Living in a world of inductive inferences

(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

Our unfathomable world of inferences. Image source: Wikipedia.

It occurred to me a few years ago, while watching the evening news, how much the world we live in is one of inductive inferences, that is, largely subjective extrapolations and generalizations. I’ve held this intellectual position for a long time but it was only then that it struck me as a deeply felt experience, not just a mere abstraction.

Regardless of our intellectual, religious, or philosophical positions, perhaps most of us assume many more notions about how reality is put together than the empirical facts of experience could justify. In science, this inductively inferred web of notions and beliefs takes the form of models, which are mathematical mock-ups that are to reality much like a map is to the streets of a city. Empirically, only very few positions in the map are actually tested against the actual configurations of the myriad streets it purports to represent. But since the map is generated by a coherent mental procedure – that is, a coherent set of axioms and derivations about the nature of reality, which Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm – by confirming a few of its implications empirically we attain tremendous psychological confidence about the validity of the mental procedure as a whole and, therefore, about the entirety of the map.

For instance, with the Standard Model of particle physics we’ve constructed a pretty good map of matter at the subatomic level, insofar as the Standard Model correctly predicts the vast majority of experimental observations of individual particles and relatively simple systems of particles. In other words, when we test the map against a few, small, isolated alleys of the city, we find an excellent match. And since the map was not put together ad hoc, but derived from a coherent mental procedure, we extrapolate these simple matches and inductively infer that the map accurately represents all the complex networks of streets, highways, junctions, tunnels, and overpasses of the entire city. What gets lost in this is the fact that nobody has ever simulated anything macroscopic, starting from the basic laws of particle physics, to check if the simulated results would match up with the realities we ordinarily experience. In other words, nobody really knows if the reality of the weather, the oceans, forests, people, bothersome neighbors, traffic jams, office intrigues, illnesses, marriages and divorces, teenage delinquency, politics, history, etc., can really be reduced to the empirically verified behavior of subatomic particles. As a matter of fact, nobody even knows if relatively simple, microscopic systems, like large protein molecules or DNA, can be reduced to the basic laws of particle physics. We just assume they can, because such an assumption is an axiom of the current scientific paradigm. Yet who is to say that entirely novel and irreducible causal forces don’t kick in at slightly higher levels of complexity? Who is to say that nature isn’t mostly governed by these non-local causal agencies, which only come into play when enough subatomic particles interact according to configurations currently too complex to test under controlled conditions? I discuss this hypothesis at length in Chapter 6 of Rationalist Spirituality.

An argument often mentioned in defense of science is the effectiveness of technology. We live in a technological society driven by computers, wireless communications, drugs designed at the molecular level, and all kinds of marvelous technological apparatuses. That they all consistently work is a testimony to the correctness of science, one might claim. And the evidence this provides is certainly much more visible and palpable than the relatively few and impenetrable (by comparison) laboratory experiments reported in scientific papers. Yet this argument is fallacious: technology is designed so as to eliminate – by construction – all but the potentially small set of causal forces that are understood by science. Take computers, for example: their binary behavior operates on a statistical basis. If enough electrical charges build up and cross a certain statistical threshold, the computer reads a ‘1;’ otherwise, a ‘0’ is read. It is conceivable that many more causal forces are at play in the buildup of the electrical charges but, through the diligent and ingenious application of statistical techniques, we eliminate their effect by construction. Analogous mechanisms are built into all technologies, for this is the only way to ensure that “noise” and unanticipated factors do not cause our apparatuses to stop working. Amongst those “unanticipated factors” there may lie evidence that things aren’t quite what we think they are…

