All in the Mind
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a
Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven
Milton
Faith is the enemy of wisdom
Anon
My problem now was, would I be able to find anything even approaching ‘truth’, given the blockading mass of pseudo-scientific dogma I had discovered?
Perhaps I could begin by investigating the principles by which we judge what is true and what is not?
I discovered that this area of research had a satisfyingly difficult Greek name: ‘epistemology’; and that it was as old as the hills. I read more books and came to the conclusion that there are three major ways in which we ‘know’ things (if we optimistically discount wild guesswork and deliberate fabrication):
1 Belief
2 Understanding
3 Direct knowledge
Belief
Belief drives most of us. We are told, virtually from birth, that x is True, or possibly The Truth, and we believe it. Kids believe most of what they are told. Many or most religious Believers may be kindly and harmless, and a blessing to the world, and I respect their positivity, but even so, Belief still smacks of cop-out to me. I can’t believe something just because someone tells me it is so. For a start, what do I do when someone else tells me something different is so? Drop the first Belief and take up the second? That could go on forever…
What bothers me more is that the dangers of Belief are huge. Apart from the atrocities resulting from blind faith, of which I mentioned just one or two earlier, Belief closes down the Mind. If you ‘know’ (but actually just ‘Believe’) that X is the only saviour of mankind; the one true prophet; the father of his chosen people; etc, then this is going to colour your views of other people and other perspectives, and probably not in a positive way. You don’t need to think, do you? Your thinking has already been done for you. And anyway, thinking might reveal things best left uncovered, like inconsistency, paradox, and illogic which you nervously suspect might be hidden within your trusty Belief, but which you really don’t want to face.
Much safer and easier to just Believe, and perhaps to enjoy your superiority over other lesser beings who Believe something else right back at you. Maybe you cover your doubts by laughing at these poor infidels; or ignore or scorn them; or maybe, if you are angry and ignorant enough, you cut their heads off on video, for the greater glory of Z, the one and only God of infinite compassion. Believers tend not to be troubled by irony, and history tells us that all too often the keener the faith the keener the sword.
Belief easily leans towards intolerance and absolutism. We see it in the attitudes of religious and political sects in which I am right and you are therefore wrong. It’s the ‘therefore’ that matters here. Belief does not encourage alternatives, discussion, mediation, curiosity, common ground, synthesis, synergy, co-operation or ecumenism. It is simply Right and brooks no competition. Dogma personified.
§ Examples: Charlemagne’s violent conversion of the Saxons; Islam’s conversion of the Maghreb; Rangers vs Celtic riots; Catholic vs Orangemen; Hutu vs Tutsi; Shia vs Sunni; Serb vs Croat; Science vs Religion; etc, etc… and exemplified by Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux who said ‘The faith of the righteous believes; it does not dispute’… as he urged thousands to set off on the murderous second crusade.
Many Beliefs effectively just say ‘My gang is better than yours’, with no rationale offered or disagreement allowed.
§ It is important to note that dogmatic Religion (with a capital ‘R’) has killed millions, but religion (with a small ‘r’) has given us much good, not least in nursing, social care, education, law, the arts, medicine, literacy and meritocracy.. the very stuff of democracy and civilisation.
We are brought up to believe what we are told by those with power over us, and we have a tough time shaking off this belief-mentality. Many of us never try, afraid that questioning The Truth will shake the foundations of our security or purpose in life. Some people seem to seek out ever harsher rules, even to the point of ‘if you won’t make to me some chains, I’ll make them myself’, sometimes literally using them to scarify their own backs. Belief so often breeds (or derives from) fear, and fear makes one a victim, with paranoia lurking.
But it seems to me that increasing numbers of people do suspect that their own Belief is troubled by inconsistencies and may thus not be absolutely True at all times. However, they often don’t know what to do about it, as they are still surrounded by the people who instilled the Belief: family, peers, the local Big Religion, and the media, who insistently preach the same old story, be it Fundamentalist Religion or Dogmatic Materialism. People may feel trapped, but can’t quite pinpoint the problem, or if they can, they don’t know how to resolve it. This can lead to unhappiness, mental illness, and depression; or it can fire up anger, fanaticism, and aggression, (which are arguably themselves forms of mental illness) especially as many people see their Belief as their only ‘certainty’ in a dangerous world. Belief is essentially the way of conventional Religion. It is enormously powerful in the world, in a way that Western liberal politicians seem not to completely understand.
§ The world contains some 8 billion people, of whom some 3-4 billion are Christian or Muslim. Another billion or so are Hindu/Buddhist. The remainder are rarely out and out atheists. The overwhelming majority of the world looks to a religion as their moral, social, and frequently political guide. That’s important.
