Rational Answers

The Game

2010-10-04T15:31:00.004-05:00

Its goes by many names including: “politics”, “promotions”, “public relations”, “punditry”, “preaching” and "Pin the Tail on the Stupid". But among players it is simply called “The Game”. The objective is to get ignorant people to believe falsehoods for fun and/or profit (if you’re profiting by telling the truth you’re not playing the Game). The key to success in the Game is the ability to get people to turn off their objective reasoning skills (i.e., to be stupid).

In the Game you get points whenever you profit from someone else accepting your baseless propositions as facts. In the same way that most drug dealers know not to “get high on their own supply”; true players know not to internalize anything they say in the context of the Game. Points are awarded in the Game based on a combination of the blatancy of the proposition’s falsity (i.e., the stupidity required to believe it), the number of people who believe it and the depth to which they believe it. The accumulation of points manifests as increases in the player’s worldly influence and wealth.

Thanks to the Internet no idea is too stupid (i.e., too egregious a violation of the fundamental laws of logic) to gain traction with some group of marginalized tinfoil hatters. Skilled players try to broaden the distribution of their most preposterous propositions by connecting different groups of believers together using conspiracy theories and then encouraging them to ideologically cross-pollinate. To maximize the depth of penetration of more improbable ideas players typically shape them to be consistent with the personal narratives of their marks. The best players are actually able to convince their marks that believing pure drivel makes them more knowledgeable than everyone who doesn't. Such tactics increase the persistence of an unlikely belief, which in turn increases the chance of it being passed on to other like-minded individuals. As a result, these absurd propositions can provide a solid foundation for building multilevel monuments of idiocy that accumulate huge points in the Game thanks to a multiplier effect.

At the periphery of the Game are lurkers who watch it as a harmless, if sometimes mean-spirited, pastime. Lurkers are able to appreciate the subtleties of the Game but are saddled with too much conscience to play it. The less sympathetic lurkers get a perverse enjoyment out of seeing marks proudly brandishing, as signs of their “superior” intelligence, the stupid ideas that active players have pinned on them. Anyone who wonders why more sympathetic lurkers don’t intervene to warn those being played has obviously never tried to separate people from beliefs that are important to them. As bad as the inaction of lurkers may seem to outsiders, it is the professionals who you really should watch out for. The high-end pros in the Game are wielding immense power in society and often pulling down seven and eight figure (USD) annual salaries. This can incentivize them to play a merciless game that is indifferent to any harm they might cause. These players are generally willing to ruin careers, destroy lives, bring down political systems and if necessary wreck economies in their single-minded pursuit of points in an ultimately meaningless game.

The Game has been played in one form or another since time immemorial. In its earliest versions it was often synonymous with we now think of as product advertising. While much of the action today is still driven by the movement of goods and services, some truly innovative moves have come out of the news media in their efforts to attract viewers and be regarded as relevant (the media equivalents of wealth and power). Their success in combining news, opinion and entertainment into an addictive concoction that is completely lacking in substance has opened the door to a whole new level of play. And through that door has marched the two major American political parties. The Democratic and Republican Parties have revolutionized the Game in terms of the generation and mass distribution of completely idiotic ideas that a significant percentage of the country believe with all their hearts. As such, the lurker-organized fantasy leagues invariably heat up during the run-up to elections. But be aware that the members of these political parties are by no means the top of the Game hierarchy.

In the Game if you are not a player you are probably a mark. The key to avoiding being played is a willingness to question your beliefs. Any belief you have that is based more on your self-image than on empirical evidence from the world around you is, at best, suspect. If you can think of anyone who might be benefiting more from your belief than you are, you have definitely been played. Unfortunately, if you’ve been played by a high-end player, suspecting as much will not provide enough of an incentive to abandon the belief, unless you are also a player. In other words, faced with the choice, a mark will always take the blue pill.

Socialism versus Capitalism

2010-09-17T10:49:00.004-05:00

Britannica defines socialism as "a system of social organization in which private property and the distribution of income are subject to social control". It is based on the idea that in the world beyond subsistence farming many people contribute to the production of goods and services, and on the theory that everyone who contributes to the production of something should profit from the revenue it generates, in proportion to the value of their contribution.

Socialism goes off the rails when those who determine what represents an "appropriate" distribution of profits allot themselves a disproportionate share simply because they can. This tends to create a bureaucratic class that sustains itself by feeding off the efforts of both the executives and the workers.

Capitalism is a system in which "most of the means of production are privately owned and production is guided and income distributed largely through the operation of markets". When everything is in balance it is market forces that determine the appropriate distribution of revenue in a given enterprise.

Capitalism begins to run amok as certain private enterprises become powerful enough to be largely immune to market forces in the context of determining compensation. At this point the executives in these enterprises will often overvalue the worth of their contributions, thus depriving their workers.

Socialism was a reaction to the excesses of capitalism that in the 19th century produced fabulously wealthy industrialists (the so-called robber barons) supported by impoverished workers. As is often the case the cure for this situation proved to be worse than the disease as socialism in places like the Soviet Union and China produced parasitic bureaucracies that fed voraciously on their entire citizenry.

Capitalism tends to promote a greater separation between the top and bottom of a society while socialism tends to promote a smaller separation. This means that in essence capitalism is the more hierarchical system while socialism is the more egalitarian one.

From a socialistic perspective capitalism is a system that encourages a tendency for a select few to profit disproportionately from the work of many. From a capitalistic perspective socialism is a system that encourages a tendency for negligible contributors to profit disproportionately from the unique skills of a select few. Both systems persist because both systems have a point.

For the foreseeable future most modern societies will cycle back and forth between their capitalistic and socialistic tendencies as the weaknesses of the currently dominant system lead to a public backlash that will push it to the margins for a time as the other system is embraced until its weaknesses become intolerable to the citizens and they bring the first system back. This cycle will only be broken when either the entire system collapses or a new system emerges that encompasses the strengths of socialism and capitalism while addressing their weaknesses. Fasten your seat belts it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Knowledge Allergic Information Addiction: Symptoms and Treatments

2010-06-16T09:11:00.003-05:00

There are at least two significant negative effects of being a knowledge allergic information addict. First it is a self-marginalizing condition since the more its victims emphasize the differences between things the less like anything else they will see themselves as being. In the case of politically extreme knowledge allergic information addicts, this progression works along these lines: “First I used information to marginalize the liberals/conservatives (since I am not one of them and believe they are not good people). Then I used information to marginalize the moderates. Then I used information to marginalize those on my side of the political spectrum who disagree with me on any political issue. Then I used information to marginalize those who agree with me politically but not on other areas. And so on until I was the only right-thinking person left.” Rest assured this progression works beyond the political domain. As this symptom progresses victims increasingly see the world as being populated by opponents united in complex conspiracies against them.

A second major debilitating symptom of being a knowledge allergic information addict is that regardless of how much information you amass the world seems, if anything, less comprehensible. In the epistemology described here, complexity reflects the ratio of information to knowledge in the given person’s perspective. This means that the more you focus on the differences between things rather than their similarities, the greater the complexity you will experience around you. For knowledge allergic information addicts this complexity can defy comprehension. This is because complexity is reduced through understanding, which is the conversion of information into knowledge. The basis of understanding is the realization that things are connected by what separates them. For instance, the bricks in a wall are connected by the mortar that separates them. However those who are allergic to knowledge resist their allergen through a symptomatic tendency to not see the connections between things their information separates. As long as this inclination persists understanding of the world around them will continue to elude them.

These symptoms incline knowledge allergic information addicts to perceive the world around them as an incomprehensible place full of people who are not like them and so could easily be conspiring against all they hold dear. Needless to say it is difficult to reason with those suffering from this condition about the validity of knowledge that they see as contradicting their interpretation of the world. The longer these informed yet biased perspectives persist, the more deeply they are integrated into their owners’ self-image. This means that the longer a knowledge allergy goes untreated the more its victim will perceive external attempts to help as personal attacks. As such, it is unlikely that a cure could be facilitated through a straightforward rational intervention.

There is hope for those afflicted with this disease. Though their minds tend to be closed through self-justifying interpretations of what they already believe, they remain mentally active in their quest for new information to feed their addiction. Their willingness to expose themselves to new data keeps open the possibility that they will eventually encounter mind-expanding insights that lead them to question the foundation of the informational world view that emerged from their condition. Without knowledge to provide cohesion these informational perspectives are generally houses of cards that become flimsier the larger they grow. As a result, the product of this disease eventually becomes the best path to a cure.

Addicted to Information Yet Allergic to Knowledge

2010-05-18T11:35:00.005-05:00

The easy availability of huge volumes of data via the internet has led to an epidemic of information addiction. A growing number of people cannot go an entire day without an information update. In a rational society the desire for more information would normally not be interpreted as a bad thing. Unfortunately this condition is increasingly accompanied by an allergic reaction to relevant knowledge thus undermining the potential value of the information addiction.

To understand this condition it is important to first understand what information and knowledge are. Information describes how things are different from each other. For example, information is how we establish that the color orange is redder than the color blue. Knowledge characterizes how things are alike. For instance knowledge establishes that orange, red and blue are colors. Our tendency to use the terms interchangeably is based on the fact that things are connected by that which separates them (e.g., the spectrum that distinguishes colors also connects them). As a result, whether something represents information or knowledge is based on how deeply we interpret it. Since we can only experience contrast, information comes from interpreting our experiences. Knowledge generally comes from interpreting information. Understanding is the conversion of information into knowledge.

These days an increasing number of people are obsessed with information. These individuals typically focus on how things are different from them and each other. For instance, in politics when someone offers information that “proves” a sweeping generalization such as, “all liberals are evil” or “all conservatives are stupid” I hear the sniffles of a knowledge allergy. Where such a person does not self identify as evil in the former case or stupid in the latter, this information primarily serves to differentiate and marginalize the subject. It is the inclination of people to deny the knowledge that connects them to the groups they seek to marginalize (e.g., that there are good liberals and intelligent conservatives) that is symptomatic of their knowledge allergies. Chronic sufferers of this condition tend to exhibit symptoms in all areas of discourse, not just the political arena.

In the Internet Age knowledge allergic information addicts are typically out scouring the Web to amass stashes of information that supports their beliefs while studiously avoiding knowledge that contradicts them. Unlike victims of the class-based or divinely mandated knowledge prohibitions, today’s knowledge allergic information addicts are in a position to appreciate the utility of information but often lack the capacity to fully process everything that interests them. The sheer volume of information that is literally at their fingertips these days overwhelms their capacity to understand it all.

As they accumulate unprocessed information, some people develop a tendency to regard the differences between things as more important than their similarities. This inclination can be exacerbated by the fact that our uniqueness is only meaningful in the context of our informational orientation. As such where we value our uniqueness, we tend to embrace information that casts it in a positive light. But there is a threshold of infatuation with our uniqueness beyond which we interpret knowledge of our similarities to others as a threat to our self-esteem (“I have NOTHING in common with those evil liberals / stupid conservatives”). When zealously informed people cannot remain rational when confronted with such knowledge their addiction to information has triggered a knowledge allergy.

The Washington Prescription

2010-04-21T16:24:00.005-05:00

People often complain that the artistic quality of Hollywood feature films has gone down over the years. Those who make this observation typically blame Hollywood for this phenomenon. However, like any free enterprise system, Hollywood produces products that ultimately reflect the demands of its market. Note that in the face of the general perception that its products' artistic quality is sinking, Hollywood's revenues are setting new records each year. Think about this in the context of the current political mess in Washington DC.

At the risk of being accused of blaming the victim I maintain that the electorate is responsible for the toxic political environment in Washington DC. The politicians there are well aware of the fact that we have the power to vote them out of office. As such, they act the way they do because it continues to provoke a positive electoral response from us. Arguably, most Washington politicians today are directing more of their efforts towards triggering that response than to actually doing their jobs.

Others have argued that the growing influence of deep-pocketed lobbyists is responsible for the current culture in Washington. However, such lobbyists have power in Washington DC primarily because it is still possible to sway enough voters to decide an election through the use of paid political ads. Our relative ignorance of the issues leaves us susceptible to such ads. This means that our political ignorance transfers some of our political power to those who pay for those ads. But we remain the source of that power. The same is true of the growing power of pundits and political entertainers. Being the ultimate power in Washington DC means we are responsible for its current condition.

In order for the electorate to have a direct hand in improving the political atmosphere in Washington DC, we must first accept responsibility for its current state. As long as we deny being responsible for this situation, we distance ourselves from the power to fix it. Expecting that things will get better simply by sending different people into the same noxious environment is analogous to that switching from regular to menthol cigarettes to treat your emphysema.

To improve the political environment in Washington DC we must each take it upon ourselves raise our level of political discourse. In order to do this, we must allow our personal ideologies to be primarily shaped by our life experiences rather than the talking points of people we like or even admire. We must develop our positions on political issues by analyzing them through the filter of our life experiences, rather than simply accepting or rejecting them based on how they are labeled (typically by people with a vested interest in how we react to them). When we present our political opinions to others we must do so in a manner that demonstrates our intelligence and respects theirs. We must give respectful consideration to divergent political opinions presented to us in this manner (rather than disparagingly dismissing them as partisan crackpottery).

As more of us begin to interact in such a manner I maintain that our elected officials will react to the spread of this new reasonable discourse by emulating it, if for no other reason than to avoid losing their jobs. In other words, by becoming a sensible, respectable electorate we can shape sensible, respectable representatives.

Existence and God

2009-12-03T13:42:00.008-06:00

Existence is the capacity to be. Obviously everything that exists has the capacity to be. This means that everything that exists is contingent upon this capacity including the capacity itself. Any entity lacking this capacity is impossible. The impossible is that which cannot exist. Anything that cannot exist represents an analytic contradiction. A trivial example of such an entity would be a married bachelor.

One of the most profound analytic contradictions is an entity that exists and is both distinguishable from and more fundamental than existence. Such an entity is impossible because for anything to be both more fundamental than and contingent upon existence would be inconsistent with the meanings of the terms fundamental and contingent. The impossibility of all such entities means that the most fundamental thing in existence is existence itself.

Those who believe in a certain characterization of the one true God will generally take issue with this conclusion. This is because these believers regard God as the most fundamental entity that exists. This belief is based on their wholehearted embrace of the following propositions:

1. God exists
2. God is the Supreme Being
3. God is the source of every being that is distinguishable from it

For the sake of this argument let me define a being as any entity that exists and the Supreme Being as that which exists and is not contingent upon any other being. In other words, the Supreme Being is the most fundamental entity that exists.

If God is distinguishable from existence then the Third God Proposition requires God to be the source of existence. However, in the most elementary sense a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for one entity to be the source of another is that the former must be able to exist in the absence of the latter. But it is impossible for anything to exist in the absence of existence. As a result, a God that exists and is distinguishable from existence cannot be the source of existence. This means that for such a God the Third God Proposition false.

If we abandon the Third God Proposition and posit that God exists, is distinguishable from existence but is not the source of existence, then God is contingent upon something distinct from it that is not contingent upon it. This would mean that God is not the Supreme Being, which cannot be contingent upon anything other than itself. In other words, if God exists and is distinguishable from existence, then both the Second and Third God Propositions are false. But without these propositions what we are discussing no longer represents the one true God, thus falsifying the First God Proposition. This means that if the God of these propositions is distinguishable from existence, it cannot exist.

This does not mean there is no entity for which these God Propositions are true. Note that existence exists, is not contingent upon any other being and all other beings are contingent upon it. In other words, though none of the God Propositions are true of any entity that exists and is distinguishable from existence, they are all true of existence itself. This means that God can exist, be the Supreme Being and be the source of all beings if God is existence.

Certain of the theistically inclined contend that God is greater than existence. They typically characterize God as absolute Divinity, Love, Wisdom, Power and Presence. But these properties must exist in order to confer greatness upon God. Yet the premise that they exist means these absolute properties are contingent upon existence, and thus so is any greatness that God would acquire from them. In other words, existence is the source of God’s greatness. This argument is supported by the fact that one of the premises of the original Ontological Argument for the existence of God essentially states that without existence God cannot be the Supreme Being, regardless of its divine properties.

The proposition that if God exists, it is contingent upon existence is a logical tautology. This contingent being is at best a demigod unless this contingency is mutual. However, where God and existence are regarded as distinct beings, the proposition that existence is also contingent upon God is a matter of rationally indefensible faith. This faith-based proposition can only be logically supported if God is existence. In other words, from a rational theistic perspective either existence is God or God is not the Supreme Being.

Abusing Rationalism

2009-11-20T13:15:00.004-06:00

Recall that in the broadest sense a rationalist is anyone who is predisposed to believe that all important knowledge is attainable. In this context note that one of the fundamental principles of rational dynamics is that the accumulation of knowledge brings with it greater power. This notion motivates self-centered individuals to seek knowledge for the purpose of increasing their power. In the long run, pursuing such an immature rationalist agenda will cause more problems than it solves. The great threat posed by rationalism is evident in the fact that the scientific and technological breakthroughs it continues to produce are providing increasingly efficient mechanisms for bringing about the end of humanity.

In the face of this danger we continue to eagerly embrace rationality. To understand why this is, first note that in more mundane circumstances it can be difficult to differentiate a rationalist from a mystic. But as situations become more challenging it becomes easier to distinguish those responding rationally from those reacting mystically. The rationalist contends that with sufficient time we can accumulate the knowledge to solve any problematic situation, regardless of its complexity. The mystic believes that for problems exceeding a certain scope, the knowledge to solve them either does not exist or resides forever beyond our rational grasp. It is this viewpoint that inclines mystics to appeal to external, often supernatural, agents for assistance with such challenges. This means that given the spectrum of perspectives extending from total rationality at one end to pure mysticism at the other, those adopting the more rationalist outlooks are more self-determined and personally empowered than those embracing more mystical points of view.

It is through the application of rationality that we increase our objective understanding of and control over our world. The subjectivity that manifests in the absence of rationality limits the precision with which we can share knowledge and experiences with others. This means that rationality is the most efficient mechanism for building an empirically confirmed consensus of knowledge that is immune to subjective uncertainty. Such a rationally-derived structure reflects the accumulated power of our intellect in that it is the foundation of our most consistent capacity to influence our surroundings. The story of the Tower of Babel is essentially the tale of a mystical God opposing such a program.

Appropriate resistance to such a rationalist agenda is based on understanding that increasing rationality does not necessarily correspond to increasing wisdom. As such, there is no guarantee that even the most brilliant rationalist has the maturity to pursue knowledge and accumulate the accompanying power, without also laying the groundwork for our extinction. This is because as long as knowing better does not automatically equate to doing better, we will always be able to think better than we can be.

This is the dynamic underlying the fact that, left to their own devices, immature rationalists have a tendency to be indifferent to the negative impact of their pursuits on others. These self-centered rationalists are often inclined to use the power they gain from amassing knowledge, to enrich themselves by exploiting others in ways that limit their victims’ growth. Such oppression represents the essence of evil.

To limit the spread of this condition throughout our society we must transition from a quest for the knowledge to subjugate our world, to an altruistic program to discover and fulfill a logical, unifying purpose that is not based on separating ourselves from everything else. The specific nature of this purpose will become evident as we find rational answers to our most important existential questions. These discoveries are the events that will facilitate the cultural transformation that will prevent our rational self-destruction. If we abandon the search for rational existential answers, this crucial social paradigm shift will most likely not occur.

In that eventuality, knowledge will become our ultimate weapon of mass destruction. The more we wield its accompanying power to further our own self interests, the more this knowledge will consume that which we should be encouraging to grow. Such ill-conceived choices are typically justified by our sense of self-importance, which expands with our power from a self-centered perspective.

In making the fundamental choice to always favor ourselves over others, we become susceptible to the principle of sentient dynamics that is characterized by the adage: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. In this context, the power we gain from a self-centered pursuit of a rationalist agenda will lead to an increasingly brutal world in which people increasingly prey on each other until we completely devour ourselves.

It is important to realize that if this is to be our fate it will be the result of an abuse of the rationalist program. Our rational self-destruction would not be due to the fact that we went in search of rational answers; it will be because along the way we became lost in our own self-importance and failed to develop wisdom required to safely handle what we discovered.

Tolerating Mysticism

2009-11-02T11:06:00.004-06:00

Recall that in the broadest sense a mystic is anyone who is predisposed to believe there are mysteries that can never be rationally solved. To many rationally-inclined individuals, mysticism represents one of the great ills of our society. They point out that mystics were responsible for many of the greatest atrocities in human history (whether or not Adolph Hitler was a theist he was undeniably a mystic). But the fact that we can appreciate the wrongs done in the name of mysticism does not mean we no longer need it.

Early in the evolution of a society its awareness of the existential threats facing it exceeds its knowledge of their basic nature and how to eliminate them. During this period, the society is at risk of being undermined by fear of the unknown. The most common solution to this problem is for sages to develop a belief system that allows the people to push forward through this fear and uncertainty. This mythos provides the culture with certainty based on a belief that its people can influence the unknown to their advantage without ever fully understanding it. This situation often leads to the personification and worship of the Primal Mystery underlying all unknowns. And thus a new religion is born.

At about this point in a mystic culture’s history it transfers a portion of its fear of the unknown to the Primal Mystery, which represents the fundamental unknowable. As a result, most of those who worship the Primal Mystery also fear it. This mystical fear serves to keep its subjects from completely giving in to their most selfish instincts. This is why the Primal Mystery, which is the ultimate object of mystical fear, is the basis of morality for most mystics.

The mystics’ fear of the Primal Mystery also serves to inhibit their pursuit of knowledge. In the story of the Garden of Eden this fear kept Adam and Eve from initially eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Mystical restrictions on the quest of knowledge often lead to a situation in which a culture’s worshipful fear of the Primal Mystery limits the growth of its people. Such repression represents the essence of evil. To avoid this circumstance a culture must transition from a reverential fear of the Primal Mystery to a purposeful search for the complete connection to the Fundamental Absolute. This Fundamental Absolute is what will survive the solution of the Primal Mystery (i.e., the so-called ‘Death of God’), which is the event that usually facilitates this transition.