Science, as a group activity subject to all the psychological and sociological biases of collective human behavior, is just an example of our tendency to extrapolate the little we know and construct vast worlds of inductive inferences to live in. Culture itself already embodies an unfathomable web of extrapolations that most of us take for granted without a second thought; as though they were empirically confirmed facts. From the moment we can understand what is spoken to us, we begin to get entangled in this web. As a result, later in life we end up assuming, for instance, that we are our brains; that our consciousness is a product of brain activity, even though there is not even a tentative, properly formed explanation for how that could possibly be the case. We accept that we are locked up inside what Alan Watts called a “bag of skin,” entirely separate from the world “out there.” We accept that the present is determined by the past, even though all that is available to observation are correlations, not causality (the latter is part of our web of inductive inferences, as I discuss in Chapter 1 of Dreamed up Reality). We assume that all reality is amenable to our rationality and ordinary perception mechanisms, even though we know the same certainly does not apply to amoebae or earthworms. We inductively infer that history and cosmology explain how we got here, even though both seem to revise their stories more often than one would feel comfortable with. We accept that death is the end of our identity and personal history, even though a growing volume of data published in leading medical journals seems to cast doubt on this notion. We believe that truth is literal, everything else being at best a good metaphor and, as such, ultimately unreal. Yet, aboriginal cultures throughout the world are incapable of making a distinction between literal and metaphorical truths (we actually have reason to believe they are correct, as I discuss in my upcoming book Meaning in Absurdity). Clearly, the world we live in is largely a matter of education and culture – of projected, inductively inferred concepts – not of hard empirical facts. If one looks critically and skeptically enough, there is precious little of the latter, if any.

Reality is far too diverse, broad, elusive, ambiguous, and complex for us to pin it down empirically to any sufficient degree. Even the empirical data we do collect can only be interpreted within the framework of a paradigm of thought and is, therefore, not really neutral. But in our desperate search for closure we confabulate models and extrapolations to construct unfathomable edifices of assumed truths. They make up the world we actually live in as far as our experience of reality; a world of stories, not facts.

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TEDx Brainport talk on the limits of logic

TEDx Brainport poster.

On Friday, May 13th, I’ll be giving a talk at the TEDxBrainport event in Eindhoven, a locally organized part of the famous TED series. In there, I will be discussing some of my latest thoughts on logic and ontology – that is, on the nature of our thoughts, truth, and reality – as elaborated upon in my third, upcoming book Meaning in Absurdity (to be published by IFF towards the end of 2011 or early in 2012). The key idea I will explore in my talk is the scope of logic in our ongoing efforts to make sense of nature and of ourselves. We tend to think that, through logical and rational inquiry, we can and will eventually uncover all the mysteries of nature and of being. But that thought rests on an unjustified assumption – namely, that the limits of logic and rationality are at least coextensive with the boundaries of reality. In other words, we must assume that all reality is amenable to logic, as if logic were a somewhat omnipotent intellectual tool.

Yet we know since the time of Agrippa and his famous Trilemma that one cannot use logic to justify the validity of logic itself. Therefore, for all we know, the entire edifice of our rationality may rest on a shaky foundation of intuition alone. As it turns out, recent experiments in physics even suggest that the core foundation of our logic, the correspondence theory of truth, has no grounding whatsoever in empirical reality. So here is the question I want to ask in my talk: In order to make sense of reality and of our condition in it, do we need to transcend our current logic and rationality?

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Rationalist Spirituality Questions and Answers

Cover of Rationalist Spirituality.

In the context of the PR campaign around my first book, Rationalist Spirituality, a Q&A was produced that touches on the key points and ideas elaborated upon in the book. It is a very nice and short overview, and I thought it would be nice to share it with you here. It takes the form of a brief interview with me; see below. And if you have already read the book, I'd certainly welcome an honest review on amazon.com and/or amazon.co.uk!

Q: Today’s science appears to be able to explain everything in nature, leaving little or no room for spirituality. How is it then that you claim in your book that spirituality is compatible with science?

A: There are at least three ways in which science does not explain everything, which I discuss extensively in my book. First, our “theories of everything” are verified experimentally only at a microscopic level. We believe that the same theories could explain everyday things like life and the weather; but we don’t really know if they do, because nobody today can perform the necessary simulations to see if it all checks out. Second, there are many mysteries in science today. More than 95% of the universe is composed of so-called dark matter and dark energy, things we know nothing about. Moreover, the latest theories in physics postulate many extra dimensions of space beyond the three dimensions we ordinarily experience. This is a lot of room for unknowns. Finally, the most familiar and obvious of all phenomena – conscious experience itself – is a baffling mystery to science. We have no idea how supposedly unconscious matter can give rise to conscious experience in the brain.