Down the centuries people have become conditioned into believing that Belief-In-Something, be it Belief in God, gods, ancestors, family, tradition, tribe, clan, nation or race, is the only natural relationship with the World and the Heavens. It offers a secure base in a harsh life. But as Intellect develops**, so do doubts. These doubts power the decline in Church of England attendance and applications to Catholic seminaries, both tumbling in recent years.
Here’s the sad bit: in many cases, if someone becomes unhappy with some aspect of their birth Belief, then their default behaviour, if they choose to act at all, is to seek another Belief, another cut-and-dried certainty, delivered by another set of professional experts, unaware that in doing this they are chasing their tails and are thus likely to go round in circles and never make the progress they feel they are looking for. To break out of this vicious circle of Dogma is not easy for many people.
But people constantly try to break out. People want Understanding, even if they are sometimes fearful of where it might lead. The Church is currently failing because it does not offer Understanding: it is thus ‘unReasonable’. It can not explain itself without appealing to ‘Faith’, inevitably ‘explained’ in jargon and vague dogmatic waffle. This is not enough for a more intelligent age.
§ Science likewise, in its current vestment of Materialism, appeals to Faith, knowing it has had no success in proving dogmatic Materialism true. Thus it appeals to us, as intelligent people, to have Faith that it will one day be proved correct in claiming that Einstein himself arose spontaneously and randomly from Big Bang quarks and electrons. In fact, Scientific Materialism has made of itself a dogmatic religion, simply replacing God with Nature as the mysterious Creator of all.
In Europe, Belief was The Truth for virtually everyone, usually enforced by armies and Inquisitions, until the advent of science and scientific method about 300 years ago.
§ An Inquisition was a fearsome thing. In 1252 Pope Innocent IV authorised the use of torture against heretics. He presumably saw no irony in this, considering the name he had chosen for himself (from the Latin for ‘harmless’).
In a word, Belief is a poor emotional substitute for Understanding.
Understanding
‘Understanding’ is tightly linked with science. It is actively sought, by an independent seeker, while Belief is passively accepted. I’ll capitalise ‘Seeker’ from now on to mean ‘someone who actively seeks out his own philosophy and understanding’.
Thoughtful people, from the Greeks onwards, and most probably before them, too, have never been satisfied with Belief. The words ‘adult’ and ‘grown-up’ mean ‘independent’, and ‘self-reliant’, and for thoughtful people this applies to things of the Intellect as much as to more social things.
A thoughtful person notes the contradictions that the local Religion tries to force upon him as part of its Belief. Why did the Christian bishops of the God of Love bless the British cannons in World War I? If Allah is all merciful, why would he want anyone to fly an aircraft into a building? If Yahweh chose the Jews, why have they always had such a bad time?
§ As the old Jewish plaint has it: ‘Next time, Lord… please choose someone else’.
Thought and Belief are uncomfortable bedfellows. And as intellect grows (and I recently read that some scientists believe that each human generation is some 10% brighter than the previous one.**) more people are beginning to see Belief for the prison it can be, and thus more people are becoming active Seekers. I realise that this will be seen as offensive to some Believers but words are tricky things… and I wonder if all Believers are in fact ‘Believers’ only; I suspect that many of them may be something more powerful. See Direct Knowledge, below.
Science developed according to the requirements of logic, empiricism, and the twin pillars of inductive and deductive reasoning.
§ Logic states that something cannot both be ‘x‘ and ‘not-x‘ at the same time: for example, a specific item cannot both ‘contain Life’ and ‘not contain Life’ at the same time. This simple ‘Law of Contradiction’ is of vital importance to our quest here when considering the origin of life. Abiotic quarks and electrons? Or a biotic Something?
Empiricism requires facts to be arrived at via observation, experience, and experiment. Anything second-hand or traditional will not do.
Inductive reasoning follows upon Empiricism, as it arrives at a Big Truth via the collation of lots of little truths. As it has been observed that anything released from a height (an apple, or a parachutist) descends to the lowest point possible as quickly as possible, we may suggest a general rule that ‘everything will fall as far as possible’.
Deductive reasoning works the other way round, from the Big to the local: thus, following the inductive truth that ‘everything will tend to fall as far as possible’, we might deduce that the ACME anvil teetering on the windowsill just above our head will also fall as far as possible. Sherlock Holmes worked by deduction, and enthralled his Victorian audience, newly intrigued by the wonders of systematic scientific method.
Seekers gradually came to Understand things about the world instead of just Believing what a religious authority told them. The classic case is of heliocentrism. The Church taught that the Sun went round the Earth, but scientists observed, calculated, and proved otherwise. Understanding is a superior mode of knowing to Believing, but it is easily tainted, because the habit of Belief takes a long time to die.
It is thus not surprising that people disaffected with orthodox religion soon came to ‘Believe in science‘ instead of using science as the tool it is meant to be. It’s easy see where this might lead: to the adoption of a dogma, and thence to an unquestioning Belief-in-Materialistically-Dogmatised-Science and the tooth and nail defence of it in the face of all ‘opposition to science’ even when it isn’t opposition to science at all, but opposition to the irrationality of Materialist Dogma.
