Interesting ideas interspersed with nonsense - by nikhil bhatla: May 2007 Archives

omar - May 30, 2007, 2:51p
i'll come back to the book notes when i have more time. but let me hit up your post.

i feel like you're going to have trouble with god belief if you view this as an experiment -- it's more of an experience. you're testing the waters? but as you said, you're not really testing, you've dived right in. but have you? can you really do that?

let me tell a small story. today, on the bart, i realized that i should just give some money to someone who's begging me for money.. why? well, i can give a little bit, and furthermore, i really believe that after so much rejection (since almost no one gives money) a ray of hope is available when someone stops and says "sure, hopefully this will help you." and tosses over some loot. i've been in situations where no one is listening to me, and that small recognition helps so much.

so, i'm thinking to myself, i'm going to do this. next time someone asks, i'll give them some money. not so hard.

i go outside the berkeley bart and start to walk towards campus. the crazy guy who is always on the corner doesn't seem to be there. but wait.. there he is, jumping into my frame of reference and i... i keep going.

i didn't give him anything. where's my fortitude?

you don't just start to believe in something. you slowly rework your mind into a different frame of reference.

finally, i have no idea what you mean by this:

"Because only through stories do we truly understand."

that's a new age statement.. pretty vacuous!

Grant - May 30, 2007, 9:10p
"Because only through stories do we truly understand." is not new age at all. The Judeo-Christian tradition is rooted in this. The most famous books of the Old and the New Testment (the Pentateuch and the Gospels respectively) are mostly narratives.

nikhil - May 30, 2007, 10:24p
omar: agreed - believing in god is an experience, 100%. but framing it as an "experiment" reassures my former self tremendously. it will take time, and i'm swimming in slowly, but the process is progressing.

Your comment just proved the truth of the assertion, "Because only through stories do we truly understand." To explain your position, you told a story about panhandling. And I understood your point better than I would have without the story.

So not vacuous at all!

omar - May 30, 2007, 11:45p
i don't think we understand through stories.. i think we make hypotheses through stories and try them out in our real life. maybe this is just semantics.. but people think you can pick up a book and "get" something.. and that's just not the case in general. you have to experience. "because only through experience do we truly understand" is the better quote, in my mind.

i think this is an important difference. people read the religious books and they are like "yeah that's the stuff" but my own feeling is that story is a poor substitute for experience. sure, we can't experience everything, but that doesn't mean stories are at all adequate replacements.

Matthew - Jun 5, 2007, 12:40a
Hey, if there is no reality why not just jump off a cliff? It's about the same as what you are proposing (irrationalism) except it's a rare example of being more functional.

People believe in science because it works. Well, jump then. If you have second thoughts, maybe there is something more important than words like subjective, consciousness, machine, soul, spirit, voodoo, angel, god, demon, etc.

nikhil - Jun 5, 2007, 10:18a
Hi Matthew,

Thanks for the comment.

I think I may have done a poor job of explaining my thoughts. Let me try again.

My contention is this: perhaps subjective reality is no more or less "real" than standard objective reality (some call *consensus* reality, since we can't really remove our subjective frames to be truly objective). I guess this is a strongly dualist notion, one that many scientists seem to have rejected. I'm not advocating irrationalism, nor am I advocating that the objective world is less "real" than the subjective world, and so doesn't matter.

More importantly, note an implicit assumption that you're making: that the physical world is purely an objective world. It's possible that the physical world comprises and enables both objective reality and subjective reality. In other words, I don't want to jump off a cliff because, not only will I lose access to objective reality, I'll lose access to the subjective one too (if my brain stops functioning). This is still a materialist perspective, but one that says that the material of the physical world gives rise to 2 realities, not just one. I think this is actually a pretty reasonable take, given that all of us seem to have such a strong sense of "I", of the truth of our own subjective experience. Further, it's possible that subjective reality has its own properties, which our imprecise use of language calls souls, spirits, gods, etc. And maybe there are other ways, asides from the brain, that subjective reality is able to affect objective reality?

I agree, science *works*, which is why it is so damn appealing. It's the foundation of much of our economic well-being, and it's able to do a lot of social good by inventing new technologies to resolve stagnating social conflict. I'm not advocating anti-science, just a more *open* perspective that recognizes how little we truly know and proposes that perhaps the subjective experience which seems so real actually is.

Of course, these ideas could be totally wrong (and likely are, like most ideas), but I don't think this perspective is irrational nor cynical of the objective world.

Matthew - Jun 6, 2007, 12:41a

1. maybe we can't really get at the truth.
2. maybe x is true.

If you lose access to both maybe its because they are the same thing. Wait, yeah I am really sure they are. Because you cannot know "objectively" without existence and you cannot have experience without existence. Agh the allure...

One problem however. If the material world gives rise to two realities what does this mean? If by two realities you mean the objective world (roughly science and rationality) and subjective (religion and experience). It turns out a lot of what the religionists say have been tested and its wrong. Perhaps you mean another universe, not just another reality. Well, if their are other universes seperate from this one, they are found through subjective experience and have truth value...

