Reincarnation - Part 1

My personal view of what it is about ourselves we are trying to capture when we think of ourselves as “having souls” will be explicated in Part 2 of this series. For now, let us assume the popular (Judeo-Western) view that every living human body is animated from the time of birth to the time of death by an individual soul, disconnected from other souls in more or less the way the body is disconnected from other bodies.

What about before birth and after death? According to the popular view, individual souls migrate here from another realm, let's call it Zoop, and when the body dies, return to Zoop, sometimes never returning to Earth, but enduring to eternity. Some may think of this eternity as just more time, time filled with very different kinds of experiences perhaps, but still abiding, one-way, flowing time. But in the realm of the spirit there is no time. So in a certain sense it is not true that the soul was formed before the body and will endure after the dissolution of the body, because technically there is no before and after except in Earthly, embodied life.

For those who ascribe to the popular view, and ascribe to some theory of reincarnation, the process would look something like this: Dorp is born in 1900 and lives until 2000. Then he dies, and his soul goes back to Zoop for some non-zero period of time, during which it is determined that this soul must go back to Earth. So the earliest time the soul can come back for a new life is in 2000, the moment after Dorp dies. Of course, the waiting period could be longer. Perhaps he won’t come back until 2050 or 2500.

But if there truly is no time in the spirit-realm then there is no reason why a person can’t be reincarnated at what on Earth would be considered earlier than the time of death. The question is, what if “after” death, Dorp’s soul is reincarnated in 1940 and lives to 2040? In that case, the same soul can be wholly present in two individuals living on Earth at the same time!

If so, then you might have met yourself in another person already. Literally.

Perhaps there is only one soul.

(There are other reasons why the same soul can be multiply embodied, with different consequences, which will require a more subtle notion of the soul, which I will share at some time in the future, if it please God.
I'd also mention in passing that in the Indian notion of reincarnation, there is no Zoop.
More to come on this topic) 

Does God Really Care About Me?

This essay is a response to the faulty argument that the universe is so vast and the human being so small, his action so inconsequential, that God would not devote much attention to him.



Aristotle argued thus: We explain phenomena by referring to other phenomena. For example, we explain the rain by reference to clouds, the clouds by reference to temperature, temperature by reference to particle movement, and so on. If so, then the explanation has to end somewhere, because if not, either the series of explanations goes in a circle or goes on forever, in either which case we understand nothing. For Aristotle, this somewhere is God. But this God is very different from the God of the Theistic religions.

The word “God”– and it is only a word – has developed connotations consistent with its use. In a Western world with Christianity as the dominant world religion, people think of God (vis. God the Father) as an invisible tough-loving bearded man in the sky. The more philosophically minded tend to think of God as a more abstract kind of being, one unsusceptible to such simple, or perhaps any, description. This abstracting is a depersonalizing of God, and it places Him at a distance from human consciousness and concern. But the Theist, even the philosophical Theist, will insist that in some sense God cares about human beings, their welfare and their behavior.

The atmosphere in which modern science finds its roots, in 16^th century Europe, was one deeply entrenched in religious thinking. For the masses, God was the invisible Superman; for the well educated, God was the abstract, incomprehensible super-unity of Maimonides and Aquinas. The Being of God was “known” from philosophy, His Nature “known” by revelation. When the first modern scientists began their work, the assumption was that God certainly exists, and that He is eminently rational. Therefore the universe, the physical world, is rationally constructed, and susceptible to understanding by way of rationality. Though we may never understand God, we might understand something of His “mind” by understanding his creation.

Without the conviction that there is a unitary basis for reality, the task of science would never have gotten started, because if we don't assume that the world is rational, then the quest for rational understanding of the world is a misbegotten one.

Scientists don't typically think they are seeking "God", because they are not seeking the invisible man in the sky. They do typically seek the God of Aristotle, though, even though they call Him by a different name: The “Grand Unified Theory” (GUT). Science, (and the quest for understanding generally) seeks that one principle that is not explained in terms of other principles, and which stands as the ground for all the rest. The reasoning process demands the assumption of a unity on the far end of it. In Big-Bang cosmology, we seek to apprehend to conditions of a world absolutely unified in a superdense chunk of matter, and to extrapolate from those conditions the unfolding of the world to the state we find it today, in all its variety.

But, consistent with the standard position of scientific inquiry today, scientists only consider the physical component of reality. They seek to explain the material conditions and physical laws of today by understanding a unified material body and its unified physical law. All the physical matter, its configuration and behavior, all is included in the primordial and prime matter. But there is more to reality than materiality alone; at very least there is consciousness. The GUT, which proposes to explain everything, a law which is supposed to contain within it every other law, is not complete until it integrates into itself the ideas of psychology as well.