Q: Why is it that consciousness is such a mystery? After all, brain science seems to have made enormous progress in explaining mind states through the workings of the brain. We often see images of brain scans that seem to explain all kinds of human behaviors and emotions.

A: Yes, neurology has made enormous progress in explaining what happens in the brain alongside conscious experiences, but not the origin of those conscious experiences themselves. In other words, we have discovered that certain states of mind come together with certain states of the brain, but we do not know how or why we experience those brain states subjectively. Let me illustrate this with an analogy: Take your personal computer; it is a very sophisticated machine capable of interacting with its environment in highly complex ways. To do what it does, it performs lots of computations. These computations are analogous to the brain states neurologists can measure with brain scans. But most people would assume that computers do not experience those computations the way we experience our brain states. Most people would indeed assume that computers do their job “in the dark,” without conscious awareness. Why not us? Why and how do we subjectively experience the computations in our brains? Why don’t we also operate “in the dark” like computers seem to? Nobody today has an answer for that.

Q: How does that link up with what people normally understand by spirituality?

A: Historically, there have been many properties people have attributed to the human “soul.” But one stands out: conscious experience. If consciousness cannot – as it currently appears to be the case – be explained by the behavior of matter, then it must originate from aspects of reality completely unknown to science. These yet unknown aspects of reality may be related to what seers of all ages have called spiritual realms. Moreover, if consciousness is not generated by the material brain, then there is no rational reason to believe that consciousness ceases after bodily death.

Q: Okay, but then I still insist on an earlier question: If consciousness is not generated by the brain, then how come neuroscientists find such perfect correlations between conscious experience and measurable states of the brain?

A: The hypothesis here is that, although the brain does not generate consciousness, consciousness is coupled to the brain in such a way that brain states frame what one experiences. In other words, you are only conscious of what happens in the brain, so if one messes up with the brain, that alters what one experiences. You see, because we cannot explain consciousness through the behavior of matter, we must postulate that consciousness is a fundamental property of nature, like space-time itself. As such, it is reasonable to postulate that consciousness is like a field, grounded on yet unknown aspects of reality. This consciousness field then manifests itself in material reality wherever a suitable structure, like a brain, is present. You could think of consciousness as radio waves that manifest themselves mechanically whenever the suitable substrate – namely, radio receivers – is available. Since the interaction of the consciousness field with material reality is mediated by the brain, it is expectable that brain states determine what one consciously experiences. For instance, if you interfere with the brain through the use of substances – like alcohol or anesthesia – such interference will frame conscious experience to the extent that consciousness, while coupled to the brain, perceives material reality only through the workings of the brain. Yet that does not imply that the brain generates consciousness; merely that it frames conscious perception.

Q: So brains are mechanisms for allowing an otherwise transcendent field of consciousness to interact with material reality?

A: Precisely. In fact, I discuss and substantiate this hypothesis quite extensively in my book, on the basis of recent scientific evidence.

Q: But why would a consciousness field need to interact with material reality? 

A: Well, I think there is a very good hypothesis for why such mechanisms may have naturally evolved. You see, if consciousness is not coupled to a discrete brain so to assume a localized perspective – a particular point-of-view, if you will – in space-time, then consciousness cannot experience information. In order to access information coming in from a world “out there,” consciousness must be anchored to a brain “in here.” It is this anchoring of consciousness to a discrete space-time identity that enables the experience of the world “out there.” Such contrast between a localized identity “in here” and an apparently external playground of experiences is an essential ingredient for learning and evolution; it may be the evolutionary motivation behind the very existence of material reality.

Q: So, in a way, you are saying that our brains and bodies are tools for learning and evolution.

A: I indeed believe that to be a very reasonable and likely possibility on the basis of everything we know today. This is a central idea in my book.

Q: So the meaning of life is to learn?