‘Understanding’ is fluid and flexible. Its apparent weakness is that it has no certainties, only shifting and extending horizons. Its strength is that Understanding knows that it does not know everything, and thus continues seeking and thus gaining in wisdom. The smarter the Seeker (or society) the more likely he is to admit his ignorance.
§ It is (apocryphally) said that Plato’s Academy classed its three years of students as
First Year: Men of Wisdom;
Second Year: Seekers of Wisdom;
Third Year: Men of ignorance.
§ Hitler thought the Western democracies were effete states that could not resist a country powered by an invincible Belief. He did not realise that consensus based on Understanding is ultimately stronger than blind obedience to a Belief, especially one as daft as the notion of Aryan supremacy. The first World War had also borne this out, but Hitler (and many others) hadn’t noticed. There’s none so blind as a True Believer.
Direct knowledge
Early on in my epistemological search I came across a puzzling quotation:
‘If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; But if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainty.’ Francis Bacon.
I could see that a Believer might become an Understander once he found the courage to break free from the second-hand ‘wisdom’ of Belief to seek his own Understanding of the Cosmos; but how might a confused ‘Seeker’ ever find the certainty that Bacon refers to? The penny dropped when I realised the importance of Direct Knowledge. This is the least considered of the three modes of Knowing, but it is hugely the most important.
§ It now seems to me that we know so little about Direct Knowledge because the Mind in general is a huge embarrassment to Materialists (who dominate our philosophical culture), never mind the possibility of the existence of anything as challenging as intuitive wisdom (Direct Knowledge). Hence, in the true tradition of bad thinking, if something doesn’t fit your prejudice or dogma, you ignore it. I confidently predict that this attitude will change dramatically over the next multiple decades, as reason re-surfaces and Materialism is abandoned.
Every one of us knows that at this present moment we are feeling happy or hungry, etc. We don’t Believe these things. We know them. We don’t need them explaining to us by a priest or scientist, and we don’t need to do repeatable experiments to prove that we are sleepy. We know.
You may think this is a trivial point, but it is supremely important, as it is this Knowing which decides our attitudes and behaviours: our Reality. If we Know we have a headache, everything we do will be coloured by this knowledge. We might become rude, or unfit to drive. Our Beliefs are irrelevant, and so are our Understandings until the ache has gone. What is critically important here is that it is impossible to convey our Knowing to another person. If you are homesick or depressed, you can tell someone, but they can never Know it the way you do. Direct Knowledge is a personal immediate Knowing when compared to Believing, which is dictated; or Understanding, which is reasoned out.
The legend of the Pilgrim (the Seeker) came to mind here. Is the Holy Grail symbolic of personal Direct Knowledge of Truth? ‘Seek and you shall find’? ‘Knock and the door shall be opened’? In other words ‘seek and allow space for what you discover: be open-minded towards incoming credible certainty’?
We’ll return to Direct Knowledge and Intuition later. Meanwhile, to experience Direct Knowledge in action, try adding up three four-digit numbers when you are tired. Your first attempt may be right, but often you can’t be sure, so you do it again. If you get a different answer, you try again. This third attempt will probably match one of the two others, but may not, so you do it a fourth time, or maybe a fifth. Here’s the point: there will come a moment when you are absolutely certain that you have got it right. It’s a detectable sensation. You Know and need to do no further checking. That’s Intuition (or Direct Knowledge) at work. It is what makes connections, and what gives you certainty.
So, to return to Bacon, it looked as though he might be inviting us to use our own Intuition to find this mysterious ‘certainty’.
Some people seem to Know things that are puzzling to the rest of us. We have all met or know of someone who Knows that there is an afterlife, for example; Carl Jung for one.They don’t try to persuade us (usually) because they don’t see the point.
And, in truth, how could they explain? Their Knowledge is personal. Most people who have a Near Death Experience are baffled by how to even begin explaining it (see eg Moody and van Lommel’s books in the bibliography. As cardiologist Dr van Lommel puts it: ‘An NDE is an overwhelming confrontation with the boundless dimensions of our consciousness’. Tricky to explain to someone who’s not been there!).
There are a couple of complicating factors:
Some Believers have convinced themselves that they are Knowers. This is often because they don’t know the difference between the two, but feel peer pressure to ‘feel the spirit within’, or whatever, and rather than feel left out, they fake it, without knowing they are doing so, although they may suspect something is awry from time to time. Cults thrive on this. It’s a kind of brainwashing. Materialism also thrives on it: what budding scientist wants to be left out of the coolest club in town, especially if your career depends on Believing?