God is the physical law that contains within It every physical law, indeed, every physical event. But God is also the consciousness that contains within it every consciousness. One pithy way of putting it is, every thought in every mind is also a thought in God's mind.

And one of the phenomena of consciousness that must be included in the principle that contains all consciousness is concern for the self. In my first consciousness, I am the most important thing in the world. My survival, my well being, my satisfaction in life, my conscience, these things are very important to me. These same thoughts and feelings - with their same intensity - are also thought and felt by God.

If the argument stands, I am in God's auspices, the most important person in the world, and so are you and so is everyone else.

Some reflections on time

This is a highly speculative essay.

Two questions to begin with: Can God stop time, and, can God change the past? Note, the same question can be asked as: Can time stop, and, can the past change? These are not questions about the nature of God, but about the nature of Time. The reason I introduce God is as a mechanism for these processes, i.e., what could possibly manipulate time in this manner but God?

The answer to the first question is no, which will require a slight discussion, since, well, can’t God do anything? This is an important point in general discussions of God, which this is not, so I’m only going to speak briefly on it. God cannot do the logically impossible. For example, God cannot make a married bachelor or a living corpse, or a square circle, not because He lacks the materials, skills, and power to do so, but because it is nonsense even to speak of such things. If we demand that God create such a non-thing, the problem is in the demand – in that it doesn’t ask God to do anything that makes any kind of sense – and not in the Power of God.

So, can God stop time? Let me ask it this way: Can God stop time for an hour? See the absurdity? If time were to stop, it would have to stop for a period of time. Therefore, it is nonsense to think time is the kind of thing that can stop. Stopping is an event that only makes sense within the context of time. God may be able to stop all events in time, but if anything is stopped, then by definition time is still passing.

How about the second question: Can God change the past? This one is more complicated. On the surface the answer seems to be no. The past is defined as what has already happened. The future is open to many possibilities, based on the choices of God, Man, and any other being that might be that can choose. But that’s because it hasn’t happened yet. There is only one past.

We must distinguish between two ways of looking at time: Physical time and Experiential time. To accomplish this end, we get to talk about a time traveler. Looking out of the window of his time machine, he sees the movements of the physical objects around him slow down, stop, and then reverse. The sun goes from west to east, tidal waves build coastal towns before being released into the ocean, and life ends with the sexual act. Think of a video playing in reverse (not that last one). No logical contradiction in that. But for the time traveler, these events are happening in forward time. Though time in the world around him stops, reverses, his past is still the events leading up to this quest; his present experience is progressing forward while nothing around him is progressing forward; and his future is still unwritten, even though it occurs in “the past”. Time as it is experienced is unidirectional. There is no contradiction in things moving backward and forward in physical time. Experiential time, however, is a matter of experience building upon experience. To go backward in experiential time is to forget your experiences.

(There are other paradoxes of time travel that don’t directly bear on this so I don’t deal with them here)

But what this means is that if experiential time did reverse alongside physical time, we systematically wouldn’t know it happened. We would just go back to the point of divergence as if all the intervening time never happened, and pick up from there with new choices and experiences. But if such is the case then it is possible that it happens. And, though the basic idea doesn’t require God, the reversal of time and the changing of the past are logically possible. If there is a God, this adds another dimension to his power.

So the answer to the second question, can the past change, can God change the past, turns out to be yes. Now the speculative part: Say this actually happens, through God or through one of nature’s countless unexplained forces: Perhaps this has some role to play in our ability to anticipate the future, or in a theory of volition.

Friday, July 27, 2007 Intelligent Speciation With or Without God

Friday, July 27, 2007
Intelligent Speciation With or Without God
 

This essay deals with two primary issues: First, the highly problematic issue of the natural existence of mind in a physical world, and second, how the evolution of the species, as events in the physical world, might be thought of as possessing mind, and intelligence. What will emerge is a different way of looking at nature.


The philosopher G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) challenges us to imagine a machine with cogs and wheels and gears that is wired exactly as the human brain is. Would such a machine possess a "mind"? If not – and this is what he was going for – then we humans, who clearly possess minds must be more than mere machines. But let us suspend that judgment. Our science is reluctant to admit the existence of a soul, a substrate for the mind, that is separate from the body, and reasonably so.

However, we cannot conceptualize a system of physics, a science of bodies, that incorporates mind.