A: This sounds pretty cliché, doesn’t it? Yet, having thought about this carefully for years, I concluded that there can be no other answer here. But allow me to convey a few more nuances so to substantiate this conclusion a bit more. You see, the meaning of life can only be something that survives our existence in a way that transcends time. Whatever achievement of our lives cannot survive eternity must be fundamentally meaningless, in the sense that it will not add anything perennial to the fabric of reality. As such, the so-called “second law of thermodynamics” – a law that basically states that everything will eventually dissolve into disorder – informs us that nothing in material reality survives forever. But since we have concluded that consciousness fundamentally transcends material reality, then experience itself is not subject to the second law; experience survives eternity and fundamentally adds something to the fabric of reality. Therefore, the only avenue open for meaning is the avenue of subjective experience. The meaning of life must be, in this sense, the learning and integration of new experiences.

Q: It sounds like you are talking about some kind of cosmic memory where all experiences – and corresponding learning – are stored for all eternity. Yet we often forget things in our ordinary lives. If memories are stored in the brain, wouldn’t the memories of all experiences be lost upon physical death? How could this learning then survive eternity?

A: Our ordinary awareness is coupled to the mechanisms of the brain in such a way that all we are conscious of are the cognitive symbols circulating inside the brain. As such, when we “run out of room” in the brain to circulate cognitive symbols related to past events, we appear to “forget” those events. But notice that the idea of “forgetting” only makes sense insofar as consciousness is coupled to the brain. In its fundamental state, we have no reason to infer that material limitations would still apply to consciousness. Indeed, transpersonal psychology has empirically observed the existence of ordinarily unconscious levels of the human mind. We all seem to share this collective unconscious mind, which constitutes a universal repository of all conscious experiences. It is a reasonable possibility that such collective, universal level of the mind corresponds to the fundamental state of consciousness prior to coupling to brains. So we should not extrapolate the material limitations of the brain to the fundamental state of consciousness. Every conscious experience may indeed survive, forever, in ordinarily unconscious levels of the mind.

Q: Returning to the idea of the human soul; how would you place such idea in your system?

A: There are many definitions for the word “soul,” so I must be careful in answering this question. Let us say that soul is a form of identity that survives bodily death. Now notice that our sense of identity is fundamentally associated to memory. If tomorrow you were to forget everything you went though in your life prior to that point, would you still have the same sense of identity? Probably not. You would instead begin to build up a new sense of identity. Now, as we discussed earlier, if all conscious experiences survive forever at the most fundamental level of consciousness, then all which gives us our sense of identity also survives forever. All of our memories, experiences, and self-image, everything that has anything to do with the concept of “I” as an entity, will thus survive bodily death. From this point of view, the concept of an immortal soul seems indeed to make good rational sense.

Q: What about wars, famine, injustice, loss, despair, and all kinds of “evil” actions and negative experiences we are all exposed to? What sense could those have in this process of learning you are describing?

A: This is tough to answer in that it is difficult to avoid passing moral judgments in the answer. But let me try: Every experience entails learning. Personally, I’ve had periods of explosive insight and even heightened creativity that have been triggered by some of the worst experiences of my life. They made me reevaluate my conception of reality, my choices, and my views of others. My book is itself the result of an attempt to integrate a very difficult period of my life. To the extent that negative experiences eventually turn out to be tools for a broader view of reality, they make absolute sense as far as the meaning of existence we have been discussing. Even if one is in a coma and, therefore, unable to have experiences, his or her situation may in itself be a tool that enables other people’s experiences: those of his or her family and caregivers, for instance. There is a way in which the worldview described in my book frames every conceivable experience in life as a valid and meaningful one, though it also validates moral choices. If such a view is correct, then life is always meaningful and worthwhile, whatever the circumstances.

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The taboo against meaning

(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

Philosopher in Meditation (detail) by Rembrandt. Public domain image.

Many people, scientists included, believe the greatest taboo in science to be the taboo against "magic." After all, science is a method for deriving explanations for everything in terms of other things. Nothing happens "by magic," but is the outcome of a long, and sometimes nearly unfathomable, chain of causality.

However, there are many historical examples in science of what we would today call "magic." For instance, during the Renaissance scientists attempted to explain electrostatic attraction by postulating the existence of an invisible substance, called "effluvium," stretching out across bodies. Strange as it may sound today, at the time effluvium was considered as legitimate an explanation for empirical observations as subatomic particles (equally invisible) are now. As the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, scientists began trying to frame every phenomenon in terms of the action of small corpuscles interacting through direct contact. Any explanation that did not conform to this template was considered "magic" and, therefore, invalid. That is why the ideas of an English scientist called Isaac Newton were ignored and even ridiculed for decades: Newton dared to propose that objects attracted one another from a distance through an invisible, mysterious force he called "gravity." Yet we know how that story developed.