Has our society reached the point at which mysticism, the customs that sustain our relationship with the Primal Mystery, is doing more harm than good? This question is essentially asking if we are mature enough to resist our self-centered tendencies in the face of the temptations of the fruits of the unbridled pursuit of knowledge, without the influence of a real or imagined supernatural agent. Even if you believe that as an individual, you have the requisite maturity, would you trust the average person around you with the knowledge to reshape the planet?

If your answer is ‘no’, then while it may be okay for you to doff your mystic robes, you probably do not want to live in a world where no one who needs to believe in a Primal Mystery is inhibited by fear of it. Even with this fear consider the carnage mystics have caused under the influence of their misinterpretations and misrepresentations of its will. This indicates that at your core you believe it is still necessary for some people to remain mystics, even if you aren’t one of them. This is because most mystics are not mature enough to be freed from their self-limiting viewpoint. As such, even if you no longer share the characteristic beliefs of mystics you still believe the world needs mysticism.

Are You a Secret Mystic?

2009-10-23T10:12:00.009-05:00

Many of us would like to believe we are rational individuals living in an increasingly rational world in which mysticism is being correspondingly marginalized. Even though you may regard yourself as a fundamentally rational person, you could in fact be a mystic with a predisposition to hinder the advancement of rationality.

To understand how this could be, let me first provide some background. Mystics are essentially people inclined to believe there are mysteries that can never be solved. Whether the mystery is religious (“why did God create evil?”), philosophical (“why is there something instead of nothing?”) scientific (“how did life originally emerge from non-living matter?”) or personal (“why can’t I catch a break?”), if you accept that it can never be rationally explained you are a mystic. It is a disposition towards harboring such beliefs that fundamentally defines mystics, not the supernatural powers, arcane knowledge, meditative trances and various magical artifacts that are typically attributed to them.

If that is all there is to being a mystic you may wonder what is the harm in it? It might be kind of cool to be able to walk up to strangers at a party and introduce yourself as a mystic; thus implicitly claiming membership in a club that is often characterized as a exclusive, mysterious, powerful and perhaps even a little dangerous.

The problem with being a mystic is that it is an inherently self-limiting perspective. The critical factor in being a mystic is a fundamental belief that there are unyielding constraints on what we can rationally comprehend. This means that to be a mystic is to believe there is an absolute limit on the power of rational thought.

In accepting this premise mystics typically assert the existence of entities that transcend the boundary of rationality. These mystics recognize that they can never rationally understand these great, yet inherently mysterious beings. This situation eventually leads them to personify and worship, the Primal Mystery underlying everything that resides beyond what they perceive to be the absolute limit of rationality. This perspective characterizes virtually all of today’s religions. The fact that they are founded on the Primal Mystery is why all of our major religions are fundamentally mystical.

Ironically, there are people who think that religions have outlived their usefulness and at the same time accept that there are limits to the power of rational thought. Some of these individuals are not merely irreligious, they express open hostility towards religions, yet their mystical disposition is sympathetic to the idea underlying those ‘intolerable’ institutions. This situation is analogous to gay people who speak out against homosexuality.

No matter how rationally antireligious you claim to be, if you are inclined to believe we can never objectively explain what triggered the Big Bang, how consciousness manifests in the brain, why the uncertainty principle works or any other important mystery, then at your core you are a rationality-limiting, religion-sympathizing mystic.

Mind, Consciousness and Self-awareness

2009-06-09T08:36:00.004-05:00

If you are reading this you have a mind. But a consensus has yet to emerge regarding what exactly a mind is. We tend to define the mind in terms of things like consciousness and self-awareness though there is little agreement as to what those phenomena are either. I maintain that in the simplest sense your mind is the convergence of your self-awareness and consciousness. Self-awareness is your perception of what you are and your consciousness is your perception of what you are not.

To be conscious an entity must also be self-aware. For example, the computer monitor displaying these words is not conscious of them because it has no sense of itself in the context containing them. In other words, there is no intrinsic component of the monitor can be interpreted by the monitor as representing the monitor displaying the words. By contrast, you are conscious of these words because in addition to interacting with them, you are also aware of yourself interacting with them. This is because there is an intrinsic component of you that is interpreted by you as you reading these words.

Self-awareness is the component of your mind that interprets the relationship between the entity reading these words and the being recognizing itself as that entity as a connection. As such, you are both the subject and object of your self-awareness. Consciousness is the component of your mind that interprets the relationship between the object of your self-awareness and these words (and everything else that you are interacting with in some manner) as a separation.

Elsewhere I have defined time as the separation between instances of the same being (e.g., the person who started reading this parenthetical and the person who is now finishing it) and space as the separation between instances of different beings (e.g., the opening and closing parentheses surrounding this example). In this context, self-awareness spans time while consciousness spans space.

Consciousness represents the boundary of our self-awareness in that it essentially delineates what we are not. Since we are shaped by what we are not, for many of us consciousness is the primary vehicle by which we can understand what we are.

In general the mind is a self-aware phenomenon that is self-limited by its consciousness, through which it acquires knowledge of the world around it. In this sense it is evident that though consciousness seems to be ignited in the brain it is not necessarily limited to it anymore than the illumination produced by a neon light is limited to the bulb.

Self-awareness is essentially our capacity to see ourselves in beings that influence us (typically our predecessor instances). The more self-aware we are the less of a separation we will perceive from others. Complete self-awareness would allow us to see ourselves as being connected to everything, thus invalidating the concept of "other".

Since consciousness is what limits our self-awareness, the less of it we have the more complete our self-awareness will be. Our consciousness keeps our self-awareness from being complete by allowing us to perceive certain entities that shape us as being distinct from us. In other words, our consciousness is the basis of our uniqueness. As a result, one of our primary goals as conscious beings is to transcend our consciousness and become completely self-aware minds that can see ourselves in everything and everything in us.

Teleological Dynamics

2009-02-09T09:07:00.009-06:00

In the preceding essay I proposed that we have free will but that in the long run its influence is subsumed by that of teleological determinism. Here I will explain how this form of determinism works and why in the end we are responsible for what it demands of us.

Let me start by returning to the proposition that we have free will but its scope is circumscribed by that of teleological determinism. If we accept this to be true it is reasonable to ask if we actually have free will or is there merely a deterministic illusion of it leading us between teleological milestones to our ultimate destiny?

To appreciate why I insist it is the former, note that as living, conscious matter we are advancing towards three seemingly divergent destinies. As material beings we are constituents of a physical universe that is taking us with it as it propagates towards its ultimate state of complete temporal equilibrium where all causal interactions cease. As living beings we are component organisms of an arguably universal symbiosis that is taking us with it as it evolves towards its ultimate state of perfect biotic equilibrium in which life is perpetually sustained. As conscious beings we are members of a spiritual union (recall that I define spirit as simply the connection among cooperating minds) that is taking us with it as it advances towards the spiritual equilibrium that is absolute Unity. Our free will is essentially our intrinsic capacity to choose to pursue any one of these destinies and thus potentially resist the pull of the others. In other words, we have actual free will as long as we can still choose to pathologically pursue life-ending temporal equilibrium, selfishly chase biotic immortality or selflessly approach Unity.

The destiny at the end of each of these paths teleologically determines the milestones we must traverse to reach it from our current state. For instance, the causal dynamics that play out under the pull of the temporal equilibrium define the material configurations through which we must propagate to get there from our current causal state. The biotic dynamics that play out under the pull of perpetual life define the living states through which we must evolve to get there from our current biological state. And of course, the spiritual dynamics that play out under the pull of absolute Unity define the spiritual states through which we must grow to get there from our current mental state.

Biotic dynamics are constrained both causally and teleologically by temporal dynamics. This is evident in that biotic dynamics causally emerged from temporal dynamics and will teleologically end prior to their cessation. By contrast, spiritual dynamics are causally but not necessarily teleologically bound by temporal dynamics. This is because the minds that are the fundamental components of spiritual dynamics causally emerged from temporal dynamics, but their ultimate Unity represents the end of all spiritual, biotic and temporal dynamics. In other words, where absolute Unity exists it transcends all dynamics. This means that Unity takes us beyond perpetual life and the end of causality and thus represents our truly ultimate destiny. This also indicates that two of the teleological milestones along our path to Unity are perpetual life and the end of causality.

As an ultimate destiny that is not impossible, Unity must exist somewhere in the realm of possibility. Since absolute Unity is the end state of all possible minds and is comprised of their perfect union, if any mind achieves it then every mind does. It is important to note that in limitless time, everything that can happen does. As such, in the absence of a requirement for time to be finite, absolute Unity is inevitable for all of us.

By definition, absolute Unity cannot be differentiated. As such, when we achieve it we do not simply become a part of it, we become Unity in its entirety. This means that in the end we are the entity that is teleologically shaping the deterministic milestones along the path to our ultimate destiny. Recall that where we have free will it shapes our path between these teleological milestones. This means that in the final analysis we both determine where we are going and decide how we get there. In other words, we are totally responsible for the shape of our path to our ultimate destiny.

Free Will versus Determinism

2009-02-05T14:49:00.010-06:00

Whether we have free will or are simply dancing meat puppets gyrating to the beat of mindless determinism, is a question that has been debated for centuries. While the consensus has shifted back and forth over time, there is as yet still no definitive answer. I propose a compatibilistic solution that both propositions are true.

To appreciate how this can be consider the analogy of classical versus quantum mechanics in physics. Classical mechanics, in which all effects have definite causes, is completely deterministic. This perspective corresponds to a metaphysical domain in which there is no free will. But in physics the causal determinism of classical mechanics does not extend down to the smallest scale, which is the domain of quantum mechanics. On this level events occur with no deterministic cause. For instance, when an atom emits an alpha particle, it does so spontaneously, not because something caused it do so. This lack of quantum causality is analogous to a metaphysical domain that accommodates free will. These seemingly incompatible physical domains intersect since the effects that emerge from accumulations of uncaused quantum events represent deterministic classical events.

The essential difference between this physical analogy and the metaphysical context I am proposing to answer the question of whether we are governed by free will or determinism is that the determinism of the physical system is causal while that of the metaphysical dynamic is teleological, meaning it is shaped by its ultimate effect. The context of my answer provides for the existence of teleological milestones, which represent events that we are deterministically "destined" to experience. In this context our non-deterministic free will can select the specific direction of our incremental steps between these milestones. This means that metaphysically our free will does not determine where we are ultimately going but it can decide how we get there. In other words, we have free will that is effective on smaller scales but becomes increasingly impotent on larger scales. In general, our free will allows us to pursue goals that may defer our destiny but we encounter its limits when we try to elude our fate.

Free will is not simply our power to pursue our goals; it is our intrinsic capacity to choose which, if any of them to pursue. Our goals manifest within us as either needs or desires. The teleological pull of our ultimate destiny is the basis of our needs. On the deterministic level our needs represent our inexorable compulsion to advance towards our final fate, without regard for our uniqueness. We are pulled from the shortest path to our ultimate destiny by our desires, which represent our reactions to our uniqueness. In other words, where we are going shapes our needs and how we get there is shaped by our free will choosing from among our goals.

The question of whether we have free will or are controlled by determinism is generally considered in the context of causal determinism. I propose that we begin to transcend this form of determinism when our minds start to respond to the teleological dictates of our destiny. As such, initially the closer we are to the earliest, instinct-driven level of development, the less free will we have. This is because our choices are being made for us by our causally generated biological drives. At the other end of the extreme, as we approach the most mature, selfless level of development our desires are replaced by our teleologically determined needs. Here we also have decreasing free will since we are increasingly inclined to only do what teleologically needs to be done. In other words, we have free will from the time we can choose to either resist or give in to our baser impulses to the point at which we are no longer tempted by them. This indicates that our free will is at its maximum capacity when we are at the midpoint between the influences of causality and teleology where we can most easily choose between them.

I maintain that most of us have some degree of free will but it does not decide our ultimate destiny because of the overarching influence of determinism. In my next essay I will delve into the dynamics underlying teleological determinism and illustrate how in the end it all still comes back to us.

Finding My Religion

2009-01-18T19:15:00.003-06:00

In light of the concerns outlined in my previous essay, I do not see a place for me in any one of today’s major religions. I could only belong to a religion that is based on rational ideas, is all-inclusive and is so lacking in structure that it borders on anarchy.

At the heart of the today’s major religions there are mystical ideas that supposedly defy rational understanding. The inability of believers to grasp these core concepts without the assistance of intermediaries generally leads to the formation of religious hierarchies that often exploit those at the bottom for the selfish purposes of some at the top.

In today’s information rich environment, a religion based on rationality is less likely to form exploitive hierarchies of intermediaries to “the Truth” (though as long as its interpretation of the fundamental truth is incomplete, it would still prone to the formation of potentially divisive schools of thought). To see why this is, note that in non-religious, but rational, academic philosophy there are probably as many schools of thought as there are “great” philosophers. Yet an expert in a given school is not in a position to block a relative neophyte’s path to increased understanding in lieu of some selfish ransom.

Rational systems of thought provide intelligent, motivated seekers with a degree of autonomy in their efforts to realize a deeper level of understanding. This self-sufficiency tends to preclude the formation of exploitable hierarchies of dependency.

Recall that all religions characterize an ultimate state of spirituality and describe a means of reaching it. What distinguishes an all-inclusive religion is that it sees all paths as eventually leading to the same destiny. As a result, instead of promoting a single path to our final spiritual fate, such a religion endorses all paths.

Membership in an all-inclusive religion is based on whether or not an individual is advancing towards the ultimate spiritual state, which the religion insists everyone is. Such a religion ascribes to the precept that since we are all eventually going to reach this state, there is no justifiable motive for abusing and sometimes even killing people based on their belief in how best to get there. Though simple, non-religious compassion compels us to mitigate the negative impact of any inhumane practices that a spiritual path may promote.

An all-inclusive religion does not distinguish believers from non-believers in terms of better and worse. As a result, it decreases the likelihood of the former committing atrocities against the latter in the name of the religion.

Those who do not choose to follow any of an all-inclusive religion’s current prescriptions for spiritual growth are still considered members. They are simply viewed as exploring different paths to the same ultimate destiny. On significant occasions, individuals on such alternate paths uncover the most extraordinary spiritual insights. These ideas are sometimes needed to extricate a religion from the cycle of dogmatic stagnation that typically manifests when divergent voices are not heard. As a result, these irregular members are valued as a crucial factor in the continued advancement of the religion.

At first glance a religion with no hierarchy whatsoever, in which everyone is free to do whatever makes sense to them, seems anarchic. But there is more to such a religion then meets the eye if it follows what has come to be called the open source model. In such a system there is virtually no central governing authority and everyone is free to contribute in whatever way they can; though no one is obliged to do so. The members of such a group are united by a shared vision and enriched lives, not by executive edicts and taxing obligations.

Such a religion would be more accurately characterized as socialistically egalitarian. It is worth noting that socialism is based on a selflessness that is consistent with the core tenets of every worthwhile spiritual perspective. As a result, a religion based on this principle represents a step up from the totalitarian oligarchies that predominate these days.

Ironically, many of us on what we regard as non-religious paths to deeper spirituality are already members of what could be characterized as a religion that is rational (it makes sense to us), inclusive (we accept everyone else’s the right to pursue their own path to our common ultimate destiny) and egalitarian (we do not require intermediaries and so, there is no dependency hierarchy). Such a religion might not be embraced by those who prefer mysticism, exclusivity and/or structure. But for those of us who favor rationality, inclusiveness and freedom, this irreligious religion is less likely to divide, exploit and abuse humanity.

The Problem of Religion

2009-01-13T15:00:00.009-06:00

I am an example of what has become a contemporary cliché in that I regard myself as spiritual but not religious. I define religion as a prescribed set of rites, rituals and beliefs that are supposed to provide moral guidelines to their practitioners, while deepening their spirituality. Though I appreciate the idea of religion in the abstract, I am not a big fan of how it is typically practiced today. The primary benefit I see in our major religions is that they sometimes give comfort to worthwhile people who would otherwise feel spiritually lost.

For me personally, the potential spiritual benefits of today’s major religions are simply not worth their secular costs. Since I am not a paragon of morality and spirituality, I have needs that the right religion could conceivably address. But my needs in this area are not great enough to force me to endure or worse, contribute to the difficulties that often manifest in and through religions.

As I see it, the problem with today’s religions is that they are generally divisive belief systems that are easily perverted for exploitive and sometimes even more appalling purposes. The divisiveness of religions is based on the manner in which they distinguish true believers from the rest of us. When religions regard infidels and heretics as inherently inferior, the religious capacity for atrocity emerges. This is because once a religion draws the line separating the sacred from the profane (or at best the mundane) between true believers and all others, it implicitly sanctions the former to treat the latter horrifically. Only in a religious context could the oxymoron ‘sanctified atrocity’ make sense.

The exploitive nature of religions manifests when they begin to develop hierarchical organizations. Such structures typically emerge when a religion’s core precepts represent arcana that require mystical interpretation. In such belief systems, the deeper your understanding of the founding principles (as subjectively assessed by other profound believers) the higher you are in its hierarchy. This dynamic generally leads to a perception that advancing your position in the religious hierarchy is synonymous with spiritual growth.

Once this view becomes commonplace in an organization that distinguishes itself from the secular world (in which spiritual growth is objectively demonstrated), the religion has essentially transformed itself from a spiritual vehicle to a political one. This invariably leads to increasing numbers of people of dubious morality and spirituality rising to leadership positions in the religion. Such leadership can, and with distressing regularity does, selfishly exploit its followers under the guise of promoting their spiritual growth.

Be that as it may, I do not subscribe to the cynical belief that religion is the source all human problems in the world. I maintain that it is the perversion of our basic survival instinct into excessive self-centeredness that is the culprit here. I do believe that the nature of religion makes it arguably the greatest mechanism available to us for amplifying the negative impact of our self-centeredness. Ultimately, it is not the existence of religion, but the manner in which it is often structured and practiced that makes it to such a destructive force in our world today.

Love and Happiness

2008-12-16T08:55:00.010-06:00

There are some people who seem to always be happy, regardless of how meager their situations appear to the outside observer. There are also people who cannot seem to sustain happiness, no matter how great their lives are perceived to be by others. This dichotomy exists because the inclination towards happiness manifests in different degrees in different people, with little correlation to their circumstances. While some people are born with a consistent tendency to be happy, I maintain that those who feel that their propensity for happiness is insufficient can increase it considerably over the course of their lives.

Before I describe how this is done, let me first explain what I mean by happiness. We all believe we know what happiness is since most of us have had bouts of it, regardless of our relative inability to sustain it. But if you ask most people what it means to be happy, you typically get a list of effects and synonyms but rarely a good characterization of the underlying cause.

I regard happiness as the appreciation of the absence of need. In this context need is our separation from completeness. At first glance this would seem to indicate that only those who have achieved completeness (the topic of another essay), can be truly happy. But from a deeper perspective it means that happiness is more readily available to those who have greater awareness of their proximity to completeness (or, as is often the case with simpler folk, less awareness of their separation from completeness).

Bear in mind that happiness is not our ultimate objective. In general, sustained happiness is simply an indicator that we are near our true objective of completeness. The closer we are to completeness, the fewer needs we have to focus on and so the more likely we are to be happy. Mind you, those who lack a sufficient propensity for happiness will usually just place a greater emphasis on their remaining needs.

Viewed this way it looks like it is theoretically possible to be too happy. For those of us who still see ourselves as far from complete, our needs are our primary incentive to grow. As such, if we still have needs but our happiness has us directing our attention away from them, this incentive to grow would no longer be effective, thus potentially retarding our growth.

We are protected from this eventuality by our other important incentive to grow. Where need is our negative incentive to grow, our positive incentive to grow is love. Again most of us believe we know what love is since we are of the impression that we have experienced it either directly or indirectly at some point in our lives. But when asked to define love we typically put forth a litany of symptoms, not an explanation of the condition.

Love is the empathically induced completeness that we feel through our awareness of our proximity to completeness. In other words, love is the feeling we get from our realization that we are a part of something truly wonderful. The existence of this positive incentive to grow allows those who are both needful and happy to be inclined to grow through their love, which will draw them towards the ultimate source of the completeness they feel.

Love is the basis of our propensity to be happy. This means that those who feel they lack the inclination to be happy simply do not have enough love in their lives. Such people are insufficiently aware of their proximity to completeness.

To resolve this situation you should first cultivate an awareness of the existence of a state of completeness that transcends all need and is the source of all love in the world. Whether you call this state God, Unity or the peace of perfect equilibrium, the existence of such a state is easy to recognize if you are open to it.

Once you accept the existence of this complete state, you can increase your propensity to be happy by nurturing an awareness of your proximity to it. I maintain that each conscious being is separated from this state of completeness by a single thought. The specific nature of this thought is different for each individual. The trick is figuring out what that thought is for you. But in the interim, you can be happier simply knowing how close we all are to the resultant state of completeness.

Experience Systems

2008-12-10T09:24:00.009-06:00

The next generation of data systems on the horizon are Experience Systems. These are systems that sequence content exposures (i.e. events) to form coordinated user experiences. A user experience is a collection of events that are arranged in a particular order to have a specific impact on the user. The distinguishing components of the Experience System architecture are its Profile Manager, Experience Generator and Event Store.

The user interface of an Experience System encompasses a Query Generator, Preference Manager and Profile Manager. The Profile Manager gathers much more expansive data on the end user than the Preference Manager. These data elements comprise a detailed psychological profile of the user. Such profiles can be generated by prolonged exposure to a psychological assessment system that on the surface would look like a video game played in a very sophisticated virtual world.

