Excerpts from the book "The Plain Truth About God-101"
(what the church doesn't want you to know!)
I've found Jesus!
He was hiding behind the sofa the whole time!
I believe in God!
I just don't trust anyone that works for him!
“I look after the big picture, son.” Said God!
“Life is a crap-shoot. You take your chances like everyone else!”
-George Burns as God-
”Life is what it is!” –Anonymous
God inspired the bible, he didn't write it. People base their lives around the manic scribbling of a bunch of desert baked primitives who ate bugs and honey! Of course they saw God! -Anonymous
Muslims have their holy day on Friday, Jews on Saturday and Christians on Sunday. Since we are all "Theists" and "people of the book" it would be nice to find a way to harmonize all three beliefs. Aside from the obvious results of an end to religious strife, one of the most immediate benefits would be a three-day weekend!
-A.W.J.
The bible states clearly that nobody can earn his salvation through morality and good deeds (Gnosticism) since we are all sinful by nature. We have the perfect catch 22 situation were only in the blind acceptance of Christ atoning for our deeds can we be saved. In other words, we are in a no-win situation against the so-called logic of the shaman; if we do not take his word for it then all is lost! –A.W.J.
When I look at the arrogance of Islam with the way they treat women and the brutality they exhibit towards others under the direction of their Imam’s, it seems very disturbing that a major world religion can exhibit such barbaric acts.
That is until we realize that Christianity is guilty of just as many, if not more infractions against humanity through its history. Islam is one of the youngest of the major religions and still rooted in its origins. Let’s face it, almost everyone in the six and seventh centuries held comparable views to what Islam does today, including the Christians. -A.W.J.
“Consciousness is the physical manifestation of God within us!” -A.W.J.
"Conscience is God's presence in man.” -Emanuel Seidenberg
If faith were the result of logical reasoning, we could expect that most intelligent people would by now be converted to one ideology or the other! –A.W.J.
A Hinduism and Zen truism: “A person is like a drop of water separated from the sea. To fall as rain, it considers itself distinct from the world soul. Then, through hill and dale, its destiny is to return to the sea!”
"I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.” --Lao-Tzu
You give but little when you give of your possessions.
It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
--Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
"The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning."-Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986)
I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and by men who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other is mistaken in the belief, and perhaps in some respects, both.
I hope it will not be irreverent of me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me. --Abraham Lincoln
"I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure. That is all that agnosticism means.” - Clarence Darrow.
There seems to be an abundance of GOD'S on this planet. There is the God of Abraham, the God of Muhammad, and the GOD of Jesus. Then there is the loving GOD, the all-powerful GOD, the vengeful GOD, the GOD of grace, the GOD of peace and the GOD'S of war. There is also the “Holy Trinity,” which is actually “three for the price of one,” and even a "dead" GOD. -A.W.J.
”What can you say about a society that thinks God is dead and Elvis
is alive!” -- Irv Kupcinet
“If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators
would be dead!” --Johnny Carson
Sacred cows make the best hamburger. -- Mark Twain
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” -Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
"One of my objections to religion is that it prevents the search for
God.” --Arthur C. Clarke
AND FINALLY:
Perhaps the greatest sin of the Western churches (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) has been the particular brand of narcissism that impels so many to feel they have God all sewn up and put in their back pocket. People who think that they not only have a ticket to heaven, but anyone who disagrees with them is going straight to hell! They believe in God, but do not believe that God is bigger than their own theology. In their arrogance they do not realized that God is not theirs to possess! -Paraphrased from M. Scott Peck.
Your "That's all Folks!" scribe;
Allan W Janssen
Showing posts with label conciousness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conciousness. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
I Think, Therefore I Are!
O.K. boys and girls, this is one of those rare times when we have to get serious about something.
I ran across an article by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times that is not only fascinating, but I also consider it extremely important for anyone that has an "inquiring mind!"
Now I know it's awfully long but please bear with me because this guy is very knowledgeable and puts things in such a way that they are easy to understand. (For poor dullards like myself!) If it gets too tedious skip down a bit or come back to it but please DO read it!!
Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: January 2, 2007
I was a free man until they brought the dessert menu around. There was one of those molten chocolate cakes, and I was suddenly being dragged into a vortex, swirling helplessly toward caloric doom, sucked toward the edge of a black (chocolate) hole. Visions of my father’s heart attack danced before my glazed eyes.
My wife, Nancy, had a resigned look on her face.
The outcome, endlessly replayed whenever we go out, is never in doubt, though I often cover my tracks by offering to split my dessert with the table.
O.K., I can imagine what you’re thinking. There but for the grace of God.....
Having just lived through another New Year’s Eve, many of you have just resolved to be better, wiser, stronger and richer in the coming months and years.
After all, we’re free humans, not slaves, robots or animals doomed to repeat the same boring mistakes over and over again. Right?????
As William James wrote in 1890, the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.”
Get over it, Dr. James. Go get yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest.
A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.
As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.
“Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Maryland. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.