Wow!

How can I get a ticket? Don't you just mean your imagination is real? I don't see anything wrong with this perspective at all; their are true statements about what you imagine. You just can't apply them to stuff like jumping off cliffs. If you have something else in mind, some other way of applying this dualism...

Let me know!

Matthew - Jun 6, 2007, 12:44a
Just a clarification when i said this:

"If you lose access to both maybe its because they are the same thing."

I am referring to the dualist objective/subjective split in reference to what is knowable. As to assumption of the objective I do not mean absolute knowledge or certainty. That should help lots.

Matthew - Jun 6, 2007, 11:50p
Another clarification. I don't see anything wrong with saying subjective experience is real. I remember reading somewhere how it's "bad" to think we can directly discern reality. Well, we can directly know subjective reality, not merely see differences between that old map/territory. In a sense, we are the territory. But, I don't see how this is going to let me live forever or solve the aids problem. Besides aren't you supposed to be an engineer?! Agh, but the notion of being two realities. Why just two? It's nonsense to say their are two different truths that are equally valid. Either my imagination is a good way to engineer the traits of two different species together or it isn't. Example: frog and deer dna spliced together.

Surely you mean something else?

nikhil - Jun 7, 2007, 11:19a
Thanks for the further comments and the good points. This type of conversation is exactly what I was hoping to see on my blog.

OK, where to start... I have a lot to say, so I've bulleted my points.

- You talk about how religion has been proved wrong time and again. Clearly this is true, but what I think you may be missing is that the literal interpretation of religious mythology is not the correct one. These mythologies are simply stories meant to communicate a point. Many are inspired by true events (I'm pretty sure Jesus and the Buddha existed) and many aren't. But that's not the point. Objective truth is not what matters in religious, subjective experience. What matters is communicating an idea (which exists in the subjective world) in the most persuasive way possible, communicating it as Truth.

- Of course, science is not infallible either - it turns out that a lot of what science has claimed has turned out to be wrong. Though we still have a sense progress, which is true. We're making progress in understanding the objective world via science.

- What does a scientific theory of consciousness even look like? I'm hoping to study the neural correlates of consciousness in neuro grad school, but honestly, I don't have a good idea. Can you even conceptualize what a scientific explanation of consciusness would even remotely look like? If you can, do tell :) Nagel sums this up most clearly in his famous "What is it like to be a bat?" -> http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/nagel_nice.html

- Perhaps understanding consciousness is beyond our comprehension - but if something is beyond our comprehension, is it even possible to recognize this and move on? Or are things that are truly beyond our comprehension also beyond knowing that they are beyond our comprehension? There are likely topics in both categories, and how consciousness "works" may be in one of them. A conscious appreciation of a play is beyond my dog Zoe, beyond both her ability to understand and beyond her ability to recognize that there even is something *there* to be understood.

- On the map/territory distinction: I think our subjective experience is still just a small exploration of what exists in subjective reality - our individual experiences aren't independent realities, but access a single shared reality, the world of concepts, ideas, beliefs, emotions. So, in a sense, each of our subjective experiences is just a small square on the map - all of our maps overlap somewhat to produce something larger, yet there is territory that is not currently mapped by any one that exists beyond the union of all subjective experiences. As time progresses, more of that "no man's land" is explored by subjective experience. Also, each individual likely contains in their own experience territory that no one else has access to.

- If there is a strong connection between the subjective and the objective, it's possible that AIDS and dying could be resolved through subjective means. Here's how. There is an infinite expanse of possible actions and movements for each person, yet we each have a profound sense of free will. Free will could be a delusion, but it could also be the point at which the subjective connects to the objective. God could be the motive force that can guide our wills, guiding us to decide to do experiment X instead of experiment Y. If experiment X leads to an insight in AIDS treatment, where did that insight come from? Did it come from the objective world, or the subjective one? In this story, it clearly came from the subjective. I think an influence in this way is possible, perhaps even probable. The real question is, how can we distinguish between these 2 methods of action, the first being a subjective motive force and the second being an objective result of cause and effect?

- Engineer I am :) Software, hardware, products, and services build can I. But how is it that I can even do that? How is it that I even choose which projects to work on? Where do my preferences come from? Why do I feel so distant from the objective world of cause and effect in the creative process of engineering?

- I don't know why there are only 2 realities. Maybe there are more, but I don't know. 2 realities is what I've experienced, that's all.

Looking forward to your response.

random-reader - May 29, 2009, 5:44a
Let me thank you profusely for breaking Roszak down for me. His writing style is too flowery for my tastes and so I find it rather difficult to digest his work. You've done a great job at helping me understand him better :) Thanks lots!

p.s. You've got a beautiful writing style; this is such an eloquent piece!

Interesting ideas interspersed with nonsense - RSS - by nikhil bhatla, nbhatla@mit.edu -