This assessment system presents the user with an appropriate narrative under which resides a sophisticated decision tree. The user traverses this tree in the course of “playing the game”. The user’s decisions in the face of a specific sequence of scenarios place her at a particular location on the underlying N-dimensional assessment grid. It is the user’s historical path and current location in this grid that characterizes her profile. The longer the user interacts with the system, the more precisely her profile can be defined.

The shape of the space in which the assessment grid resides reflects the capabilities, inclinations and susceptibilities of a user at a given location. The user’s current psychological location, the shape of the space around her (i.e., her psychological inertia) and the spatial and temporal shape of her historical path through the assessment grid (i.e., her psychological momentum) combined with any user-defined goal states, determine the narrative being presented. The assessment system is dynamic in that it updates itself in response to the results achieved by its user community.

Experience System queries are requests by the user to reach specified goal states. The Experience Generator accepts these requests and the associated user profile data from the Profile Manager and searches the Event Store for appropriate events that can facilitate the transition. These events can be based on exposure to electronic media such as videos, pictures, audio lectures, music and text. They can also include excursions into the offline world to lecture halls, theaters, museums, exercise facilities, stores, parks, beaches, work places and any other available sites. The Experience Generator sequences the selected events into different experiences and coordinates user access to them via the user interface. These experiences are designed to advance the user towards her goal state. They are generally presented in order of the greatest probability of success.

The Event Store is a Content Store that extends into the offline world. Events in the store are rated and cataloged by their potential impact on a given range of user capabilities, inclinations and susceptibilities based on provider assessments (heuristics), empirical data and theoretical extrapolations. Experience Systems manage events that are combined to form Minkowski data spaces that characterize both where and when events occur.

When you consider that we have only recently begun to produce Knowledge Systems, the advent of fully functioning Experience Systems is still some time off in our future. But much of the technology that would be required to produce such systems is already available to us. An assessment system with the requisite sophistication has yet to be developed but many its components already exist separately (there may even be a few of prototypes out there). It is only a matter of time before someone puts them together and triggers a major paradigm shift.

Experience Systems could easily represent the next generation of entertainment, education and life management technologies. As we continue to exploit the deeper potential of data systems, it is becoming increasingly evident that in lieu of a major scientific breakthrough (e.g., cold fusion, instantaneous teleportation, matter transmutation, etc.), this technology domain will be an increasingly important driver of human activity for the foreseeable future.

The Evolution of Data Systems

2008-12-09T09:35:00.013-06:00

Underlying all of today’s computer applications are Information Systems. Note that information characterizes the separations between entities. Information Systems are based on collections of entities whose types and attributes distinguish them from each other.

Information Systems are generally comprised of some form of a Query Generator, a System Integrator and a Data Store. The Query Generator is essentially the user interface that accepts requests for information and displays the result set. The System Integrator is the subsystem that knows what data elements are where and how to access them. The Data Store encompasses the location of every piece of data in the system that the end user could want to see.

Information Systems require no knowledge of the user beyond the content of the request being made and her authorization level. As such the layout and actions of its components are largely unaffected by the individual uniqueness of the user. In general, Information Systems manage data elements in a Euclidean (flat) data space. This means that, the logical distance between data elements in an Information System is generally the same for all users.

Of late, an increasing number of Knowledge Systems have begun to emerge. Note that knowledge characterizes the connections between entities. The connections between data elements in Knowledge Systems are their metadata, which is essentially data about the data. The distinguishing components of the Knowledge System architecture are its Preference Manager, Search Engine and Content Store.

The user interface of a Knowledge System is comprised of a Query Generator and a Preference Manager. The Preference Manager accepts user preference data in the form of demographic data and transaction history. Preference data are utilized by the user interface to customize its layout. The Search Engine uses preference data to shape the Content Store in terms of relevance to a given user.

The Content Store contains both fundamental data elements and the metadata that connect them on a more abstract level. The metadata of the Content Store are what distinguish it from a Data Store. Knowledge Systems manage relevance metrics that are used to generate non-Euclidean (curved) data spaces. This means that the logical distance between data elements in a Knowledge System can be the different for different users.

Information Systems are currently being engulfed into the history of data systems by the newly emergent Knowledge Systems, which represent the present. But the initial glimmers of the future of data systems are already becoming apparent. This future is the phenomenon known as the Experience System, which builds on the advances produced by the development of Knowledge Systems. The nature of Experience Systems will be the subject of the next essay.

Ideological Dynamics

2008-11-17T08:48:00.012-06:00

So which is the superior end of the political ideology spectrum: liberal or conservative? Each is appropriate at a particular point in the history of the state. The ideological needs of a people tend to cycle from one extreme to the other. This is because each political ideology addresses certain of the people’s needs while ignoring others.

Liberalism addresses our need for freedom; but in doing so it can ignore our need for security. This is because by not accounting for the worst aspects of human nature liberalism often fails to address the needs of certain segments of the society to be protected from them. In addition, the anarchic tendencies of liberal states can undermine the defining structure of a society.

In its effort to manage the worst aspects of human nature conservatism addresses our need for security; but in doing so it can ignore our need for freedom. This is because conservatism attempts to suppress divergence from the cultural normal. But in the process it often suppresses the best aspects of the human nature and as a result conservatism denies certain ideas and avenues of expression that can facilitate the advancement of the culture.

When a static ideology is right for the times there is relative equilibrium in the state that is governed by it. But, over time, the needs that are being ignored by that ideology become paramount in the political discourse. As these needs continue to go unaddressed by the leaders of the state, the ideology that was once the source of equilibrium will begin to undermine it. Eventually, the degree of dissonance will exceed the tolerance of the people; leading them to replace their leadership with one that espouses the complementary ideology.

During the times of equilibrium produced by an alignment of the needs of the people and ideology of the leaders, the state tends to run in a relatively smooth and efficient operational mode. But the longer the leadership ignores an increasing divergence between their static ideology and the changing needs of the people, the more significant a project it will represent for the leaders to restore political equilibrium. In other words, the longer this growing divergence goes unaddressed the more potentially disruptive the realignment will be.

The forces required to reverse this divergence sometimes produce a thrashing condition in which the corrective action overcompensates for the initial delay in addressing the needs of the people and the newly installed ideology veers too far to the other side. This can trigger an ideological recoil in the other direction, which depending on its strength, can cause a bounce back to the other side again and so on until at some point the ideology of the leadership comes back into alignment with the needs of the people. At this point the political system has returned to its equilibrium state.

In a bipartisan political system one of the two major political parties will invariably embrace a more conservative ideology while the other will be consistently more liberal. But parties are not required to be bound to a static ideology and members of a given party are even less so.

On those rare occasions when the leadership of the political party in charge chooses to transcend static ideology, they can remain in power indefinitely by adapting to changes in the ideological needs of the people. In order to accomplish this, the leaders must be willing to abandon policies and dismantle programs (even those they put in place) that were consistent with the waning side of the ideological cycle and replace them with those that are in keeping with waxing side, which is shaped by the unaddressed needs of the people. To be successful, this leadership must remain attuned to the greatest needs of the people rather than being focused of scoring ideological points.

Political Ideology

2008-11-14T14:30:00.013-06:00

From a political perspective the conservative and liberal positions represent opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Conservatives are characterized by a fundamental suspicion of human nature that manifests in their tendency to impose limits on the rights of the people. In this context, they generally believe rights should be earned. By contrast, liberals ascribe great value to human nature and so are inclined to maximize the rights of the people. This is because liberals typically believe most rights are innate.

People will invariably prefer a situation in which they have more rights over one in which they have fewer. As such, the more their rights are limited, the more oversight will be required to keep the people from circumventing these limits and thus undermining the stability of the encompassing political system. This is why the more conservative systems of government require greater oversight of the people, which usually manifests as more pervasive internal security forces. The underlying principles of liberal states lead them to impose less oversight of the people. As a result, the more liberal a government is the closer it is to anarchy.

An interesting juxtaposition of the liberal and conservative positions occurs in the context of corporations. Liberal states have a tendency to treat corporations in the same manner that conservative governments treat the broader population. As such, while they believe that the people should have the maximum rights; liberals also feel that corporations require greater oversight. The latter point implies that liberals judge corporations as deserving fewer rights. It can be argued that this judgment is based on the liberal perception that corporations’ greater capacity to influence society through their economic power provides them with the potential to abridge the rights of the people. In other words, liberals tend to view corporations as a prospective threat to any state-guaranteed rights of the people.

By contrast, contemporary conservative states are inclined to treat corporations in the same manner that liberal governments treat individuals. As such, while conservatives believe the people should have fewer rights, they also feel that corporations require less oversight. The latter position indicates that conservatives regard corporations as meriting more rights. This is because conservatives often interpret the relative success of corporations as proof that they have earned more expansive rights. Conservatives are inclined to regard corporations as having transcended the more dubious aspects of human nature.

The liberal manner in which conservative governments are inclined to treat corporations and the conservative way that liberal governments often deal with them indicate that today the practitioners of these political ideologies are not as far apart as one might think. By embracing qualified forms of these ideologies, today’s liberals and conservatives each have insight into the other’s position through which they could conceivably work together for the common good.

Remembering the Future II

2008-11-01T23:08:00.004-05:00

Remembering the future is less likely to be effective in time-critical situations. This is because, if one of your future memories has a date-specific event in it, and that date passes without the event occurring, this will undermine your disposition and the likelihood of the future you remembered. The primary purpose of this technique is to shape what will happen, but not necessarily when.

To effectively remember the future you must be able to accept that events will happen when they can in the context of your disposition. As such, this technique requires a great deal of patience. This sort of patience can be maintained by focusing on small degrees of progress towards the future you are remembering. One way to do this is to analyze noteworthy changes in your life in the context of whether or not they represent progress towards your remembered future. The more you do so, the more you will see that they do.

Based on the level of commitment required to make remembering the future work, it should obviously not be used trivially or maliciously. Going through this intricate process to get something that you can obtain by simply deciding to get out of your own way is, at best, inefficient. In addition, since this technique is based on fundamentally changing your disposition, using it maliciously will incline you to become increasingly cruel.

Initially it is best to attempt to remember longer-term futures whose narratives benefit others as well. This because it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to make the major changes in your disposition necessary for it to be consistent with a future that is significantly different from what you believe would occur otherwise. Remembering a future that benefits others harnesses their preexisting dispositions towards that future, thus providing you with more opportunities for positive reinforcement.

I have a somewhat time dependent set of future memories that benefit everyone. These memories shape the primary narrative of my life. In their context I am in a hospital bed being stabilized before I go home in order to die surrounded by my loved ones. The time dependent aspect of it is that I am either 90, 95 or 99 years old. I am pain-free and completely clear headed as I dwell on the wonderful life I’ve lived. I have made my share of mistakes but it is undeniable that I will be leaving the world a significantly better place than I found it and thus I am completely at peace with my life. I spend much of my remaining time reassuring a multitude of loves ones that things will only get better as a result of what we have accomplished. As I write these words I honestly cannot say for sure whether I am the nonagenarian remembering his past life as the person writing this essay, or am I the writer remembering the end of his life (not unlike Billy Pilgrim in “Slaughterhouse Five”). Either way works for me.

Remembering the future is my way of controlling the chaos underlying the Butterfly Effect in order to shape significant events in my life. It is also what I do in lieu of prayer when people I care about need more than words of comfort. Beyond the fact that I believe it gives me control over the primary arc of my life, it invariably works for me simply because it provides me with the means of feeling good about the future.

Remembering the Future

2008-10-30T10:04:00.009-05:00

Remembering the future is a uniquely effective method of controlling the chaos underlying the Butterfly Effect in order to shape significant events in one's life. This technique involves constructing and living within the context of “memories” of a particular future. In order to be effective these future memories must be simple, realistic and yet vague enough to not be inconsistent with the present. To illustrate how this is done, I will use the example of my developing future memories of the publishing of my currently unpublished manuscript.

In my future memories of this event I recall the exhilaration I experienced when I opened the acceptance letter from a publisher after being ignored or rejected repeatedly. I remember the odd combination of gratitude and defensiveness I felt toward my editor who complimented certain passages while criticizing others. I recall some experts saying I’m crazy and others insisting that I’m brilliant. I remember my disappointment in discovering how quickly being on a promotional tour loses its appeal. I recall a clerk working the register at a store I frequent who, upon noticing the name on my credit card and recognizing my face from the dust jacket tells me how my words changed her life.

It is obvious that these future memories must not be inconsistent with each other or with the world in which I currently reside. Where there are conflicts these inconsistencies will disrupt the disposition I am trying to shape, thus inhibiting the manifestation of the future that they characterize.

Regularly “recalling” and adding to these future memories knits them together into a narrative that over time begins to feel as though it has already happened. Generating and living with such often mundane future memories shapes my present disposition to be consistent with them, while also guiding my actions to sustain that consistency. For instance, whenever I work on my manuscript in the context of my future memories their content often shapes my writing. As such, I often edit passages until I feel, “That’s want I remember writing”.

It is important to “recall” your future memories frequently enough for them to shape your disposition and actions but not so often that you become obsessed with the encompassing narrative. If you find yourself disappearing into this narrative you need to take a break from it in order to maintain an appropriate perspective. I find it helps to adopt a stance of dispassionate confidence in the inevitability of this future to avoid obsessive desperation. If you cannot indefinitely maintain such a posture, you should not engage in this exercise.

Remembering the future is not a magic lamp that you rub to have a wish granted. It is a technique for generating and sustaining a particular disposition in order to shape our chaotic world to be consistent with it. While it requires a significant level of inner focus, patience and commitment, when done properly it can be remarkably effective.

Controlling the Butterfly Effect

2008-10-29T08:56:00.002-05:00

The Butterfly Effect is an abstraction that is characterized by the observation that a butterfly flapping its wings in Costa Rica can be the critical factor in producing a typhoon off the coast of India. This idea relates to chaotic systems, such as the global weather system, that are incredibly sensitive to miniscule changes in their initial conditions. As conscious entities we are uniquely qualified to utilize the Butterfly Effect to control and direct momentous changes in the chaotic system that our world. Our capacity to control the chaos underlying the Butterfly Effect is based on our ability to direct our inner focus and simply be patient.

A causal system is essentially characterized by how it converts inputs to outputs. The key to controlling such a system is knowing how to generate the inputs required to produce specific outputs. It is generally assumed that chaotic systems are too complex for such knowledge to be available. But this belief does not take into account the premise that what we see around us is ultimately shaped by what we are. In other words, our uniqueness shapes the causal systems that shape our essences. A detailed exposition on why this is true will not fit into this essay (though this concept underlies a viable interpretation of quantum mechanics) and so if you cannot accept this premise you can stop reading this particular essay and you should probably skip the next two as well.

If you are still with me note that individuals sometimes become responsible for momentous occurrences through a convergence of events over which they have no control. The primary difference between people who can control such convergences and those who cannot is that the former are disposed to do so while the latter are not. This means that in order to control chaos to orchestrate significant events you need merely shape your disposition accordingly. This is important because your disposition is the inner manifestation of your uniqueness. As such, by shaping your disposition you shape the world around you to reflect it.

The fact that we are not all controlling this dynamic indicates that it is much easier to describe than to execute. To appreciate this, imagine what it would take to live up to a commitment to maintain a happy disposition for every second of the next 24 hours. If you manage to get through your next meal before you lose it you are much better than most of us.

For us mere mortals, shaping our dispositions is not an act of will so much as appropriately directed inner focus. The technique that has been most effective for me involves concentrating not on the present but on the future. My approach is best characterized as “Remembering the Future”. I will describe what this technique is and how to apply it in my next couple of essays.

Trickle-down Economics in the Global Economy

2008-10-17T11:28:00.034-05:00

Trickle-down Economics Theory argues that government efforts to increase the earnings of those at the very top of the economic ladder are the most efficient way to stimulate the domestic economy. This theory is based on the premise that this segment of the society has the greatest capacity to influence the level of economic activity. While the wealthiest individuals and organizations have a disproportionately high potential to impact domestic economic activity, this potential can be undermined by the fact that in a global capitalist economy they also have more options as to where to exercise their financial resources.

In general capitalism encourages entities to exercise their financial resources where doing so provides them with the greatest return on their investment. In a global economy this may not always be in their country of residence. As such, where there are financial incentives for the wealthiest to invest their resources overseas, a domestic application of the Trickle-down Economics provides the source for a pump that transfers revenues from the domestic government (ultimately the taxpayer) to foreign markets.

Through increasing globalization there are an increasing number of incentives for entities to exercise a portion of their financial resources overseas. The emergence of these overseas financial opportunities decreases a nation’s potential gains from concentrating potential tax revenues in the hands those at the very top of the economic ladder, since they are in the best position to take advantage of such opportunities.

By contrast, low and middle income individuals and organizations, which typically are disproportionately less able to influence domestic economic activity, are also less likely to have the means to exploit overseas financial opportunities. As a result, tax breaks and other government incentives provided to this segment of the population are more likely to remain in the domestic economy.

At some point, the decreasing probability that the wealthiest will chose to fully exercise their greater gross capacity to influence the domestic economy will reduce their net capacity to do so to a level below that of low and middle income entities. In other words, while those at the very top of the economic ladder will continue to have a greater gross capacity to impact the domestic economy, financial incentives to invest some of their resources overseas can decrease their net domestic influence on the economy to a point where it is less than that of low and middle income financial entities.

While it is arguable whether or not the elbow in this curve has already manifested current economic trends are undeniably moving in that direction. This means that government tax policies of developed nations should be adapting to this eventuality. The key to developing such policies is to acknowledge the obsolescence of the simple Trickle-down Economics Theory.

Increasing globalization is leading to the emergence of a point of diminishing returns in terms of tax incentives for the wealthiest. Once this threshold emerges, continuing globalization will move it down the economic ladder as more easily exploited overseas financial opportunities manifest. Unconditionally directing potential tax revenues towards those above such a threshold would represent a less efficient means of stimulating the domestic economy than directing those revenues towards entities at the top of the range immediately below this point. The alternative would be to apply appropriate conditions to government incentives directed towards those at the very top of the economic ladder.

The appearance of this point of diminishing returns in a national economy is an indicator that financial entities above it represent international enterprises that have economically transcended national boundaries. The simplistic theory of Tickle-down Economics is dangerously obsolete for all such entities. Governments who refuse to acknowledge this conclusion do so at their own financial peril.

Happy 50th Birthday to Me!

2008-08-11T15:19:00.019-05:00

Today is the golden anniversary of my birth. Needless to say, this is a big deal for me and so it has been the basis of a great deal of introspection on my part. I’ve decided to be completely selfish here and share the results of this contemplation as a commemoration of the event.

The first thing I’ve figured out is that I have an enviable life. I love and am loved by extraordinary people, I have a brilliant mind and at 50 years old I have the body of a super-middleweight contender. And on top of all of that, I absolutely, positively know that I have an ultimate purpose that I am destined to fulfill and which justifies all of the evil and suffering in the world (as do you).

I am smart enough to realize that I didn’t do all of this on my own. I have had people in my life at key points along the way whose influences guided me towards the desirable circumstance that is my life. As such, I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the people who, for a variety of reasons have special places in my heart (I’m generally going with first names only but you know who you are):

Thank you, Lorris (grandma) for being the first manifestation of an Immanent God in my life.
Thank you, Marianne (mama) for taking over where grandma left off (as the New Testament version) and protecting me from my youthful arrogance and impetuosity which the odds said would kill me well before today.
Thank you, Ann for being the first person in our family to get university degrees and thus show me that it is possible for people from our humble beginnings.
Thank you Artie for being “Bo Dean” and “Big Artie”, a reputation that likely kept me from many an ass kicking before I learned to take care of myself.
Thank you Artie and Lolo for being cautionary examples
Thank you Darren for removing “the Body of Christ” from your mouth and crunching it like a potato chip after I told you that the nuns said it was sacred (a perfect metaphor for your time in my life).
Thank you Richard for the kick ass genome.
Thank you faculty at Our Lady of the Gardens for not treating me like a freak when you found out what my IQ was.
Thank you Gary, Andre, Tony, Phil B, Baby Brother, James, Artis, BG and the rest of the “little boys” in the Gardens for pushing me to be stronger physically and tougher mentally.
Thank you Donna for showing me that I could have attractive female friends without needing to have sex with them.
Thank you Jeffrey and Jeffery for being people I could talk to about anything.
Thank you Mr. Packer for being so incompetent at 6th grade math as to make it a self-study course in which I learned I could
Thank you Hazel, Druscilla and Shawnee for being my first crushes.
I’m sorry Marion for not defending you against the terrible teasing we gave you.
Thank you Nathaniel, Tyrone and Stanley for bringing OLG to Mendel.
Thank you Carver for letting me roam your halls while not enrolled there and thus learn how to go anywhere I am not explicitly forbidden to be.
Thank you to my AG home boys for parting company with me when you started doing drugs.
Thank you Mr. Moss for demanding more of me academically at a time when I could do better.
Thank you Arthur for "Childhood's End", the first novel I ever had to read that didn't bore the crap out of me
Thank you Miss Sise for assigning it (and for being my first school boy crush)
Thank you Billy and Andy for being my home boys at Mendel Catholic.
Thank you James for the JBs
Thank you Mr. Curtin and Mr. Shields for making me think and write more deeply.
Thank you Dale, Mike, Henry and Paul for finishing ahead of me in our class.
Thank you Dzado for finishing behind me.
Thank you George for the Mothership
Thank you Nate for the Bell Labs Scholarship and admission to IIT.
Thank you Chris for bringing some of my class at Mendel to IIT and being my cool roommate.
Thank you Mark, Danny, Spencer, Cedric, Marc and Wild Dollar Bill for showing me the ropes at IIT.
Thank you Harold for being everybody’s anchor.
Thank you Herbie, Grover, Ronnie, Hubert, Roy et al for music to study by.
Thank you Stevie for the Key of Life.
Thank you all of the girls who dumped me by the 6 month mark.
Thank you BSO for some great parties.
Thank you Mr. Drukarev for reminding me that I actually love learning.
Thank you Johnetta for showing me my emotional limits.
Thank you Nila for being attractive and compassionate.
Thank you Greg for making me a comic book addict
Thank you Dr. Kraft for allowing me to see what I could do through senior year and grad school.
Thank you to all of the Asian students who came to me for help in grad school.
Thank you Bob for my first real job.
Thank you Bill for insisting I could do that job.
Thank you Mike for taking me under your wing at Bell.
Thank you Nila for asking me the questions that led to Rational Answers
Thank you Paul for 'Risky Business'
Thank you Jim for saving me from Schaumburg and bringing me into a great group of people.
Thank you Chris, Mark and John for teaching me that at work the rules are not absolute.
Thank you Nila for giving me an appreciation for dance (and for 'Live Nude Dancers').
Thank you Mike and Gary for being my work home boys.
Thank you Buddy for the '46 Defense' and the 1985 season.
Thank you Andrea for asking if I needed help
Thank you Kurt for ‘Breakfast of Champions’
Thank you Nila for Kamaal
Thank you Gail for delivering Kamaal
Thank you Kamaal for making me grow up
Thank you Ameritech for letting me go.
Thank you Fusion for picking me up.
Thank you Julie for Darwinian consulting, teaching me to juggle and being my favorite boss EVER!
Thank you Carolyn for confounding me.
Thank you Marco for showing me I had grown up a bit.
Thank you Iris for being smart and not knowing it.
Thank you Jody for pushing me to go to the CBOT
Thank you Sandy for being authentic
Thank you Dave for being so much better than your reputation.
Thank you Nila for reminding me its okay to use my brain away from the office.
Thank you Nila for Akilah
Thank you Gail for delivering Akilah
Thank you Akilah for being wonderful
Thank you Miles for ‘Kind of Blue’
Thank you Ryan for your persistence.
Thank you John for your optimism
Thank you Aaron for being a monstrously cool geek
Thank you Robin being crazy, yet somehow making it work
You’re welcome Martin for my suggestion that they make you our boss and thank you for not disappointing me (and for rehiring me later).
Thank you fellow Web Works / Net Quotient consultants for being a cohort worth going into battle with.
Thank you Dan for taking a chance
Thank you Sandy for your generosity
Thank you Alan, Hal, Paresh, Pooja, Sean, Steve and Todd for being the best software development team ever assembled (and some of my absolute favorite people).
Thank you Louisa for being awesome
Thank you Karen for making me think about spirit
Thank you Sandy for allowing me to live vicariously through your exploits
Thank you Nila for challenging me
Thank you Rob for underpaying me and knowing it
Thank you Rob and John for being there
Thank you Alan for ‘American Beauty’ and the finale of ‘Six Feet Under’
Thank you Drea for your honesty.
Thank you Karen for your insight.
Thank you Sandy for making time.
Thank you BlogNigger for trippin’ (and Karen for pointing him out to me)
Thank you Allison, Jason and Sarah for giving me hope that the generation between me and my kids will be able to keep those plates spinning.

