Well the dialogue continued with a couple tedious exchanges and it felt like I hit another dead end, and imagined that was that. So I decided to take a couple days off for a breather. This morning I found that he sent me another email a couple days earlier.
So, as they say the project is never finished, ya just meet deadlines, and the rewrites never end.
On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 9:05 PM
Perhaps I’m getting a handle on what you want. There’s plenty of good writing on your topics by educated and informed people; that’s not the problem. You want the knowledge spread to the general populace and for them to understand it, take it seriously, and act on it. That’s a different matter, perhaps one better addressed by psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, etc. There are popular books on the topics, certainly, but they will be ignored by people resistant to the ideas. The last election doesn’t offer hope.
Is that it? You want someone to successfully popularize your ideas?
Best,
Hello Professor,
I took a couple days off the computer so have only read your email this morning. Thank you.
In answer to your question, I have been searching for is some serious critique of the words I’ve written down. For instance:
Please understand I come at this God question from a different and somewhat unique Earth-centrist, science-respecting, bottom-up, evolutionary perspective.
Is belief in God rational?
To me, that framing feels like a trick question of sorts. God is a belief in itself. God is not a thing.
Regarding people’s faith in a God, I ask, how does an assumption of God get transmuted into a thing? Is a belief in a belief rational? (Is faith rational?)
I’d say sure, from an evolutionary and pragmatic perspective, there are a host of reasons faith in meta-physical beliefs could and does bring benefits to believers.
Regarding what God is, that needs to start with resolving the ageless question, “Who am I?”
Fact is, I, we, are evolved biological animals, the product of half a billion unbroken years of Earth’s processes. From the beginning, all creatures have required a degree of awareness, processing and action abilities, each according to their individual biology. Ours is simply the most advanced mind, thanks to our incredibly evolved body and experiences. (Both body and consciousness are evolved.)
Still, our thoughts are the interior reflection of our body communicating with itself as it processes incoming information. (See: Drs. Solms, Damasio, Sapolski, etc. for details.) It is our body and brain interacting with physical reality that produces our mind, sense of self, thoughts – collectively our mindscape.
The inevitable conclusion from the scope of sciences is that consciousness is not a thing, it is an interaction. Our consciousness is produced in the living moment by our living body.
As with the dynamo that stops producing electricity when it stops spinning, so, too, when our body stops living, our mind/consciousness ceases to be produced. After that, we become memories within those we leave behind.
It seems to me self-evident from the above that God must be a product of our thoughts, which in turn, are driven by personal biological imperatives, needs, ego, bias, etc.
The hard problem is figuring out why such a straightforward observation – that our body/brain interacting with the world produces our mind – is so assiduously avoided.
Our Gods are very real, still we should be very clear, our Gods belong to the meta-physical realm.
Gods are not part of the physical reality that makes up the biology of our bodies, nor the substance of this miracle planet Earth that created us to begin with.
Key concepts are the physical reality–human mind divide: appreciating that our living body produces our thoughts, and that our Gods are born from within our own ego-centric thoughts.
The other question discussed was: “Does morality require God?” How can it, if we create our own Gods?
For me, that realization puts the responsibility right back upon us humans, collectively and individually.
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I’ve come to learn most people need religion to deal with the mysteries, of nature and our own emotions and mortality - ritual and belief in something greater, wonder at the night sky - it’s like love, deny it all we want, still it tugs at us from all directions.
Science is blamed for robbing that sense of awe and spirituality - I strongly disagree.
We wonder, we try to comprehend and it overwhelms, faith in a vision bigger than us helps us hold on through day to day survival - that’s the essence of religion.
What I’m trying to do is about examining the poetic synthesis of my experience - that is, the cumulative product of all my proactive learning through serious physical sciences combined with a lifetime of musing on the big humanistic mysteries and questions from my tree-huggers perspective.
As for a grandiose vision
What’s been really fascinating for me is that going down this Earth centric, bottom-up Evolutionary path to understanding has provided me a gateway to deeper spiritual challenges and resolutions, well beyond anything religions have offered.
I came out the other end Knowing, down to my core that: I am a filament in Earth’s pageant of creation - and it is good. The eternal question: Who Am I? Has been utterly resolved, making peace with the inevitability of my own, death, and disappearing and giving a better awareness of the person I am, that’s healthy and cascades to loved ones. Being in the moment. That’s worth sharing with others who may have similar ideas.
No woo or magical thinking needed and no special powers bestowed, … that is, beyond a feeling of resolution and an “at-homeness” peace of mind that gets reflected in my life and interactions with others and with resolving my own internal conflicts.
Conflict remains for sure, but the deeper perspective removes the melodrama, which makes other matters manageable.
I do it without any need for woo, yet I recognize people’s need for woo and stories. I think reality is better.
Earth produced your body, your body produces your individual consciousness; your individual consciousness produces your God(s).
Please show me where discussions regarding God or consciousness, start with that sort of concise summary, or preamble? I think it would provide a foundational touchstone of sorts - providing a mental conceptual framework to organize all the solid science around.
Learning to explicitly appreciate that we create our own Gods, who are as real as we want them to be, because they are characters within our own mind and consciousness, not from any physical source.
I believe that’s worth trying to message.
Please show me where discussions regarding God or Consciousness, start with that sort of explicit summary of what we do know about who we are, I’d love to find some?
Although I hate to say the response was, well frankly, it was empty.
I wouldn’t critique your views because I agree with them. In my circle – other than a few unaccountably religious people – they are the default assumptions we start with in our thinking. These assumptions leave a lot to think through though, as the range of articles in SEP and IEP shows.
Stating a position isn’t the same as arguing for it, and since there are many people who disagree with our (yours and mine) view, there is still a place for arguments for and against god, for and against morality, for and against humans’ place in the universe, etc.
I’m not saying anything that you don’t know, of course, just noting that we are on the same side.
Hope you are well,
Apparently what I write about is plenty correct, but it’s not worth discussing. Yippy.
Then I got to thinking about what kind of bona fides, you know, record of successes do social sciences and psychological sciences have to show in helping guide society into a rational sustainable future. Where have they been?
Watching our society going down the road of Faith Based Thinkings, forced on us by the Christian war on rationalism.
Science, the need for truthfully looking at scientific facts went straight out the window, soon it started hitting the bottomline that demanded ever greater profits, damned the torpedos.
I been paying close attention since the early '70 and been witness to decades after decades of idiotic, predictably self-destructive decisions one after another. Where were the grown ups?
Once the uber rich refined their attacks and slander on climate science and the scientist practitioners who reported the facts, they spread their vision to taking down our entire rule of law/balance of power/ pluralistic democracy, and the whole of upper academia stood by, deaf and mute. By and by, here we are 2025 and national trust of our American Constitution has been broken by us and it’s like noting has changed, nothing wrong, and the band played on.
Backsliding after backsliding, too worried about their own funding to point out that we were on an absolutely existentially suicidal course - unless we rearranged our priorities and by and large as an overall society that notion was told to go stick it, I want my Maserati too!
The era of dystopia has arrived . . .
so guess it doesn’t matter much in any event.
And that’s that.
And it was a valuable exercise, it felt good to write out that last section above, the why of it.
