the successive formation of larger and larger cooperatives, coordinated living processes are now managing and controlling events on the scale of continents. And life appears to be on the threshold of another major evolutionary transition: humanity has the potential to form a unified and inclusive global society in symbiotic relationship with our technologies and with the planet as a whole. In the process, “we” (the whole) will come to manage matter, energy, and living processes on a planetary scale. When this global organization emerges, the scale of cooperative organization will have increased over a million billion times since life began.

If humanity is to fulfill its potential in the evolution of life in the universe, this expansion of the scale of cooperative organization will continue. The global organization has the potential to expand out into the solar system and beyond. By managing matter, energy, and living processes on a larger and larger scale, human organization could eventually achieve the capacity to influence events at the scale of the solar system and galaxy. And the human organization could repeat the great transitions of its evolutionary past by teaming up with any other societies of living processes that it encounters.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation. . . .

We are set irrevocably, I believe, on a path that will take us to the stars—unless in some monstrous capitulation to stupidity and greed we destroy ourselves first.

Carl Sagan

The great potential of the evolutionary process is to eventually produce a unified cooperative organization of living processes that spans and manages the universe as a whole. The matter of the universe would be infused and organized by life. The universe itself would become a living organism that pursued its own goals and objectives, whatever they might be. In its long climb up from the scale of molecular processes, life will have unified the universe that was blown apart by the Big Bang.

The Emergence of Spirit by Philip Clayton

2007-10-03T12:39:00.000-07:00

Co-dependent arising, the topic of the last few posts, is closely associated with emergence. In emergence lower levels of mutually interconnected (or co-dependent) parts can give rise to higher levels of organization with new properties. In his article “EMERGENCE OF SPIRIT,” Philip Clayton develops an emergent view of the Cosmos consistent with Theism. Spirit does not emerge from matter according to his view rather it is present from the beginning. However he conceptualizes divine activity as functioning differently at the physical, biological and the mental levels of emergence. The article appeared in the fall 2000 issue of the bulletin of CTNS, the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. The following passages have been extracted from pp 15-17 and have been reprinted with permission.

How exactly should we conceive divine action within the Cosmos given the law-likeness of the physical world, the increasing complexity of the biological world, and the conscious agency that we have found to be indispensable in the world of human actors? Just as importantly, if the history of the Cosmos does reveal a gradual "becoming conscious" of the spiritual nature of the universe and its creator, in what sense was that spiritual dimension present and efficacious from the start? Does God only emerge gradually along with the creation (but then the creation can’t be attributed to God!); or is there some sense in which the same God is present and active in the world in different ways during the different periods and at the different levels of cosmic evolution?

It is easy to formulate several unsatisfactory ways of interpreting the suggestion that God affects the physical world. On one side, there are problems with supposing that God is constantly performing physical miracles by communicating divine purpose to rocks and plants and animals, thereby directly causing them to behave in ways that they otherwise wouldn't. On the other, if theism is viable, then talk of divine action can not be purely otiose, merely adding a religious rhetoric to what is better explained in natural terms…

... Fundamental physics does not offer any openings for divine influence (with the possible exception of quantum indeterminacy---a debate that I will not reopen today). If one asks about the matter, i.e. about causation prior to the emergence of life, the answer must be that what ever divine input or organization or there might have been must have been built and from the beginning. Nothing in our understanding of physics suggest the possibility of subsequent direct divine influence over rocks.

Yet in biology we found reason to break with a purely materialist view: there is an informational element in biology, involving the role played by form, structure and fuction, that is crucially different from physics. Moreover there is some anticipation within the biological order of the kinds of purposes we see fully expressed in mental phenomena. To avoid anthropomorphism I used the Kantian phrase purposiveness without purpose. If one grants my position on God’s causal position in influencing thought, and grants proto-mentality in the biological sphere, then one would expect to see divine causal agency, appropriately limited, at levels in the natural history of life prior to the emergence of conscious being. But how is such causal agency to be conceived---especially if, like most theologians in this field, one is committed to avoiding an account that is either interventionist or occasionalist. Theologians today are correct, I believe, in eschewing answers that imagine God introducing a new form of energy into the physical universe or directly causing deviations in the motion of created entities. But if one accepts this limitation, in what sense can God be set to exert a causal influence on or within creation?

…[P]anentheism changes the framework: if the world remains within and is permeated by the divine: then it is possible to speak of divine purposes and goals being expressed even at the stage at which there are no other actual conscious agents. Even the lawful behavior of the natural world can now be an expression or manifestation of the divine character or intentionality.

Because physical phenomena do not function with anything we can identify as “focal" or direct purpose, we may speak of them as manifesting only God’s "autonomic agency," just as the actions of our own bodies are divided between autonomic processes and focal intentions. For the pantheists, the regularities of natural law represents the autonomic or, as it were, habitual operations of divine action apart from God’s specific or focal intentions. By contrast, should God sometimes consciously influence conscious thought processes in humans or other animals, we would speak of these is focal divine actions.

As organisms evolve and begin to undo the in more complex ways, pantheism allows one to speak of the category of divine action that is not merely autonomic---that is, not completely explicable as a mathematical result of God's autonomic agency---but that nevertheless stop short of focal purpose. We can speak of the central features of the biological realm as reflecting the divine character and influence without claiming that kidneys or amoebas themselves possess the goals of functioning as they do...

... Like physical regularities, biological regularities reflect the divine character; yet here, because organisms also behave in a purposive manner, there is a place in principle for speaking of divine influence. The influence in question must be intermediate between the conscious influence that is possible in relation to conscious beings and the apparent impossibility of influence (outside of natural law) in physics. If biological organisms are indeed more than machines, and if it is correct to ascribe drives, strivings in nonconscious goals to them, then there is room for influence on these goals.

…When the pantheistic account is developed in a manner consistent with the logic of emergence, human thoughts and intentions appear as (at least) a three-level phenomena, with a distinct type of divine influence corresponding to each level. (1) Since thought is built upon the enduring regularities within the one physical cosmos, it (like everything else) reflects the constant character of the all-pervading God. Given the framework of panentheism, we may view these regularities as an expression of autonomic divine agency. (2) Like other forms of activity in the biosphere, the human neurological system is not only conditioned by the autonomic or natural-law level, but also by the quasi-intentional level of biological drives and goals. It is thus open to the sort of biological influence or constraint described above. (3) Finally, if human consciousness is indeed an emergent property of our complex neurophysiological structure, then humans (and perhaps some other animals) also exercise a distinctive form of causation: conscious agency. This would in principle allow God to influence our thoughts and motives at the same mental level that other persons influenced them, even though the means may be rather different.

Human thought in this threefold sense is thus not simply a direct, unmediated expression of God’s own focal thoughts and purposes. We might say that human thoughts are divine thoughts that are removed from any simple identity with the divine will buy their location in a context determined by the various "lower" expressions of divine agency, i.e. by the whole course of natural history.