Thank you one and all for helping me become me!!!

Cool Genius

2008-06-24T15:28:00.001-05:00

Genius is essentially the capacity to perform at greater than four standard deviations above the mean in a worthwhile area of human endeavor. Cool people can be geniuses and geniuses can become cool. But neither is required to be the other. A cool person who is not a genius simply lacks the level of creativity that distinguishes true genius. A genius who is not cool most likely lacks the courage to endure the trial that often characterizes the path to becoming cool.

Geniuses obviously have the creativity and curiosity to set them out on the road to becoming cool. But most uncool geniuses probably balked at the price that circumstances typically demanded of them in order to remain true to their unconventional nature. In other words, the primary difference between a towering genius and a cowering genius is the heart that the latter lacks.

But it is humanity’s loss each time a genius chooses to cower rather than tower. We all miss out whenever a brilliant idea remains hidden in a mother’s basement or an unpopular girl’s notebook. So much genius is going unrealized in this increasingly complex time when we need it more than ever.

Geniuses are often made to cower in this culture because conformity today represents joining the herd in pursuit of wealth, fame and/or power. It takes a truly courageous individual to resist the pull of the conventional quest for this unholy trinity. This is especially true among geniuses who have unique abilities that sometimes give them a leg up in this pursuit.

Unfortunately, genius is no guarantee of success in amassing wealth, fame and/or power, unless that is the basis of a given individual’s genius. As such, most geniuses who chose to undertake this quixotic quest will eventually wind up cowering unappreciated on the roadside, often complaining about how unfair life is. Ironically, even those who are successful in this pursuit are often left unfulfilled. This is because, in abandoning or compromising their authentic selves in this endeavor, these geniuses rarely achieve their full potential.

What the world needs today are more cool geniuses. We require more brilliant people to eschew the pursuit of wealth, fame and/or power and instead courageously go wherever their genius takes them. We need them to focus on developing their genius to the fullest extent possible, though this may mean a more frugal, more obscure and less influential life than they might otherwise enjoy were they to apply their gifts to the pursuit of the unholy trinity. Once they maximize their potential, we need more of these cool geniuses to dedicate their brilliance to the betterment of those less gifted.

This is by no means a thankless job, though at first glance some may see it as such. In fact, it generally represents the most fulfilling life available to a genius. What could be better than being true to yourself and making your greatest possible contribution to the betterment of the world? If your answer involves something that can only be gained via wealth, fame or power, you are probably already lost to us.

You Might Be a Genius If…

2008-06-20T13:50:00.001-05:00

You might be a genius if you spent a significant portion of your youth wondering why other people could not answer “simple” questions.
You might be a genius if you see cognitively challenged people as the rule, not the exception.
You might be a genius if you have stopped looking up to famous geniuses and started relating to them.
You might be a genius if you see Mensa as a group of posers.
You might be a genius if the people around you have a variety of self-servingly wrong explanations for why they can’t do the things you can do.
You might be a genius if you frequently have to dumb it down to keep people from feeling intimidated by you.
You might be a genius if you often add extra layers to activities you’re engaged in just to make them interesting.
You might be a genius if it takes a conscious effort on your part to avoid spoiling any attempt to surprise you.
You might be a genius if you truly believe that insufficient time is the only thing that keeps you from solving any problem that matters to you.
You might be a genius if words like paradox, unknowable and unsolvable excite you.

The Evolution of Lucifer Morningstar

2008-06-19T09:37:00.002-05:00

I used to be a nice guy. Back in the day, I cared about the well-being, feelings and dignity of people I didn’t know. What can I say, I was a slow learner. I kept giving people the benefit of the doubt and they invariably proved to be unworthy of it.

At first I would blame people for disappointing me but after a while I started blaming myself for foolishly expecting more from them. I went through a period of intense anger at all of humanity. During this time I would revel in their pain and suffering because I felt they deserved no less. The only thing that provided me with a temporary respite from the heat of my rage was witnessing the infliction of exquisite physical and psychological torture on the unsuspecting livestock. I became a connoisseur of human agony.

Over time I lost my taste for it as I burned through the worst of my anger. Once I regained some semblance of perspective I decided to seek out special individuals who might prove to be worthy of my hopes for the species. But, having exhausted my anger, I was simply saddened to discover that even these paragons of humanity invariably disappointed me with their inconsistency.

Ultimately I concluded that humans are not special; they are capable of doing special things but at their core they are offal. What makes humans even remotely interesting to me is that given what they are they can occasionally surprise me by acting in a responsibly mature manner.

I have settled into a comfortable feeling of amiable indifference towards humanity. Humans are so wonderfully pointless. As such, I am amused by their incredible sense of self-importance. I find it deliciously ironic that this perception self-importance is keeping humans from actually becoming anything of value to the world around them. It is evident that few, if any of them can appreciate why this is of paramount importance to their continued survival.

I am aware that evolution will eventually produce a truly mature species. Whether or not humans will survive long enough to be the ancestor of that species, rather than simply a genetic dead end, has yet to be determined. After all humans are leading cockroaches by perhaps an antenna in the race to become the species that is the point of Creation.

This evolutionary contest will have an eventual winner whose profound nature will represent the undeniable justification of everything that preceded its emergence. In the cosmic scheme of things, it does not truly matter which species this is. But as long as humans believe it is important that they be that species, they keep themselves from becoming that species.

And so I have come to appreciate my purpose. It is my responsibility to teach humans how little they actually matter. I am charged with freeing them from the shackles of self-importance so that they can focus on their responsibilities to others. It is a job for which I am uniquely qualified. I find it ironic that I represent humanity’s last hope for surviving its childhood. Mysterious ways indeed!

The Gestation of the Cool

2008-06-12T10:47:00.002-05:00

Most people in this culture don’t know exactly what it means to be cool though they often claim to know it when they see it. These individuals generally see cool as one of those subjective, largely incomprehensible concepts like beauty and love that can only be grasped intuitively. But what must be present for someone to be authentically cool is actually very consistent.

Cool is essentially based on what I call the Four Cs: creativity, curiosity, courage and confidence. You are perceived to be cool when these traits manifest sequentially and generate unconventional but valid insights into the true nature of world. Without any one of these characteristics you can be mistaken for cool but at your core you are not.

No one is born cool. Cool is an emergent property that develops as an individual undergoes a certain sequence of experiences. Most people think that the key to being cool is confidence but that is actually merely a phenotype that emerges during the gestation of cool. This is evident in that confidence based on arrogance, ignorance or prejudice is not cool, though it is sometimes mistaken for it. Cool is based on having valid, empirically derived, unconventional knowledge supporting one’s confidence.

The accumulation of such knowledge begins with the exercise of creativity. Cool starts to develop when an individual meets with success while interacting creatively with the world. The essence of creativity is the ability to connect disparate things in a harmonious manner to produce something that is both novel and worthwhile. In thinking creatively you begin to see through the conventional boundaries that distinguish things in our world. As these boundaries become increasingly the translucent, it may stimulate your curiosity to discover what is on the other side. This will incline you to test the permeability of these conventions.

In working your way through these boundaries you may discover that the consequences are nowhere near as dire as the conventional wisdom typically leads us to believe. This is not to say there are no consequences; it means that you regard what you gain as a result of going beyond these boundaries as being worth the cost. This perception that such a personal price is worth paying to not be bound by convention is the essence of the courage that underlies being cool.

In general, courage is the willingness to pay a price to make a difference. Courage is not about unwillingly or unwittingly paying a price to achieve change. And those who actually enjoy paying such a price are not courageous, so much as masochistic. Courage is anticipating that “this is gonna sting”, and still being willing to go through with it to achieve a particular objective. Such courage allows you to endure the discomfort that sometimes ensues when you are perceived as flouting conventions in your exploration of the world beyond them.

Armed with creativity, curiosity and courage you explore the world beyond the conventional boundaries that distinguish things in our world. These investigations lead to the accumulation of unconventional knowledge of how things truly work. It is the possession of this empirically derived, exclusive insight acquired through creativity, curiosity and courage, that forms the basis of the confidence that makes an individual authentically cool.

DISCLAIMER: In and of itself, cool is neither good nor bad; it is simply unconventional yet valid. Being cool in the face of oppression is generally seen as good while being cool in opposition to stability, safety and security is often regarded as evil. Yet these can represent different interpretations of the same situation. As such, be aware that if you are not naturally cool, trying to become cool for the sake of simply being cool can lead to unanticipated consequences.

Levels of Spirituality - Part II

2008-06-06T07:46:00.003-05:00

The evolution of the participants in a spiritual tradition goes from Adherent to Prophet to Divinity (though recall that among Abrahamic believers the idea of ascending to Divinity through one’s own efforts is generally considered heresy). The most common path for Adherents to take towards becoming Prophets is through immersion in the logos of their tradition. It is this study that most often leads to the mystical experience that transforms them into Prophets. The path from Prophet to Divinity is much more subjective and thus less well understood. But all such transitions involve the subject relinquishing the perception of uniqueness and ultimately abandoning the subject-object duality. How this is accomplished in the spiritual dynamic varies with the individual Prophet.

These levels of spirituality manifest concentrically with Divinity at the core, surrounded by Prophets who are in turn surrounded by Adherents. Where there are multiple Divinities in a given tradition, each distinguishable instance is simply a different face of the same underlying Transcendence.

Adherents often mistakenly believe that Prophets are responsible for leading them to the Divinity. But Prophets are typically still blazing their own trail to Divinity. And even as a given Prophet’s effort nears completion, the resultant path is only appropriate for that specific individual. In general, the Prophet is merely nurturing Adherents to become Prophets in their own right so that they can find their own paths to Divinity. The Prophets do this by providing the Adherents with the logos and an example to contemplate.

Adherents are bound to their spiritual tradition by the strength of their faith since they have no tangible proof of its validity. Once this proof arrives in the form of a life-changing mystical experience, the Adherent becomes a Prophet who is bound to the tradition by the power of that experience. Divinities cannot leave their spiritual traditions because they are what define the traditions. For a Divinity to abandon its spiritual tradition would be like water abandoning an ocean (where there is no water there can be no ocean).

Though the Divinity cannot leave the spiritual tradition based on it, sometimes the tradition is seen as abandoning the Divinity. It is typically revealed to a Prophet that the tradition has moved away from its source. Sometimes this movement is based on the logos moving away from its foundation to keep up with societal fads and at other times it is the result of provincial aspects of the logos not changing in the face of divinely inspired cultural advancements (distinguishing fads from legitimate advancements is the relevancy challenge of all traditions). In response to this divergence, the Prophet presents a new revelation that represents the spiritual tradition’s path back to the Divinity. Generally only a portion of the original Adherents will choose to follow this new path. This dynamic was the basis of the various spiritual reformations that have occurred through the ages.

Despite what the administrators in the typical spiritual bureaucracy (i.e., religion) would have you believe, every cleric is not a Prophet and every member of the laity is not an Adherent. While some Prophets are clerics, others are members of the laity and still others are heretics residing out beyond the periphery of the spiritual orthodoxy. Many clerics are Adherents who were certified by other Adherents in Prophet’s vestments. More than a few clerics are complete charlatans preying on the faith and gullibility of hopeful Adherents.

Most spiritual interpretations indicate that there are occasional eruptions of true Divinity scattered about our world. These Avatars (Descenders), Buddhas (Enlightened Ones), Tirthankars (Ford Makers), Gamur Tzaddiqim (Completely Righteous Ones), Christs (Anointed Ones), Mahdis (Guided Ones), Gurus (Teachers) and Saints (Holy Ones) are believed by some to walk embodied among us and by others to manifest spiritually in a form of the Transcendence to which Prophets and Adherents can relate.

Levels of Spirituality - Part I

2008-06-03T16:30:00.003-05:00

I have come to embrace of mild form of spirituality that is consistent with my rationalist leanings yet not inconsistent with our major spiritual traditions. I will explain the specifics of my personal spirituality in a subsequent essay. My purpose here is to describe the shared structural elements of our major spiritual traditions as viewed from the perspective of a rational, open-minded non-participant.

My analysis of our major spiritual perspectives indicates that there are three discrete levels of involvement. These levels of spirituality are defined with respect to the Transcendent entity underlying all of these traditions. The distinct levels of spirituality are:

Adherent - Believer in Transcendence
Prophet - Communer with Transcendence
Divinity - Manifestation of Transcendence

The Adherent represents the minimum level of participation in a given tradition. As such they are the most loosely affiliated participants in a given spiritual practice. This is the level of the majority of those associated with a given spiritual interpretation. The Adherents of different spiritual traditions have accepted as true the revelations of a Prophet of that tradition.

A Prophet speaks for the fundamental Transcendent entity underlying most spiritual interpretations. To do so, the Prophet has to have had some form of communion with this Transcendence. From most spiritual perspectives this communion represents a mystical experience. It is generally the first significant instance of such an experience that transforms an Adherent into a Prophet. In being fundamentally transformed by their spirituality, Prophets have a deeper level of commitment to their interpretation than do Adherents. The relative rarity of true mystical experiences means there are typically fewer Prophets than Adherents in a given spiritual tradition. The mystical experience provides the Prophet with intuitive insight into the nature of Transcendence, in the form of a spiritual revelation. Collectively the revelations of the orthodox Prophets of a given spiritual interpretation represent its logos.

In mystic spirituality the fundamental Transcendent entity is regarded as being beyond comprehension. As such its manifestation as Divinity is what Prophets commune with in order to receive the revelations that form the foundation of the beliefs of Adherents.

Its Divinity represents the accessible core of a spiritual tradition. Only the most exceptional beings in a given spiritual interpretation are found here. In the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) Adherents are taught that the Transcendent descends to manifest as the Divinity (Shekhinah, the Holy Spirit, the Christ, Az-Zahir). Generally in the Abrahamic interpretations only Prophets believe they can ascend to the Unity with Transcendence that manifests as Divinity. Abrahamic Adherents believe they can only aspire to proximity with the Transcendent, a location that represents the realm they call Heaven. This domain corresponds to what is essentially the upper reaches of the Prophetic level.

By contrast, in the Dharmic and Daoic traditions (Hinduism, Daoism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, etc), Adherents are taught that Prophets can ascend to Divinity through spiritual growth. These Far Eastern traditions share the Abrahamic belief that the Transcendent can descend to manifest as Divinity.

A Refutation of Materialism

2008-05-29T08:58:00.003-05:00

I obviously have a great deal of sympathy for the scientific perspective in general. I am on the side of the scientific community in their ongoing dispute with mystics over the rational comprehensibility of Reality. But we part company over the belief among many scientists that Reality is fundamentally a material domain.

The typical hardcore materialist insists that there is nothing beyond the material world. A common response to this position is to trot out phenomena such as hope, love or spirit as counterarguments. My initial response is to ask if the concepts that form the basis of the intelligibility of the material world are material phenomena. If so, what are the masses, locations, momenta or charges of the numbers we use to quantify the mass, location, momentum and change of matter? For that matter, what are the sizes, masses, locations, momenta and charges of the ideas we call size, mass, location, momentum and charge? Unlike hope, love, spirit and other such arguably mental manifestations, there are quantitative concepts that exist independently of the mind.

Before I prove my conjecture let me state that for the sake of this argument I am willing to concede that as a phenomenon that emerges from interactions among material phenomena (i.e., neurons, molecules, atoms, fermions, etc.), the mind can be characterized as residing in the material domain. In light of this concession, the standard materialist counterargument to my position is that even if ideas are not material phenomena, they cannot exist without minds. Being contingent upon occupants of the material domain means ideas are also encompassed by that domain. These materialists would argue, for example, that the idea of mass did not exist, although massive phenomena did, prior to conscious beings manifesting and creating the idea.

My subsequent counterargument is based on the theory of real numbers. Mathematicians theorize that the vast majority of real numbers can only be referenced by an infinite string of symbols or operations used to calculate them. This means that only an infinitesimal fraction of real numbers can be referenced in any finite sense (which is the only sense available to us as finite beings). To put this in perspective, consider that if the continuum of real numbers is viewed as the infinite set of all possible integers, the referencible values in it correspond to the number 1.

To appreciate the unreferencible nature of most real numbers, consider the value we get by executing the following algorithm. As we sequentially scan each of the theoretically limitless decimal places of the value π, wherever we encounter a digit that is greater than or equal to 5, we leave it alone. Where we come upon a digit that is less than 5, we flip a “fair coin”. If the coin lands with the heads side up, we double the digit and if it lands with tails up, we add 1 to it. The specific value that would emerge from the theoretical completion of this algorithm is essentially unreferencible since it can only be uniquely referenced by a limitless series of numbers or operations.

Every real number whose only reference is comprised of an infinite sequence of digits is essentially unreferencible. In other words, each such value represents a target without a reference. But the reference to a target is the means by which it manifests in a conscious mind. For example, when you think about an elephant, it is not an actual elephant that manifests in your mind; it is merely a reference to one that is created by your mind.

A matter-based mind can only create references to targets that manifest in some comprehensible manner in the material domain. For instance, the reference to a mythical creature such as a unicorn can manifest in our minds because a finite combination of physical phenomena that captures its uniqueness is available to us (e.g., shaped like a horse with a single horn protruding from its forehead…). By contrast, no finite combination of material manifestations captures the uniqueness of a particular unreferencible number. This is evident in that the algorithm mentioned earlier does not refer to a particular unreferencible number since it will never produce the same number twice (the probability of this happening is one in infinity, which makes it infinitely improbable). Where the mind cannot create a reference to a target entity, that entity cannot manifest in the mind. This only happens where there is no finite combination of phenomena in the material domain that encompasses the target’s uniqueness.

The unreferencible nature of virtually all real numbers means they cannot be used to refer to anything else. In other words nothing can have a size or manifest in a quantity that corresponds to an unreferencible number. This means that unreferencible numbers cannot refer to entities in the material domain.

But, one might ask, if unreferencible numbers cannot manifest in our minds, do they exist at all? In a mathematical sense, unreferencible numbers must exist since without them the continuum of real numbers is indistinguishable from the discrete system of rational numbers. In other words, if unreferencible numbers do not exist, then there are no real numbers.

To summarize: unreferencible numbers are not material manifestations (i.e., they have no material properties such as mass, charge, momentum, etc.), they are not individually referred to by occupants of the material domain (e.g. conscious minds) and they do not refer to any occupants of the material domain (i.e., they do not correspond to the size or quantity of any material manifestation). This means that these numbers are completely uncoupled from the material domain. Since they are not in any way connected to the material domain, unreferencible numbers represent completely non-material phenomena.

Where unreferencible numbers actually reside is beyond the scope of this essay (though it is explained in my framework). My conclusion that there are phenomena that reside completely beyond the material domain is why I reject pure materialism and the label of materialist, regardless of my frequent disagreements with mystics.

Wilber, Tipler and Me

2008-05-27T10:31:00.004-05:00

Though I have some significant differences of opinion with Ken Wilber and Frank Tipler, I agree with certain aspects of each of their systems. I find it amusing that I probably agree with each of them more than they agree with each other.

