Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Science

  • Creating God

    Creating God

    I do not believe that the concepts of “god” and science are incompatible. Provided we accept that we have created the concept of “god” in the first place and that through science we have the means to become godlike.

    Qualiacomputing is run by people with the impressive aim of discovering what triggers our feelings, our emotions, our “qualia”.   These people believe that qualia have a mathematical, scientific basis and hence can be re-created and manipulated. That qualia represent certain brain states – those of harmony (in the case of pleasant states) and disharmony in states of malaise and pain.

    I follow their website with interest. Like their friend the fascinating philosopher  David Pearce, they wish to save the world through science. To make us happy and good, well and altruistic through altering our genetic make up.

    I responded as follows to a recent post:

    My own worldview seems to accord mostly with your own. Of course I have no scientific basis for my view, merely intuition and disconnected theorizing. Nonetheless for what it is worth my conclusion is that everything we conscious entities feel, suffer or enjoy is, at bottom, a quale. Spirituality is, for example, the quale we “enjoy” when certain external factors put our mind into a certain state.

    By way of example ritual (church music, incense, incantation, intonation of the psalms) can put me into a state where I feel at one with the world and seem to be connected to some sense of the numinous.  And I am an atheist or at best agnostic.

    How does this come about? And does it suggest that there is a deity “out there” or perhaps at least some pantheistic or Jungian uber consciousness?

    My belief is that it comes about through electrical and chemical reactions in my brain which smell, music and rhythm cause. Call this reductionist if you will. Hence I do not believe that a deity is “out there”. Nonetheless like Pascal, I believe we should act as if there was.

    I believe in a sense that we make our own deity and certainly our own meaning. But at heart we do so through the basic laws of physics. To use your own terminology through “harmony”, by creating certain states of rhythm and harmony in our brains which cause us to feel in a certain way. To experience certain qualia.

    And we “should” feel those qualia for the world to evolve in a better and kinder way.  We “need” to feel those qualia. To manufacture, bring about and encourage those qualia. Hence I firmly believe in the sort of project you are aiming at: to alter our qualia for the better, to raise our hedonic set point.

    I believe that to do so makes for a better world. I believe that the application of science through the methods you have suggested (genetic engineering for instance) will enable us to create what the religious has never been able to create – a heaven on earth.

    Is that spirituality? Or is it reductionist and bare, feeling-less science?  I do not believe you should separate the two. If “god is within” as so many of the world’s religions postulate, then surely we should use science to amend and adjust the “within” to achieve the bliss, beauty and love we so sadly lack. We created “god” in our own image. It is we who now have the chance to become godlike – perhaps in the way that Frank Tipler envisaged. Or, in a slightly more traditional and religious way, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

  • Philosophy – Would we need it if we were happy?

    Philosophy – Would we need it if we were happy?

    Would we spend so much time in hand wringing existential anxiety if we discovered the genetic code of the pain pleasure axis?

    I rather doubt it. Or if we did, the questions which philosophy has traditionally sought to address would become much less important to us. I was enjoying a discussion on “materialism” on Steven Yate’s enjoyable website Lost Generation Philosopher and thought to make one or two comments on his latest musings on “Materialism” as set out below.

    Maybe it’s just me but I worry about “philosophy” far less (if at all) when “happy”. I am deeply interested in the nature of human consciousness and can not help but think that an understanding of the “pain pleasure” axis on a scientific basis, coupled with the ability to shift our position on that axis, would solve many of our problems. War, aggression, poverty and oppression might look rather more manageable if we could overcome our genetic inheritance and steer our species along a more productive and happy path.

    Long live the Abolitionist Project.

    “All we are is dust in the wind.”

    Or chemical scum as Stephen Hawkings put it. I wonder whether life need be so very complex as your posts suggest? I wonder if beneath your philosophical musing you may be able to wring great simplicity out of great complexity?

    After all String Theorists would have us believe that all matter, all energy is at bottom a “mere” collection of one dimensional strings of energy.

    I wonder whether humans might do better by seeking the way to manipulate the pain pleasure axis than spend an eternity wondering about questions which are, for the foreseeable future, unanswerable.

    At heart, it seems probable to me that there is no “meaning” other than that we create in this arguably pantheistic universe.

    You, me and everyone else has various basic needs. Perhaps society should work on satisfying those first and at the same time make universal happiness the goal since that, I believe, must be what drives us all in the end. Even if most of us do not realise it.

    Frankly after a lifetime of search the sort of philosophy promoted by David Pearce is all that interests me. And research into qualia and the pain pleasure axis. If we get that right, my belief is we would find existential anxiety to be a mere symptom of deep rooted human fear and unhappiness.

    Incidentally non of what I say is criticism. I like your post very much and agree with the vast majority of what you say. My own website is subtitled “Weltanschauung – a search for the Soul”. Even though like you I am a man of science and therefor use the term metaphorically.

    My comments are therefor not flippant, nor meant to be. And I am serious about David Pearce and the abolitionist project.

