Ancient humans watched the skies and the movement of the stars and planets. They came to understand the patterns, such as the 18.6-year cycle of moonrise and moonset. With monumental observatories such as the Octagon at Newark, Ohio, built by the Adena-Hopewell culture, and perhaps Stonehenge, they documented their understanding of the celestial patterns. Celestial observation was an early form of structured science. Other regular events, many also influenced by the movement of celestial bodies relative to the Earth, were observed, and patterns were found. The phases of the moon, the changing cycles of the seasons, the solar year, animal and bird migrations, growing old, river flooding cycles, and many other cycles where there is change through time, all became teachers to the science students, who were also evolving biologically, socially, culturally, and through epigenetic changes brought about by things like language development. Humans observe and analyze change, and also undergo changes through time. Humans can observe what happens to them, in a sense, becoming subject and object. They can also observe how change makes them think and feel. That was perhaps the original birth of philosophy and psychology, at least in a social sense. We had already developed what neuroscientists call ‘theory of mind,’ which assumes other people have consciousness similar to ours, and perhaps a concept of self, and a worldview of sorts.
In general, the more we
engage with and ponder something, the better chance we have of understanding it
and developing insights for further understanding. Buddha was said to be
powerful in knowing the past and future, including the karma of beings he
encountered. He suggested that the mechanisms of karma are complex and advised
his students not to ponder the details of karma, as it involves actions and
tendencies accumulated from countless past lives, where, in a scientific sense,
we have no real data to work with, since we do not remember these so-called
past lives. Perhaps he was saying that trying to discern the details would be
an exercise in futility and not useful without enlightened insight. That
reminds me of the teachings of the Pyrrhonists. Pyrrho of Elis in ancient
Greece and his Roman student, a few centuries later, Sextus Empiricus,
expounded these teachings, which revolve around the limitations of
understanding the unknown. The basic tenet was that belief in or about
something non-evident (whether unknown or unknowable) should be avoided since
it creates a kind of anxiety that is not useful and can be harmful. The
Pyrrhonists talked about cultivating a state free of anxiety, called ataraxia.
In a way, it can be seen as a form of acceptance of the uncomfortable paradoxes
of the unknown. However, humans like to tell stories and also like to ponder
the unknown in “what if” scenarios. Thus, we developed mythological and
religious ideas and scenarios that continue today. Some say these have a kind
of “truth,” and maybe they do, but to believe it is necessary to adopt a
specific scenario to attain salvation, presumably in some afterlife, can be
seen as random, unfair, and just plain unlikely.
Technology has allowed us to
probe the unknown with our instruments. These instruments permit us to “see”
far beyond our sensory limitations, basically extending them. We can see back
in time with astrophysics. We can see through vast amounts of space with
telescopes and determine the compositions of extremely distant objects through
spectroscopy. We can see into the Earth with seismic, aeromagnetic, and gravity
methods. We can see the very small with powerful microscopy techniques. Thus,
our sensory range has vastly expanded through technology. That expanded sensory
range has allowed us to vastly expand our knowledge of things we could not even
observe in the past, such as microscopic worlds, nanosecond-scale processes,
and the distant parts of the known universe. Technology allows us to expand our
knowledge and understanding, but it has yet to solve the mysteries of life.
Currently, there are many
interesting ideas about integrating the mysteries of physics and biology.
Mechanical Engineer Adrian Bejan has written some interesting books expounding
his Constructal Law in physics, which suggests that evolution towards a goal,
in this case, greater access to flow in what in engineering are known as flow
systems, is very interesting. His most recent book, published in 2022, explores
the human perceptions of time and beauty. He notes, citing neuroscience, that
our perception of time changes as we get older due to the observation that our
processing of visual information slows as we age, so we process less of it over
time. The idea of biocentrism, expounded by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman, argues
that we can’t really separate reality from animal consciousness, even though it
appears that we can. Another tenet of biocentrism is that time does not have a
real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which
we perceive changes in the universe. Space has a similar designation, not able
to exist outside of consciousness. Of course, such ideas baffle us because
consciousness is all we have to understand the world. Knowledge and
understanding require consciousness. That the universe and the world may exist
without our conscious perception of them is difficult to fathom, but also
impossible to deny. We are left in the uncertain state of paradox.