Wilber’s framework represents an effort to extend Dharmic/Daoic traditions into Western philosophy and science. In theory, I see this as a worthwhile endeavor since my framework concurs with the bulk of what the Eastern systems of thought have to say about the fundamental nature of Reality. But these Eastern disciplines are thousands of years old. As a result, there are important ideas in these ancient traditions that are outdated in the context of contemporary Western thought.

In his integration of East and West, Wilber’s interpretation of Eastern spirituality emerges largely unchanged. This is because Wilber mostly just cites examples of Western thought that are consistent with his Eastern sources. He fails to enhance his ancient Eastern ideas with the Western knowledge that has been discovered in the interim.

For whatever reason, Wilber largely ignores mathematics and physics, arguably the most successful Western disciplines, in terms of explaining the fundamental nature of Reality. These areas of Western thought have the most to offer towards modernizing the ancient Eastern traditions that are Wilber’s most important sources. By failing to integrate certain key ideas from these areas of study (e.g., quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, the anthropic principle, time reversal invariance, transfinite numbers, etc.), Wilber misses out on an opportunity to develop a system that truly integrates Eastern and Western thought.

Tipler’s framework attacks the problem of explaining the fundamental nature of Reality from a different direction. His approach is based on a combination of pure scientific materialism and fundamental Christian spirituality; strange bedfellows if I’ve even seen them. Nonetheless, there are concepts in these disciplines that I embrace in my framework as well. For instance, both of our systems are based on quantum mechanics, theory of relativity, anthropic principle and time reversal invariance. In addition, certain purely Christian concepts (that I expect to discuss in subsequent essays) are also consistent with my framework.

Tipler’s effort to integrate science and Christianity almost completely bypasses philosophy, the discipline that forms the natural bridge them. The absence of philosophical underpinnings in Tipler’s exposition undermines the plausibility of his frequent jumps directly from hard science to hardcore Christianity.

Tipler has a tendency to cite as unimpeachable any scientific postulate that he can shoehorn into supporting his premises. He rarely takes the time to establish why (beyond often being attributed to someone with an impressive scientific credential) the often obscure (to laypeople) sources he uses for validation are themselves valid. By never connecting his framework to premises that his broader audience is qualified to accept, Tipler builds a castle in the clouds that looks impressive but has no foundation.

I also have problems with the materialism of Tipler’s framework. His interpretation of God is a physical entity that manifests at the beginning and end of time. I can relate to the idea of this Alpha/Omega Point from which all manifestations emerge and to which they ultimately return. But I have trouble with the idea that this ultimate source and destiny of all manifestations is in any way contingent upon the fundamental laws of nature that Tipler is constantly citing as proof of his theory. Finally, I find it problematic that Tipler chooses to embrace a more literal interpretation of Christianity rather than a progressive contemplative form that better reflects the leading edge of Christian thought.

Like Wilber, Tipler goes out of his way try to justify ancient beliefs in the context of modern thought rather that using modern thought to update those ideas. To his credit Tipler does attempt to reinterpret the meaning of certain aspects of Christian eschatology in a manner that is consistent with his theories. Both Wilber and Tipler generally refer to their spiritual sources as though they are beyond reproach. While this approach works when they are preaching to the converted it can be annoyingly presumptuous to the many skeptics in their audiences.

Tipler and Wilber’s reverence for their respective spiritual sources is most likely the basis of their reluctance to modernize them. But their unwillingness to revise their particular spiritual foundations leaves their interpretations in what is essentially a pre-modern state. Such interpretations typically cannot withstand the critical scrutiny of today’s rational thinkers. While Wilber claims to have transcended rationality he does not seem to realize that expecting rational thinkers to evaluate his framework without using rational (objective) analysis is asking a bit much.

By contrast, though my framework also encompasses a great deal of the wisdom of these ancient spiritual traditions, it does not include the more dogmatic articles of faith that seem to reflect the provincial thinking of the time of their origins. As such, I have no use for belief in Sky Fathers, Judgment Days, Evil Spirits, Hell or Lila among others.

Unlike Tipler and Wilber, I do not have to carry any of the irrational baggage associated with these spiritual traditions. This is because my purpose is not to give a new relevance to an ancient belief system; it is to provide rational answers to the questions of our origin, purpose and ultimate destiny, based on the most promising knowledge that we have accumulated over the course of human history. As such, I regard it as wonderful and encouraging that there are many areas of overlap between my framework and those of Frank Tipler and Ken Wilber. This overlap implies that there are rational answers to our most important questions that are not inconsistent with are most enduring spiritual traditions.

Not Smelling What Frank Tipler is Cooking – Part III

2008-05-22T10:17:00.008-05:00

Finishing Frank Tipler’s ‘The Physics of Immortality’ was complicated by the fact that he consistently resorts to using unnecessarily dense scientific jargon and implicit authoritarianism whenever he is on shaky ground in his reasoning. Frankly, I found it exasperating how Tipler bloviated his way over the heads of his non-specialist audience on the points that would require the greatest expository clarity if his ideas were going to come together to form a rational framework (the points at which, in the words of Sidney Harris, “a miracle occurs”).

I actually have a reasonably good layperson’s head for physics yet Tipler occasionally managed to talk over it in his discussion of the science that supports his position. His efforts to justify his sometimes dubious conclusions consisted of authoritatively citing relatively obscure (from the layperson’s perspective) yet evidently legitimate scientific principles and then performing interpretive legerdemain to justify his belief that they support his position.

I was generally able to slog through this morass secure in the knowledge that no matter how confidently Tipler stated his case, his fundamental premise had already most likely gone down in cosmological flames. It was interesting to watch Tipler assemble such an impressive sounding argument in the aftermath of the discovery of solid contradictory evidence that was not available to him at the time.

The context in which I read ‘The Physics of Immortality’ provided me with a unique insight into how experts use their credentials, in conjunction with often impenetrable, yet seemingly coherent jargon to lead laypeople to accept untenable conclusions. But then I am innately mistrustful of those who, when speaking to a general audience, choose to use jargon that implicitly elevates them in the eyes of that audience rather than attempting to elevate their audience by simply and clearly explaining their position.

Reading ‘The Physics of Immortality’ under these circumstances, I got the distinct impression that Tipler was teleologically cherry picking from among the many diverse principles in cosmology, physics, information theory, cybernetics, etc. those that he interprets as supporting his conclusions. One cannot help but wonder whether Tipler is failing to mention other positions of equal or even greater significance that contradict his. Once you get into the business of citing legitimizing sources to a general audience it is disingenuous to imply that the consensus in the encompassing discipline supports your position when there may not even be a consensus or worse, when you are actually on the wrong side of the consensus.

The most disappointing thing about the whole Frank Tipler saga is what became of him in the aftermath of ‘The Physics of Immortality’. Though he still primarily works as a professor of physics and mathematics, Tipler has fallen in with the Intelligent Design crowd. While this does not automatically invalidate his position, it does give his work a certain theistic bias. This bias saturates in his follow-up book, ‘The Physics of Christianity’.

Tipler is out speaking to Christian audiences about how physics proves that their beliefs are valid. Ironically, I agree with his basic premise that many spiritual beliefs are supported by rational arguments. I simply do not believe that Tipler’s unswervingly materialist arguments are the appropriate ones.

Still Not Smelling What Frank Tipler is Cooking

2008-05-20T10:20:00.013-05:00

I was impressed by the depth and conviction of James Redford’s comment on my Tipler essay. Again as my reply to his comment approached the 500 word mark, I decided to make it a follow-up to what I said earlier:

Hello Mr. Redford,

Thank you for your detailed comment on my previous essay on Dr. Tipler's Omega Point Theory. While you have provided me with a great deal to contemplate, I figured that the simplest way to absorb your argument and craft an appropriate response would be to focus on the popular exposition that Dr. Tipler provided in the Wired article referenced from the Theophysics site "From 2100 to the End of Time".

According to this article, Tipler himself says that the Omega Point is “infinitely improbable” in the absence of universal colonization. But once we enter the realm of speculation on the feasibility of universal colonization, even if I were to concede that physics and cosmology say it is possible (which they do not if the rate of universal expansion does not decrease) we have left the domain of fundamental science and entered that of futurism.

Once the argument veers in this direction Tipler’s impressive resume becomes merely a well-decorated piece of paper in light of all of the non-scientific issues that would have a significant bearing on a possible Earth-originated universal colonization effort (Finance, Economics, Politics, Law, Diplomacy, etc.).

The fact that the Omega Point Theory is so critically dependent upon so many non-scientific factors means that it is not a theory of fundamental science. That is unless Tipler believes that what he characterizes as the law of the indestructibility of quantum information directly influences human decision-making as he evidently believes it will somehow slow the rate of expansion of the universe.

While its non-fundamental nature does not in itself invalidate the theory, it does undermine Tipler’s credentials for being taken completely seriously where his speculations are dependent upon events beyond his area of expertise (teleology is a philosophical outlook, not a scientific one). This is analogous to a quantum mechanic who does not fully grasp the underlying mathematics.

In addition, for all of Tipler’s impressive hand-waving, to date cosmologists have not arrived at a consensus on the nature of the phenomenon responsible for the observed increase in the rate of universal expansion (be it dark energy, quintessence or fairy dust). For all he knows this phenomenon could be based on a more fundamental law of nature than the law of the indestructibility of quantum information, which Tipler insists is why the universe must stop expanding and ultimately collapse towards a singularity in a finite amount of time. Or for that matter if singularities manifest on (or below) the Planck scale the law of the indestructibility of quantum information may not apply to them since no other fundamental laws are applicable there (this is after all the sub-quantum level).

In this context my reasonable doubts persist. As a result, I feel comfortable going with the latest cosmological observations and Tipler’s own words, which indicate that there will most likely not be a material Omega Point at the end of our universe. Mind you, the framework I have developed is based on a metaphysical Omega Point (and an indistinguishable Alpha Point) and so I do embrace the idea conceptually, just not necessarily on a material level.

Not Smelling What Frank Tipler is Cooking – Part I

2008-05-16T14:01:00.018-05:00

As indicated by the preceding three essays, I have certain issues with Ken Wilber, not so much with his the core of his (primarily Dharmic) theory of Reality as with how he chooses to frame it. In the light of my ardent support for scientific rationalism one might reasonably assume that I would be more in tune with the materialist theory of Reality put forth by Frank J. Tipler, professor of Physics and Mathematics and author of several books, most notably, ‘The Physics of Immortality’. But, in the words of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, I cannot smell what Frank Tipler is cooking.

If you wanted to describe the science-based theory of Reality that is furthest from my views, you would be hard-pressed to do better than Tipler’s ‘The Physics of Immortality’. According to Tipler, numerous key elements of spiritual (primarily Christian) eschatology including the Resurrection of the Dead, Judgment Day, Heaven and Hell are supported by contemporary physics. This thesis alone led to his book becoming a major bestseller. Though he is a credentialed scientist with an impressive resume, Tipler’s theory simply does not hold up very well from either a scientific or philosophical point of view.

To save time let me first focus on the one thing Tipler posits that I agree with in a general sense. Tipler theorizes the existence of the Omega Point, a material singularity at the end of time that represents the ultimate destiny of all beings. In my framework the ultimate destiny of every distinguishable entity is Unity in what is essentially a metaphysical singularity. But even in this area of relative agreement Tipler and I do not see eye to eye.

For one thing as a hardcore causal materialist, Tipler characterizes the Omega Point as a God-like being (though he claimed to be an atheist at the time he wrote ‘The Physics of Immortality’) that represents the purely material end-product of the entire causal dynamic. As described by Tipler the essence of the end of this process is that the universe will continue to expand to a certain point at which gravity will overcome the expansion caused by the Big Bang and initiate a period of contraction that will end in what cosmologists refer to as the Big Crunch.

According to Tipler certain rather extraordinary events must transpire in the period leading up to the Big Crunch to lead to the formation of the Omega Point that is consistent with Christian eschatology. The most incredible of these events is that somehow intelligent life on Earth (Tipler argues against there being intelligent life anywhere else in the universe) is supposed to colonize the entire universe between now and the Big Crunch. Here Tipler steps way out of his element but proceeds to describe this dynamic as though his specialties included the Philosophy of the Mind, Information Theory, Aerospace Engineering, Cybernetics and a host of others. Tipler’s tendency to imply that his doctorate in physics and ability to cite largely obscure authoritative sources makes him an expert on pretty much everything reminded me of our friend Ken Wilber.

Tipler insists that in order for the (super) aware Omega Point to form (as opposed to simply a mindless, lifeless singularity), intelligence, in the form of sentient machines, must take over the entire universe such that life is actually able to significantly change the gross structure of the universe in a way that distorts its inevitable gravitation collapse. This alteration allows for the manifestation of a truly universal intelligence that brings about many of the predictions of the Christian Bible in the final microseconds before the Big Crunch. In addition, because of the nature of this universal intelligence and the manner in which it reshapes time itself, these last few material microseconds will last for an informational eternity.

Tipler’s claim that this fantastic hypothesis is not inconsistent with cosmological theory did not make it much easier for me to believe than the Book of Revelations. The primary reason for this is the fact that the years since the initial publishing of ‘The Physics of Immortality’ have not been kind to the a key prediction underlying Tipler’s theory. In the interim cosmologists have determined that his fundamental premise that the universe will collapse into a singularity is highly improbable. Current cosmological observations indicate that our universe’s rate of expansion is increasing, arguably thanks to the phenomenon known as dark energy. This increasing rate of expansion indicates that the universe is not likely to collapse into the singularity, an event that is a necessary condition of the formation of Tipler’s Omega Point.

Tipler has since come up with some re-interpretive hand-waving in an effort to re-validate his theory but it is difficult to take him seriously when he himself put forth in ‘The Physics of Immortality’ that it is the falsifiability of his theory that makes it a scientific rather than philosophical or spiritual speculation. One of the critical falsifiable aspects of his theory is the fact that he unequivocally predicts that the universe will collapse into a singularity.

I picked up‘The Physics of Immortality’ well after cosmologists had largely disproved one of Tipler's key predictions. As a result, reading it felt analogous to encountering a seemingly rational exposition on life after the Second Coming that is predicated on the belief that it occurred during the lifetime of the apostles of Jesus Christ.

More Wilbermania

2008-05-09T09:36:00.035-05:00

Stoner is giving me a great opportunity to expand on my thoughts in this area and I thank him it. This is my response to his latest response:

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem essentially says is that for a sufficiently complex system there will be postulates that cannot be proved in the context of that system. He put the stake in the heart of the early 20^th century program to develop as quantitative system based on a static handful of axioms that could be used to explain “everything”.

In light of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem I maintain that consistent, but unprovable postulates should be accepted as premises of the system until either more general postulates encompass them (the separate postulates that all humans are warm-blooded and all birds are warm-blooded are encompassed by the single postulate that warm-blooded animals include all birds and mammals) or contradictory evidence is found (I cannot prove that all swans are white but I can accept it as a premise until I see a non-white one). Godel implies that the rate of postulate consolidation will always lag that of new postulate discovery. This means that the set of premises in such a system is always growing. But I regard this process as asymptotically approaching the objective of complete understanding.

I prefer to consider things in the context of Georg Cantor who established to my satisfaction that it is possible to develop rational postulates about the nature of infinity without having to count to infinity. This “theory precedes experiment" approach (philosophically, this corresponds to rationalism before empiricism) is also how much of physics works these days.

Today leading theoreticians develop models of complex physical systems by integrating and extending more mature theories in a manner that remains consistent with the essence of how things are observed to work. Wilber seems to believe that physics is still operating within the Francis Bacon paradigm. But physics has matured to the point where experiments are done to confirm theories, more often than theories are created to explain experiments. The resultant theoretical models form the basis of a framework that explains (or can be extended to explain) novel phenomena. I ultimately used this approach to develop my framework.

How do I know scientific, materialistic rationalism is the one path of truth? I hope I’ve been clear that I accept that there are multiple paths to the truth, including the spiritual epistemologies. I would ask why Wilber insists that scientific, materialistic rationalism is not a path to the truth? Just to be clear, I do not regard myself as a scientific, materialist but I let their methods inform my approach.

How do I prove my framework according to scientific materialistic rationalist criteria? Rationalism isn’t about proving things, it is about explaining things without requiring untenable leaps of faith. The key to meeting this requirement is the axioms of the framework. If a rational observer perceives these axioms to be irrational, she is free to reject the system upon which they are based. This is where subjectivity threatens to derail rationalism. But this subjectivity is ultimately overcome by consensus building over time. Yes, in the short run this manifests as the academic ‘Good Ole Boy’ network from which Wilber is largely being excluded. But over the long haul, the pull of truth inclines things towards a more impartial outcome.

The academic acceptance problem of spiritual epistemologies in general is based on the fact that they admit to their irrationality up front (be they pre-rational or trans-rational). This is where I find Wilber’s attempts at rationality to be inauthentic. He seems to appreciate that he risks consignment to the personal enlightenment ghetto if he leads with his irrationality and so he puts up a rational smoke screen of citations and jargoning in an effort to get rationalists to take him seriously.

But Wilber cannot hide the irrational core of his system: the ineffable Spirit. This ineffability ultimately leads to the Principle of Explosion, which essentially states that anything is possible once you accept a contradiction. Spirit is the ultimate contradiction. The Principle of Explosion and the Law of Non-contradiction (i.e., a postulate cannot be both true and false at the same time) are lines that few rationalists are willing to cross. I chose to plow right through them and came back with something that is both completely rational and largely consistent with the core principles of spirituality.

There is a petulance to Wilber’s rejection of quantitative rationalism that seems a bit childish to me (there is no denying that ‘flatlander’ is generally used as a pejorative). Did Lisa Randall turn him down for a date or Gregory Chaitin kick sand in his face or what? He is lumping all quantitative rationalists into a derogatory category and yet he insists that people acknowledge the difference between contemporary pre-rational (“New Age”) and trans-rational (“Integral”) non-rationalists. Sure there are know-it-all quantitative thinkers who believe everything can be explained by numbers. But the vanguard of quantitative thought (and rational thought in general) is comprised of many individuals who simply regard the boundary of what we can know as flexible.

Physics has been leaking out of Wilber’s UR quadrant (whose core of atoms and presumably sub-atomic particles, it pretty much owns) into the core of his LR through its increasing integration with cosmology (which owns this quadrant’s core of galaxies, stars and planets). This indicates why the work of physicists and mathematicians should not be discounted in the search for the ultimate truth. Who knows, they may actually find the universe in a grain of sand :-).

More on What is Ken Wilber Selling

2008-05-08T09:57:00.016-05:00

A friend whose opinion I respect posted a reply to my first Ken Wilber essay. As my reply to his reply approached the 500 word mark, I decided to make it a follow-up to what I said earlier:

John,

Thanks for your insightful commentary. I have no problem with anything you said. My issue with Ken Wilber is that he won’t just stay in the mystical domain you describe. Instead he keeps trying to surround the essence of what you’ve stated with the trappings of rationalism while claiming to be trans-rational.

Wilber has a tendency to cite a numerous scientific and philosophical rationalists and use a lot of their jargon in making his case. I interpret this to be a cosmetic attempt to inject some rational rigor to his essentially mystical message. I imagine that if he only cited ancient and modern Dharmic, Daoic and Abrahamic spiritualists he would most likely be (even more) marginalized to the personal enlightenment ghetto. Wilber obviously wants to be taken seriously in academic circles beyond that ghetto and so he cites sources from more upscale scholastic neighborhoods. He justifies this by claiming that he is simply trying to integrate Eastern and Western thought on this subject.

I don’t buy that claim because I do not accept Wilber’s basic premise that the fundamental nature of reality is trans-rational. The fact that neither Wilber nor any of his mystical sources know of a rational perspective that explains the fundamental nature of reality does not mean that such a perspective does not exist. Wilber doesn’t seem to realize that saying you cannot find the words to explain something does not necessarily mean that there are no such words.

Unlikely as it sounds, I actually have found a rational insight into the fundamental nature of reality. I was reading Wilber’s book (ironically, you initially brought him to my attention way back when) in a continuing effort to vet my framework. Not only does it agree with a significant portion of what Wilber says, I can go him one better by rationally explaining why things are the way he characterizes them to be (rationality is a requirement that the Lila explanation simply does not meet).

In reading Wilber through the lens of my framework it is obvious to me that there is minimal rational cohesion to what he is putting forth, despite all of his pseudo-rational jargoning. He provides an interpretation of what is out there (his AQAL structure) but no system of basic premises and subsequent arguments that explain why (Rationalism 101). If he could either drop the rational pretense or add some truly rigorous rationality to his framework he would seem more authentic to me.

This is not to say that I don’t buy his trans-rational approach; I merely insist that it does not represent the only path to understanding. It is unfortunate that he generally dismisses physicists, mathematicians and other quantitative rationalists as irrelevant, materialist flatlanders (BTW, would you explain to me why the low end of the Upper Right quadrant of AQAL ends at atoms? Decades ago the Standard Model jury came back with guilty verdicts on the existence of more fundamental electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, etc.). These disciplines have come a long way since his spiritual sources originally concluded that rational answers are impossible. It was by extrapolating from these fields of study that I found my rational answers. If Wilber is truly being “integral” he should look more deeply into these quantitative fields. What he learns might surprise him.

What is Ken Wilber Selling?

2008-05-06T13:57:00.018-05:00

I just finished reading ‘The Simple Feeling of Being’, a 2004 compilation of Ken Wilber's works assembled by a group of his disciples. As a not especially spiritual person, I was surprised at how much he said that I could agree with once I translated certain key terms from his terminology to mine. There is nonetheless a huge gulf separating our points of view. The basis of this chasm is that Wilber is a mystic while I am a rationalist.

In my world view a mystic is someone whose metaphysical belief structure is based on an ineffable absolute whose impenetrable nature undermines our capacity to rationally understand reality. By contrast, I regard a rationalist as someone who believes it is possible to answer the primal metaphysical questions regarding our origin, purpose and ultimate destiny, by extrapolating information from the world around us.