Emergent Properties and Connectionism-by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch

2007-08-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

The following is from THE EMBODIED MIND: COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND HUMAN EXPERIENCE (pp. 93-98) which combines insights from Cognitive Science and the Buddhist tradition. It illustrates the co-dependent arising---or emergence, or self-organization---of neural activity between different brain regions. It relates this to Buddhists insights that parse the arising of mental experience into five components or aggregates (forms, feelings/sensations, perceptions, dispositional formations, and consciousness). These may appear to be separate, but are really co-dependently arising aspects of experience. The previous entry, also from the same book, considered the Buddhist view of the co-dependent arising of both self and world. Reprinted with permission of the authors and MIT Press.

… [A]lthough neurons in the visual cortex do have distinct responses to specific features of the visual stimuli, these responses occur only in an anesthetized animal with a highly simplified internal and external environment. When more normal sensory surroundings are allowed and the animal is studied awake and behaving, it has become increasingly clear that stereotype neuronal responses become highly context sensitive. There are, for example, distinct effects produced by bodily tilt or auditory stimulation. Furthermore, the neuronal response characteristics depend directly on neurons localized far from their receptive fields. Even a change in posture, while preserving the same identical sensorial stimulation, alters the neuronal responses in the primary visual cortex, demonstrating that even the seemingly remote motorium is in resonance with the sensorium. (...)

It has, therefore, become increasingly clear to neurosciences that one needs to study neurons as members of large ensembles that are constantly disappearing and arising through their cooperative interactions and in which every neuron has multiple and changeable responses in a context-dependent manner. A rule for the constitution of the brain is that if the region (nucleus, layer) A connects to B, then B connects reciprocally back to A. This law of reciprocity has only two or three minor exceptions. The brain is thus a highly cooperative system: the dense interconnections among its components entail that eventually everything going on will be a function of what all the components are doing.

This kind of cooperativeness holds both locally and globally: it functions within subsystems of the brain and at the level of the connections among these subsystems. One can take the entire brain and divide it into subsections…. These subsections are made up of complex networks of cells, but they also relate to each other in a networked fashion. As a result the entire system acquires an internal coherence in intricate patterns, even if we cannot say exactly how this occurs. For example, if one artificially mobilizes the reticular system, an organism will change behaviorally from, say, being awake to being asleep. This change does not indicate, however, that the reticular system is the controller of wakefulness. That system is, rather, a form of architecture in the brain that permits certain internal coherence is to arise. But when these coherences arise, they are not simply due to any particular system. The reticular system is necessary but not sufficient for certain coherent states such as wakefulness and sleep. (...) In fact, there are many levels of resolution at which such neuronal emergences can be studied, from the level of cellular properties to entire brain regions….

Consider what happens in visual perception in its peripheral stages. (...) The optic nerve connects from the eye to a region in the thalamus called the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and from there to the visual cortex. The standard information-processing description…is that information enters through the eyes and is relayed sequentially through the thalamus to the cortex where “further processing” is carried out. But if one looks closely at the way the whole system is put together one finds little to support this view of sequentiality. (....) It is evident that 80% of what any LGN cell listens to comes not from the retina but from the dense interconnectedness of other regions of the brain. Furthermore, one can see that there are many more fibers coming from the cortex down to the LGN than there are going in the reverse direction….

Thus even at the most peripheral end of the visual system, the influences that the brain receives from the eye are met by more activity that flows out from the cortex. The encounter of these two ensembles of neural activity is one moment in the emergence of a new coherent configuration, depending on a sort of resonance or active match-mismatch between the sensory activity and the internal setting at the primary cortex. The primary visual cortex is, however, but one of the partners in this particular neuronal local circuit at the LGN level. Other partners, such as the reticular formation, the fibers coming from the superior colliculus, or the corollary discharge of neurons that control eye movements, play an equally active role. (...)

What we have described for the LGN and vision is, of course, a uniform principle throughout the brain. Vision is useful as a case study since the details are better known than for most other nuclei and cortical area. An individual neuron participates in many such global patterns and bears little significance when taken individually. In this sense, the basic mechanism of recognition of a visual object or a visual attribute could be said to be the emergence of a global state, among resonating neuronal assemblies.

At this point we would like to return to topic of emerging biological processes and the five aggregates discussed in the previous chapter. We raised the issue there of whether the aggregates arise sequentially or simultaneously. (...) [C]oncern with the parsing of experience is one of the more remarkable points of convergence between cognitive science and mind full/awareness tradition. To take a sequential view of the aggregates seems similar to taking a sequential view of brain activity. Form would have to come first through some pre-attentive segmentation at the retinal and geniculate level, then sensations and perceptions would arise at the reticular and collicular input, whereas concepts and consciousness would be added at different stages of “higher” brain centers…. If, however, perception cannot be so simply analyzed into a straightforward sequence, then it becomes difficult to separate the “low” level of form from the ”higher” levels of, say, sensations and discernments [italics added to indicate the attributes]. The arising of form always involves some predisposition on the part of our structure. If we take the notion of a heap or a pile (Skandha) as a metaphor for the emerging configurations of a neural network, we will be led to think of the aggregates as resonant patterns in one moment of emergence. (...)

It is possible, then, to see the notion of a heap or pile as a metaphor for what we would now call a self-organizing process. The aggregates would arise as one moment of emergence, as in a resonating network where strictly speaking there is no all-or-none separation between simultaneous (since the emergence pattern itself arises as a whole) and sequential (since for the pattern to arise they must be a back-and-forth activity between participating components). Of course… the aggregates do not constitute an information processing theory. Nonetheless, the neuropsychological approach that we have just adumbrated seems compatible with the direct observation based on mindfulness/awareness meditation, thus making all the more remarkable the fact that this tradition has continued to verify the parsing of experience into coherent moments of emergence.

The Middle Way - by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch

2007-07-05T08:46:00.000-07:00

This passage is taken from THE EMBODIED MIND: COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND HUMAN EXPERIENCE (pp. 224-226), which juxtaposes insights from cognitive science and from Buddhism. The initial Abhidharma tradition emphasized the absence of a permanent self. The Mahayana tradition, which began 500 years after Buddha's death, in addition emphasized the absence of an independently existing world---or complete groundlessness. The passage summarizes and comments on the Mahayana philosophical argument for groundlessness. The previous post from Carl Sagon’s book helps point out from an objective prospective that our usual view of reality is very limited. Alisa's essay on her meditation experience, the second to last entry, reveals a moment of complete emptiness---which was accompanied by expanded awareness.Reprinted with permission of the authors and MIT Press.

1. ...By definition, something is independent, intrinsic, or absolute only if it does not depend on anything else; it must have an identity that transcends its relations.

2. Nothing in our experience can be found that satisfies this criterion of independence or ultimacy. The earlier Abhidharma tradition had expressed this insight as codependent arising: nothing can be found apart from its conditions of arising, formation and decay.... Nagarjuna took the understanding of codependence considerably further. Causes and their effects, things and their attributes, and the very mind of the inquiring subject and the objects of mind are each equally codependent on the other. Nagarjuna's logic addresses itself penetratingly to the mind of the inquiring subject...to the ways in which what are actually codependent factors are taken by that subject to be the ultimate founding blocks of a supposedly objective and a supposed subjective reality.