While we have great and
innovative scientists and engineers figuring out in detail how things are and
how things work, with much impressive progress, our progress on deciphering the
mysteries of life and death has not changed. In that sense, we are limited. We
have enabled longer lifespans, improved health, improved comfort, and many
material advancements, but we are still subject to many of the same limitations
and paradoxical mysteries as ancient peoples. While we have debunked many
ancient beliefs with our scientific probes, we have barely made a dent in those
deeper mysteries. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s notion of
model-dependent realism asserts that humans interpret sensory inputs by making
a model of the world to explain reality. It may be the case that more than one
model could explain reality, they suggest. The history of science is one in
which better and better theories, or models, have come about to explain
reality. Still, it seems that all we can really do is probe about and hope for
clues.
The lure of religion is that
there is an answer of some sort that we can find by practicing according to the
religious dogma. Psychologist Jesse Bering’s 2012 book, The Belief
Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life,
suggests that belief in supernatural scenarios is wholly or partly instinctual.
It is difficult to avoid developing such scenarios. The mysteries of existence
create a kind of cognitive dissonance that we solve with God or our beliefs in
the supernatural. Some biologists like Richard Dawkins and, perhaps to some
extent, Edward O. Wilson see religion and belief as a kind of byproduct of
biology. However, Bering sees religion as a psychological adaptation based
partly on language, in that it was language that necessitated the practice of
behavioral inhibition because we could now know about one another through
words. Particularly, we could know about others’ tendencies and past actions by
having someone else tell us. That would have the effect of making us “check”
our public behavior. It was philosopher Daniel Dennett who developed the idea
of intentional stance, that we see others as having intentions and
make choices based on their desires and beliefs. Our social strategies often
depend on reading the intentions of others. Bering also made the interesting
observation that we have absolutely zero data on what it means to not exist, to
be dead, or unborn. Thus, we are limited, even though we know we will one day
cease to exist. Theory of mind is said to be an aspect of intentional stance
that involves understanding and attributing mental states to others. Psychologist
Michael Shermer, once a “believer,” now a skeptic, says that the theory of mind
forms the basis of agenticity. Agenticity often involves the
presumption of an ‘other’ that is also an intentional agent. Shermer defines
agenticity as “the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, attention, and
agency.” Belief in spirits, ghosts, souls, gods, demons, aliens, government
conspiracies, etc., in most forms are examples of agenticity. Shermer also
noted that after we form our beliefs, we defend, justify, and rationalize them.
So, belief comes first, and our conception of reality is based on that belief.
He calls this idea belief-dependent realism. This is based on
Hawking and Mlodinow’s model-dependent realism. He goes further, saying that
model-dependent realism and all scientific models are at a deeper level
belief-dependent realism. He notes that our brains interpret sensory data to
find patterns and then infuse those patterns with meaning. The first part, he
calls patternicity; the second part, agenticity. Perhaps this may seem
circuitous in that if reality depends on belief and belief is just some form of
guessing, then we live in a reality that we can only offer our best guess
about, but it seems to be true. Of course, these ideas do not assuage our
dissatisfaction about the mysteries of life and the cosmos, so how useful they
are is debatable. The notion of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in physics,
that the observer alters the observed by the mere act of observation, has
always fascinated me, although I sometimes read that it is being challenged.
The notion that object and subject can be separated may well be illusory, as
the Indian Buddhist philosophers have suggested. They have long expounded the
idea of the "two truths," relative/conventional truth and
absolute/ultimate truth, which operate on different “levels” in a sense. They
speak of a subject-object duality that appears in our relative reality, which
is not real in ultimate reality. They also note that ultimate reality can only
be experienced directly, rather than through concepts. Thus, one reality is
conceptual and the other non-conceptual. Concepts are based on language and
thus, on the theory of mind. The concept of non-conceptual reality is not based
on the theory of mind, cannot really be expounded on satisfactorily, and can
only be experienced directly, whatever that means.
In science, we rely on some
seemingly strange theories like relativity, quantum mechanics, and evolution.
The first two can be arrived at mathematically but are difficult to expound
since we don’t have a conscious experience or perception of things like a
space-time continuum, but we do have well-established perceptions of space and
time. Evolution sees our species journeying over time while continuing to
“develop” biologically, psychologically, socially, and culturally.
I guess I’ll stop here and
call it Part 1.
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