“If people freak at evolution,” he wrote in an e-mail message,“how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”
Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said, “when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”
Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force.
People experience free will. They have a sense that they are free.
But, “The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.
That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”
Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said.
How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free will. The traditional definition is called libertarian or deep free will. It holds that humans are free moral agents whose actions are not predetermined.
This school of thought says in effect that the whole chain of cause and effect in the history of the universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.
At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.
“That strikes many people as incoherent,” said Dr. Silberstein, who noted that every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random. “Both are bad news for free will,” he said.
So if human actions can’t be caused and aren’t random, he said, “It must be — what — some weird magical power?”
People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.
But whatever that power is — call it soul or the spirit — those people have to explain how it could stand independent of the physical universe and yet reach from the immaterial world and meddle in our own, jiggling brain cells that lead us to say the words “molten chocolate.”
A vote in favor of free will comes from some physicists, who say it is a prerequisite for inventing theories and planning experiments.
That is especially true when it comes to quantum mechanics, the strange paradoxical theory that ascribes a microscopic randomness to the foundation of reality.
Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist at the University of Vienna, said recently that quantum randomness was “not a proof, just a hint, telling us we have free will.”
Is there any evidence beyond our own intuitions and introspection's that humans work that way?
In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger,
Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.
The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.
In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.
Dr. Libet’s results have been reproduced again and again over the years, along with other experiments that suggest that people can be easily fooled when it comes to assuming ownership of their actions.
Patients with tics or certain diseases, like chorea, cannot say whether their movements are voluntary or involuntary, Dr. Hallett said.
In some experiments, subjects have been tricked into believing they are responding to stimuli they couldn’t have seen in time to respond to, or into taking credit or blame for things they couldn’t have done.
Take, for example, the “voodoo experiment” by Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, and Emily Pronin of Princeton. In the experiment, two people are invited to play witch doctor.
One person, the subject, puts a curse on the other by sticking pins into a doll. The second person, however, is in on the experiment, and by prior arrangement with the doctors, acts either obnoxious, so that the pin-sticker dislikes him, or nice.
After a while, the ostensible victim complains of a headache. In cases in which he or she was unlikable, the subject tended to claim responsibility for causing the headache, an example of the “magical thinking” that makes baseball fans put on their rally caps.
“We made it happen in a lab,” Dr. Wegner said.
Is a similar sort of magical thinking responsible for the experience of free will?
“We see two tips of the iceberg, the thought and the action,” Dr. Wegner said, “and we draw a connection.”
However, most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the conscious mind is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking can give a golfer the yips. Drivers perform better on automatic pilot.
Fiction writers report writing in a kind of trance in which they simply take dictation from the voices and characters in their head, a grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers.
Naturally, almost everyone has a slant on such experiments and whether or not the word “illusion” should be used in describing free will.
Dr. Libet said his results left room for a limited version of free will in the form of a veto power over what we sense ourselves doing. In effect, the unconscious brain proposes and the mind disposes.
In a 1999 essay, he wrote that although this might not seem like much, it was enough to satisfy ethical standards. “Most of the Ten Commandments are ‘do not’ orders,” he wrote.
But, that might seem a pinched and diminished form of free will.
Dr. Dennett, the Tufts professor, is one of many who have tried to redefine free will in a way that involves no escape from the materialist world while still offering enough autonomy for moral responsibility, which seems to be what everyone cares about.
The belief that the traditional intuitive notion of a free will divorced from causality is inflated, metaphysical nonsense, Dr. Dennett says reflecting an outdated dualistic view of the world.
Rather, Dr. Dennett argues, it is precisely our immersion in causality and the material world that frees us.
Evolution, history and culture, he explains, have endowed us with feedback systems that give us the unique ability to reflect and think things over and to imagine the future. Free will and determinism can co-exist.
“All the varieties of free will worth having, we have,” Dr. Dennett said.
“We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes,” he said. “We have the power of imagination, to see and imagine futures.”
In this regard, causality is not our enemy but our friend, giving us the ability to look ahead and plan. “That’s what makes us moral agents,” Dr. Dennett said. “You don’t need a miracle to have responsibility.”
Other philosophers disagree on the degree and nature of such “freedom.” Their arguments partly turn on the extent to which collections of things, whether electrons or people, can transcend their origins and produce novel phenomena.
These so-called emergent phenomena, like brains and stock markets, or the idea of democracy, grow naturally in accordance with the laws of physics, so the story goes.
But, once they are here, they play by new rules, and can even act on their constituents, as when an artist envisions a teapot and then sculpts it — a concept sometimes known as “downward causation.”
A knowledge of quarks is no help in predicting hurricanes — it’s physics all the way down. Does the same apply to the stock market or to the brain? Are the rules elusive just because we can’t solve the equations or because something fundamentally new happens when we increase numbers and levels of complexity?
Opinions vary about whether it will ultimately prove to be physics all the way down, total independence from physics, or some shade in between, and thus how free we are.