3. Therefore, nothing can be found that has an ultimate or independent existence. Or to use Buddhist language, everything is "empty" of an independent existence for it is codependently originated.

...Why should it make any difference at all to experience? One might say, So what if the world and the self change moment to moment -- whoever thought that they were permanent? And so what if they are mutually dependent on each other -- whoever thought they were isolated? The answer...is that as one becomes mindful of one's own experience, one realizes the power of the urge to grasp after foundations -- to grasp the sense of foundations of the real, separate self, the sense of the foundation of a real, separate world, and the sense of foundation of an actual relation between self and world.

It is said that emptiness is a natural discovery that one would make by oneself with sufficient mindful/awareness -- natural but shocking. Previously we have been talking about examining the mind with meditation. There may not have been a self, but there was still a mind to examine itself, even if a momentary one. But now we discovered that we have no mind; after all, a mind must be something that is separate from and knows the world. We also don't have a worlds. There is neither an objective nor subjective pole. Nor is there any knowing because there is nothing hidden. Knowing sonyata [emptiness]... is surely not an intentional act. Rather (to use traditional imagery), it is like a reflection in a mirror -- pure brilliant, but with no additional reality apart from itself. As mind/world keeps happening in its interdependent continuity, there is nothing extra on the side of mind or on the side of the world to know or be known further. Whatever experience happens is open (Buddhist teachers use the word exposed), perfectly revealed just as it is.

We can now see why Madhyamika is called the middle way. It avoids the extremes of either objectivism or subjectivism, of absolutism or nihilism. As is said by the Tibetan commentators, "through ascertaining the reason -- that all phenomena are dependent arisings--the extreme of annihilation (nihilism) is avoided, and the realization of dependent-arising of causes and effects is gained. Through ascertaining the thesis -- that all phenomena do not inherently exist -- the extreme of permanence (absolutism) is avoided, and realization of the emptiness of all phenomena is gained."

Nature and Wonder: A Reconnaissance of Heaven- by Carl Sagan

2007-07-05T08:21:00.000-07:00

This post is from the first chapter of Carl Sagan’s book, THE VARIETIES OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERIENCE: A PERSONAL VIEW OF THE SEARCH FOR GOD, edited by Ann Druyan. It helps place our home, the Earth, in the Cosmos. These excerpted passages---especially without the pictures---can only hint at the power of the chapter. In contrast to the previous entry that evoked a moment of cosmic consciousness from the inside, subjective viewpoint, this entry evokes the experience of cosmic consciousness from the outside, objective viewpoint. Reprinted with permission.

The word “religion” comes from the Latin for “binding together,” to connect that which has been sundered apart. It’s a very interesting concept. And in this sense of seeking the deepest interrelationships among things that superficially appear to be sundered, the objectives of religion and science, I believe, are identical or very nearly so. But the question has to do with the reliability of the truths claimed by the two fields and the methods of approach.

By far the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night. I believe that it is very difficult to know who we are until we understand where and when we are. I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky. This is reflected throughout the world in both science and literature. Thomas Carlyle said that wonder is the basis of warship. And Albert Einstein said, “I maintain that the cosmic religion feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” So if both Carlyle in Einstein could agree on something, it has a modest possibility of even being right. (...)

There are a vast number of stars within our galaxy. It’s about 400 billion stars, of which the Sun is one. (...)

...[W]here would the sun be? Would it be in the center of the galaxy, where things are clearly important, or at least well lit? The answer is no. We would be somewhere out in the galactic boondocks, the extreme suburbs, where the action isn't. We are situated in a very unremarkable, unprepossessing location in this great Milky Way Galaxy. But of course, it is not the only galaxy. Very many galaxies, a very large number of galaxies....

(In fact, there are more galaxies in the universe than stars with in the Milky Way Galaxy.) (...) The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at least in the thousands of millions and perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars more or less comparable to that in our own galaxy. So if you multiply out how many stars that means …[i]t's something like one followed by twenty-three zeros, of which our Sun is but one. It is a useful calibration of our place in the universe. And this vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially no Western religions.

Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.... Edward Young, in the 18th century, said, "An undevout astronomer is mad," from which I suppose it is essential that we all declare our devotion at risk of being adjudged mad. But devotion to what?

All that we have seen is something of a vast and intricate and lovely universe... There is no particular theological conclusion that comes out of an exercise such as the one we have just gone through. What is more, when we understand something of the astronomical dynamics, the evolution of worlds, we recognize that worlds are born and worlds die, they have lifetimes just as humans do, and therefore that there is a great deal of suffering and death in the Cosmos if there is a great deal of life. For example, we talked about stars in the late stages of their evolution. We've talked about supernova explosions. There are much vaster explosions. There are explosions at the center of galaxies from what are called quasars. There are other explosions, maybe small quasars. In fact, the Milky Way galaxy itself has had a set of explosions from its center, some thirty thousand light-years away. And if, as I will speculate later, life and perhaps even intelligence is a cosmic commonplace, then it must follow that there is massive destruction of whole planets, that routinely occurs, frequently, throughout the universe.

... In fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the god portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a God of the galaxy, much less of a universe... I don't propose that is a virtue to revel in our limitations. But it's important to understand how much we do not know. There is an enormous amount we do not know; there is a tiny amount that we do. But what we do understand brings us face to face with an awesome Cosmos that is simply different from the Cosmos of our pious ancestors.

Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we admiring. If we see that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe and all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand if such a traditional God does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.

The Fear of Meditation and its Role in my Life - by Alisa Voll

2007-05-27T02:38:00.000-07:00

The following piece is a personal account of a meditation experience provoked by negative emotions – an attempt to see, what Joanna Macy calls, “the true nature of phenomena,” in her book, WORLD AS LOVER, WORLD AS SELF

I feel frozen in irrationally intense anger, and I do not move as the subway train car rattles down to 42^nd street where I am to meet my boyfriend. The only thing making the tension in my body bearable is the release the slight sway of the train car provides as the laws of physics force it to tilt first to one side, then the other until it is again fully parallel to the ground beneath it. Most seats are taken, one by me, and a few people are standing. At this point I no longer remember what my boyfriend did that made me so angry. Yet, my body’s anxiety persists. My mind is racing with hateful thoughts. My fingers fidget unconsciously. My breath is shallow; irregular. My heart beats out of my chest, and I feel the unhealthiness of my circumstance. I want to relax; more because of the harm my state causes my being than because I realize that it is irrational.

I close my eyes. Without considering it, because if I do I will refuse to continue, bringing my attention to the air entering my nostrils, I direct it to the lower chamber of my lungs. My belly expands and I notice that the muscles there are tense and must have been flexed for some time. My mind still races. As air continues to slowly enter, it gradually fills the lower, middle, and finally the highest chamber of my lungs. With conscious effort I exhale smoothly, attempting fluidity and calm to the collapse of my shoulders and the shrinking of my lungs. As minutes go by, time slows. Relaxed now, my stomach expands; my chest rising and falling harmoniously.

