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Okay, so what do I believe in? (Or not.)
Today's news coverage of the upcoming Reason Rally (a big Washington hoedown for atheists) gives rise to the question, "Am I an atheist?". The answer is no -- but increasingly, I feel like it's the wrong question.
When I was a kid, I was a fairly ordinary reflexive atheist, like so many 13-year-old science fiction fans. The world should be governed by SCIENCE! and religion was just silly. It wasn't any more a considered viewpoint than that of the average parochial schoolchild -- it was simply the assumptions of the cultural milieu that I had bought into.
After college, that softened quite a lot, and I wound up with the sort of squishy intuitive Deism that I still have today. I joined the Masons (on the grounds that Deism was good enough for many of the founders of the organization, so it should still be good enough), but certainly never bought into any organized religion. For 10-20 years, when I made myself think about it, I generally identified my religion as "Minbari", which was a bit flip but mostly accurate: a vague sense that we are how the Universe learns about itself, and that "god" is really made up of the collective sentience of the Universe. That sense is still there, but is just a piece of the puzzle.
The thing is, though, that while I may still kinda-sorta believe in a demiurge, I increasingly do *not* really believe in the idea of a soul, and that's arguably the more important question. There are a lot of reasons why not, and I'm not sure I've ever unpacked all of them before.
On the one hand, there was the realization last year that the idea is not universal, and hasn't always been part of the human experience. This was really driven home by the course Religions of the Axial Age, one of my favorite-ever Teaching Company courses, which is about many of the religions of the thousand years BCE. Among other things, it traces the rise of the meme of the soul, and the surprisingly quick evolution through the logical complications, especially Hinduism's take on the notion of reincarnation (which is far from entirely benign, if you really push through the logic) and Buddism's reaction to that idea. The eastern religions wrestle much more honestly than the western with the notion that eternity is a Very Long Time, so an eternal soul is a mixed blessing.
Then there is my growing internalization of the logic of quantum mechanics, and the increasing trend for cosmology to be viewed in Many Worlds terms. I've always been intuitively attracted to the Many Worlds hypothesis, the notion that the world as we see it at any given moment is simply the sum of a lot of probabilities, one among a multitude. I know that not everyone in science buys into that viewpoint; still, with Stephen Hawking implying pretty clearly that it's how things work, I don't feel dumb in accepting it. And personally, I find it pretty wondrous, the idea that every possible outcome exists in that probability-space to some degree -- it's the IDIC principle (baked into my brain at a young and impressionable age) taken to its logical extreme.
But it's very difficult to square Many Worlds with the idea of a soul. If "I" am branching -- slowly on the macro scale, but a billion billion times a second on the micro scale -- into variant versions of "me", with different probabilities of following particular pathways of my life, how are those all "me"? And how can such a rigidly unitary notion as the soul encompass that branching probability tree?
And then there are my explorations of Buddhism itself -- not so much accepting any of the religious schools that grew out of it, as playing syncretically with the underlying philophies and ideas. One of the points that comes up from time to time goes right to this point: as one Buddhist site puts it, "According to Buddhism mind is nothing but a complex compound of fleeting mental states.":
Within that viewpoint, a person isn't so much a unitary eternal soul as a *process* -- each moment giving rise to the next. The process is continuous, and that continuity produces a sense of identity, but that identity is momentary: a snapshot of the current state of the process. It is constantly changing and shifting, and eventually that identity comes to an end.
But -- and this is the part that I find genuinely inspiring about it -- the process doesn't end, because the identity is only a piece of it. We are more than a little isolated soul, an island lost amidst trackless seas; rather, we are part and parcel of everything around us, and that world is just as much a part of our process as our own identity. If that isn't inspiring, I don't know what is.
Moreover, this viewpoint forces me to consider the moment seriously. "I" am not something that will be summed up at the end; I can't be bad today on the theory that I'll make up for it later so that the scales balance positively at the end of my life. If all I have is now, then I have to drink that now deeply: I need to find my joys in the current moment, and be the best person I can be right here, right now.
So when I put this together, I wind up with a truly beautiful world. I am part of the world, and it is part of me, all just processes interacting. The idea of the soul is a counter-productive separation of the one from the other, and I find that I miss that idea less and less with each passing year, slowly quieting the part of my ego that fears losing it.
God is the summation of the sentience of everything in the world -- all the moments that ever have been, ever will be, and ever *could* be. All of this has to be viewed from outside time -- which, after all, is just one dimension of the giant probability structure. That viewpoint comforts and quiets the fears of opportunity cost, the desire to know and experience everything I possibly can. Somewhere in the probability tree, someone has been there and done that: the chance is not lost simply because this little shard of the universe doesn't happen to be doing it right now.
And in this grand scheme of things, I -- the collection of probability waves typing this essay right now -- am just a speck: a particular, relatively well-defined process among an infinite number of others. But everyone around me is also part of that process, and anything I can affect for the better increases the probability of states of joy in the grand array. I don't think anybody can really ask for more than that...