You see, magic is not really a taboo in science. It has never been. After all, the chain of reduction has to end somewhere. One cannot keep on explaining one thing in terms of another forever. Eventually, one must postulate fundamental properties of nature that are not reducible to, or explainable by, anything else. These fundamental properties are what they are simply because that's how nature is; period. This is where science legitimately accepts "magic." Electromagnetic waves vibrating in a vacuum sounds pretty much like magic (after all, what is it that vibrates, given that it all happens in a vacuum?) but that's just how nature is. Imagining the fabric of space-time twisting and bending in the presence of condensed energy (what is energy, by the way?) also sounds like magic, but who are we to judge it? It's just the way things are. In the course of the history of science, we have chosen different things to label as "fundamental properties." Each time this choice changed, the previous one was made to look like silly "magic." But at all times have we accepted "magical," fundamental properties of nature; indeed, perhaps never more so than today, with the advent of quantum mechanics and the new multiverse cosmologies.

No, magic has never been the real taboo. The real taboo is meaning.

Once scientists thought that the Earth was the center of the universe. Ptolemaic astronomy could explain nearly all astronomical observations of its time, based on just such an assumption. That gave us humans a sense of being special, significant, meaningful: we were the center of existence, after all; the heavens turned around us. But it was not to last. And once scientists realized that our planet was just a rock going around the sun along with countless other rocks (i.e. the other planets, moons, and the asteroid belt), a great sense of shame must have ensued. How ridiculous and stupid astronomers must have felt; all their aspirations of meaning and significance shattered beyond repair.

And it happened again; and again. For instance, for centuries we believed that living creatures differed fundamentally from inanimate objects in that we were powered by a special force later called "élan vital," or "life force." Indeed, we were special because, out of all of creation, we were animated by this divine force. Our existence must, therefore, have had a special meaning to motivate such distinction. Life had a purpose; we had a purpose. But again, it was not to last. Today, the vast majority of scientists extrapolate the little we know of molecular biology and assume that life is merely a mechanical process at a molecular level. In other words, we are just machines, not fundamentally different from rocks except in that metabolism operates slightly faster than crystallization or erosion. Again we fell flat on our faces. We are not special or meaningful; we're just like everything else.

Psychologically, these are very powerful experiences. When you have aspirations of significance and the world conspires to show you, very publicly, how deluded you have been and how unimportant you are, the shame and sense of inappropriateness that ensues can be devastating. It is easy to imagine how this could have built right into the culture and values of science a deep phobia against delusions of meaning. No, it is better to assume the very worst and be positively surprised than to expect some kind of meaning and be, again, ridiculed. Let us thus assume, as a matter of principle, that there is no meaning, and then let nature prove to us that we are wrong. This way, we turn the tables on nature: we challenge her to try and humiliate us again, if she can! For this time we are ready with our shields of skepticism and cynicism. Never again will we be made to look like fools... or so the subconscious thought might go.

The problem is that, over time, such cautious value system can (and, in my view, did) turn into a taboo. Don't get me wrong: having spent time with some of the greatest bastions of science, I do not think this is, in any way, a Machiavellian conspiracy. Scientists are overwhelmingly honest in that they do believe they are following the correct intellectual avenues. The taboo against meaning is a cultural value that has been unconsciously taught and learned over generations, and which is now so deeply ingrained in the way-of-thinking of most scientists that it goes undetected.

Nonetheless, and leaving aside its built-in bias, a taboo against meaning has the potential to be as naive and delusional as the aspiration of meaning itself. The idea behind the taboo is that we are not special: Who are we to assume that our existence has any meaning anyway? But you see, who are we to decree that it does not? What do we know anyway? The historical instances where our aspirations of meaning were proven hollow represented very naive conceptions of meaning. Today, who would associate the idea of meaning to being physically located in some kind of cosmological center? Our conception of meaning has become much more sophisticated and subtle.