    I do not believe that we will find absolutes in the universe other than the physical laws that you describe. But we must not forget the many worlds theory which may yet prove to have found the winning formula in which case physical laws are not absolutes but will differ from universe to universe.

    Science and philosophy are all that we have, practically speaking, to lead us forward. And indeed all that we should have now that the man of reason has disposed of god and his ilk.

    So we may as well use science and reason to make ourselves happy. There may be no up and no down in the universe. No left and no right. Equally therefore no “right” and no “wrong”.

    Therefore perhaps happiness is the only worthy pursuit. Yes we may argue that Pol Pot’s happiness or Stalin’s may be in torture, ethnic cleansing and murder but my suspicion would be that were these men truly “happy” and at peace with themselves they would not find the need to make a hell of the lives of their compatriots.

  • What is the Purpose of Poetry?

    What is the Purpose of Poetry?

    Does poetry have a purpose? If so, then what?

    I noticed today that by far the majority of WordPresss bloggers who have been kind enough to like or follow my blog are poets. It set me thinking.

    Why on earth would a poet want to read anything I write? Then I realized that perhaps my goal and that of a poet are in fact the same. And that therefore there may not be so much difference between my prose and their poetry.

    My URL is “zenothestoic”. The title of my Blog is ” Weltanschauung ” – a Search for the Soul. According to Wikipedia:

    Weltanschauung is a concept fundamental to German philosophy and epistemology and refers to a wide world perception. Additionally, it refers to the framework of ideas and beliefs forming a global description through which an individual, group or culture watches and interprets the world and interacts with it.

    In a sense I have been writing “poetry” or at least writing prose but in a style which resembles somewhat the style of poetry.

    So if I have been writing poetry, to what end?

    Well I think the title of my Blog probably gives my game away. The purpose of my poetry (or prose, if you insist) is to help me understand the world and my place in it. Exactly the same purpose underlies my flirtatious dalliance with religion, art and music.

    And I suspect in essence poets (real poets) write poems for much the same reason. Including those who wrote the beautiful Book of Psalms.

    There is poetry even in science. When I read Richard Dawkin’s “Unweaving the Rainbow” I saw his sense of wonder and compared it, strangely, with that of a mystic or a poet.

    Because Dawkins believes he deals with science. And he does. But from science he gets much the same sense of wonder, much the same sense of pantheistic mystery as I might get from reading the Psalms aloud in a windswept and empty Norman church in the middle of the Shires.

    Science is wonder. Yes, science seeks rather more practical applications for its answers but it nonetheless receives a sense of awe from its subject matter – the universe, its origins and its “purpose”. Or its workings, in any event.

    So in a sense I see the same “use” and “purpose” in many different fields.

    In my case, poetry helps me to see and experience wonder. Even a war poem can help me to understand life, to broaden my horizons while confirming my view that life should not be about war. Or indeed hatred or any of our destructive emotions.

    My old Sweet etcetera is a case in point. What an absurdity, that war; any war. And foolish relatives at home taking pride in their son’s death and misery in the trenches.

    So for me the purpose of poetry is both to free and to focus my mind, if that makes any sense to you. A poem can make my mind soar like a mystic to dance in the sheer beauty of creation. But at the same time it can reaffirm the absurdity of most of what we humans wrongly consider important.

    Without poetry, art and music we would be dead souls, condemned to wander in the dark.

  • Was Albert Einstein into Alchemical Healing?

    Was Albert Einstein into Alchemical Healing?

    I was reading a post this morning on “alchemical healing” and was a little puzzled by it.

    I believe in the scientific concept of “emergence”. Namely that the sum is greater than its constituents parts.  I believe that great complexity has arisen from a few simple rules of nature and that as time goes by science will reveal more to us. I believe that eventually intelligent life will become what our ancestors would have considered “gods”

    We now know the aims of alchemists are achievable – we know that any one element can be turned into any other element given enough heat and pressure.

    On “spirituality” we are coming to understand more about the mind and indeed I am interested in recent scientific research on qualia and the nature of consciousness.

    But I believe one must distinguish such concepts as “art” on the one hand from “science” and the search for facts on the other.

    My sense of spirituality is to sit in a Norman Church in the English countryside and read the book of Psalms. Not because I believe in a god or gods but because it puts my mind at ease.  I do not believe my experience is “mystical” in any sense; I believe rather that the space and peace, the beauty and the language give my tired mind the ability to rest and to contemplate my “weltanschauung” in tranquility.

    I believe that the world is a miraculous enough place as it is without the necessity for belief in anything other than what is there, than what we can prove by experiment.

    I love the idea of pixies and goblins; I have been an avid fan of Tolkien, CS Lewis and fantasy all my life.

    But I am very aware that I must not confuse fantasy and fiction with reality.

    Beauty and escape in art, literature, music and theatre are essential to me. But when I want to know about healing I look to science. I may be inspired by Ents and Gandalf but if I want to know how the world works I look to CERN or Roger Penrose rather than Ursula le Guin.