Dr. Silberstein, the Elizabethtown College professor, said, “There’s nothing in fundamental physics by itself that tells us we can’t have such emergent properties when we get to different levels of complexities.”
He waxed poetically as he imagined how the universe would evolve, with more and more complicated forms emerging from primordial quantum muck as from an elaborate computer game, in accordance with a few simple rules: “If you understand, you ought to be awestruck, you ought to be bowled over.”
George R. F. Ellis, a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, said that freedom could emerge from this framework as well. “A nuclear bomb, for example, proceeds to detonate according to the laws of nuclear physics,” he explained in an e-mail message. “Whether it does indeed detonate is determined by political and ethical considerations, which are of a completely different order.”
I have to admit that I find these kind of ideas inspiring, if not liberating. However, I worry that I am being sold a sort of psychic perpetual motion machine.
Free wills, ideas, phenomena created by physics but not accountable to it. Do they offer a release from the chains of determinism or just a prescription for a very intricate weave of the links?
Therefore, I sought clarity from mathematicians and computer scientists.
According to deep mathematical principles, they say, even machines can become too complicated to predict their own behavior and would labor under the delusion of free will.
If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer’s operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions.
But, Dr. Lloyd said, “If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system will say ‘I don’t know, wait and see, and I’ll make decisions and let you know.’ ”
Why can’t computers say what they’re going to do? In 1930, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel proved that in any formal system of logic, which includes mathematics and a kind of idealized computer called a Turing machine, there are statements that cannot be proven either true or false.
Among them are self-referential statements like the famous paradox stated by the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who said that all Cretans are liars: if he is telling the truth, then, as a Cretan, he is lying.
One implication is that no system can contain a complete representation of itself, or as Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College of Columbia University and author of the 2006 novel about Gödel, “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines,” said: “Gödel says you can’t program intelligence as complex as yourself. But, you can let it evolve. A complex machine would still suffer from the illusion of free will.”
Another implication is there is no algorithm, or recipe for computation, to determine when or if any given computer program will finish some calculation.
The only way to find out is to set it computing and see what happens. Any way to find out would be tantamount to doing the calculation itself.
“There are no shortcuts in computation,” Dr. Lloyd said.
That means that the more reasonably you try to act, the more unpredictable you are, at least to yourself, Dr. Lloyd said. Even if your wife knows you will order the chile rellenos, you have to live your life to find out.
To him that sounds like free will of a sort, for machines as well as for us. Our actions are determined, but so what? We still don’t know what they will be until the waiter brings the tray.
That works for me, because I am comfortable with so-called physicalist reasoning, and I’m always happy to leverage concepts of higher mathematics to cut through philosophical knots.
The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility.
According to those who believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein said in an e-mail message, it would mean that “people are no more responsible for their actions than asteroids or planets.” Anything would go.
What about Hitler?
Dr. Wegner of Harvard said, “We worry that explaining evil condones it. We have to maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a theory of evil in advance that could keep him from coming to power?”
He added, “A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying them back for what they’ve done might be a good thing.”
Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have little effect on people’s lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.
“It’s an illusion, but it’s a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back,” he said, comparing it to a magician’s trick that has been seen again and again. “Even though you know it’s a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don’t go away.”
In an essay about free will in 1999, Dr. Libet wound up quoting the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said in an interview with the Paris Review, “The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living.”
I could skip the chocolate cake, I really could, but why bother? Waiter!
Dennis Overbye will answer select readers' questions regarding this article. E-mail your questions to askscience@nytimes.com. E-mails may be published. Answers will be posted on nytimes.com/science on Friday, January 5, 2007.
So there you have it! Complicated? Yes! Important? Definitely! But, free will aside, the study of consciousness is even more convoluted and we won’t get into that here!
Let’s just leave it with a phrase that satisfies me:
Consciousness is the physical manifestation of GOD within us!
Or this;
** I AM – GOD
** I Think, Therefore I am -Descartes
** I yam what I yam, and that's all what I yam. –Popeye
Your "inquiring" scribe;
Allan W Janssen
Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html
I ran across an article by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times that is not only fascinating, but I also consider it extremely important for anyone that has an "inquiring mind!"
Now I know it's awfully long but please bear with me because this guy is very knowledgeable and puts things in such a way that they are easy to understand. (For poor dullards like myself!) If it gets too tedious skip down a bit or come back to it but please DO read it!!
Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: January 2, 2007
I was a free man until they brought the dessert menu around. There was one of those molten chocolate cakes, and I was suddenly being dragged into a vortex, swirling helplessly toward caloric doom, sucked toward the edge of a black (chocolate) hole. Visions of my father’s heart attack danced before my glazed eyes.
My wife, Nancy, had a resigned look on her face.
The outcome, endlessly replayed whenever we go out, is never in doubt, though I often cover my tracks by offering to split my dessert with the table.
O.K., I can imagine what you’re thinking. There but for the grace of God.....
Having just lived through another New Year’s Eve, many of you have just resolved to be better, wiser, stronger and richer in the coming months and years.