Becoming enveloped in the internal world of my mind, I hear nothing except the pace of my even breath. Since I was a child, my brother told me that I have a stable, unchanging part so far inside me that it is untouchable by anything. As I sit on the train, I finally feel it; my share of nature’s energy - my essence. It looks like a light amid an ocean of peaceful deep blue darkness. The longer I meditate, the stronger I am able to sense it and the more connected I become to it. There is only silence, except for a quiet buzz of vibrations of nature’s frequency. Time has completely stopped now. As strange as it seems impossible, I am at utter harmony with everything. I do not feel positively or negatively. Floating in the all encompassing infinite space, I simply exist, as the trillions of other specs of energy do, fitting together just right to form the universe.

The train arrives at 42^nd street as I lift my lids. I am puzzled by my state as it seems as though I embody peace. This feeling is foreign to me, as usually I am unhappy about something or other. I am no longer mad at my boyfriend, and the reasons why I was no longer concern me. I had never felt such peace before and have not since then.

The incident on the train happened three years ago and was the only successful meditation I have ever had. Though my brother had suggested meditation for my goals of spiritual self-development and self-knowledge, I had always dismissed it. I was not ready to actually put in the work.

Yet knowing myself was and is very important to me. I need to be aware of not only the causes and effects of my moods, my dispositions, but also how these pathways came to be. With that knowledge I am better able to tackle my demons and to live the person and the life that I have wanted to for so long. As revered Indian philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, taught until his death in 1986, an individual is only one in whom the outer is the same as the inner, and the inner the same as the outer. I aspire to understand every iota of my being, so that I may be able to transform my inner to be at peace, and correlate with it, the outer and vice versa.

Only recently, with the clarity that tackling the hardships of being away at college provided me, has the possible validity and role of meditation in forming who I want to be become evident. Unfortunately, my recent attempts at meditation have been unsuccessful. It seems as though I have made no progress since months ago. I am too impatient and find myself unable to concentrate on one sound or sensation of the body, switching from concentrating on the air going into my nostrils, then on my chest rising and falling, then on the air passing through my nasal passage. I do not focus on one sensation for more than a few seconds. My mind may not be thinking about random events in my life, but it is thinking about trying to focus, and throughout the last time I meditated, about how I was slowly falling asleep without noticing it.

I have not been meditating regularly. A part of the skepticism about it, or rather my skepticism about my own ability, is still there. Whenever something does not come easily to me, I reject it and find reasons for why it is unnecessary. Meditation had always been one of these things. This is why if I were more aware on the train, I would have stopped myself from meditating. I am afraid, and have been since I first learned about it, that if I apply great effort and persistence to meditation and I fail, it will be a blow to my self esteem greater than I know how to handle. Logic says that there is a better chance of succeeding at meditation if I genuinely attempt it than if I muse on it. But, I do not function that way yet, free from the bounds of dispositions and insecurities. Even if I sincerely devote myself to learning how to meditate and to learning from it, it will take years for the state of peace and harmony I felt mediating on the subway to transfer over to my daily life.

It is gradually becoming easier, however, to do the things that I am uncomfortable with and that scare me - such as meditation. I have to keep moving forward. Slowly, I dispose of unnecessary conditioned responses manifested as insecurities, and come closer to embodying my essence.

The Forgotten City: Turning the Wheel of the Dharma

2007-05-21T08:14:00.000-07:00

The following extracts from WORLD AS LOVER, WORLD AS SELF , by Joanna Macy pp. 53-57, describe the Buddha's teaching of Co-Dependent Arising. This dharma---the Pali word for a teaching or law---resonates with many of Spinoza's ideas in THE ETHICS. It teaches the interconnectedness and thus the ever changing nature, or the impermanence of all things (emotions, in/animate objects, etc). It implies that the emotion-laden labels we attribute to these things (especially "bad" or "good"---the labels Spinoza stresses in his Preface to Part IV) are the result of clinging to what is ever changing. Nothing is "bad" or "good." Things just ARE; they exist and change. The excerpt is reprinted with the permission of the author.

The eight-spoked wheel that graces gateways and temple roofs throughout the Buddhist world symbolizes the teaching of the Buddha. It is called the Wheel of the Dharma, the Dharma Chakra. It also represents the central doctrine that his teachings convey: the doctrine of paticca samuppada or the dependent co-arising of all phenomena. As the Buddha said, “they who see paticca samuppada see the Dharma, and they who see the Dharma see paticca samuppada….”

This centerpiece of the Buddha’s teaching is not about a level of reality separate from our daily lives or aloof from the phenomenal world of change. It refers not to any absolute being of essence, but to the process itself—to the way things work, how events happen and interrelate. Hence it is often called the Law—the law of causality….

With fascination I studied the early Buddhist text. I read how the perception of paticca samuppada dawned on the Buddha the night of his enlightenment, and featured in his discourses. I saw how it underlay everything he taught about self, suffering, and liberation from suffering. I noted how it knocked down the dichotomies bred by hierarchical thinking, the old polarities between mind and matter, self and world….

He did not begin with abstractions or generalities, but with the existential factors of life. He named these factors of experience---ignorance, volitional formations, cognition, name and physical form, sensation, feeling, craving and so on---and pursued them relentlessly to determine how they relate to each other. Persistently he questioned, "For this factor to arise, what else must happen? For it to cease, what else must stop?"

Tracing thus the sources of suffering, he did not find a first cause or prime mover, but beheld instead patterns or circuits of contingency. The factors were sustained by their own interdependence. It was then, in that vigil, in the crucible of his attention, that the perception of dependent co-arising swept upon him.

Coming to be, coming to be!...Ceasing to be, ceasing to be! At that thought, brethren, there arose... a vision of things not before called to mind, and knowledge arose. ...Such is form, such is the coming to be of form, such is its passing away. ...Such is cognition, such is its coming to be, such is its passing away. And [he abided] in the discernment of the arising and passing away.

The process nature of reality became clear-its continual flow, the radical impermanence of all things, with no element or entity aloof from change. But the flux was not chaotic or random, for patterns of conditionality emerged. He saw how factors of existence are mutually determined, providing occasion and context for each other's emergence and subsiding.

All the factors of our lives subsist, then, in a web of mutual causality. Our suffering is caused by the interplay of these factors, and particularly by the delusion, aversion, and craving that arise from our misapprehension of them. Hence, the Four Noble Truths: We create our own bondage by reifying and clinging to what is by nature contingent and transient. Being caused in this way, our suffering is not endemic. It can cease. The causal play can be reversed. This is achieved by seeing the true nature of phenomena, which is their radical interdependence. This is made possible by the cleansing of perception through meditation and moral conduct.

Such a vision, however, is hard to convey, because it goes against the grain of both our sensory experience and our desire for security.

Spinoza's Ethics, Preface to Part IV

2007-05-19T08:25:00.000-07:00

We have decided to follow up on the last piece, based on a book about Spinoza called BETRAYING SPINOZA, with some of Spinoza's own writing. He is often called a philosopher's philosopher, and his writing is correspondingly dense. THE ETHICS is no exception; however he also included reasonably accessible prefaces and/or appendices to its various parts, which help capture aspects of his thinking.