  • Renaissance Man: Dead or Alive?

    Renaissance Man: Dead or Alive?

    Wren, Newton, da Vinci and Galileo, to name a few,  were “renaissance men”.  They were able to master and practice a number of widely different professions.  Can it still be done in today’s highly specialised world?

    David Deutsch in the Fabric of Reality puts a slightly different slant on the question and it remains one of the most interesting and convincing  books I have ever read.  As a child, like many scientists, Deutsch wanted to “know everything” and wondered whether that could ever be possible.

    To qualify his ambition he did not require knowledge of “where every sparrow fell” – a wonderful biblical allusion to Matthew 10:29-30.  He did not aspire to be god.

    Many of us have this unquenchable thirst for knowledge. We want to know where we came from, how the universe began, the nature of time and consciousness. What is the “meaning” of maths? Its object, its goal, its range of competence?  It is all so mysterious and complex and many experts seem to spend their entire lives ruminating on just one tiny piece of the puzzle.

    A Renaissance Man living in the 21st Century on planet earth has to curtail his ambition somewhat. We no longer live in the days of Galen and should not expect to become surgeon barbers.  You have to specialise.  But that does not mean we can not, as laymen, understand at least the rudiments of modern medicine.

    Roger Penrose has spent a lifetime as a distinguished mathematical physicist and as laymen we should not expect to attain his grasp of cosmology or quantum mechanics.

    And yet we can and should know in broad general terms about all these things. We should at least aim to have a broad understanding of what the outlines of current human knowledge actually are.

    So yes, Renaissance Man lives on. He can not be expected to both build Cathedrals and replace broken hearts (or mend arms or legs) but he can at least have a broad and cultured knowledge about what it is his colleagues in other fields practice.

    I will never grasp the minutiae but I do at least want to understand what such men do.

  • Depression – Rational Enquiry vs Emotional Wallowing

    Depression – Rational Enquiry vs Emotional Wallowing

    Depression can only be defeated by science and rational enquiry not airy faerie emotional wallowing such as is to be found in most useless self help books.

    Amazon is replete with absurd self help manuals promising 10 step programs to beat depression without drugs, “paths to wholeness”, feeling your chakras or mandalas (whatever they may be?) and ten thousand other routes to hopelessness.

    You don’t want “warm and supportive little books” or flights of fantasy about “flower mandalas”.

    What you do need is medically prescribed  antidepressant drugs and advice from a qualified clinical psychologist.

    If you do want a self help book or two then you are best off picking something practical and down to earth. Eschew pixies and faerie dust.  And above all avoid reading the horrible books written by depressives describing their awful psychoses.  Why read about Samuel Johnson and make yourself worse?

    The first helpful book I ever read on the subject was by Dorothey Rowe and I still think it is one of the best:

    The theme is that depression is a prison of your own making and to an extent I have found that to be true. But it still does NOT mean that words alone will rescue you from the pit of despair. Nor will meditation, awareness, religion or anything else on its own act to prevent a slithery descent down the black slope to hell.

    The problem is the stunning ignorance and prejudice which prevents the depressive from seeking chemical help. Coupled with the sadly only experimental state of such cures. But while SSRI’s may be imperfect they have improved the lives of countless thousands and medicine and science are the only way out of the hole.

    Eventually science will ensure that all will be well.

  • What am I?

    What am I?

    The question “what am I” is the most important avenue any sentient being can enter.  It is not a question we can currently answer but we have been trying for as long as we have existed.

    The first difficulty is that this is a true “rabbit hole” and once entered you are unlikely to emerge or find any definitive answer. Because the answer at present is “I do not know”.  Even for that unsatisfactory conclusion, you have to take a detour down every possible scientific avenue of enquiry we are currently pursuing or have ever pursued.

    The questions which naturally follow from this one deseptively simple enquiry do not end.  At the macro level it inevitably leads to the BIG question: “what is reality”?

    Until and unless you discover the nature of reality you will be hard pressed to try and answer the much smaller question “what am I” since it must be self evident that we are a mere subdivision of reality.

    Unless you are a single, lonely solipsist.

    So you have to take in physics and its derivatives chemistry and biology.  Not on a professional level but as that of an enquiring layman.  You have to consider cosmology and particle physics. You need to know what our current state of knowledge is.  What is our universe? How big is it? What is it made of?

    You need to know that we are made of the same elements as everything else in our universe and that all that “stuff” out there (and in us) was created within stars.

    You need to consider “consciousness” because that apparently distinguishes us from the vast majority of “stuff” out there. It allows us “self awareness” which can usefully be defined in this context as the ability to ask what we are in the first place!

    My current reading is Our Mathematical Universe by Mark Tegmark .  It is fascinating and easily understood by the layman and those not versed in mathematics.  It is well suited to someone of a more philosophical than actual scientific bent.

    It is telling me that I am a mathematical structure and so is the rest of reality. It is one man’s theory of the ultimate nature of “what is”.

    It is one of numerous such books I have read on my journey and there will be a great many more.