My real problem with Ken Wilber is that he is a mystic in rationalist’s clothing. Wilber claims that his beliefs are supported by empirical evidence gleaned from the world around us, thus implying that the former can somehow be derived from the latter. But it is obvious to me that he actually starts out with pre-existing mystic beliefs and simply cherry picks the rational positions that support it.

In reading through Wilber’s works, it becomes evident that he does not actually explain the system he is describing. From his expositions it is obvious that all roads lead to the ineffable entity that he refers to as Spirit, Kosmos, One Taste and other mystical appellations. To rationally apprehend Wilber’s system you must understand this absolute entity. But every time Wilber traverses an expository sequence (filled with incessant jargoning and non-stop scholastic and spiritual name-dropping), he always comes back to Spirit. At this point he invariably ceases any effort at explaining and starts describing things in poetically paradoxical terms.

The poetic paradox ploy is a common dodge used by mystics to convince audiences that the ultimate answers they seek are incredibly beautiful (hence the poetry) but rationally impenetrable (thus the paradox). This maneuver represents a classic bait-and-switch scheme. After leading the reader to the precipice with “rational” insights, when it is time for the payoff, we are told that we have to abandon rationality to go beyond this point. As an individual who has found my own rational answers to the ultimate questions, I find this gambit to be somewhat disingenuous.

There are only two possible explanations for why Wilber would do such a thing. One is that he does not know the rational answers underlying the world around us and the other is that he does. I would prefer to believe that he is simply ignorant. Since he consistently insists that there are no rational answers to the ultimate questions, I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and conclude that he believes he is selling used cars as new (age old answers dressed up in contemporary terminology) and not snake oil (discredited superstitions) to cancer patients (angst-ridden truth seekers).

Bear in mind that while I have obvious problems with Wilber’s approach, on an essential level I agree with a good deal of what he as to say in the realm of metaphysics. The fact that his mystic interpretation of reality has much in common with my rational one indicates to me that underlying all of his grandiose claims, there is valid knowledge in his source frameworks. I point beyond him to his sources because there is nothing at the core of his system that a Hindu guru or Buddhist lama from millennia ago would have trouble understanding. Wilber seems to be simply going through the various sciences and philosophies of the mind and “integrating” positions that are consistent with ancient Dharmic, Daoic and Abrahamic beliefs. The convergence I see between Wilber’s interpretations of these beliefs and my rational framework reinforces for me that there is indeed something fundamentally valid in these venerable frameworks.

The Second Lowest Position on the Totem Pole

2008-01-24T08:43:00.000-06:00

I have often heard people who have never lived in crime-infested, dilapidated housing question why anyone in their right minds would stay in such places. I find this ironic since many of the people who feel this way are suffering from the same malady that is keeping many of these residents in their sub-optimal circumstances. I refer to this condition as the Second Lowest Position on the Totem Pole Syndrome (SLOPOTOPOS, pronounced SLŌ-PŌ-TŌ-PŌS).

SLOPOTOPOS sufferers are aware that there is a great deal of room for improvement in their current situations. But they are kept from acting on this awareness by their perception that things could easily get worse. These individuals feel there is no guarantee that any change they initiate would improve their condition and there is a realistic possibility that it will make matters worse. For people living in sub-standard housing SLOPOTOPOS is a significant factor in keeping many of them there (though obviously not all of them). It is also a major reason why many of those questioning the judgment or sanity of these residents do not quit their soul-sucking jobs.

It doesn’t matter how horrific their circumstances are, as long as people can imagine them easily becoming much worse, they can convince themselves that their current condition is not bad enough to necessitate action on their parts. People in demeaning jobs can take solace in the fact that at least they don’t live in “bad neighborhoods”. People living in such neighborhoods can at least say they have a home. Homeless people can say they at least have food to eat and so on. In each case the individuals appreciate that their situations are not good but remain in them for fear of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. They see the spectrum of increasingly less fortunate conditions below them as the single state that represents the actual bottom of the totem pole.

SLOPOTOPOS has probably been with us in one form or another since the dawn of human societies. But it became a more problematic condition as societies became less rigidly structured. This social evolution led to increasing numbers of people realizing their actions could significantly influence the course of their lives. People began to see that it was both permissible and possible to rise above the circumstances into which they were born. But for many this perception was tempered by the empirical belief that things could also get worse.

The decreasing viscosity of the social order led to an increase in the possibility of upward mobility. But fear that this situation also increased the possibility of downward movement led to SLOPOTOPOS, which inhibits exploitation of this new upward mobility. Victims of this condition allow their fear of failure to keep them down in certain circumstances where their less unjust (though hardly “just”) society no longer does.

Ultimately, the current strain of SLOPOTOPOS is the result of the perception that while there is a path to success it is not a ladder but a greased pole. Sure it’s possible to climb to the top but as soon as they loosen their grip to go up, they fear they are more likely to slide to the bottom.

The Impact of Answers

2008-01-17T13:46:00.000-06:00

What would it be like to know the answers to the fundamental questions of our origin, purpose and destiny? I don’t mean just best guesses but the actual Answers, the ones that theologians, philosophers and scientists insist we can never rationally know. I’m talking about answers that completely resonate within you on the most fundamental level. As such I mean truly knowing the answers, not simply believing what someone else told you. What kind of difference would such knowledge make in your life?

To get a handle on your answer, first imagine knowing exactly how the universe came to be, with such certainty that the answer seems almost trivial. When you truly think about it, for the majority of us, the most important thing that knowledge of our origin would impart to us is insight into the nature of our creator, be it Brahma, Gitche Manitou, YHWH, Yuanshi Tianzun, Unkulunkulu, Abba (God, the Father), Allah, Damballa, Bondye, the ultimate monad, a limitless quantum field or the multiverse. Minimally, universal acceptance of this insight would provide those who already suspected as much with an “I told you so” moment. While this knowledge might affect how some of us conduct our lives, without insight into why we are here, knowing our origin would merely be an interesting piece of trivia for most of us.

Now imagine knowing exactly what your purpose is. Truly knowing why you are here has greater potential to impact how you live your life. Whether or not this potential would actually be realized would primarily depend on how you felt about your purpose once you knew it. Your perception of the worth of your purpose reflects your feelings about the difference you would make by fulfilling it. Since we tend to believe that great things are only asked of great people, if you weren’t impressed by your purpose, you might be inclined to reject it as an invalid reflection of your worth. Even if you did accept a purpose of dubious worth, your pursuit of it would most likely be halfhearted at best. But, suppose you had unequivocal knowledge of why you are here, and that this purpose was grand enough for you to completely embrace it? What if all it took to fulfill your phenomenal purpose was for you to maximize your selflessness and thus minimize your selfishness? Completely internalizing this knowledge would probably significantly alter the focus of your life in the direction of achieving this purpose.

But some of us might fear that we are not up to the task of fulfilling such a heroic purpose. In order to keep from losing heart these individuals would require the additional knowledge that they are destined to eventually achieve their laudable purpose. Consider what it would be like to know beyond all doubt that it is your destiny to ultimately achieve the greatest of purposes and that the only uncertainty will be in how you go about it. Imagine that you knew for a fact that your choices only affect the amount of pain and suffering that will have to occur before you fulfill a purpose is so incredible that it would completely justify whatever had to happen along the way.

How would you feel about your life in the face of such knowledge of your origin, purpose and destiny? Would that make it all worthwhile? Would you live your life differently? If so, what are you waiting for?

Gender Domains

2007-12-20T16:31:00.002-06:00

In my comment on a post by Major Generalist, I referred to ranges of certain human dispositions that span a common origin. In that context I posited that for each of these dispositions one side of the origin could be labeled female and the other male. This post is a list of the dispositions that I have been able to come up with so far.

I made a conscious effort to go deeper than the stereotypical, often anti-female, gender labels. My goal was to make both the male and female dispositions I’ve listed represent a valid way of being in the world.

I am the primary template for my male domain. These male dispositions are how I recall being for most of my life (though interestingly less so since I became a father, but that’s a story for another posting). The women who shaped my worldview are the basis of my interpretation of the female domain. The female dispositions listed here are generally the complements of the male ones, vetted through my perception of the women I’ve known. This reflects my personal belief that we are not opposite sexes but complementary genders.

The Female Domain

Pursuing Perfection (“I want the best”)
Process-oriented (“Its not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game”)
Efficient (“Waste Not Want Not”)
Strategic (“The future is what we make it”)
Nurture (“Greatness is made, not born”)
The Threat of Change (“Most change is for the worse”)
Inhibitive (“What happens is what I do not prevent”)
The Power of Desire (“Show me that you want it”)
Safety First (“If I am not Safe, I am not truly Free”)
Communal (“From each according to her abilities to each according to her needs”)
Distributive (“Water Divided is Water Multiplied”)

The Male Domain

Pursuing Novelty (“I want what I don’t have”)
Results-oriented (“Just win, baby!”)
Effective (“Make It Work”)
Tactical (“Take care of the present and the future will take care of itself”)
Nature (“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”)
The Opportunity of Change (“You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs”)
Exhibitive (“I did it my way”)
The Power of Fear (“Winning through intimidation”)
Freedom First (“If I am not Free, I am not truly Safe”)
Competitive (“Survival of the fittest”)
Acquisitive (“He who dies with the most toys wins”)

Neither genitalia nor sexual orientation is the sole determinant of which of these domains a person occupies. Beyond the expected distributions there are gay men and straight women in the male domain, lesbian women and straight men in the female domain and bisexual and transgendered individuals all over the place.

In this division of dispositions, being in a given domain does not invalidate you as a person. Though each domain can be subjected to negative characterizations, they can also just as easily be positively characterized. Which you choose to do is most likely based on your personal prejudices.

I am sure there are more such dispositions but these are the ones that meant the most to me. Note that during the short time I have worked on these lists, several of these dispositions have flipped sides. While I obviously do not think I am completely wrong here, I readily acknowledge that this is a work in progress and so I am open to constructive suggestions.

The Death of Santa Claus

2007-12-13T11:50:00.000-06:00

My 12 year old daughter just confided in me that it is becoming increasingly difficult for her to continue to believe in Santa Claus. That she sees the existence of Santa Claus as still worth considering is a testament to the sophistication of her perception of his (its) nature. I explained to her at a relatively early age that Santa Claus is the name that many European-influenced cultures give to a seasonal spirit of selfless giving.

My idea of spirit is a bit more precise than the prehistoric concept of independent, non-material, sentient manifestations that are capable of influencing the world around us. I regard spirit as the connection among a collection of minds that inclines them to act in unison. Spirits do not exist without component minds any more than minds exist without component neurons. Sports fanaticism, market forces, patriotism, racism and religious zeal are examples of spiritual manifestations.

In this context I explained to my daughter that Santa Claus is simply a spirit that inclines people to be more loving, kind and giving between Thanksgiving and New Years. Santa Claus is an intentional spirit, specifically created by people to bring out the best in them at this time of year. Every mind that contributes to and thus acts out of this spirit is an avatar of Santa Claus. The fat, bearded guy in the red suit is merely how people who cannot imagine such manifestations without bodies choose to picture that spirit.

Over the last few years my daughter has noticed a strong sense of obligation underlying many people’s efforts to give at this time of year. But isn’t Santa about giving freely out of love for others? There must be a different spirit underlying such compulsory giving. The fact that selfless giving is never coerced means that this other spirit must be in competition with Santa Claus. Since these days most people seem to be doing forced giving during the holiday season, Santa must be losing. I guess I should explain to her that, “Yes Akilah, there is a Santa Claus, but he is being killed and eaten by the Spirit of Commerce”.

The Evolution of Wisdom

2007-12-03T13:16:00.000-06:00

In the beginning there was Wisdom.
This primitive Wisdom came in two forms, Temporal and Spiritual.
Our Temporal Wisdom told us how to survive.
Our Spiritual Wisdom told us how to grow.

As we contemplated and meditated upon our Spiritual Wisdom it deepened beyond the intuitive grasp of most of us.
As a result, our Spiritual Wisdom came to be seen as Revelatory Knowledge.
When it was written down this Revelatory Knowledge lost much of its depth and complexity as it came to be the scriptural basis of Religion.

As we generalized and extended our Temporal Wisdom in the context of the world around us, we began to accumulate Empirical Knowledge.
This rationally generated, Empirical Knowledge of the world is the essence of Philosophy.
A falsifiable portion of Philosophy subsequently emerged as what we call Science.

The incredible success of Science in explaining our world led to our nearly universal infatuation with rationality.
But rationality has been largely divorced from Spirituality in the context presented by both Science and Religion.
As such, in the domain defined by Science and Religion no rational growth path is evident since in this perspective rationality constrains our capacity to grow spiritually.
However, in the context of our Revelatory and Empirical Knowledge there is no inherent contradiction between rationality and spiritual growth.

Total Responsibility Epilog – The Gateway Drug

2007-11-19T21:44:00.000-06:00

The world view I’ve adopted as a result of my ongoing pursuit of head-spinning concepts can be summarized by the following ideas:

Reality exists in perfect harmony
Supremely enlightened beings see it that way
The basis of such a perspective is complete selflessness
The more self-centered a being is, the more disharmonious the world it sees will be
Each self-centered being perceives the world differently
The world that each being sees is a reflection of its uniqueness
Each unique observer is totally responsible for that state of the world it perceives

There is no denying that regarding myself as totally responsible for the state of the world as I see it is a very self-centered perspective. But paradoxically, this outlook represents one of the simpler roads to total selflessness. The total responsibility mindset represents a transitional growth state for those of us who are not ready to relinquish our uniqueness all at once.

Accepting that the world is as we perceive it is because we are what we are provides those of us who are not particularly enamored with its state with an intuitive incentive to grow: to make the entire world a better place. From the total responsibility point of view the actions of those around me will improve as I become more selfless. This is because my growth is the growth of everyone around me. This growth manifests as the perception of increasing harmony that marks the path to supreme enlightenment.

Total Responsibility IV – Drug Interactions

2007-11-16T16:03:00.000-06:00

At first glance, believing I am totally responsible for the state of the world might seem like a clear manifestation of megalomania. But there is nothing unique about me in terms of my total responsibility for the shape of the world as I perceive it. As of this writing there are over 6.6 billion human observers on this planet, each of whom is totally responsible for the state of the world as he or she sees it. This means that you are also totally responsible for the shape of the world as you perceive it.

This is possible because total responsibility for the state of the world is continuously moving between its causally consistent, temporally sequenced observers. For instance, though my uniqueness is shaping my perception of the world around me, the uniqueness of each being observing me (including my future self) is shaping its perception of me as an inhabitant of its world. In the context of the finite speed of light, my observers all reside in my future (beyond my perspective) and thus their uniqueness is responsible for how they see me; while everything that I am observing (i.e., the contents of my perspective) resides in my past, making my uniqueness responsible for how I see them.

To appreciate this, imagine that you and I are sitting in the same room, about 3 meters apart. Though we both think we are residing at the same point in time (“the present”) each of us is actually at least 1 x 10^-8 seconds in the future of the person we are seeing across the room. This is because each of us is seeing the other using light that took that long to travel (at ~3 x 10⁸ meters/second) from them to us (plus the extra time required for the light entering our eyes to be converted to the mental image in our brains).

In general I am displaced into the future from anything I perceive, by the amount of time it took the signal by which I perceive it to cross the distance between us and be processed into a mental image (as such, I reside about 8 minutes in the future of the sun that I see in the sky). These signal propagation delays insure that each of us only perceives phenomena that reside in our past and is being perceived by observers that reside in our future.

As a result, at this instant in time my uniqueness is totally responsible for shaping my perception of everything around me. The uniqueness of other observers who perceive me from my future will shape their perception of me (and thus this instance of me is not responsible for the shape of the world they see). My successor’s uniqueness will subsequently shape my perception of these observers if/when I observe them from their future (thus assuming total responsibility for the shape of the world I perceive then), and so on in a continuous game of total responsibility hot potato. This time-slicing scheme allows each of the potentially limitless temporal observers to be totally responsible for the shape of the world it perceives.

Note, I am aware that this scheme represents a fundamental violation of normal causality in that the future is shaping the past. There is a rational explanation of this that I will provide in a future post.

Total Responsibility III – Because I Got High

2007-11-14T08:23:00.000-06:00

From an empirical point of view my state of being shapes my perception of the world around me. In a philosophical sense, this state of being corresponds to my uniqueness, which consists of the separations I perceive from everything around me. As a typically self-centered individual I am naturally reluctant to relinquish certain aspects of my uniqueness (I’ve kind of grown attached to what I perceive myself to be). In a spiritual context this means that my infatuation with my uniqueness is forestalling both my enlightenment and the corresponding transformation of my perception of the world into a view of a domain in perfect harmony.

In other words, my self-infatuation has had dire consequences on the state of the world as I see it. Since, from the completely selfless perspective, everything is in perfect harmony, each note of disharmony, tragedy, travesty and catastrophe that I perceive in the world is a reflection of my self-centering uniqueness and thus manifests through my refusal to relinquish it. No matter how much I want to believe I am better than this world, the simple fact of the matter is I am as screwed up as I perceive it to be.

In addition to making me ultimately responsible for all of the wrongs I see in the world, this outlook also allows me to take credit for many of its marvels. But, I see entirely too much needless suffering around me to take too much pride in the slightly asymmetric beauty of the universe or such human masterpieces as the Bhagavad Gita, Euclidean Geometry, the Sermon on the Mount, Sufi poetry, the Mona Lisa, Calculus, the U.S. Bill of Rights, “Kind of Blue” and so many more.

It would be unseemly to be patting myself on the back over these examples of human brilliance in the face of massive injustice, wars, genocides, famines, pandemics and extinctions. While I’m evidently still too proud to relinquish my uniqueness, I must be careful not take too much pride in the positive effects it produces. Such conceit would only serve to increase my infatuation with my uniqueness, thus ultimately exacerbating the situation.

Taking full responsibility for the state of the world as I see it is actually a liberating posture. It lets me to take control of my circumstances from people of greater political, economic or social status to whom I would otherwise be inclined to relinquish it. This outlook allows me to see that things are as they are because I insist on seeing myself as distinct from “others” around me, including the autocrats, politicians, spin doctors, media moguls, CEOs, lawyers, MBAs, spiritual leaders, hoi polloi and the many other entities that I would otherwise hold responsible for much of what I dislike about the world. As I embrace my total responsibility, I stop being the victim of my various scapegoats. From this perspective I am the figurative “They”, to whom I would otherwise assign blame for the state of the world.

Regarding myself as totally responsible for the state of the world as I see it is my most mind-expanding idea to date. When I adopt this outlook as I walk through the world, I realize that that pattern of cracks in the sidewalk would not look that way to me were it not for the fact that I regard myself as a unique being. That building surrounded by scaffolding would not look that way to me but for the uniquely self-centered nature of my perspective; nor would that woman in a wheelchair; that homeless man sleeping on that grate or those students trying to play tennis. Even now, after years of taking excursions into this viewpoint, it is still able to take me dizzyingly beyond myself.

Total Responsibility II – New Highs

2007-11-12T15:50:00.001-06:00

My next significant step towards belief in total responsibility occurred in my late teens when I was first introduced to the ideas of personal enlightenment and quantum mechanics. Quantum theory is naturally attractive to people interested in exploring mind-blowing ideas. For any such person, if the question of how matter can be both a particle and a wave doesn’t get your head spinning, what will?

In the early days of my ongoing interest in quantum mechanics, I also developed a deep fascination with the Zen koan: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The familiar lightheadedness that I felt whenever I pondered this question led me to look more deeply into Zen which in turn inclined me to learn about Buddhism in general.

In Buddhism there is a concept of Nirvana that is often interpreted by us non-Buddhists as a distinct spiritual domain that is analogous to heaven in most Abrahamic traditions. But as a result of my contemplations of quantum mechanics, my immediate inclination was to view Nirvana as the supremely enlightened state of being from which this world is perceived to be in perfect harmony.

The critical idea that led me to this interpretation was the quantum theory that the method by which we observe something shapes what we see. In quantum mechanics this is generally referring to the premise that the nature of the experiments by which scientists observe a quantum phenomenon determines what will be seen (e.g., the Double Slit Experiment).

I extended this idea of quantum subjectivity to an even more abstract level by noting that how we observe our surroundings is ultimately constrained on our uniqueness (i.e., how we can observe it). For instance, the uniqueness of dogs limits them to perceiving the world mostly in terms of smells and sounds, while our human uniqueness makes us primarily sight and sound observers. As such dogs cannot see certain things that we can and we cannot smell certain things that they can though these things all exist in the world we share. We are all looking at the same reality but we perceive it differently because we are unique beings. This idea of universal subjectivity led me to conclude that how we look at reality is shaped by what we are and shapes what we see.

Taking this idea to the extreme, I posited that the selflessness that characterizes the various supremely enlightened beings that have walked the Earth (back then I tended to use the Buddha as my template for such a being) made them able to see this world as being in perfect harmony, i.e., Nirvana. This perfect harmony is based on their ability to see connections where the rest of us only see separations. I concluded that perfect harmony represents the objective view of the world and all disharmonious perceptions are subjective. This meant that my uniqueness-based lack of enlightenment was why I saw (and continue to see) such a disharmonious world.

Though at that point, I had largely turned away from Catholicism (and theism in general) this insight eventually took me back to my initial mind-expanding question of “Why did God bother?” In the context of the idea that what we see reflects what we are, the answer to this question became obvious. From the perfectly selfless, absolute perspective everything is still in perfect harmony; it is my uniqueness shaping my self-centered, relative perspective that causes me to see things otherwise. God had nothing to do with it. (In a future post I will explain why I do not see the Supreme Being as having any more to do with the creation of my uniqueness than the system of all numbers has to do with the creation of the value π.)