Two proofs: First, the philosophical zombies. These zombies are just like human beings. They look and act and even interact like normal human beings. But they have no consciousness and no experience of the world. The fact that such is a coherent idea means that there is something more to possessing a mind then having the physiology and behavior of a human being. We are obviously not such beings. Second proof, the "neural correlates of behavior". Every class of behavior, including thinking (in theory at last, and let us grant the strongest theory,) can be detected using advanced brain scanning technology. That is, if I'm thinking of a pizza, if someone can see into my brain with sufficient detail, he can know that I'm thinking of a pizza. But my experience of the thought pizza is different from my firing neurons. What is happening in my brain involves electric charges, molecules and ions, shapes and patterns, all laid out in geometric space. The idea in my head has nothing to do with any of those things. Be it true that whenever one is present the other is present too; that doesn't make them the same thing. It merely means they are correlated.

We don't understand what it means for a physical pattern to be a mental pattern. But what else could the mind be? Physical matter shouldn't have mind, if elementary physics is correct, but it seems to in some cases, namely brains. So we assert that the firing pattern of the brain and the thought are the same without understanding how. It takes us beyond the boundary of science, however, it seems a reasonable conjecture. In any case, I can think of no good scientific philosophy of mind other than this one. Let us grant it then, and see where it leads us.

Leibniz's machines – and we're not so far away from creating such machines with computer technology – might indeed be conscious. There is nothing about the particular kind of goop a brain is made of that makes us think that it is the only substrate that can hold a mind. If the same interactions take place in a network of silicon chips or in a computer program, there is no scientific reason to think that mind will not occur in such substrates. (Of course, it will be impossible to prove that mind exists in computers. However, we can forgive that as it is impossible for me to prove that you have a mind and are not a "zombie". I think, therefore I am; I can prove only my own consciousness, not yours. Incidentally, we humans can never know exactly what it's like to be a non-human animal.)

However, why bias ourselves to assume that the only physical systems that can manifest consciousness are brains? The lesson here is that mind and matter can (sometimes) be identified one with the other, that is, this thought, action or feeling is the motion of matter. What does it matter if the moving is the stuff of brains or other stuff? The brain is a highly complex physical system. The interactions that comprise the exchange and proliferation of genetic material in the evolution of species, are also extremely complex. During the processes of exchange and proliferation of electro-chemical signals in the brain, the various states of consciousness occur. Perhaps the evolutionary processes, (along with many other processes of nature which I'm not addressing at the moment) also possess consciousness.

Perhaps, you could say, from its perspective there is a state of the evolution of a species that is always correlated to its mental state at the time.

There is a debate going on between "evolutionism" and "intelligent design" as ideologies of the origin of the species. Evolutionism sees the processes responsible for evolution as random and senseless, because, they posit, all of nature's interactions are random and senseless. The rules of nature are such that enough random, senseless motion occuring within them produces complex, beautiful, and interesting results. But are all of nature's interactions random and senseless? What about human interactions? Some interactions are purposeful, for example, when we humans act purposefully. Perhaps other physical systems also act purposefully.

Bioforms change and evolve through time through adaptations that make them better suited for their environments. Some of these adaptations are very clever indeed. But you and I mean differently with the word "clever". I take it to be cleverness in the way that people or animals are clever. I don't know what you take it to mean. You kind of mean it as a metaphor. It would take a clever person to design what nature did by chance. But you were willing to accept the word when you first read it.

Whether or not you believe in God, you believe in the existence of the human mind. If so, there is no reason not to believe in other kinds of mind also. If so, then the forces that govern the evolution of bioforms may very well be intelligent.

Friday, May 11, 2007 Reflections After the Biting of a Guy's Nipple by an Alligator on Cable TV

A topic which fascinates me is the sympathy/empathy complex. There are numerous conflicting accounts of the distinction between the two in the psychological literature and in people's minds. In my mind I have two ideas, two different modes of how emotion can be transferred. If you disagree that the two ideas I'm elaborating are "sympathy" and "empathy", that's okay, they are still two different ideas. We attach words to things after we think of their concepts in order to try to characterize them, and when words fail, that doesn't mean we don't possess the concepts.

My definitions are these. Sympathy ("feeling with") is actual participation in a feeling that originates in someone else. Empathy ("feeling into") is a feeling that originates in oneself, when one creates a copy in oneself of the feeling, and feels that copy. One way to look at this is to reflect that one can have empathy into a fictional character, but not sympathy.

An interesting insight into the matter occurred to me as I was watching the movie Jackass (just comes to show how philosophy is everywhere). I saw a man having his nipple bitten by a baby alligator. Ouch. I was cringing for the entire duration. Emotion was transferred. I distinguished three levels of participation in the feeling. First, there was the guy having his nipple bitten. He was in physical pain. Now the idea of any physical pain is problematic, since insofar as a thing is physical, by standard definitions, it does not have feelings at all. He was also screaming, and laughing (curious) and after the humor had registered, he had the incredible urge to act so as to get rid of the fucking alligator. Then there were the people who were with him at the time. They had the "cringe" reaction as well, I'm sure, more profoundly than I did. But where they differed the most with me on the couch, and agreed with the victim was in the urge to act to remove the pain. (They eventually pried to gator's mouth open with a knife). That was a sympathetic reaction. His feeling was motivating their actions. As for me, that was merely empathy. This is perhaps another mark of sympathy distinguishing it from empathy.