After all, we’re free humans, not slaves, robots or animals doomed to repeat the same boring mistakes over and over again. Right?????
As William James wrote in 1890, the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.”
Get over it, Dr. James. Go get yourself fitted for a new chain-mail vest.
A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.
As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.
“Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Maryland. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.
“If people freak at evolution,” he wrote in an e-mail message,“how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”
Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said, “when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”
Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force.
People experience free will. They have a sense that they are free.
But, “The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.
That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”
Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said.
How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free will. The traditional definition is called libertarian or deep free will. It holds that humans are free moral agents whose actions are not predetermined.
This school of thought says in effect that the whole chain of cause and effect in the history of the universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.
At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.
“That strikes many people as incoherent,” said Dr. Silberstein, who noted that every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random. “Both are bad news for free will,” he said.
So if human actions can’t be caused and aren’t random, he said, “It must be — what — some weird magical power?”
People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.
But whatever that power is — call it soul or the spirit — those people have to explain how it could stand independent of the physical universe and yet reach from the immaterial world and meddle in our own, jiggling brain cells that lead us to say the words “molten chocolate.”
A vote in favor of free will comes from some physicists, who say it is a prerequisite for inventing theories and planning experiments.
That is especially true when it comes to quantum mechanics, the strange paradoxical theory that ascribes a microscopic randomness to the foundation of reality.
Anton Zeilinger, a quantum physicist at the University of Vienna, said recently that quantum randomness was “not a proof, just a hint, telling us we have free will.”
Is there any evidence beyond our own intuitions and introspection's that humans work that way?
In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger,
Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.
The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.
In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.
Dr. Libet’s results have been reproduced again and again over the years, along with other experiments that suggest that people can be easily fooled when it comes to assuming ownership of their actions.
Patients with tics or certain diseases, like chorea, cannot say whether their movements are voluntary or involuntary, Dr. Hallett said.
In some experiments, subjects have been tricked into believing they are responding to stimuli they couldn’t have seen in time to respond to, or into taking credit or blame for things they couldn’t have done.
Take, for example, the “voodoo experiment” by Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, and Emily Pronin of Princeton. In the experiment, two people are invited to play witch doctor.
One person, the subject, puts a curse on the other by sticking pins into a doll. The second person, however, is in on the experiment, and by prior arrangement with the doctors, acts either obnoxious, so that the pin-sticker dislikes him, or nice.
After a while, the ostensible victim complains of a headache. In cases in which he or she was unlikable, the subject tended to claim responsibility for causing the headache, an example of the “magical thinking” that makes baseball fans put on their rally caps.
“We made it happen in a lab,” Dr. Wegner said.
Is a similar sort of magical thinking responsible for the experience of free will?
“We see two tips of the iceberg, the thought and the action,” Dr. Wegner said, “and we draw a connection.”
However, most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the conscious mind is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking can give a golfer the yips. Drivers perform better on automatic pilot.
Fiction writers report writing in a kind of trance in which they simply take dictation from the voices and characters in their head, a grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers.
Naturally, almost everyone has a slant on such experiments and whether or not the word “illusion” should be used in describing free will.
Dr. Libet said his results left room for a limited version of free will in the form of a veto power over what we sense ourselves doing. In effect, the unconscious brain proposes and the mind disposes.
In a 1999 essay, he wrote that although this might not seem like much, it was enough to satisfy ethical standards. “Most of the Ten Commandments are ‘do not’ orders,” he wrote.
But, that might seem a pinched and diminished form of free will.
Dr. Dennett, the Tufts professor, is one of many who have tried to redefine free will in a way that involves no escape from the materialist world while still offering enough autonomy for moral responsibility, which seems to be what everyone cares about.
The belief that the traditional intuitive notion of a free will divorced from causality is inflated, metaphysical nonsense, Dr. Dennett says reflecting an outdated dualistic view of the world.
Rather, Dr. Dennett argues, it is precisely our immersion in causality and the material world that frees us.
Evolution, history and culture, he explains, have endowed us with feedback systems that give us the unique ability to reflect and think things over and to imagine the future. Free will and determinism can co-exist.
“All the varieties of free will worth having, we have,” Dr. Dennett said.
“We have the power to veto our urges and then to veto our vetoes,” he said. “We have the power of imagination, to see and imagine futures.”
In this regard, causality is not our enemy but our friend, giving us the ability to look ahead and plan. “That’s what makes us moral agents,” Dr. Dennett said. “You don’t need a miracle to have responsibility.”
Other philosophers disagree on the degree and nature of such “freedom.” Their arguments partly turn on the extent to which collections of things, whether electrons or people, can transcend their origins and produce novel phenomena.
These so-called emergent phenomena, like brains and stock markets, or the idea of democracy, grow naturally in accordance with the laws of physics, so the story goes.
But, once they are here, they play by new rules, and can even act on their constituents, as when an artist envisions a teapot and then sculpts it — a concept sometimes known as “downward causation.”