When I was a kid, I was a fairly ordinary reflexive atheist, like so many 13-year-old science fiction fans. The world should be governed by SCIENCE! and religion was just silly. It wasn't any more a considered viewpoint than that of the average parochial schoolchild -- it was simply the assumptions of the cultural milieu that I had bought into.
After college, that softened quite a lot, and I wound up with the sort of squishy intuitive Deism that I still have today. I joined the Masons (on the grounds that Deism was good enough for many of the founders of the organization, so it should still be good enough), but certainly never bought into any organized religion. For 10-20 years, when I made myself think about it, I generally identified my religion as "Minbari", which was a bit flip but mostly accurate: a vague sense that we are how the Universe learns about itself, and that "god" is really made up of the collective sentience of the Universe. That sense is still there, but is just a piece of the puzzle.
The thing is, though, that while I may still kinda-sorta believe in a demiurge, I increasingly do *not* really believe in the idea of a soul, and that's arguably the more important question. There are a lot of reasons why not, and I'm not sure I've ever unpacked all of them before.
On the one hand, there was the realization last year that the idea is not universal, and hasn't always been part of the human experience. This was really driven home by the course Religions of the Axial Age, one of my favorite-ever Teaching Company courses, which is about many of the religions of the thousand years BCE. Among other things, it traces the rise of the meme of the soul, and the surprisingly quick evolution through the logical complications, especially Hinduism's take on the notion of reincarnation (which is far from entirely benign, if you really push through the logic) and Buddism's reaction to that idea. The eastern religions wrestle much more honestly than the western with the notion that eternity is a Very Long Time, so an eternal soul is a mixed blessing.
Then there is my growing internalization of the logic of quantum mechanics, and the increasing trend for cosmology to be viewed in Many Worlds terms. I've always been intuitively attracted to the Many Worlds hypothesis, the notion that the world as we see it at any given moment is simply the sum of a lot of probabilities, one among a multitude. I know that not everyone in science buys into that viewpoint; still, with Stephen Hawking implying pretty clearly that it's how things work, I don't feel dumb in accepting it. And personally, I find it pretty wondrous, the idea that every possible outcome exists in that probability-space to some degree -- it's the IDIC principle (baked into my brain at a young and impressionable age) taken to its logical extreme.
But it's very difficult to square Many Worlds with the idea of a soul. If "I" am branching -- slowly on the macro scale, but a billion billion times a second on the micro scale -- into variant versions of "me", with different probabilities of following particular pathways of my life, how are those all "me"? And how can such a rigidly unitary notion as the soul encompass that branching probability tree?
And then there are my explorations of Buddhism itself -- not so much accepting any of the religious schools that grew out of it, as playing syncretically with the underlying philophies and ideas. One of the points that comes up from time to time goes right to this point: as one Buddhist site puts it, "According to Buddhism mind is nothing but a complex compound of fleeting mental states.":
Every moment there is birth, every moment there is death. The arising of one thought-moment means the passing away of another thought-moment and vice versa. In the course of one life-time there is momentary rebirth without a soul.Putting it more simply, I am not the man I was ten years ago -- far from it. And I have no expectation or desire that I will be the same person in ten years. Life is continuous change, and that is a *good* thing; lack of change is stillness and death.
Within that viewpoint, a person isn't so much a unitary eternal soul as a *process* -- each moment giving rise to the next. The process is continuous, and that continuity produces a sense of identity, but that identity is momentary: a snapshot of the current state of the process. It is constantly changing and shifting, and eventually that identity comes to an end.
But -- and this is the part that I find genuinely inspiring about it -- the process doesn't end, because the identity is only a piece of it. We are more than a little isolated soul, an island lost amidst trackless seas; rather, we are part and parcel of everything around us, and that world is just as much a part of our process as our own identity. If that isn't inspiring, I don't know what is.
Moreover, this viewpoint forces me to consider the moment seriously. "I" am not something that will be summed up at the end; I can't be bad today on the theory that I'll make up for it later so that the scales balance positively at the end of my life. If all I have is now, then I have to drink that now deeply: I need to find my joys in the current moment, and be the best person I can be right here, right now.
So when I put this together, I wind up with a truly beautiful world. I am part of the world, and it is part of me, all just processes interacting. The idea of the soul is a counter-productive separation of the one from the other, and I find that I miss that idea less and less with each passing year, slowly quieting the part of my ego that fears losing it.
God is the summation of the sentience of everything in the world -- all the moments that ever have been, ever will be, and ever *could* be. All of this has to be viewed from outside time -- which, after all, is just one dimension of the giant probability structure. That viewpoint comforts and quiets the fears of opportunity cost, the desire to know and experience everything I possibly can. Somewhere in the probability tree, someone has been there and done that: the chance is not lost simply because this little shard of the universe doesn't happen to be doing it right now.