Thursday, May 03, 2007 Polytheism for Jews?

Thursday, May 03, 2007
Polytheism for Jews?  

I would sooner be a polytheist than an atheist. Of course (not of course) I am a monotheist. I believe this to be the most rational position of all: That there is a spiritual power underlying all reality and that this power is essentially One. This principle of unity is considered rational in empirical science as well, indeed it is held by many to be the determinant of rationality, that, although we perceive the world as subject to a multiplicity of theories, there is/ought to be a unified theory underlying them all, if only we can discover and understand it. But we do perceive a multiple world.


We do not, however, perceive a world empty of spiritual power as atheists insist. I can defend this view, but not for the purposes of this exploration.


Monotheistic religions tend also to acknowledge a multiplicity of spiritual powers subordinate to God -- the angels. According to a Jewish tradition (cited in the Midrash) for every blade of grass, there is an angel standing over it urging it to grow. If this is granted as true (if only for the sake of argument,) then it is also true that each tree has its angel, and then, every leaf, and then every forest, and then, perhaps, plant life in general. If so, then animal life ought also to have its own angel. If so, the weather should have its own angel, volcanoes, the sun and moon, music, love, fertility, etc. Another tradition holds that each nation has its own guardian angel, If so, then within each nation, sub-societies should have their own angels as well, and each family, and each trade, and international corporations, etc.


I used to think the doctrines of angels to be silly, and opposed to the principle of unity from which monotheism derives its rationality. Yes, we perceive a world wherein God works through multiple channels, but that is a limitation in our perspective; in the final analysis, all is One. When I discovered the following argument, I had to change my position on the matter: Reflect on Descartes' famous argument: I think, therefore I am. Self-consciousness is proof of the existence of the being who is conscious. Therefore, if angels are self-conscious, then even if they are really modifications of God, they have real existence in the same degree as we do. Though I can't prove that angels exist on such an argument, just as I cannot prove you exist as a consciousness, the angel can prove its own existence to itself, just like as can prove your own existence. Therefore, it is not my place to outright deny that the angel, or any other consciousness, exists. It's not merely a question of definition.


According to polytheistic systems with which I am most familiar, which are African and Hindu religions, aside from the vast multiplicity of gods posited, there is also posited a One Supreme Being, of which all these other gods are merely modifications. The theological difference between monotheism which includes angels and such polytheisms is not in the existence of the entities in question, because what monotheisms call God can be identified with the Supreme Being and the angels can be identified with the multiple gods. Neither is it the choice of which gods or angels exist: I don't believe it to be of serious theological significance how we decide to split up God's tasks; we can always split them up differently to explain different things (much in the same way we can draw the lines between different scientific disciplines differently, for example, the domains of biology, chemistry, geology and ecology may overlap or separate depending on the problem we attend). And I think that polytheistic systems typically agree, as, for example, the Romans at the height of their empire had lists of over a million gods from all over its territories, and did not care which gods people worshipped. The divine, like any comprehensive phenomenon, can be split up in lots of different ways. Just like we can split the angels up in lots of different ways, if the angels are the gods, then they too can be split up in lots of different ways.


The difference between polytheism and monotheism thus construed is not in the ontology of the matter, not in what reality is thought to exist, but rather in the nature of the way humans ought to relate to that reality. Monotheism does not bar the existence of very powerful created spirits. But they are thought to be irrelevant to human devotion - or more, that human devotion to such spirits is inappropriate..


With this as background, here is my problem. I am a customer in a restaurant. I know intellectually that the source of the food I am being served is the owner of the restaurant, (and following the chain, the farmers, or the capitalists, or the chefs of the past who invented the recipes –again, there is a measure of arbitrariness in how we split it up. Ultimately, the end of the chain would be God. But for the illustration we'll pretend the restaurant owner is the end of the chain). So I should really be thanking the owner for the food. This may be true enough. But does that mean that I should not also thank the waiter that is serving me now? Similarly, if I am eating an apple, I know I should ask God for and thank Him for the apple. But should I not also thank the tree or the spirit of the tree, or pray to the tree spirits and weather spirits etc? Why should a relationship to the One Supreme God exclude relationships – real relationships – to other spiritual beings?