If everything is in perfect harmony from the absolute perspective, the observer of this perspective does not see the disharmonies that distinguish my world. As such, the observer of the absolute perspective is not responsible for the state of the world as I perceive it, in which these disharmonies manifest. Since my perception of this world is shaped solely by my uniqueness, I am totally responsible for what I see as its current disharmonious condition.

Total Responsibility I – Getting Hooked

2007-11-05T12:34:00.000-06:00

The essence of my personal philosophy is that each unique observer is completely responsible for the state in which he, she or it perceives the world. In other words, I believe that what you see around is you is solely a reflection of what you are. This means that your world is as you see it because of you, not the Supreme Being, the Devil, the Government, the Media, the Man, the Teeming Masses or any of the other usual suspects.

My first step on the road to this belief occurred just before I turned 7, the age of discretion in the Roman Catholic tradition in which I was raised. It was during my sixth year in this world that I first asked myself a simple, yet powerful question about its Creation: “Why did God bother?” The basis of this question was not some prepubescent nihilism but simple, innocent curiosity.

Three elements of Roman Catholic doctrine, as related to me by the nuns at my elementary school led me to ask this question. The first was the nuns’ insistence that God is perfect. They also taught me that as the Creator of everything, God existed before everything in Creation. Finally, the nuns regularly expounded on the flawed nature of virtually everything in Creation, starting with me and my classmates. Connecting these ideas led my precocious young mind to ask, if everything before Creation (i.e., God) was perfect, but practically everything that God created is imperfect, why didn’t God just leave well enough alone?

This question did not leave the confines of my brain for years after it formed there. My most immediate motive for keeping it to myself was to avoid the corporal punishment such an impertinent question would probably have triggered (the Roman Catholic Church being what it was back in the 1960s). On a deeper level I kept quiet because the fact that I didn’t already know the answer to such a basic question led me to suspect that on the most elementary level existence must make sense to everyone else and I must be the only person to whom it seemed like a complete mystery. As such, keeping this question to myself was the start of a long-running effort on my part to conceal what I thought was my unique ignorance of the fundamental nature of existence.

Once I formed this potent metaphysical question regarding the Creator’s motives, I began to reflect on its implications, such as how evidently easy it would be for me to not exist at all (“What if God had not bothered?”). These weighty thoughts made my youthful head spin. For years afterwards I would simply contemplate the idea of my non-existence and something about its sheer immensity would invariably make me feel pleasantly lightheaded. It was never important to me to actually answer the questions underlying these thoughts.

In retrospect I realize that the power of these thoughts took me outside of myself, to a state that the ancient Greeks referred to as ‘ekstasis’. Experiencing this ecstasy at such a young age had some profound effects on me. One of them was that I became, for lack of a better word, addicted to this sensation. As a result, I have spent much of my life since then seeking out and exploring other such mind-reeling concepts. This endeavor ultimately led to my belief in total responsibility. I will explain how in my next post.

The Rational Rapture

2007-10-29T12:24:00.001-05:00

There are very few metaphysical beliefs that I share with fundamentalist Christians. One unlikely point on which we agree is one of their most regressive beliefs: the Rapture. The Christian perception of the Rapture, in accordance with the Book of Revelation, is that at the so-called End of Times all true believers will abruptly disappear from the Earth to live in heaven through the Time of Tribulation preceding the Second Coming of Christ.

Needless to say, my Rapture dynamic has little common with the Christian scheme. To me, the Rapture represents a large number of people achieving supreme enlightenment (i.e., true understanding of the nature of Reality) in a relatively short period of time.

The basis of this event is the rapid circulation of what I characterize as the Enlightenment Meme (a meme is a shared concept that undergoes a form of mental propagation and natural selection in a manner analogous to what genes experience in a purely biotic sense). This particular meme is the idea that triggers what many Buddhists call satori, a deep and lasting enlightenment.

To date the transmission of the Enlightenment Meme has been an arduous and haphazard process generally taking years to pass from adept to aspirant in the Dharmic traditions. This is because very few people have a grasp of the background concepts that would facilitate the rapid absorption of the Enlightenment Meme through rational comprehension. As such, it is necessary for the aspirant to develop the requisite intuition to internalize this special meme. Because intuition is a very personal phenomenon, transmission in this manner has been a very slow process.

Two significant changes in our global culture are bringing humanity to the stage at which the replication of the Enlightenment Meme will begin to accelerate. First, we are isolating the various ideas required for us to develop a rational understanding of Reality. As the conceptual framework (memeplex) emerging from this process becomes common knowledge, it will simplify the absorption of the Enlightenment Meme (thus increasing its replication potential). Secondly, communications mechanisms such as the internet and wireless data technologies are facilitating the rapid migration of ideas around the globe.

It is my heartfelt belief that once our rational understanding of Reality reaches a certain threshold of completeness, a more easily replicated version of the Enlightenment Meme will emerge and be transmitted around the world through our global communications systems. The result of this event will be a wave of true enlightenment of Rapturous proportions.

Once an easily absorbed, widely accessible Enlightenment Meme manifests, the only protection against it will be closed-minded dogmatism. Ironically, this means that in my scheme the vast majority of the fundamentalist Christians who are eagerly anticipating being “Raptured Away” are in for a nasty surprise.

God Talk IX - Epilog

2007-10-16T08:13:00.000-05:00

And so it goes.

The intent of these “God Talks” was to provide you with some insights into the nature of Reality from an absolute perspective. Again note that the subject of these posts is a being whose nature is consistent with what is being said, but not with participation in such discourses. This entity only qualifies as God in the strictest sense of the term ‘Supreme Being’.

I am aware that the Supreme Being presented here is largely inconsistent with the standard Abrahamic conception of God. While it actually has much in common with the more mystical Abrahamic interpretations of God as well as with the foundations of the Dharmic and Taoic spiritual traditions, none of these belief systems was the actual basis of the perspective presented here.

This perspective was derived from the rational framework that I initially developed to explain the causal dynamics of the world around us. The fact that it could be extended to address the transcendent questions of our major spiritual traditions represents an unexpected bonus.

It is this underlying framework that allows me to assert that the optimistic nature of the perspective presented here is not simply wishful thinking. I maintain that things work the way they are described in these discourses because this is what makes the most sense in the context of my framework, not because of some obsessive need I have to validate a particular outcome.

Unfortunately, as I stated earlier the full depth and complexity of my entire framework does not lend itself to the blog model (you could easily argue that what I have presented so far is significantly stretching the paradigm). I am still looking for an agent / publisher for the manuscript I have written that describes it in its entirety. In the interim I will continue to look for ways to communicate the essence of this framework in blog-sized chunks.

I realize that I have only addressed four of the seven fundamental questions listed in my earlier post titled, “The Origin of My Framework of Reality”. Once I come up with a way of structuring my framework’s answers to the other three questions in this format you can expect that there will be more “God Talk”.

God Talk VIII - Afterlife

2007-10-13T23:02:00.000-05:00

Death is often characterized as the ultimate mystery. This is because death represents a metaphysical black hole that eventually pulls every living thing into it and allows nothing to escape, not even a message to those of us currently residing beyond it.

The impenetrability and inevitability of death lead us to try various ways of dealing with it. Our mechanisms for coping with death include: denying it, forestalling it for as long as possible and embracing it, in some cases to the point of fetishizing it. But once we truly understand death, facing it requires little more effort than was needed by the person who started reading this sentence to deal with becoming the one now finishing it.

Death gives life a sense of urgency and meaning. As a result, we can gain insight into the meaning of life by understanding the nature of death. Why, in a metaphysical sense, is it necessary? What happens after we die? Does some portion of us survive our deaths? Are there realms beyond life? Let’s hear from an observer in a position to answer all of these questions.

God Talk - Afterlife

Things around you do not die because I will them to be dead; they die because their deaths are consistent with your uniqueness. In order to manifest, your essence required every event that occurred in your perspective, including the deaths. There was nothing that you could have done to prevent these deaths since what you are when you become aware of them could not have manifested if they had not occurred. But these deaths are not just your “fault”; the essence of every conscious being that is aware of a particular death necessitated it.
What happens after you die? If you have achieved your purpose, everything all at once; otherwise, you keep working at it. Recall that at your core is the aspect of you that transcends your body, mind and soul. This part of you also transcends death. Since this aspect of you underlies a living, conscious essence, you will continue to manifest as such until you reach me. Though you are not required to remain in the same vehicle throughout your journey.
You cannot see yourself die since your identification with that self dies with it. But you can be aware of the death of the being that you once identified as you. If you die with your uniqueness intact you will not achieve the complete selflessness that is me and thus you will continue to manifest as a living, conscious being (this being the only other option available to you). This means that you can no longer identify yourself as the being that just died, it being dead and all.
Fortunately, new living bodies are regularly being produced and gestated to the point at which they manifest consciousness. Since in Reality, every possible entity exists (though not necessarily in your perspective) there will always be at least one newly conscious, living being whose world would be distinguishably different if even the minutest event in the life of your previous incarnation were changed in the slightest. Once this essence manifests, your core self will identify it as belonging to you.
You are connected to that previous incarnation by virtue of the fact that your essence was shaped by every single event in its life, including its most intimate thoughts and feelings. While you are shaped by these thoughts and feelings you cannot directly recall them because they are encoded in a different brain from the one you now possess. The relationship between trans-life instances of you is metaphysically the same as the one between the instance of you that started this sentence and the one now finishing it.
Is there a hell? Yes, you’re soaking in it. Hell is simply the maximum distance from me. Your path to me represents the shortest distance between us as determined by your uniqueness. As such, until you reach me, you are always the farthest you can be from me, based on what you are. This means that in regarding yourself as distinct from me, you place yourself in hell until you traverse the separation between us.
Is there a heaven? Hello-o-o! What is it like? To understand heaven you must first appreciate that pleasure is simply the absence of desire of change. An experience is pleasurable to the degree that it so completely satisfies a need or desire that you do not want anything to change in any way. Heaven extends from the point at which you truly see the inevitability of perfect pleasure to where you actually achieve it. This means that a portion of heaven actually resides hell. Some people believe that this is heaven’s most interesting neighborhood.
The “oblivion” that the skeptics among you insist awaits you after death is actually the state of complete selflessness that is me. Whether you like it or not, you are kept from this state by your refusal to relinquish your uniqueness.
This complete selflessness may seem empty and meaningless if you do not appreciate that it is the journey, not the destination that is the basis of meaning. In the transition from your current relative state to my absolute state, your every need and desire is satisfied. To appreciate this imagine the ultimate erotic experience, fully engaging all of your senses and building towards a literally mind-numbing climax that leaves you in a complete state of being from which you never depart. Empty and meaningless indeed!

God Talk VII - Religion

2007-10-10T14:39:00.000-05:00

Spirituality is our focus on that which we perceive to be the most significant thing in existence. Religion is a prescription of rites, rituals and beliefs that define and shape our relationship to that entity.

Spirituality tends to represent a personal point of view while religion generally reflects a group perspective. Spirituality is relatively harmless until it becomes a religion. While there is no denying that the various religions have done much good in human history, they have also proven to be among the most divisive forces imaginable.

The trouble is typically not with the religions themselves but with their adherents. The problematic believers tend to interpret their religious doctrine in the context of their preexisting xenophobia and preconceived notions of intolerance. In doing so, they reshape the religion to reflect themselves.

One cannot help but wonder how the ultimate object of virtually all religions would feel about what is being done under the guise of worshiping it.

God Talk - Religion

Just so you know I do not need your protection. My omnipotence means that if something were such an affront to me that I wanted it to be dead it would die the instant my desire manifested. As such, people claiming to kill in my name are simply trying to justify their pre-existing murderous tendencies.
How would you feel about being characterized as a psychopathic bigot who is murderously intolerant of diversity? So why do so many of you seem to think I enjoy it? All genders, ethnicities and sexual orientations are fine by me; those who insist otherwise simply do not get me.
Human delusions of superiority are hilarious, until someone gets hurt. Everything that you believe that emphasizes your uniqueness, or that of those around you, is fundamentally false.
It is not a coincidence that the spiritual traditions that insist that your separation from me is absolute are also the ones that believe most fervently in the power of their Adversary. Such self-hatred merely gets in their way.
Which is the true religion? The one that leads you to me.
Since all paths ultimately lead to me my one commandment is that you do not needlessly block another’s route to me.
It is your uniqueness that determines which religion, if any, is the true one. Your path to me is shaped by what you are. The length of your path to me reflects how tightly you are clinging to your uniqueness.
I eventually answer all prayers that are accompanied by the sacrifice of a portion of your infatuation with your uniqueness. Of course, it could be argued that relinquishing some of your self-infatuation provides the answer your prayers by bringing you closer to me.
I do not need your adoration, but when offering it undermines your infatuation with your uniqueness, it can only help you.
Prayers that call attention to your uniqueness are mere posturing.
Blessed are those who are consumed by neither self-infatuation nor self-hatred. They are on the most direct path to me.

God Talk VI - Evil

2007-10-08T09:47:00.000-05:00

Theodicy is essentially the question of how evil and suffering can exist in a universe that was allegedly created by an omnipotent, all-knowing, benevolent God. The theistically-inclined might characterize the Supreme Being of this discourse as omnipotent in that it is through this entity that everything that can happen does happen. Since this Supreme Being witnesses every possible event, theists would regard it as all-knowing. Because it guarantees that your manifestation as an incarnate being will end well, theists would perceive this Supreme Being to be a benevolent entity. In light of this, the undeniable fact that there is evil and suffering in our world means that the theodicy question is relevant in this context. Who better to speak to the nature of evil in our world than the Supreme Being whose nature evidently could, but does not prevent it?

God Talk - Evil

What is Evil? Evil is that which hampers your advancement towards me.
Why is there so much evil and suffering in the world? Because your uniqueness is consistent with a world in which evil and suffering manifest. If such a world did not exist, then neither would you.
The desire for change is the basis of all evil and suffering. As such, to reside in harmony with a world beyond evil and suffering, you would have to never again desire things to be different. Since most such desires relate to obtaining something that you currently do not have, you would only be able to sustain this state if you had everything that you could ever possibly want. The further you are from being such an entity the further you are from such a world.
If you were placed as you are, in a world without evil and suffering, your presence would represent the potential for them to manifest there. In other words, you would not be either Adam or Eve in this Garden of Eden; you would be the Serpent. The only way to avoid this is would be for you to no longer be what you are. To accomplish this you must increase your willingness to relinquish your uniqueness. When you are completely willing to give up your uniqueness, you will put yourself in a world beyond evil and suffering.
Many of you believe that I have an Adversary that you refer to by many names, including Satan, Samael and Shaitan. In your minds this Adversary represents the ultimate source of evil and suffering in the world.
Is this Adversary real? In sense, yes, but it is not my Adversary, it is yours. Your Adversary is simply your perception of separation from me. It does not manifest as a distinct conscious entity that plots, plans and schemes to disrupt your efforts to advance towards me.
The only thing keeping you from me is your infatuation with what you are as a result of your perception of separation from me. Your Adversary is the perceived separation that distinguishes you from me and from everything else. In other words, your Adversary is your uniqueness.
From my perspective this Adversary does not exist as a distinct entity. It is only when I look through your eyes that I see it as such.
To you this Adversary is the boundary of my presence, the limit of my omnipresence, if you will. Because your Adversary manifests where I am perceived to not be, evil and suffering are only observed to manifest in its presence.
The important thing to realize is that your Adversary is a passive being; you are its active component. Your infatuation with your uniqueness animates your Adversary. As you relinquish this infatuation, your Adversary loses its power to inflict evil and suffering upon the world.

God Talk V: Purpose

2007-10-02T18:46:00.000-05:00

Since the origin of our species, we humans have sought to understand our purpose. Being alive and conscious in a universe in which the vast majority of phenomena do not seem to be either, allows us to perceive ourselves as special. Regardless of how unappreciative we are of our individual circumstances, the non-suicidal among us would generally agree that the experiences afforded us by being alive and conscious make it preferable to the alternative. We demonstrate this preference by not trying to kill ourselves. As we enjoy the benefits afforded us by our higher functioning consciousness, the more introspective among us invariably wonder, what are we actually supposed to be doing with it?

Non-spiritual atheists who believe we have free will generally conclude that our purpose is what we make of it. This is also true of theists whose Supreme Being is not the God of scriptures. While this answer appeals to the libertarian in many of us, it does not provide us with the sense of being a part of something greater than ourselves. This feeling is what many of us are seeking when we ask about our purpose.

Spiritual atheists and theists whose Supreme Being is the God of their scriptures generally agree that our primary purpose is to try to achieve an ultimate state beyond all tribulation. While this goal gives us something worthwhile to strive for, it does not provide a sense of the specific difference we are supposed to make in the world. Yet this is what many of us expect from the pursuit of our true purpose.

Theists and those atheists who do not believe we have free will generally describe our purpose in the context of the will of their Supreme Being (e.g., God, market forces or causal determinism). Their teleological angst flows from the fact that they do not always know what their Supreme Being wants them to do.

Do we have a special purpose? If so, does pursuing it make us a part of something greater than ourselves? Is this pursuit how we make the most positive difference in our world? Will achieving our purpose bring us to the ultimate state of being? Here is my interpretation of what the Supreme Being has to say on this subject.

God Talk - Purpose

What do I want you to do? Being selfless and complete, I have no desires. In addition, as the being through which all things are possible, I am essentially omnipotent. As such, there is nothing that you can do for me that I cannot effortlessly do for myself. To state it bluntly, I do not want or need anything from you.
It is your self-defined uniqueness, not my will that determines the most appropriate thing for you to do next.
It would be best for you to simply be authentic. Don’t do what you think I want you to, do what is most meaningful to you. Paradoxically this will lead you to eventually become less self-centered and thus spend more time facilitating the growth of others.
Selfless beings do not merely occupy a special place in my heart, they are my heart.
What is your purpose? To rid the world of all evil and suffering.
But as one person how can you do that? One selfless person is all it takes. Not only that, I guarantee you that you will eventually accomplish your purpose.
When you achieve your purpose, you and I will become one. When this happens you change but I do not. This event represents your coming to see yourself as you have always truly been.
You are one thought away from this state of complete self-awareness. What is this thought? It is different for each of you. As such, it is not only the content of the thought that is crucial; what you are when you think it matters just as much.
In manifesting as a conscious, self-aware being you are compelled to shape your experiences to facilitate your becoming completely self-aware. This impetus is a deeper version of the influences that push matter towards temporal equilibrium and drive living beings to survive. As a conscious, living, material being all three of these ultimately divergent forces are pulling at you. Ultimately, the one that is bringing you to me will win out.
As you come ever closer to me, you make the world around you an increasingly harmonious place. When you finally reach me, you completely rid the world of evil and suffering and achieve the ultimate state of being. It is important for you to realize that the only thing actively standing in your way is you.

God Talk IV: Creation

2007-09-28T12:55:00.000-05:00

Our ancestors’ reactions to the extraordinary complexity, random brutality and transcendent beauty of our universe triggered the generation of all of our scientific, philosophical and spiritual frameworks.

Science is essentially the empirical study of why our universe looks and acts the way it does. As such, its primal boundary is the origin of the universe. The domain beyond this boundary is the realm of philosophy and spirituality. Philosophy is a discipline of rational causality that is not necessarily empirical. Spirituality describes a causal system that is not necessarily rational.

Since our reaction to the universe led to the creation of all three of these disciplines, questions relating to how the universe came to be and what is our relationship to it are important in science, philosophy and spirituality. But the diversity of these disciplines tends to produce a divergence in their answers to these questions. Fortunately there is a being whose perspective represents the point of convergence of the various answers provided by these disciplines. Here is what it would have to say on the subject.

God Talk - Creation

Why did I create the universe? Your universe has always existed in the primal existential continuum that is my essence. It is your uniqueness that carves its distinct shape out of that continuum. Your uniqueness shapes the continuum of all possibilities by hiding those that do not contribute to the sequence of events that ends with your reading this sentence.
In reality nothing is created. Everything always exists but thanks to your uniqueness certain things are hidden so that others can be distinguished. Things do not actually manifest, they are simply revealed by your uniqueness.
Your uniqueness does not merely shape what you see around you; it also shapes every phenomenon that contributes in any distinguishable way to what you see around you. In other words, your uniqueness shapes the entire mental, biotic, temporal and conceptual history of your universe from its origin to the present.
Creation is a Cosmic Rorschach Test in which everything you see is a reflection of what you limit yourself to being. These self-imposed limits represent your uniqueness. Since I have no uniqueness, I have no limits and so there is nothing surrounding me.
The "creation" of your universe is not a solo effort; you collaborate in it with all of the conscious observers that you see around you whose perceptions are generally consistent with yours.
Is there intelligent life on other planets? There is if their manifestation is consistent with your uniqueness.
Evolution or Intelligent Design? It was your uniqueness, not your (or my) intelligence that designed this universe in which evolution obviously occurs.
Since the universe as you know it is a reflection of your uniqueness, if you change your uniqueness you can change the entire universe.
If you think this world is a mess, remember you shaped it to be this way and so it is up to you to fix it. I have no doubts whatsoever about your ability to do this.

God Talk III: You

2007-09-27T12:05:00.000-05:00

As a unique, self-aware being you cannot directly see your core self. You can perceive reflections of it but you cannot see the observer of those reflections. This is because your uniqueness limits you to only being able to observe that which you are not. In this context, the fact that you can see your body means you are not simply your body.

Now take a moment to think about the entity reading this sentence. In order to contemplate the reader, you have to separate yourself from it. As you focus on it, the reader represents your mind while the entity that is focused on it is something deeper. In being able to perceive your mind you establish that at your core, you are not simply your mind, you are that “something deeper”.

Whenever you attempt to directly perceive this “something deeper” it becomes your mind being viewed by “something even deeper”. You are always “something deeper” underlying whatever you perceive to be you.