A knowledge of quarks is no help in predicting hurricanes — it’s physics all the way down. Does the same apply to the stock market or to the brain? Are the rules elusive just because we can’t solve the equations or because something fundamentally new happens when we increase numbers and levels of complexity?
Opinions vary about whether it will ultimately prove to be physics all the way down, total independence from physics, or some shade in between, and thus how free we are.
Dr. Silberstein, the Elizabethtown College professor, said, “There’s nothing in fundamental physics by itself that tells us we can’t have such emergent properties when we get to different levels of complexities.”
He waxed poetically as he imagined how the universe would evolve, with more and more complicated forms emerging from primordial quantum muck as from an elaborate computer game, in accordance with a few simple rules: “If you understand, you ought to be awestruck, you ought to be bowled over.”
George R. F. Ellis, a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, said that freedom could emerge from this framework as well. “A nuclear bomb, for example, proceeds to detonate according to the laws of nuclear physics,” he explained in an e-mail message. “Whether it does indeed detonate is determined by political and ethical considerations, which are of a completely different order.”
I have to admit that I find these kind of ideas inspiring, if not liberating. However, I worry that I am being sold a sort of psychic perpetual motion machine.
Free wills, ideas, phenomena created by physics but not accountable to it. Do they offer a release from the chains of determinism or just a prescription for a very intricate weave of the links?
Therefore, I sought clarity from mathematicians and computer scientists.
According to deep mathematical principles, they say, even machines can become too complicated to predict their own behavior and would labor under the delusion of free will.
If by free will we mean the ability to choose, even a simple laptop computer has some kind of free will, said Seth Lloyd, an expert on quantum computing and professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Every time you click on an icon, he explained, the computer’s operating system decides how to allocate memory space, based on some deterministic instructions.
But, Dr. Lloyd said, “If I ask how long will it take to boot up five minutes from now, the operating system will say ‘I don’t know, wait and see, and I’ll make decisions and let you know.’ ”
Why can’t computers say what they’re going to do? In 1930, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel proved that in any formal system of logic, which includes mathematics and a kind of idealized computer called a Turing machine, there are statements that cannot be proven either true or false.
Among them are self-referential statements like the famous paradox stated by the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who said that all Cretans are liars: if he is telling the truth, then, as a Cretan, he is lying.
One implication is that no system can contain a complete representation of itself, or as Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College of Columbia University and author of the 2006 novel about Gödel, “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines,” said: “Gödel says you can’t program intelligence as complex as yourself. But, you can let it evolve. A complex machine would still suffer from the illusion of free will.”
Another implication is there is no algorithm, or recipe for computation, to determine when or if any given computer program will finish some calculation.
The only way to find out is to set it computing and see what happens. Any way to find out would be tantamount to doing the calculation itself.
“There are no shortcuts in computation,” Dr. Lloyd said.
That means that the more reasonably you try to act, the more unpredictable you are, at least to yourself, Dr. Lloyd said. Even if your wife knows you will order the chile rellenos, you have to live your life to find out.
To him that sounds like free will of a sort, for machines as well as for us. Our actions are determined, but so what? We still don’t know what they will be until the waiter brings the tray.
That works for me, because I am comfortable with so-called physicalist reasoning, and I’m always happy to leverage concepts of higher mathematics to cut through philosophical knots.
The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility.
According to those who believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein said in an e-mail message, it would mean that “people are no more responsible for their actions than asteroids or planets.” Anything would go.
What about Hitler?
Dr. Wegner of Harvard said, “We worry that explaining evil condones it. We have to maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldn’t it be nice to have a theory of evil in advance that could keep him from coming to power?”
He added, “A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying them back for what they’ve done might be a good thing.”
Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have little effect on people’s lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.
“It’s an illusion, but it’s a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back,” he said, comparing it to a magician’s trick that has been seen again and again. “Even though you know it’s a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don’t go away.”
In an essay about free will in 1999, Dr. Libet wound up quoting the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said in an interview with the Paris Review, “The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living.”
I could skip the chocolate cake, I really could, but why bother? Waiter!
Dennis Overbye will answer select readers' questions regarding this article. E-mail your questions to askscience@nytimes.com. E-mails may be published. Answers will be posted on nytimes.com/science on Friday, January 5, 2007.
So there you have it! Complicated? Yes! Important? Definitely! But, free will aside, the study of consciousness is even more convoluted and we won’t get into that here!
Let’s just leave it with a phrase that satisfies me:
Consciousness is the physical manifestation of GOD within us!
Or this;
** I AM – GOD
** I Think, Therefore I am -Descartes
** I yam what I yam, and that's all what I yam. –Popeye
Your "inquiring" scribe;
Allan W Janssen
Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html
Monday, October 16, 2006
Oh for God's Sake!
Dr. Richard Dawkins has been one of the leading proponents of the atheistic point of view and according to some articles I have read he is slowly starting to preach atheism with the same feverous zeal that is displayed by some evangelical religious adherents.