Summary: The world is not the top-down result of a divine purpose, but rather the bottom-up result of the interaction of natural things. The notion of good and bad, perfection and imperfection do not apply to natural things. Natural things are perfect, or what is the same thing, real, being, or essences. However distinctions such as good or bad are useful to compare the effective activity of a being relative to its potential.
(We welcome your own summary or any other thoughts as a comment.)

PREFACE: Part IV

Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse. Why this is so, and what is good or evil in the emotions, I propose to show in this part of my treatise. But, before I begin, it would be well to make a few prefatory observations on perfection and imperfection, good and evil.

When a man has purposed to make a given thing, and has brought it to perfection, his work will be pronounced perfect, not only by himself, but by everyone who rightly knows, or thinks that he knows, the intention and aim of its author. For instance, suppose anyone sees a work (which I assume to be not yet completed), and knows that the aim of the author of that work is to build a house, he will call the work imperfect; he will, on the other hand, call it perfect, as soon as he sees that it is carried through to the end, which its author had purposed for it. But if a man sees a work, the like whereof he has never seen before, and if he knows not the intention of the artificer, he plainly cannot know, whether that work be perfect or imperfect. Such seems to be the primary meaning of these terms.

But, after men began to form general ideas, to think out types of houses, buildings, towers, etc., and to prefer certain types to others, it came about, that each man called perfect that which he saw agree with the general idea he had formed of the thing in question, and called imperfect that which he saw agree less with his own preconceived type, even though it had evidently been completed in accordance with the idea of its artificer.

This seems to be the only reason for calling natural phenomena, which, indeed, are not made with human hands, perfect or imperfect: for men are wont to form general ideas of things natural, no less than of things artificial, and such ideas they hold as types, believing that Nature (who they think does nothing without an object) has them in view, and has set them as types before herself. Therefore, when they behold something in Nature, which does not wholly conform to the preconceived type which they have formed of the thing in question, they say that Nature has fallen short or has blundered, and has left her work incomplete.

Thus we see that men are wont to style natural phenomena perfect or imperfect rather from their own prejudices, than from true knowledge of what they pronounce upon. Now we showed in the Appendix to Part 1 that Nature does not work with an end in view. For the eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature, acts by the same necessity as that whereby it exists. For we have shown, that by the same necessity of its nature, whereby it exists, it likewise works. The reason or cause why God or Nature exists, and the reason why he acts, are one and the same.

Therefore, as he does not exist for the sake of an end, so neither does he act for the sake of an end; of his existence and of his action there is neither origin nor end. Wherefore, a cause which is called final is nothing else but human desire, in so far as it is considered as the origin or cause of anything.

For example, when we say that to be inhabited is the final cause of this or that house, we mean nothing more than that a man, conceiving the conveniences of household life, had a desire to build a house. Wherefore, the being inhabited, in so far as it is regarded as a final cause, is nothing else but this particular desire, which is really the efficient cause; it is regarded as the primary cause, because men are generally ignorant of the causes of their desires They are, as I have often said already, conscious of their own actions and appetites, but ignorant of the causes whereby they are determined to any particular desire.

Therefore, the common saying that Nature sometimes falls short, or blunders, and produces things which are imperfect, I set down among the glosses treated of in the Appendix to Part 1.

Perfection and imperfection, then, are in reality merely modes of thinking, or notions which we form from a comparison among one another of individuals of the same species; hence I said above, that by reality and perfection I mean the same thing. For we are wont to refer all the individual things in nature to one genus, which is called the highest genus, namely, to the category of Being, whereto absolutely all individuals in nature belong. Thus, in so far as we refer the individuals in nature to this category, and comparing them one with another, find that some possess more of being or reality than others, we, to this extent, say that some are more perfect than others. Again, in so far as we attribute to them anything implying negation--as term, end, infirmity, etc.,--we, to this extent, call them imperfect, because they do not affect our mind so much as the things which we call perfect, not because they have any intrinsic deficiency, or because Nature has blundered. For nothing lies within the scope of a thing's nature, save that which follows from the necessity of the nature of its efficient cause, and whatsoever follows from the necessity of the nature of its efficient cause necessarily comes to pass.

As for the terms good and bad, they indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking, or notions which we form from the comparison of things one with another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him that mourns; for him that is deaf, it is neither good nor bad.

Nevertheless, though this be so, the terms should still be retained. For, inasmuch as we desire to form an idea of man as a type of human nature which we may hold in view, it will be useful for us to retain the terms in question, in the sense I have indicated. In what follows, then, I shall mean by "good" that which we certainly know to be a means of approaching more nearly to the type of human nature, which we have set before ourselves; by " bad," that which we certainly know to be a hindrance to us in approaching the said type. Again, we shall say that men are more perfect, or more imperfect, in proportion as they approach more or less nearly to the said type.

For it must be specially remarked that, when I say that a man passes from a lesser to a greater perfection, or vice versa, I do not mean that he is changed from one essence or reality to another; for instance, a horse would be as completely destroyed by being changed into a man, as by being changed into an insect. What I mean is, that we conceive the thing's power of action, in so far as this is understood by its nature, to be increased or diminished.

Lastly, by perfection in general I shall, as I have said, mean reality in general --in other words, each thing's essence, in so far as it exists, and operates in a particular manner, and without paying any regard to its duration. For no given thing can be said to be more perfect, because it has passed a longer time in existence. The duration of things cannot be determined by their essence, for the essence of things involves no fixed and definite period of existence; but everything, whether it be more perfect or less perfect, will always be able to persist in existence with the same force wherewith it began to exist; wherefore, in this respect, all things are equal.

source http://home.earthlink.net/~tneff/e4a.htm

Betraying Spinoza - by Lois Isenman based on Rebecca Goldstein's Book

2007-04-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

The 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza counseled that we strip ourselves of our attachment to our personal identity and instead use reason to take our place as citizens of the cosmos. Contemporary philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein betrays Spinoza in her book Betraying Spinoza by considering how the environment he grew up in influenced his philosophical views. She also betrays Spinoza by telling something about the unusual circumstances in which she first encountered him.

I will also betray Spinoza. To begin with, my knowledge of his work is secondhand. Yet it has affected me profoundly.

The loss of individual identity, of subjectivity, advocated by Spinoza leads to what Goldstein calls radical objectivity. This objectivity is different from what, rightly or wrongly, is today taken to be the objectivity of science. Spinoza’s worldview is framed by reason, yet there is a strong ecstatic, or blissful, impulse it. (In fact the word ecstasy originally meant to stand outside oneself.) Goldstein sometimes pegs his views as ecstatic rationalism.