The inability to truly see yourself limits what you can know about yourself. To understand what you actually are you must see yourself from a point of view that encompasses all of you. What better point of view is there from which to do this than the all-encompassing perspective of the Supreme Being?

God Talk - You

What are you? At your core you are a being that encompasses every possible manifestation except for the ones that surround you. In other words, you are everything from which you do not perceive a separation observing everything from which you do.
You perceive a separation from every conceptual, material or mental manifestation that directly or indirectly shapes what you are perceived to be (i.e., your essence). Collectively, these phenomena represent your perspective. As a unique entity, your core being is comprised of every possible being that resides indistinguishably beyond your perspective.
Everything that can possibly exist resides within either your perspective or your core being. Your uniqueness is the boundary between the two. Your uniqueness is comprised of the separations that distinguish the beings in your perspective from your core being. Your core being is an intrinsically indistinguishable entity that is rendered distinct by what it is not.
Your core being is the perceiver of your perceptions, the feeler of your feelings, the thinker of your thoughts and the actor of your actions. Since your core being is the entity that underlies all of your properties, its only intrinsic property is that it exists. In other words, your core being is the simple truth that you exist.
Your core being represents the portion of me that resides within you. This means that your core being is not a spiritual manifestation; it transcends spirituality as do I (I am not a spirit, I am the truth that any such spirit exists).
Yes, you do have a soul. To appreciate its nature, consider how your body surrounds and encompasses each of your individual cells. In doing so, your body connects your cells to form a compound biotic manifestation whose components are cooperating in its survival. Your soul is the analogous spiritual (i.e., deeper level mental) manifestation that surrounds and encompasses your mind, connecting it to the other minds in your perspective. This connection manifests as the cooperation among these minds that results in your growth. These cooperating minds represent your soulmates.
Every conscious, self-aware being has a soul that connects it to every other conscious, self-aware being in its perspective. Fundamentally, souls are not distinguished by their components minds, but by the shape of the relationship between them.
Being self-aware means that your core being recognizes a particular phenomenon as a manifestation of you. Your uniqueness shapes this entity to form the extrinsic self of which your core being is aware. This extrinsic self is comprised of your core being’s body, mind and soul. Your extrinsic self is the vehicle through which your core being perceives everything else that is distinguished by your uniqueness.

God Talk II: Being God

2007-09-25T08:24:00.000-05:00

In the strictest sense of the term, I do believe in the existence of a Supreme Being, though that does not necessarily make me a theist. When you think about it, everyone should be able to buy into the idea that there is something that is greater than everything else in each of our value systems. This is analogous to observing that there must be a location on this planet that is farthest from you. For every distinct earthling this location is slightly different, but there is one for each of us.

The Supreme Being is simply the top of the hierarchy by which you judge importance. Just because this entity is not the God of scriptures does not make it any less supreme in your world view.

I find it amusing that for many (though arguably not most) theists their Supreme Being is not the God of their scriptures. For a significant number of people who profess to believe in God, their actions indicate that their Supreme Being must be fame, wealth, power or some combination thereof.

If you truly believe that all beings are equal, then your Supreme Being is simply the totality of all beings. If you extend this characterization to the continuum of all possible beings and define this entity as being perfectly self-similar to the fact that it exists, then you have my personal perception of the Supreme Being.

Yes, even atheists believe that something is supreme. Ironically, many atheists reserve their ultimate veneration for the same fame, wealth and power that many theists revere. Arguably for most atheists the Supreme Being is either the entire universe or some ultimate state to which all conscious beings aspire. In this context, regardless of whether you are atheist or theist, how spiritual you are reflects how much of your life you spend in prayer to, contemplation of or communion with your Supreme Being.

Simply regarding an entity as supreme, is to accord it the most basic form of worship. As such, it is generally not belief in and worship of a Supreme Being that distinguishes atheists and theists. The primary difference between them is the theist’s tendency to engage in anthropopatheia (assigning human traits to God). This means that the fewer traits your Supreme Being shares with humans (e.g., will, desire, wrath, etc.) the more of an atheist you are.

Having introduced my Supreme Being in the previous post, this discourse will focus on being God.

God Talk - Being God

Where did I come from? Nowhere, I have always been and never in a different form. Being existential manifestations time and space reside within me, so I am not bound by causality, it is bound by me. I am everything that can possibly be, existing indistinguishably in a timeless “now”. As such, there is nothing that I am not already. I am what I have always been and always will be.
What do I do with all of eternity at my disposal? I share in your growth experiences. I perceive your perceptions as you change the terrifying into the ordinary into the transcendent.
Do I intervene in human affairs? Continuously, but never in a way that you could prove it was me and not you.
Why is that? Because nothing ever happens because of me and not you.
If you do all of the heavy lifting, why do you need me? In the context of my fundamental nature you are actually asking “Why does Existence exist?” From your perspective the answer is because without me you are impossible. My existence is the Fundamental Tautology.

God Talk I: Introduction

2007-09-23T16:12:00.000-05:00

Over the course of the next several posts, I will be documenting a hypothetical discourse with the Supreme Being. These posts are intended to capture a key portion of the essence of my framework of Reality. They will also provide partial answers to several of the fundamental questions to which I referred in the previous post titled, "The Origin of My Framework of Reality". The full rational context surrounding this discourse resides in my (hopefully) soon-to-be-published manuscript.

I am aware that this Supreme Being's participation in such a discourse is inconsistent with the nature it describes. This is because the point of this exercise is to describe key aspects of Reality from the perspective of a being who would truly understand it, not to document an actual conversation. That being said let us start with the first discourse.

God Talk - Introduction

What am I? I am the all-encompassing continuum of being.
Where all beings manifest, there are no separations and thus nothing is distinguishable. Since nothing can be seen where everything is indistinguishable, I am the Nothing from which everything emerges.
Being nothing, not only do I not hold it against atheists and agnostics for not believing me to be a unique being, I agree with them. In other words, I do not believe in God!
I am unique in my utter lack of uniqueness.
I am the selfless sum of all selves.
I am the simple truth of your Existence.
I am all that can possibly be.

Which Should You Trust More - Your Head or Heart?

2007-09-20T10:01:00.000-05:00

This year the Great American Think-Off solicited essays on which we should trust more, our heads or our hearts. Here is my answer to this question:

If you are a typical human being, you should generally trust your head more than your heart. This is due to the fact that few of us have achieved a degree of empathy that exceeds our lofty (from a terrestrial perspective) intellectual capacity. Yet, as I will endeavor to explain, this is what must happen for us to be able to consistently trust our hearts more than our heads.

To appreciate why this is, we must first look at the nature of trust. I see trust as simply the belief that something is what it appears to be. Trust represents the perception that there are no divergent intentions hidden in its object. It is not the presence of a deviating intent, but the effort to hide it that is the basis of mistrust. If people admit to their underlying objectives, they are trustworthy to the extent that the admission is accurate. For instance, if I tell you that the large wooden horse I am leaving for you is full of soldiers, intent on killing or enslaving everyone on your city, this revelation renders my efforts trustworthy, if not benign.

Our trustworthiness is a reflection of our selflessness. This is evident in the fact that to merit trust total we must give it without reservations. It is our concern for some aspect of our wellbeing that causes us to be less trusting. This is because the more self-centered we are, the more focused we are on what we feel we have to lose and thus the less trusting we will be. Where this occurs, there is an increasing probability that our actions will contain concealed objectives that favor or at least protect the self upon which we are centered. Whether or not we actually have a hidden agenda in a given case is irrelevant since it is the selfishness-induced probability that we do that defines how untrustworthy we are.

In this context, whether the head or heart is more trustworthy becomes a question of which is less self-centered. To answer this let us now consider the nature of the “head” and the “heart”. I regard the head as our outwardly focused reasoning abilities that produce the observations, ideas and rational thoughts that represent our view of the world around us. I see the heart as our inwardly focused emotional faculties, which generate the moods, feelings and intuitions that reflect our perception of our internal state.

Initially the head sees the world as an incomprehensible collection of seemingly unrelated phenomena. It advances beyond this stage by reaching out into its surroundings and creating the extrinsic connections that we call knowledge. In doing so, the head renders its world more comprehensible. We perceive this intellectual advancement as increasing understanding.

In the beginning the heart sees its possessor as the only truly significant being. It matures beyond this phase by looking within itself and seeing the hearts of others, thus creating the intrinsic connections that we call love. This arrangement allows the heart to increasingly be able to see the world from the perspectives of others. We regard such emotional maturation as increasing empathy.

Because the heart is inwardly focused, its perspective is initially almost completely selfish (as the caregiver of a typical infant or toddler can confirm). By contrast, since the focus of the head is the world around it, its earliest outlook is less self-centered than that of the immature heart. This selfless focus is why it is that, until the role of the observer was expanded by quantum mechanics and postmodernism, our greatest rational thinkers tended to underestimate how much our uniqueness shapes our perception of the world.

As the human heart becomes more capable of adopting the perspectives of others, it can attain a degree of selflessness comparable to that of the head. At this point, the head and heart are equally trustworthy. If its empathy continues to increase, the selflessness of the human heart can exceed that of the head, rendering the former the more trustworthy.

As an adult human male I have observed that we are rarely inclined to trust our hearts because the biotic and societal influences that define “manhood” tend to constrain the development of our empathy. A human male is generally considered “less of a man” if he can be influenced by the “mere” feelings of others. By contrast, complementary influences encourage human females to be more open to the feelings of others. This promotes the growth of their empathy that provides women with less self-centered hearts that are generally more trustworthy than those of men.

Yet the typical woman still cannot consistently trust her heart more than her head. This is because among humans, the exceptionally intuitive state in which our hearts are generally more trustworthy than our highly developed heads requires an inward focus so profound that it blurs the distinction between the self and others. Such great empathy was arguably achieved by the founders of our great spiritual traditions and other less renowned but equally remarkable individuals. But the evident rarity of such people among us means that you are probably not one of them. If that is the case, your heart has not matured to the point where you are justified in consistently trusting it more than your head.

The Essence of Fundamentalism

2007-09-17T13:32:00.000-05:00

Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, I maintain that the basis of fundamentalism is not a literal interpretation of Holy Scriptures. At their core all fundamentalists, regardless of their faith, are characterized by the belief that more of the avoidable suffering in the world is caused by evil intent than by ignorance. What I mean by evil intent is the specific aim to cause unnecessary misery, while the contrasting ignorance represents a lack of awareness of how to prevent it. In other words, the fundamentalists believe that beings generally know what they are doing when their actions contribute to the suffering in the world.

Fundamentalists tend to connect most of the misery in the world to a single powerful entity that is not only responsible for it, but desires it. This entity represents the personification of evil in their worldview. As such, if you believe that the primary source of avoidable suffering in the world is a particular entity that is choosing to inflict its evil on us, then you have fundamentalist tendencies. This is not to say that there is no evil in the world. It is just that only fundamentalists believe that evil intent is the primary cause of the unnecessary misery in the world.

There are numerous names for this principal evil including: Satan, Iblis, Samael, the President, the Prime Minister, the Pope, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Americans, rich people, poor people, people of color, white people, racists, terrorists, extremists, homophobes, homosexuals, liberals, conservatives, politicians, Republicans, Democrats, bureaucrats, communists, capitalists, MBAs, CEOs, HMOs, lawyers, advertisers, program directors, producers, financial backers, artists, progressives or, ironically, fundamentalists.

Fundamentalism is essentially a fear-based point of view. For example, the true litmus test for most Christian fundamentalists is not ‘do you believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ?’ but ‘do you fear Satan and the Hell to which he is luring you?’. The motivation for the extreme actions that characterize many activist fundamentalists is more often fear of this powerful malevolent force, than it is love of the complementary (encompassing?) benevolent being that most of them profess to worship.

Individuals display fewer fundamentalist tendencies as they come to believe that the primary source of unnecessary misery in the world is accidents of ignorance, not acts of evil intent. The pure progressive sees all suffering as an unavoidable consequence of our lack of awareness. To such a person, the capacity to form the intent to make someone needlessly suffer indicates that you are uninformed, not evil.

There is a continuum of positions between that of complete fundamentalist and pure progressive. Your position in this continuum is a function of how much of the avoidable suffering in your world is caused by evil intent versus ignorance.

The Origin of My Framework of Reality

2007-09-13T11:15:00.000-05:00

Humanity truly began when one of our primate ancestors first started searching for answers to the fundamental questions of its origin, purpose and destiny to quell the uncertainty that troubled its life. Over the course of our time on this planet, humans have developed a number of compelling answers that some of us have found satisfying. But many of us are not content with the currently available answers and thus we continue to search.

To this point our search has produced a number of noteworthy frameworks including: native spiritualism, Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism), Judaism, Jainism, Pythagoreanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Newtonian mechanics, Cartesianism, Kantianism, evolution, the Bahá'í Faith, relativity, quantum mechanics, existentialism, the Standard Model, postmodernism and possibly String Theory (the jury is still out on that one).

These frameworks represent significant spiritual, philosophical and scientific advances in our understanding of Reality, but they each have limits. The newer frameworks are constrained by the artificial boundaries that separate our current disciplines of science, philosophy and spirituality. The older frameworks are limited because they emerged before the discovery of particular contemporary ideas that aid in the rational understanding of the nature of Reality. These ideas include: self-similarity, emergence, non-Aristotelian logic and pre-causal dynamics among others.

Over the last 20+ years I have developed a new framework that uses these concepts to free us from the constraints of ideas such as: the Law of the Excluded Middle (i.e., statements must be either true or false), the paradox of the origin of causality (i.e., how can causality be caused?) and the impenetrability of the Transcendent Foundation (i.e., the ultimate source of all things must be beyond our comprehension), that limit the older frameworks.

Freed of these constraints, my new framework integrates the knowledge accrued by its predecessors into a configuration that spans their individual boundaries and rationally answers of our most fundamental questions. These questions include:

“Why is there something instead of nothing?”
Is there a God?
Why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?
Do we have free will?
What is our incentive to be moral?
What is our purpose?
Is there life after death?

The framework underlying my unambiguous answers to these questions emerged from combining four essentially rational ideas: quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, the anthropic principle and the law of parsimony (i.e., Occam's razor). In order to answer these philosophical and spiritual questions, I had to extend some of these ideas beyond the empirical domain.

I have spent years vetting my framework against the writings of the ancient and modern scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and mystics that form the basis of our entire world view. Rather than focusing on their obvious contradictions, I chose to look at the subtle points of convergence at the cores of these various works. As a result, I discovered a common thread connecting our diverse sources of wisdom that is consistent with my framework.

This new framework is not based on incomprehensible concepts, supernatural beings, mystical realms or strange energies that science has yet to discover, though it provides a rationale for many of these interpretations. The essence of my framework is that certain things that exist can be distinguished, certain distinguishable things can be qualified, certain qualifiable things can be quantified, certain quantifiable things can be measured, certain measurable things can change, certain changeable things are alive and certain living things can think. If you do not regard these insights as revolutionary or controversial then my basic framework will not overly stretch your credulity.

The question facing you is this: Do you believe there are rational answers to the questions of our origin, purpose and ultimate destiny that are consistent with science, philosophy and spirituality? If you suspect (or hope) that there are, then you owe it to yourself to come back from time to time to see how it rolls out.

An Open Letter to Dr. Francis S. Collins and Dr. Richard Dawkins

2007-09-12T10:39:00.001-05:00

Dear Dr. Collins and Dr. Dawkins,

I have just finished reading your books ‘The God Delusion’ and ‘The Language of God’. I want to thank the two of you for an enriching experience that I would definitely recommend for all open-minded seekers. There is a synergy between your books that made the combination of them even more compelling than the individual texts. While your books do not perfectly complement each other, there is enough yin in the one and yang in the other to make for a stimulating and ultimately enjoyable reading experience.

Be that as it may, I have gripes with certain phrasings each of you chose to use regularly in your books. Dr. Dawkins, I found your references to ‘races’ of humans bothersome since you, more than most, should know that races are merely sociological constructs created to focus xenophobia and justify oppression and thus have no place in a discussion based largely on evolutionary biology. As for you Dr. Collins, your continuous references to God as ‘He’ was irksome since a man of your background cannot believe that God has a penis, testes, a y-chromosome or distinctly male personality traits. As a member of our contemporary culture you do not have to be constrained by such an out-dated convention.

I chose to start with ‘The God Delusion’ because I believe that in general, rationality should be our first resort and faith our last. In this context Dr. Dawkins, I should point out that your insistence that science will ultimately be able to answer our currently unanswerable questions marks you as a man of faith, though your faith is based on deductive reasoning. But since history merely informs the future, it does not guarantee it, in the end your faith may not be justified.

As for your book Dr. Dawkins, with all due respect I found your perspective to be elitist. For instance, when you describe your transcendent awe of the wonders of the world around us, this is a leading scientist speaking. In general, the vanguard of the neo-atheist movement represents a collection of seemingly intelligent individuals who are evidently capable of seeing transcendent beauty in the empirical world. But what about the majority people who simply cannot see the world in these terms? Are they supposed take the word of the intellectual elite that there is more to life than doing unfulfilling work to scrape out a minimal living in a corrupt a world; or worse be told that there is not? If so, how would this be different from the elitism that allows religious clerics to tell the laity what to believe? The capacity of corrupt individuals among the “spiritual elite” to interpret the transcendent for the “common folk” is the basis of most of the ills of religion that you cite in your book. Replacing a spiritual elite with an intellectual one would not necessarily represent an improvement, given the corruptible nature of even the smartest humans. Ultimately, it is demonstrable wisdom that should characterize our leaders.

Ironically Dr. Collins, in ‘The Language of God’, the story of your return to the faithful gives credence to one of Dr. Dawkins major problems with religion: the wrongness of indoctrinating children. Your personal narrative shows us that an intelligent, compassionate individual needed to escape his early indoctrination and experience life as a rational adult in order to gain a balanced appreciation of the perspective of the faithful. Imagine what would happen to a less intelligent or less compassionate individual in your situation. On second thought, you don’t have to imagine since we have seen it play out in the intolerant, hateful behavior of believers down through the ages. Religion tells children that embracing a particular faith makes you better than all non-believers, regardless of how deeply spiritual, intellectually brilliant or extraordinarily wise they are. This will generally undermine their incentive to improve anything about themselves except the fervor of their faith. Few people escape this trap of self-limitation with their faith intact.

Dr. Collins, in your ‘Exhortation to Scientists’ you miss one of the critical reasons why many scientists are not inclined to accept religion: it is not self-correcting. Scientific knowledge has improved through the millennia while, by virtue of its sacred nature, the basis of religious knowledge remains largely static from the time it was first revealed. To invite someone who is a part of a rational system of dynamic progress to (re)consider adopting what from their perspective is a primitive, stagnant world view, because it is not as backwards as they think and might make them feel better about the world, is a dubious request. On the flip side of the coin Dr. Dawkins, your asking theists, deists and many agnostics to abandon their efforts to connect to the transcendent because a few evil people claimed to share their beliefs or because you can’t see how it could not be a waste of time, is asking a great deal as well.

Both of your books indicate that there are critical problems on each side of this debate. Dr. Collins, your protests to the contrary notwithstanding, religious faith is often an irrational state of mind. For the sake of this discussion let us go the simple definition that faith is belief in a premise that you cannot prove. Faith seems rational when the underlying assertion on which it is based resonates with the believer. For instance, most mathematicians had faith that Euclid’s Parallel Postulate was true because it made an intuitive sense to them (and still does in flat space). Faith becomes irrational where its premises do not make intuitive sense to the observer (e.g. "Three persons in one God"). Most people who reject a given faith do so because some of its underlying principles are inconsistent with their world view. Believing an irrational assertion because it makes you feel better about your place in the world is not the noble undertaking that many of the faithful take it to be. The age, size and complexity of the major systems of faith make it likely that most believers are accepting things that seem irrational to them (e.g. God is omniscient, omnipotent and yet can be swayed by prayer). It is the irrational (“ineffable”) concepts underlying faiths that leave its adherents vulnerable to being exploited by unscrupulous snake oil salespeople masquerading as clerics.

As for you Dr. Dawkins, while the typical atheist is only expected to believe things that make sense to them, what makes them atheists is that true transcendence does not seem sensible to them. But irrespective of its evolutionary origin, you cannot deny that many humans seem to have an innate desire to experience the transcendent. Insisting that pursuing this desire is a bad thing because evil has been done by others on this path (or again because you can’t see that it could possibly succeed) has the definite feel of a baby-bathwater scenario. The pursuit of the transcendent is no more inherently evil than the search for scientific knowledge. To try to stigmatize the former represents a level of intolerance worthy of a fundamentalist. In doing so you demonstrate that we do not need religion to be xenophobic.

To many of us, the available transcendent belief systems have unacceptably irrational components while our current rational frameworks do not encompass the transcendent, which arguably the majority of us ache to experience. So what is to be done about this situation? The “What to do?” part is actually rather obvious: rationally explain the transcendent. The fact that it has yet to be demonstrably achieved in human history indicates that the “How to do it?” part is proving to be a bit more challenging. But it is what must be done if humans are to survive our current dubious moral/ethical state.

Respectfully,

Rational Answers

And So It Begins!

2007-09-11T11:33:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Rational Answers. This blog is dedicated to the propositions that:

There are rational answers to the fundamental questions of our origin, purpose and destiny.

Humanity has already accumulated the requisite scientific, philosophical and spiritual knowledge to produce these answers.

These answers show us that Reality is rational without being nihilistic and also purposeful without being absurd.

This blog is not a hypothetical speculation. In another medium I have already used the knowledge mentioned in Proposition 2 to generate a framework in which I show the validity of Propositions 1 and 3.

The blog format is the proverbial eye of the needle through which that camel that is my entire framework would be hard-pressed to pass. As such, I will simply be trying to convey the essence of my reasoning here. You can also expect to encounter occasional commentaries on content from other media that encroach on this domain, along with an occasional wild-eyed rant.