He started off slowly with his first book "The Selfish Gene" back in the seventies, but has been gathering up momentum recently in his quest to disprove the existence of God.
He describes his astonishment that, at the start of the 21st century, religious faith is gaining ground in the face of rational, scientific truth.
Science based on scepticism, investigation and evidence must continuously test its own concepts and claims.
Faith, by definition, defies evidence: It is untested and unshakeable, and is therefore in direct contradiction with science.
In addition, though religions preach morality, peace and hope, Dawkins says; "They bring intolerance, violence and destruction. The growth of extreme fundamentalism in so many religions across the world not only endangers humanity but, is in conflict with the trend over thousands of years of history for humanity to progress –to become more enlightened and more tolerant."
In his latest book "The God Delusion" he has a few comments that I would like to expound upon, and a few that I would like to refute!
Now, Dr. Dawkins is right when he states that we don't know the answer to conciousness, but I believe he is dead wrong in saying that a religious explanation has no merit. (This in spite of the fact that I have absolutely no use for any mainstream religion whether it be Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. They are just interpretations of the Divine that are flawed by human agendas and purposes!)
We cannot look upon this marvelous Universe without some degree of awe and wonder. The notion that all of creation is only a matter of chance and random luck would be as big a fallacy as as making proclamations of blind faith to a belief system that was thought up by some fast talking shaman.
We have to look upon conciousness as our link with the Divine - since this seems to be the root of its purpose. We are living in the here and now of this Universe and although we have some empirical evidence of other planes of existence they are by their very nature beyond our ken.
This by no means precludes their own reality in a way that is not verifiable by us and this is where conciousness could play a role. It might be a link with other realities and this allows us to make conjectures about their validity.
From the book: "The Plain Truth About God-101" (what the church doesn't want you to know!)
The gulf between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom is so great because of our unique outlook and appreciation of existence! (Conciousness)
As far as we know, not even the great apes, dolphins, whales, dogs, cats, or any other living thing, has ever given even the slightest thought to our reason for being here!
You will never hear fido say to you, "What's it all about - Alfie.”
People, on the other hand, spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on the question of purpose. So much so, that it seems to influence almost every aspect of not only our lives, but everything around us.
We might see flashes of pseudo-cognizance in fido's eyes every now and then, but I can tell you for sure that fido and his buddies do not sit around and discuss the merits of art or literature!
Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html
He started off slowly with his first book "The Selfish Gene" back in the seventies, but has been gathering up momentum recently in his quest to disprove the existence of God.
He describes his astonishment that, at the start of the 21st century, religious faith is gaining ground in the face of rational, scientific truth.
Science based on scepticism, investigation and evidence must continuously test its own concepts and claims.
Faith, by definition, defies evidence: It is untested and unshakeable, and is therefore in direct contradiction with science.
In addition, though religions preach morality, peace and hope, Dawkins says; "They bring intolerance, violence and destruction. The growth of extreme fundamentalism in so many religions across the world not only endangers humanity but, is in conflict with the trend over thousands of years of history for humanity to progress –to become more enlightened and more tolerant."
In his latest book "The God Delusion" he has a few comments that I would like to expound upon, and a few that I would like to refute!
Consciousness is the biggest puzzle facing biology, neurobiology, computational studies and evolutionary biology. It is a very, very big problem. I don't know the answer. Nobody knows the answer.
I think one day we probably will know the answer. But even if science doesn't know the answer, I return to the question, what on earth makes you think that religion will?
Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.
Nobody has an explanation for consciousness. That should be a spur to work harder and try to understand it. Not to give up and just say, "Oh well, it must be a soul."
That doesn't mean anything. It doesn't explain anything. You've said absolutely nothing when you've said that.
Now, Dr. Dawkins is right when he states that we don't know the answer to conciousness, but I believe he is dead wrong in saying that a religious explanation has no merit. (This in spite of the fact that I have absolutely no use for any mainstream religion whether it be Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. They are just interpretations of the Divine that are flawed by human agendas and purposes!)
We cannot look upon this marvelous Universe without some degree of awe and wonder. The notion that all of creation is only a matter of chance and random luck would be as big a fallacy as as making proclamations of blind faith to a belief system that was thought up by some fast talking shaman.
We have to look upon conciousness as our link with the Divine - since this seems to be the root of its purpose. We are living in the here and now of this Universe and although we have some empirical evidence of other planes of existence they are by their very nature beyond our ken.
This by no means precludes their own reality in a way that is not verifiable by us and this is where conciousness could play a role. It might be a link with other realities and this allows us to make conjectures about their validity.
From the book: "The Plain Truth About God-101" (what the church doesn't want you to know!)
The gulf between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom is so great because of our unique outlook and appreciation of existence! (Conciousness)
As far as we know, not even the great apes, dolphins, whales, dogs, cats, or any other living thing, has ever given even the slightest thought to our reason for being here!
You will never hear fido say to you, "What's it all about - Alfie.”