Baruch Spinoza grew up in a community of Portuguese Jews who had escaped from the inquisition and moved to Amsterdam where they were free to practice Judaism. A brilliant yeshiva student, who also read widely, he came to reject the rigidity of traditional practice and doctrine, and especially the notion of the Jews as the chosen people. His ideas eventually led to his excommunication. Goldstein traces how the spiritualized rationalism of Talmudic debate (a way of “meshing with the Devine” by studying his laws) and the Kabbalistic, or Jewish mystical tradition (strongly influenced by the Greeks) joined together with the recent suffering of the Jews at the hand of the inquisition to influence his philosophy. She says:

I have long thought that the distinctly platonic tone of Spinoza's philosophy, which consist not so much in his actual picture of reality but in the ecstatic impulse that radiates it, and that sharply distinguishes his rationalism from both Descartes' and Leibniz’s came to him by way of the kabbalistic influences which were vividly alive in his Portuguese community. And Spinoza's system will offer us, as we shall see, its own solutions to the two mysteries that the most central to kabbalistic speculations; the ontological mystery of why the world exists at all, and the ethical mystery of suffering; why does suffering---and of such mind-numbing magnitude---exist in this world, if God is both all good and all-powerful? (p. 91)

Although Spinoza suggests the key to avoiding suffering is to enlarge one's frame of reference to include all of creation, his views are grounded in bodily experience and in subjectivity. He wrote, “The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.” ( The Ethics , Part III. VII, quoted in Goldstein p. 161) We come into being in a body and are committed to the well-being of this body in a way we are committed to nothing else. We cannot help it.

This basic yet nonetheless curious fact is at the core of most experience. It is what Spinoza calls conatus. Our emotions, bestowed on us by evolution to assure that we survive, make it so. Antonio Damasio, an emotion researcher, in his book Looking for Spinoza, points out that Spinoza anticipated much of current thinking in cognitive science. Damasio, for example, has amassed a great deal of neuroanatomical and clinical evidence that places the body and its emotions at the very core of the experience of self. Goldstein writes:

One cares about oneself simply because one is one’s self. A person is committed, immediately and unthinkingly, to the survival and flourishing of a single thing in the universe that she is. There is no reason, external to one's own identity with that thing--- one self --- that one should be so single-mindedly, unswayingly committed to it. What explains this commitment is nothing over and above the bare fact that one is who one is. (p.160)

When we are happy, this body and the experience of self that come with it seems to expand. When we are unhappy it seems to contract into itself. Our biological mandate, which we cannot refuse, is to try to expand this self as much as possible. Yet our emotions are shaped, or conditioned, by our background and also triggered by external circumstances. They are thus doubly contingent on things we cannot control. Spinoza argues that the only way to assure success in our commitment to ourselves is to greatly enlarge our point of view. We suffer less to the extent that we can distance ourselves from our own emotions. Goldstein says:

That problematic and precious “I” is, for Spinoza a symptom of a passivity, the acceptance of the contingently given, that weakens our capacities, drains and us, impedes our driving force to persist in our own being, to flourish in the world. Paradoxically the only way to flourish in one’s being is to cease being only that being.(p. 69)

Our very essence, our conatus, will lead us, if only we will think it all through, to a vision of reality that, since it is the truth, is in our interest to attain, and will affect such a difference in our sense of ourselves that we will have trouble even returning to the pre-philosophical attachment to ourselves.(p.162)

I had an illuminating experience while reading Goldstein’s book. Just as I was getting ready to go to the airport for my flight home from a trip, I checked my email and received some unanticipated bad news. A deeply unpleasant incident occurred on the way to the airport as well, in part because I was completely occupied processing my thoughts and feelings.

I arrived at the airport in a state of psychic shock. After stewing in my feelings for a while more, I felt drawn to reading Goldstein’s book; I read straight through to Boston. When I arrived home, my emotional pain had not gone away: it was a deep ache in my chest. Yet I was now able to accept these unpleasant events and the internal discomfort they caused without judgment. This seemed to free my mind from its tendency to process seemingly endlessly deeply upsetting events.

Spinoza’s pragmatic if challenging solution to the question of human suffering meets another strand of his philosophy. His basic assumption is one of holism. He begins The Ethics with the following definition,“By that which is self-caused, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent." (The Ethics, Part I, I, in Goldstein p.71) The universe causes itself. It is therefore deterministic, even if we with limited minds can not understand it. The universe defines logic, or as Goldstein says, it is logic self-aware.

But this reality is not the material world generally perceived by the senses. Sense experience is the lowest step on Spinoza’s hieracrchy of cognition; he calls it imagination. Rather reality is the web of rational necessary connections that underlie the cosmos. By forsaking personal identity, and using our reason, we can partake of this web of necessary connections of which we are, at least in our essence, inherently a part. Though this logic is something we can only fully experience with intuition, our reason prepares us and guides us to this knowledge of God with Nature---deus sive natura.

I had another experience that helped illuminate the power of Spinoza’s work. One morning after spending about an hour with my notes from Goldstein's book in preparation for writing this article, I went outside to go to my car. The shimmering light and my hour with Spinoza seemingly came together to allow me a taste of something extraordinary, which might have some relationship to the ecstacy associated with nature for Spinoza. This feeling came neither from the sensory details themselves, nor how they fit together. Rather it came from something intangible behind all this. Whatever it was seemed dazzlingly intelligent (though whether it was was rational, and thus conceptual, or non-conceptual, I do not know). In any case, the world appeared both material and immaterial, and I found myself soaring to the rhythm of the pulse between the two.

For the next several hours, whenever I turned from my work I could reconnect to this ecstatic feeling. (Even now when I extend my field of vision to its limits, I can recapture a faint echo of the feeling.) But later in the afternoon I came down hard.

A friend’s manipulation about something unimportant and my acquiescence in order to minimize the situation and avoid a showdown left me internally fuming. My effort to talk myself down and to distract worked only to an extent. It did not really get inside to the source of my intense reaction, and I could not completely put this reaction aside. Alas, even though I had tried not to betray Spinoza and myself, I ended up betraying us both.

I plan to read Spinoza’s books, even though their sparseness and rigor makes them daunting. I would like to get a more of a feeling for this web of necessary connections Spinoza calls reason and also how reason and intuition come together for him. Even more importantly, I hope his methodology---his bare bones rationality---in conjunction with his message, will help me become more immune to the seductive and tenacious pull of negative emotions (even when it is round about).

Although I tend not to think this way, I am aware that there may be a bonus. Actually my preference is for super-grounded experiences of altered consciousness rather than ecstatic ones. But hey, if it ever gets to be a real issue, maybe I can work something out.

Rebecca Goldstein, Betryaing Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Schocken Books, 2006).

Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003).

Religion and Science - by Albert Einstein

2007-03-29T15:12:00.000-07:00

The following article by Albert Einstein appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 9, 1930 pp 1-4. It has been reprinted in Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, Inc. 1954, pp 36 - 40. It also appears in Einstein's book The World as I See It, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949, pp. 24 - 28.

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions - fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal. In this sense I am speaking of a religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases a leader or ruler or a privileged class whose position rests on other factors combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.

The social impulses are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God.

The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples' lives. And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a varying blend of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically, one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events - provided, of course, that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hopes of reward after death.

It is therefore easy to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees.On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered wide through the world and through the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.

No Essential Difference - by Paul Tallant

2007-03-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

Paul Tallant wrote me (Lois) after reading my piece that he had some thoughts about science and religion. I encouraged him to put them in writing and submit them as a comment. The result was so comprehensive and moving to me and also so parallel to what I had written in certain ways --- I decided that it fit best right afterwards. Paul's views are not exactly the same as mine, but they come close in many areas.