Conversely, some Knowers think of themselves as Believers. I have met Christians who don’t understand why I resist much of their dogma. When pressed, several have told me of a personal experience, which they interpreted as spiritual. From that point on, they Knew something, but could only label it in the mode of the presiding religion of the day, which for Christianity is ‘Belief’. Ever since they had their experience, they have tried to repeat it or build upon it, but always in terms of Christian dogma. Hence a Knowing experience gets transmuted and muddied by being forced to fit into a series of second-hand Belief Dogmas, which may not lie easily with the original personal experience.
§ Belief, Understanding and Knowing might also be thought of as the three phases of pre-rational, rational, and post-rational, as suggested by Ken Wilber.
I guess it is this process of inner development that Bacon was thinking of when he said ‘But if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainty.’
***
I started this investigation because I could not ‘Believe’. After checking out the options, I knew that I did not ‘Know’. That left me with seeking Understanding. Logic was the tool with which to seek. But where would it lead me? And would there be (could there be?) a limit to logic? And if so, how would I ‘Know’? I came across a quote that encouraged me:
‘In order to understand the truth, you should not suppress your intellect. On the contrary, you should purify your intellect, exercise it and intellectually try to test everything which we can possibly put to the test.’ Leo Tolstoy
But first, what of ‘scepticism’? ‘Nullius in verba’ and ‘Test everything’, and other similar exhortations all support the notion of ‘scepticism’. Fine. We should all learn to think for ourselves and not Believe anything unless it is true for us (‘true for us’ being the Intuitive process of ‘Knowing’, as above). But it’s not easy, is it? Words change meaning and can even mean quite different things to different people. For me, ‘scepticism’ means what it ought to mean, according to a dictionary: ‘a doubting approach to a body of belief; needing to test a belief or concept for truth before accepting it’, but for a lot of Materialist-Scientists it means something else, namely ‘a refusal to accept anything which is not explicable in purely Material(ist) terms’.
§ This is another example of how Materialism has hi-jacked a word. It has not been a deliberate deceit, just a gradually developing habit grounded in optimistic conviction. But the result is the same. The words ‘sceptic’, ‘rationalist’, ‘realist’, ‘reductionist’ and ‘Darwinist/evolutionist’ have all gradually come to be synonymous with ‘Materialist’; and, of course, ‘Materialist’ has become synonymous for many with ‘scientist’. Not everyone realises this, so confusion reigns. You and I, and a dogmatic Materialist may disagree simply because we take different meanings for these words. There can be no discussion or comprehension while this confusion persists.
A Scientist recently asked what I was currently writing. I mentioned this book, and he asked ‘And have you seen a spaceship?’ Such sneering ‘scepticism’ is only a mask for bigotry. From now on I’ll spell this degenerate version as Skepticism, in memory of a noisy group of mainly American bigots who deny anything whatsoever that smacks of non-Materialism. Skeptics, as true believers, are not troubled by doubt, and, of course, the truer the believer, the louder the voice.
§ For example, the Wikipedia entry for ‘Cleve Backster’ as of November 2008 (the 2022 version says much the same thing). CB once did some tests on plants with a lie detector which showed that plants appear to experience pain, and other unexpected effects. Wikipedia adds:
“Backster’s ‘Primary Perception’ theory was referenced in the Discovery Channel television show MythBusters. The team attempted to reproduce Backster’s experiments using a polygraph and an EEG machine. They reproduced the plant experiment and initially got something peculiar as predicted by Backster’s work. However, after more carefully controlling the conditions of the experiment to eliminate the possibility of external influence, the plant did not demonstrate any measurable reaction to external stimulus.”
First of all, how unbiased would you expect a team called ‘MythBusters’ to be? And note that when they got the same results as CB had done, instead of congratulating him and then expanding on their findings, they ‘carefully controlled’ the apparatus until they didn’t get the same results as CB. Now they could scoff at CB’s work, which was the whole point of the exercise. Tawdry stuff. Anti-science.
Backster’s findings have apparently been replicated many times with care taken to exclude ‘external influences’. I say ‘apparently’ because it has become hard to know who to believe, since what was once a question of fact (‘Did Backster produce meaningful results or not?’) has now become a question of Belief, with Materialist dogma on the one hand and a romantic anti-scientism on the other. Just as with ghosts, ‘facts’ are no longer rigorously sought.
It is ironic that science, as polluted by Dogmatic Materialism, has degenerated into the very thing that Skeptics are dedicated to eliminating: what they call ‘pseudo-science’.
Philosophy, or er…
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference
Richard Dawkins
It is the theory which decides what we can observe
Albert Einstein
We see only what we know
Goethe
After much pondering, a penny dropped and revealed to me the blindingly obvious fact that Philosophy is a matter of.. opinion. And for me, what was the point of ‘opinion’?What I needed was facts. My question was ‘What is true and what is not?’, and not ‘What does somebody else think is true and what is not?’
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