People, on the other hand, spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on the question of purpose. So much so, that it seems to influence almost every aspect of not only our lives, but everything around us.
We might see flashes of pseudo-cognizance in fido's eyes every now and then, but I can tell you for sure that fido and his buddies do not sit around and discuss the merits of art or literature!
Allan W Janssen is the author of The Plain Truth About God-101 (what the church doesn't want you to know!) at; www.God-101.com
And the petition to have people mind their own business instead of yours at; http://www.petitiononline.com/moses/petition.html
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Let's get things back into perspective here!
The fact that we can examine ourselves thinking, (Like mentally looking in a mirror) is one of the great mysteries. This, along with the existence of God, the process of evolution, and much more in the metaphysical sphere are questions that do not easily lend themselves to interpretation.
Not to take anything away from the Eastern Philosophies, (Since they probably have a better handle on things than most Western Religions) but these are answers we mistakenly try and understand from a here and now point of view. As long as we look at these questions from a materialistic, egocentric point of view I dont't think we will find an answer.
Perhaps the question "Is there a God" or better yet, "What is God?" are areas that we are not meant to address in this life. They could, by their very nature, be unanswerable.
(Here we go, now everyone is going to tell me THEY have the answer. Save your breath, unless you have a REALLY bad Messianic Complex!)
The point is, perhaps we should be more concerned with attaining a "State of Grace" in this life, and then sitting back to see where it leads us in the next! Remember..(from my book God-101) When all else fails, the simple solution is usually the correct one! OR If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras!
Why can't some of you people LISTEN instead of grabbing anything at all as an excuse to once again spout your bullshit nonsense. Listen to me please, I don't need doubletalking, assinine, convoluted, self absorbed, deluded rants to make me see the light!
The truth is not in the Bible or the Koran. (Or the Bhagavad-Gita for that matter!) They should all be thrown in the garbage because they were written by sun-baked, wandering nomads who mostly ate bugs and honey..... of course they saw God!!!!
God is not in a book because that is other people trying to tell you what is right and what is wrong. You are not going to find paradise by listening to 2000 year old, hallucinating, camel jockeys.
KEEP IT SIMPLE! Don't jump through hoops trying to explain the infinite. Don't manufacture all these grand theories on the nature of God. Centainly don't sit there and try and second guess what God wants, and CERTAINLY don't tell me that you know what God wants ME to do!
I don't think it's our job to probe these questions yet. When we are ready they will be revealed. But they will be revealed to EVERYONE.
I think God is big enough that he doesn't need translaters. Remember-the simple solution is usually the correct one! God is love!!!!
In other words, God is within you and no one should ever come between. If we must refer to religious texts I would like to quote from the Book "God-101" once more.
One of the core sayings of Jesus was "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' For behold, that kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” Jesus tells us quite clearly that the "Kingdom of God" is not a coming kingdom, or a future kingdom, but rather something already in amongst his disciples.
It is not a place, but rather a state of mind! Or, to quote James Breech once more: "Your concept of the kingdom of God, whether it belongs to the future mythological conceived, in either eschatological or apocalyptic terms, misses the reality of the kingdom. The symbolism really refers to a power that is a basic factor in human experience!"
** The foundation of Christian ideology revolves around "Love" for one and another. To understand this we need to define exactly how the term or meaning of "Love" is used!
In the first instance, there is the true Christian "Love" which means it is rooted in the power of the kingdom of God. This is the "Love" that the historical Jesus preached to his followers.
The second type of Christian "love" (small L) is defined solely as an ethical idea that was propagated by the spreading Christian faith in trying to define the words of Christ.
Nietzsche probably best defined this form of Christian 'love' as a masked feeling of pity or charity. In other words, we feel sorry for others and from this superior moral ground to lend a helping hand.
Nietzsche claims that Christian 'pity' (love) is a device used by those who are not themselves truly vital and alive to obtain a perverse elevation of their own position by undermining others. In other words, "I can make myself feel better by thinking you or someone else is worse-off and deserving of "love.” We often confuse the feeling of Christian "love" for someone with:
1. Pity for them.
2. Humanitarianism-or a love of Mankind.
3. Altruism, or self denial, and
4. Sentimentalism, or wanting to be with others.
These concepts of “love" have been re-enforced over and over again in the Bible through one story or another.
What Jesus actually said was something much more basic and infinitely harder to achieve. The historical Jesus did not urge us to love Mankind or to feel pity for someone else.
He did not tell us to deny ourselves for someone else's sake, or flagellate ourselves, or even to enjoy another’s company!
What He did say was pure and simple and straight to the point, "Love one another.” This sort of Love is not the altruistic love of Mankind, nor the possessive love for our mate, but rather, something that requires hard work, tenacity, and sacrifice.
It is easy to love your wife or husband, child or parent, but to Love your neighbor (or stranger) is a task that is never ending and always requires effort.