No Essential Difference by Paul Tallant

Acknowledgment: I am grateful to Lois Isenman for her encouragement to write this note and for her gentle and thought-provoking comments and queries as I wrote it.

I was waiting in the doctor’s office and spied a copy of the 17 July 2006 Canadian issue of Time. The cover with a cowboy hat sporting a Presidential Seal and boots protruding beneath caught my attention initially, but my eyes rapidly shifted to one of the cover’s sub-captions; “Exclusive Einstein Letters.” I started reading Walter Isaacsons’s feature “The Intimate Life of A. Einstein,” however my name was called before I finished (a seemingly infrequent event in the patient-waiting rooms of Canadian medicine). After my appointment, the receptionist told me I could borrow the issue. I returned home with it and placed it on my night-time reading table. At bedtime, after reading Isaacson, I discovered David Van Biema’s article “Reconciling God and Science” in the “Religion” section of same issue of Time. Naturally I began reading Van Biema. I did not turn out the light until I had read his entire account of Francis Collins’s personal encounters with God and how Collins reconciles his work in science with his beliefs in the Divine---taken from Collin’s new book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Serendipitously, Lois Isenman’s post, a doctor’s appointment, and a five-months old copy of Time provided me an opportunity to comment on a subject that, in various incarnations, has held my attention for years. I thank Lois for the opportunity to describe briefly the latest edition of my thoughts regarding God and science.

I believe in God. I believe in evolution. And I believe that those two beliefs are intrinsically harmonious. But this harmony is infrequently heard amid the crescendo of a commonly perceived dissonance between God and science. It is the perceived dissonance that likely led Van Biema to title his piece “Reconciling ---” and similarly for Lois to title her’s “--- Bridging –“

I grew up with beliefs far more conservative than those of Collins. Early-on I believed in a “young” Earth, and essentially accepted the Genesis story as an account of Divine science. But Collins does not take that tack and is quite clear in his view about the Genesis account. He says “I don’t think God intended Genesis to teach science.” I now agree with Collins.

Collins’s approach to spirituality was different than mine. Collins was hiking in the Pacific Cascades and encountered a frozen waterfall with the shape of three distinct streams. From those frozen forms Collins recognized the Trinity and surrendered to Jesus Christ. My hike was figurative. It seemed that on a thickly-clouded night I was deep in the Barrens of the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland Canada, seeking to return to the only road that led back home to Witless Bay, a small ex-fishing community near St. John’s. I was lost. But out of the darkness appeared a woman who was studying to be a rabbi. She handed me a copy of Minyan, Ten Principles for Living a Life of Integrity by Rabbi M. Shapiro and said “read it.” I did.

Rabbi Shapiro’s account of the foundation of spirituality is strongly credible to me because he is a Jewish Rabbi who has moved spiritually beyond both his Orthodox upbringing and the Reform rabbinical training he received. In “Minyan –“ Shapiro gives a moving account of his experience as a rabbinic student. Shapiro says:

“I delivered a sermon on the necessary unity of God, woman, man and nature. Immediately after the service I was called into the office of the chairman of the philosophy department for a scholarly reprimand.”

“Referring to my position that God and creation are one, the chairman said; ‘You sir are a megalomaniac.’”

“”With all due respect, Rabbi,’ I said, you are wrong. If I understand the term correctly, a megalomaniac thinks he is God. I, on the other hand, know I am God.’”

“What I meant to convey and doubt very much that I did, was my deep conviction that God is not something or someone living somewhere in or out of time and space. To me God is the One who manifests as all things in time an space. God is not something you pray to, but rather the greater reality to which you awake.” (Italics mine.)

Rabbi Shapiro’s approach to spirituality is in a sense similar to Collins avowing a belief in God and concurrently possessing acknowledged stature in molecular genetics. Shapiro moved beyond the traditions of his cloth and Collins embraced a spiritual belief not common among his scientific peers. I take the essence of Shapiro’s thesis to be that God dwells within each of us, is indescribable, is Love, and is accessible through the exercise of our own free will.

The lady with the book provided the way for me to figuratively return to the road and civilization. I believe in God and further believe that God dwells within me, and within every human being. I spent years wondering about the nature of God, feeling almost a compulsion to discover the nature of God. Lois comments about the deeper meaning of the Jewish concept of God being indescribable and un-nameable. That now is my view of God, perhaps not in the strict Jewish sense, but I recognize that neither I nor any other human can possibly define God, other than to deny God’s existence – and that is a thread-bare definition. I am now content to believe that as part of God being God, the Divine dwells within each of us. And I leave the huge remainder to God alone.

Francis Collins, when viewing the frozen waterfall, surrendered to Jesus Christ. After absorbing more of Minyan -- and the works of other thoughtful writers (for example see Williamson , Welwood , Walsch) I surrendered to God Within, to Love Within. In the broad theme of the Divine, I believe there is no essential difference between Collins’s experience and mine (and that of zillions of other spiritually inclined people)--- what difference there is lies in human viewpoints. I believe further that there exists a perspective that presents these seemingly different views of God as a single Wholeness.

The notion of “no essential difference” applies also to my belief about a “gap” between science and religion, or the need to “reconcile” God and science. Within the broad theme of the Divine, I believe that there is no difference, no gap, and no need for reconciliation. I believe that nature is an explicit revelation of God and that science is the tool available to us humans to learn of the “testable” part of the Divine.

Lois quotes Richard Dawkins as saying, "I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine…” She also quotes Annie Dillard as saying, “I don't know beans about God.” Van Biema describes an exchange between Collins and a Ph.D. candidate at a meeting of Harvey Fellows in Alexandria Virginia. The student asked Collins if he felt that evolution applied to everything else but humans. Collins responded that such a position would get you into real trouble. Collins also said “the human genome contains nonfunctional elements in the precise spot where they can be found on chromosomes of lower animals.” Then Collins asked a question and provided his own answer. “If God was creating humans afresh, why would He insert a pseudo-gene that has lost its ability to do anything in the same place that it appears in a chimp? “ Collins continued “Barring evolution, you are forced to the conclusion that God was trying to mislead us and test our faith and I have trouble with that kind of conjecture.”

Physicists have long recognized the extreme sensitivity of the nature of our Universe to the value of fundamental physical constants. From the Big Bang on, very slight changes in one or more of these constants would have resulted in a dramatically different Universe than what we observe today. And as Lois describes, argument and controversy in the context of God swirls about the origin of the value of these constants.

In graduate school one of the most important things I learned about representing physical phenomena is to use a coordinate system that is intrinsically appropriate to the process itself. For example, if a process inherently has spherical geometry, don’t describe it or cast it in Cartesian coordinates; you’ll only create a symbolic mess for yourself. On a more abstract level, a coordinate system is simply a formality through which details of phenomena can be visualized. It is a perspective through which to view the behavior of a process or system.

Personally, I take the approach of choosing the appropriate “coordinate system”, the appropriate perspective to solving the issue of God and science. If you do not believe in God, then you have the “trivial” solution; there is only science and no need to look further. But if with me you admit the existence of God, then I believe we require a figurative “coordinate system,” a yet undiscovered and undefined perspective, a point-of-view, that will allow the “problem” of God and science to be resolved with efficacy and integrity.