The fact is, the universe exists; life exists. Assuming that it all came out of nowhere for no reason is, I believe, as much a leap of faith as anything else.

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The God Helmet

Photo by Dr. M.A. Persinger. Public domain image.

A research team in Canada has, for some time now, used a strange device to induce, on demand, religious-like experiences in volunteers. The device is a modified helmet with attached magnetic coils. The idea is that the coils produce fluctuating magnetic fields that affect the volunteers' brains in such a way as to induce quasi-mystical states, including the feeling of an ethereal presence.

Many TV documentaries, including a normally reliable and trustworthy British series, have now portrayed the so-called "God Helmet" experiments as evidence for the hypothesis that religious or mystical experiences are "nothing but" the product of mere brain physiology. Although such a reductionist hypothesis is clearly consistent with the experimental results, I take exception with the implicit suggestion that it is the only hypothesis the results support. In my view, such suggestion is, at best, the reflection of intellectual laziness, unconscious bias, or faulty logic.

Eminent Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad had already postulated, decades ago, the idea that consciousness may be a broad, non-local property of the fabric of nature at large. As such, brains are like reduction valves: they provide a space-time locus to anchor consciousness, but they do not generate consciousness. The nervous system (including sense organs) may have evolved to focus conscious perception on what is relevant to the immediate survival of the physical body. It filters out everything else so we are not overwhelmed with torrents of perceptions that do not correlate with the space-time location of the body. This is, to this day, a very reasonable hypothesis. Indeed, it seems more conducive to a resolution of the "hard problem of consciousness" than the idea that brains magically generate consciousness out of an unconscious material substrate.

In Rationalist Spirituality, particularly in Chapters 7 and 8, I extensively elaborate on this idea. We have a wealth of empirical evidence, namely from the field of transpersonal psychology, that human consciousness transcends the boundaries of the brain at ordinarily subconscious levels. In that book, I hypothesize that the brain is like a transceiver of conscious perception. As such, the role of the brain is to constrain conscious perception to a space-time locus, enabling the emergence of what we call "information." The brain does not generate consciousness, but provides a mechanism for constraining and localizing the range of consciousness. Logically, if such mechanism were to fail or be interfered with in just the right way, it would allow conscious perception to jump back to its unconstrained, non-local state. In the book, I mention scientific studies supportive of this hypothesis.

I submit that the God Helmet results can be construed to lend support to the hypothesis that the brain is a mechanism for constraining and localizing consciousness, the latter being a primary (i.e. not epiphenomenal) property of nature at large. By interfering with the volunteers' brain functioning through fluctuating magnetic fields, the helmet is merely interfering with the ability of the localization mechanism to perform its job. As a result, the consciousness of the volunteers partially and temporarily escapes the space-time locus it was ordinarily constrained to, leading to religious-like experiences.

The correlation between consciousness and brain function is undeniable. But it is simplistic and intellectually lazy to assume that this correlation necessarily entails a direct causal link between the two. We must maintain the rational discipline required to not discard alternative hypotheses that are equally supported by the empirical evidence at hand. It is perfectly reasonable, in light of the data at hand, to postulate that physical interference with the functioning of the brain (be it through a God Helmet, meditative breathing, psychoactive substances, brain entrainment machines, sensory deprivation, ordeals, etc.) can qualitatively modulate conscious experiences, even when we assume that consciousness is not generated by the brain.

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Pandeism, Pantheism, and Panentheism

The symbol of Pantheism, by the world Pantheist movement.

Reader Knuje asked me to comment on the following question:

I'd like your opinion as a scientist on a spiritual question -- given our current state of knowledge of the mechanics of our Universe, is it plausible for an entity to be "omniscient" and "omnipresent" and yet exist as detached from our physical Universe?

It appears to me that the question centers on the difference between what has traditionally been called "Pandeism" and "Pantheism" on the one hand, and "Panentheism" on the other hand.