It is a Love that seems to have no immediate benefit and is therefore not practiced by many people. However, in the long run, this is what will make Humanity rise up to it is potential and approach what Jesus referred to as the "Kingdom of God (Father).”
This is not something that is to be expected in the near, or far, future. Rather, it was a state of being that is present at this time, and only has to be observed and followed in order to achieve a state of Grace.
Allan W Janssen is the author of the book "The Plain Truth About God-101' (what the church doesn't want you to know!)
Not to take anything away from the Eastern Philosophies, (Since they probably have a better handle on things than most Western Religions) but these are answers we mistakenly try and understand from a here and now point of view. As long as we look at these questions from a materialistic, egocentric point of view I dont't think we will find an answer.
Perhaps the question "Is there a God" or better yet, "What is God?" are areas that we are not meant to address in this life. They could, by their very nature, be unanswerable.
(Here we go, now everyone is going to tell me THEY have the answer. Save your breath, unless you have a REALLY bad Messianic Complex!)
The point is, perhaps we should be more concerned with attaining a "State of Grace" in this life, and then sitting back to see where it leads us in the next! Remember..(from my book God-101) When all else fails, the simple solution is usually the correct one! OR If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras!
Why can't some of you people LISTEN instead of grabbing anything at all as an excuse to once again spout your bullshit nonsense. Listen to me please, I don't need doubletalking, assinine, convoluted, self absorbed, deluded rants to make me see the light!
The truth is not in the Bible or the Koran. (Or the Bhagavad-Gita for that matter!) They should all be thrown in the garbage because they were written by sun-baked, wandering nomads who mostly ate bugs and honey..... of course they saw God!!!!
God is not in a book because that is other people trying to tell you what is right and what is wrong. You are not going to find paradise by listening to 2000 year old, hallucinating, camel jockeys.
KEEP IT SIMPLE! Don't jump through hoops trying to explain the infinite. Don't manufacture all these grand theories on the nature of God. Centainly don't sit there and try and second guess what God wants, and CERTAINLY don't tell me that you know what God wants ME to do!
I don't think it's our job to probe these questions yet. When we are ready they will be revealed. But they will be revealed to EVERYONE.
I think God is big enough that he doesn't need translaters. Remember-the simple solution is usually the correct one! God is love!!!!
In other words, God is within you and no one should ever come between. If we must refer to religious texts I would like to quote from the Book "God-101" once more.
One of the core sayings of Jesus was "The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say 'Lo, here it is!' or 'There!' For behold, that kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” Jesus tells us quite clearly that the "Kingdom of God" is not a coming kingdom, or a future kingdom, but rather something already in amongst his disciples.
It is not a place, but rather a state of mind! Or, to quote James Breech once more: "Your concept of the kingdom of God, whether it belongs to the future mythological conceived, in either eschatological or apocalyptic terms, misses the reality of the kingdom. The symbolism really refers to a power that is a basic factor in human experience!"
** The foundation of Christian ideology revolves around "Love" for one and another. To understand this we need to define exactly how the term or meaning of "Love" is used!
In the first instance, there is the true Christian "Love" which means it is rooted in the power of the kingdom of God. This is the "Love" that the historical Jesus preached to his followers.
The second type of Christian "love" (small L) is defined solely as an ethical idea that was propagated by the spreading Christian faith in trying to define the words of Christ.
Nietzsche probably best defined this form of Christian 'love' as a masked feeling of pity or charity. In other words, we feel sorry for others and from this superior moral ground to lend a helping hand.
Nietzsche claims that Christian 'pity' (love) is a device used by those who are not themselves truly vital and alive to obtain a perverse elevation of their own position by undermining others. In other words, "I can make myself feel better by thinking you or someone else is worse-off and deserving of "love.” We often confuse the feeling of Christian "love" for someone with:
1. Pity for them.
2. Humanitarianism-or a love of Mankind.
3. Altruism, or self denial, and
4. Sentimentalism, or wanting to be with others.
These concepts of “love" have been re-enforced over and over again in the Bible through one story or another.
What Jesus actually said was something much more basic and infinitely harder to achieve. The historical Jesus did not urge us to love Mankind or to feel pity for someone else.
He did not tell us to deny ourselves for someone else's sake, or flagellate ourselves, or even to enjoy another’s company!
What He did say was pure and simple and straight to the point, "Love one another.” This sort of Love is not the altruistic love of Mankind, nor the possessive love for our mate, but rather, something that requires hard work, tenacity, and sacrifice.
It is easy to love your wife or husband, child or parent, but to Love your neighbor (or stranger) is a task that is never ending and always requires effort.
It is a Love that seems to have no immediate benefit and is therefore not practiced by many people. However, in the long run, this is what will make Humanity rise up to it is potential and approach what Jesus referred to as the "Kingdom of God (Father).”
This is not something that is to be expected in the near, or far, future. Rather, it was a state of being that is present at this time, and only has to be observed and followed in order to achieve a state of Grace.
Allan W Janssen is the author of the book "The Plain Truth About God-101' (what the church doesn't want you to know!)
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