And in this grand scheme of things, I -- the collection of probability waves typing this essay right now -- am just a speck: a particular, relatively well-defined process among an infinite number of others. But everyone around me is also part of that process, and anything I can affect for the better increases the probability of states of joy in the grand array. I don't think anybody can really ask for more than that...
no subject
There are other multiple-universe theories out there, a couple of which still include multiple versions of a given individual, but which have potential for interaction between universes. These are the ones cosmologists care about.
no subject
The cosmologically interesting theories that have multiple versions of you out there are relevant to this discussion, because they are statistical in nature, rather than probability splitting in nature.
Imagine there is another "you". He lives on a planet that is exactly like yours, sees a sky exactly like you see when you look up. When I say "exactly", I mean down to the quantum states of every particle of his being, his planet, and his sky - even the states of all the particles in all the stars he can see.
The branching many-worlds you is different from you in at least one quantum number, somewhere in his body. This person isn't. And, if the Universe is large enough, or the ensemble of Universes is large enough, he's statistically guaranteed to exist. The larger the Universe/ensemble is, the more of you there will be.
Everyone's a special snowflake, but if you really have enough snowflakes, they won't be unique any more...
no subject
What I find myself wondering about both models, though, is how probability plays into it. I'm not at all convinced that "exists" is even the right word to be using. If everything is probability waves (or infinitely large statistics), is it meaningful to speak of existence even as a binary state? Or is it more appropriate to focus on the overall probability of getting from one state to another? (More interesting question for many-worlds than infinite-universe, I think, but I hadn't been thinking about the latter before.)
I honestly don't know the math well enough to understand this one as well as I'd like, to know whether my intuition here is even mathematically appropriate -- might be a study project for me at some point. In either model, statistics and probability are driving forces, so it *seems* appropriate to incorporate them into any philosophical worldview derived from them. Hmm...
no subject
Well, to start off with, that's still a bit "IF". Remember that most of what you read about quantum mechanics is interpretation - trying to read a physical interpretation of mathematics. A physicist who is being careful won't say, "Everything is probability waves." They'll say, "It is as if everything is probability waves." The two statements are far from equivalent.
Basing major philosophy on attempts to wring physical interpretation out of mathematics that may not actually have a physical interpretation is... sketchy stuff. IMHO, of course.
But, to your question - physics already has the concept of something that is there, and has real effects, but isn't really there. We have "virtual particles" - and mathematically, they behave slightly differently from "real" particles.
So, we have things that aren't, things that are, and things that are inbetween. The math does *not* reduce to "everything is imaginary".
no subject
no subject
I come at a similar point from a very different direction: the cliched thought-experiment of "What if the universe is a giant computer program?" Combining my programming background with the common notion that "it's all math at some level", I actually take that question quite seriously. (Taking it literally is silly, and leads to annoying "elephants all the way down" problems, but bear with me.)
That leads to the following thought experiment. Say that I have a program complex enough to simulate a universe with "life". Run it -- it plays through, beginning to end. (Maybe with quantum branching, maybe not -- not really relevant to the point.) Now, run it again. The same things happen again; in all important respects, this "universe" has occurred again, exactly the same way. Is it meaningful to distinguish between the two runs? Why?
Now, for extra credit -- based on the above, is it necessary to run the program at all? Why? In what meaningful way are 1, 2, 1000 or 0 runs different to the "existence" of the objects in the program, which are just reifications of mathematical expressions?
And taking it one step further: is it relevant to write the program down?
This leads me down some *very* mystical and odd roads, of believing at some level that the universe exists simply because it *can* -- that the mere possibility of being able to describe a self-consistent system mathematically makes it in some sense real. That's extreme enough that I'm not sure if even I truly believe it deep down, but I find it damned intriguing from a philosophical POV.
Anyway, to your point: from any number of viewpoints, I actually *assume* that I am not in any meaningful sense unique. That stopped bothering me a long time ago, on the grounds that it is true but in every sense irrelevant. Insofar as that tweaks my ego, I generally consider that a bug in my ego. I am what I am; worrying about other "me"s is just as much of a waste as worrying about maybes and might-have-beens. I find them philosophically interesting, but that's a very different thing from them *mattering* to me...
no subject
Of course, this is heavily influenced by having recently finished Hawking's The Grand Design -- which, while it doesn't say "Many Worlds" in as many words, is essentially grounded in it as an underlying assumption, far as I can tell. (Indeed, a good chunk of the book is taken up by discussing the anthropic principle, and the fact that the highest-probability versions of the universe are probably boringly uniform from our POV.)
That said, The Grand Design is a semi-philosophical work -- basically an extended refutation of the necessity of intelligent design -- so it shouldn't surprise me that it wanders a bit afield from the more pragmatic parts of the field...