This perspective must deal with both the spiritual and the physical. The spiritual requires faith, the physical intrinsically does not; it is “testable.” With Annie Dillard, I don’t know “beans about God.” But I believe that God exists and I believe with Rabbi Shapiro that the Divine dwells within me and within each of us humans. I further believe with Collins that DNA is a “language of God,” that evolution exists and that it has been and continues to be active in our world. I also believe with Richard Dawkins that “—there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine –.” I further believe that a perspective exists that contains an elegant and non-trivial solution to the issue of God and science. And finally, when viewed via this perspective, I believe we will discover that the solution contains no essential difference between God and science.

Principles of Research - by Albert Einstein

2007-03-29T14:52:00.000-07:00

The following piece was a speech written by Albert Einstein for Max Planck's 60th birthday.

In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.

I am quite aware that we have just now light-heartedly expelled in imagination many excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly, responsible for the building of the temple of science; and in many cases our angel would find it a pretty ticklish job to decide. But of one thing I feel sure: if the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have come to be, any more than a forest can grow which consists of nothing but creepers. For these people any sphere of human activity will do, if it comes to a point; whether they become engineers, officers, tradesmen, or scientists depends on circumstances. Now let us have another look at those who have found favor with the angel. Most of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other, in spite of these common characteristics, than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple? That is a difficult question and no single answer will cover it. To begin with, I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strong¬est motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

With this negative motive there goes a positive one. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

What place does the theoretical physicist's picture of the world occupy among all these possible pictures It demands the highest possible standard of rigorous precision in the description of relations, such as only the use of mathematical language can give. In regard to his subject matter, on the other hand, the physicist has to limit himself very severely: he must content himself with describing the most simple events which can be brought within the domain of our experience; all events of a more complex order are beyond the power of the human intellect to reconstruct with the subtle accuracy and logical perfection which the theoretical physicist demands. Supreme purity, clarity, and certainty at the cost of completeness. But what can be the attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of nature thoroughly, while one leaves everything subtler and more complex shyly and timidly alone? Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to be called by the proud name of a theory of the universe?

In my belief the name is justified; for the general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capacity of the human intellect. The physicist's renunciation of completeness for his cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle.

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who has really gone deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles; this is what Leibnitz described so happily as a "pre-established harmony." Physicists often accuse epistemologists of not paying sufficient attention to this fact. Here, it seems to me, lie the roots of the controversy carried on some years ago between Mach and Planck.

The longing to behold this pre-established harmony is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has devoted himself, as we see, to the most general problems of our science, refusing to let himself be diverted to more grateful and more easily attained ends. I have often heard colleagues try to attribute this attitude of his to extra-ordinary will-power and discipline -wrongly, in my opinion. The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart. There he sits, our beloved Planck, and smiles inside himself at my childish playing-about with the lantern of Diogenes. Our affection for him needs no thread¬bare explanation. May the love of science continue to illumine his path in the future and lead him to the solution of the most important problem in present-day physics, which he has himself posed and done so much to solve. May he succeed in uniting quantum theory with electrodynamics and mechanics in a single logical system.

Religion vs Science: Bridging the Gap - by Lois Isenman

2007-03-29T14:50:00.000-07:00

The gym is not a place I associate with insight into the important spiritual or intellectual issues of our day. Nor for that matter is Time Magazine. I had just finished my workout on the elliptical machine and was on my way to the weight room when I glanced at the magazine table in the hall and in the corner of my eye caught the cover of Time. The cover article “God vs. Science” got my attention. Yet it was as much the spaciousness of the cover design that held my interest. In contrast to Time’s usual dark and busy cover, it was a large white field mostly empty except for an uncurled DNA double helix sauntering down its length to one side. The DNA bases turned into rosary beads and the "molecule" ended up holding a cross--- but I didn't see that until later. I grabbed the magazine and brought it with me to the weight room.

The body of the article turned out to be a debate between an evolutionary biologist and a Christian geneticist. Richard Dawkins , a well-known evolutionary biologist is virulently anti-religion: his recent book is called The God Delusion. The geneticist, Francis Collins, led the effort to decode the genome: his recent book is called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. A while back I heard Dawkins debate a leading intelligent design proponent on NPR. I am very attached to the idea of evolution---to its power and elegance: my sympathies were certainly not with the fundamentalist. However I felt there was something lacking in the case that Dawkins made. Evolution and a sense of a deeper purpose or meaning to existence than that of the material world are not necessarily opposed to each other. I have trouble with the concept of God, but I do believe in the reality of something beyond the material world.

Francis Collins, the geneticist argued--- as do many scientists of faith--- that the fact that the six universal or cosmological constants work out to be just what they have to be to support life indicate that the universe was the handiwork of God. Most scientists agree that if even one constant had been a little off in one direction after the Big Bang--- for example if the gravitational constant had been off by one part in 100 million million --- the expansion of the universe would not have occurred in a way that would have eventually supported life. This is called the anthropic principle.

Dawkins countered in part that this assumes that the cosmological constants are fluid rather than fixed.

"People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill."

Certainly it is difficult to imagine the divine knob twiddling. Yet much more interesting to me is the other tact he and others use to argue against the difficult to account for coincidence implied by the universal constants working out just right to support life. If there were not just one, but a very large number of universes with different cosmological constants, then finding one where everything worked out right would not be so wondrous and would not necessitate an underlying intelligence.

"The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning."

In response Collins invokes Occam’s razor, saying that he finds the idea of a designer a simpler hypothesis than postulating a large number of alternative universes.

"This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam's razor--Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward--leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination."

This helps illustrate what is so often true. One person’s Occam's razor, or simpler explanation, is another person's Mount Everest--- or nearly impossible impasse. I have to say that I am with Collins on this one (though I would posit an intelligent force rather than a designer-- which is too” knob twiddling” for me). An intelligent force seems to be simpler to me than an almost infinite number of universes. Yet I'm not sure which I would think the simpler hypothesis if I didn't have sporadic experiences that support the existence of a deeper and more sophisticated force working in us and through us. My personal concept of spirituality is pretty much grounded in those brief moments in which I get hints of this larger consciousness in the cosmos.

Source: http://travel.webshots.com/photo/1034552630026140686cDYFEY

Notice I said nearly impossible impasse above when remarking that one person's Occam's razor is another person's Mount Everest. Alas Dawkins, a scientist with a large theoretical reach---in spite of his strong antireligious bias --- does seem able to make an assent. He says,

"I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine…My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up…. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed."

Thus Dawkins is not necessarily arguing against mystery, but just for greater mystery that can be contained in God as a historical concept. A wise not so old man I met recently, when I told him about this debate, gave me a new sense of why Jews are not supposed to say the word God. Perhaps Annie Dillard , whose books have a strong spiritual thread (see Oct 26), captures this best---for our unholy and minimalist age--- when she writes, “I don't know beans about God.”

This piece first appeared in Intuition in Depth