In the philosophies of Pandeism and Pantheism, the deity and the universe are one and the same. There are two ways one can approach this. First, if one simply defines the deity to be synonym with nature itself, then one is simply playing a game of words; no new qualities are attributed to nature other than the known qualities of nature itself. Second, one may postulate that qualities normally attributed to the deity (consciousness, intelligence, omniscience, etc.) are, by operation of the identification of nature with the deity, inherent properties of nature itself; in other words, one postulates that the underlying fabric of nature embodies the properties of being conscious, intelligent, sentient, etc. It appears to me that only the second approach to Pandeism or Pantheism is a philosophical position interesting to debate, since the first is merely an arbitrary word definition.

Now, according to the philosophy of Panentheism, the whole of nature is in the deity, but the deity transcends nature. In other words, although nature is God, God is not limited to nature. Here, the entire approach hangs on how we define "nature," since the deity is supposed to transcend that definition. Indeed, if we define "nature" as the totality of existence – both known and unknown aspects – then Panentheism is, by mere definition, incorrect, since we leave no space for anything that might transcend such definition.

What alternatives are we left with? I submit that there is one reasonable alternative: What we call "nature" is but the totality of our current perception and understanding of existence. This encompasses everything we can possibly attribute to nature at the present time, but leaves room for aspects or properties of nature that are, today, entirely unknown to us. In that case, Panentheism states that the deity transcends nature (according to this definition of nature) to the extent that our apprehension of nature is incomplete. The difference between Pandeism and Pantheism on the one hand, and Panentheism on the other, then boils down to an epistemological question centered on human cognition.

It would, in my view, be presumptuous to assume that our cognition of nature is mostly complete. History has shown us that people who have held such optimistic position in the past have been proven wrong again and again. Famously, physicist Lord Kelvin stated, only a few years before the Relativity revolution led by Albert Einstein, that physics was done and only required minor fine-tuning. Therefore, if we leave open the possibility that, in the future, we may become cognizant of aspects of nature that would be even more unimaginable to us today than Relativity was to Lord Kelvin, then we could say that Panentheism seems like a reasonable philosophical position to take (at least as far as the semantic definition of the word).

The real question, of course, is whether such yet unimaginable aspects of nature would be compatible with, or at least suggestive of, the qualities we normally attribute to the deity: consciousness, intelligence, omniscience, etc. That is a question probably nobody can answer today. Yet, the paradigms of scientific thought have gone through many surprising revolutions in the past (as Thomas Kuhn masterfully uncovered). The possibility that science may come to embrace fundamental natural properties unthinkable within the scope of the reigning materialistic paradigm cannot be discarded.

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Meaning in Absurdity

Cover of Meaning in Absurdity.

It has been many months since I last wrote in here. Such gap has not been planned and is not the result of mere neglect or lack of interest. Indeed, there have been several subjects I have been meaning to touch upon and share ideas on with you here. However, one of these ideas has taken on a life of its own: It has developed into a major research project that has demanded most of my free time. The hard fruits of that work have now turned into the manuscript for a third book, tentatively titled Meaning in Absurdity, which has just been accepted for publication.

Here is the tentative blurb of this new book, exclusively for you:

This book is an experiment. Inspired by the bizarre and uncanny, it is an attempt to use logic to expose the illogical foundations of logic; an attempt to use science to peek beyond the limits of science; an attempt to use rationality to lift the veil off the irrational. Its ways are unconventional: weaving along its path one finds UFOs and fairies, quantum mechanics, analytic philosophy, history, mathematics, and depth psychology. The enterprise of constructing a coherent story out of these incommensurable disciplines is exploratory. But if the experiment works, at the end all these disparate threads will come together to unveil a startling scenario about the nature of reality and our condition within it. The payoff is handsome: a reason for hope, a boost for the imagination, and the promise of a meaningful future. But it does not come for free: this book may confront some of your dearest notions about truth and reason. Yet, one cannot dismiss its conclusions lightly, because the evidence it compiles and the philosophy it leverages are solid in the orthodox, academic sense.

If all goes to plan, it should be out late in 2011. Hopefully, you will consider it worth the wait! In the meantime, Rationalist Spirituality has now been out for 2 months. You can have a look at it at Google Books. If you've had the opportunity to read it, and have some spare time, I'd much welcome an honest review on Amazon USA and/or Amazon UK.

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