Misunderstanding Trump

I have read two major books by George Lakoff and several of his articles.  He is a sharp analyst of political discourse when he sticks to linguistics.  When he goes big in metaphysics (Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999) and in the recent Alternet piece, "Understanding Trump," not so great.  His "family metaphor" for America's political culture is mostly useless.

If Trump's supporters were all 8 or 9 years old, Lakoff would be spot on.  Almost no one past that age thinks of their culture in terms of "strict father" or "nurturant parent."  But Lakoff thinks all Americans do.

  "We tend to understand the nation metaphorically in family terms …."

"We" apparently means "all of us," that is, all adult Americans of voting age.  All of us (Canadians, too, probably), consciously or unconsciously think of the nation as a kind of large family.  That's nonsense.  As they develop from infancy to adulthood, individuals become members of other social collectives - peer groups, sports teams, military units, college fraternities/sororities, corporations, charitable organizations, etc. - which no one thinks of as extended family groupings.  This fact calls for different sorts of cultural categories.  Tribe, kingdom, empire, and nation are available.  Just as 'organism' is not a good metaphor for society in general, 'family' is a bad metaphor for culture in general.

"The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The nurturant parent family (progressive) and the strict father family (conservative)."

"Most readily understood," sure, because pitched at the mentality of a 10-year old.  Far too simplistic for a political theory.  Do family systems fall neatly into two simple categories, nurturant parent and strict father?  What about strict mother? Indifferent parent? Abusive parent?  Permissive parent?  Same sex parent?  Atheist parent?  Multiple agnostic parents? All right, give Lakoff a pass on that.  More to the point is his classification of voters: conservatives and progressives.  Are they all coming from the Family System perspective?

There are many different kinds conservatives and progressives.  Take conservatives:  this website lists 7.  Throw in Libertarianism for an 8th.  It's ridiculous to think that all those varieties can be lumped together into a single moral worldview governed by the family metaphor.  There is one group that does seem to fit the description.  Lakoff again:

 "Evangelical Christianity is centered around family life. Hence, there are organizations like Focus on the Family and constant reference to “family values,” which are taken to be evangelical strict father values. In strict father morality, it is the father who controls sexuality and reproduction. Where the church has political control, there are laws that require parental and spousal notification in the case of proposed abortions."

Ok, give him the white Evangelicals, even though Trump himself is not particularly religious.  However, Lakoff seems to realize that his metaphoric vessel cannot contain all the wine in the cellar of contemporary conservatism:

"There is a certain amount of wiggle room in the strict father worldview and there are important variations. A major split is among 1) white evangelical Christians; 2) laissez-fair free-market conservatives; and 3) pragmatic conservatives who are not bound by evangelical beliefs."

Indeed.  So much wiggle room, in fact, that only the first of his three "variations" is a plausible exemplar of the Family System Theory, as we have seen.  The other two whom he labels "pragmatic conservatives" and "laissez-faire free marketeers" don't fit the mold at all.  Those are not insignificant groups of conservatives.  They number in the millions, and none of them are operating from the pre-rational metaphors of God the Father, family system, or family values.  They are rationalists through and through.  Think Michael Bloomberg and the Koch Brothers.  Carly Fiorina and Condoleeza Rice.  Their donation dollars support candidates whose values are power and money and whose loyalties lie with the 1%, not with 'the people' or, rather, 'the children' in the Family System metaphor. 

So two of Lakoff's 'wiggler' groups do not operate from the strict father worldview.  There is a fourth group he might have mentioned:  the now fabled Angry White Male class.  These include traditional rednecks, second amendment fanatics, Reagan democrats, and hordes of newly unemployed mine and factory workers who feel betrayed by Republican and Democratic leaders alike.  Strict Father is not what these guys have in mind for their vote.  They are clamoring for something like a Warrior Hero or Avenging Chieftain on the order of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan.  Trump is their fantasy Achilles at the walls of Troy gearing up to smite their enemies.

In light of so many 'wigglers,' just how useful is the Family System Theory as a descriptor of the worldview conservatives are supposed to share?  Nor are conservative outliers the only groups that won't march obediently under Lakoff's Family System umbrella.  Next up - progressives. 

Wait, what about liberals?  Lakoff doesn't bother to distinguish between these.  Liberals might protest, but since neither liberals nor progressives are using the Family System map, we can cooperate with Lakoff for the sake of this discussion.  

Progressives will justly ask, "What do you mean by 'nurturant parent family'?"  Lakoff doesn't say much about this here, but he does describe the nurturant parent model as the opposite of the strict-father family - basically, not governed by a fearsome boss-dad.  The nurturant parent family, in Lakoff's view, is not a dominator hierarchy, but it is a hierarchy nonetheless, a benign one headed up by a loving parent instead of a boss parent. 

Whatever that means in the details, progressives would reject the entire premise.  A progressive democracy, for them, does not consist of nurturing governors and childlike citizens.  Citizens of voting age, with important exceptions, are considered by progressives to be competent adults equal in dignity and rights to their elected representatives and capable of working out their own morality by means of rational thought and dialogue, not by taking direction from any kind of parent-figure, whether strict (the boss) or nurturant (the nanny). 

I have argued that Lakoff's Family System Theory is too narrow to encompass the large spectrum of political orientations in America's political landscape.  People who march behind Trump's banner arrive there with a variety of metaphorical perspectives and perceive in Trump several different kinds of person:  Strict Father for some, yes, but also Warrior Chief, Pragmatic CEO, Outsider Change Agent, Messiah for American Exceptionalism, etc.  What does Lakoff think?

"Trump is a pragmatic conservative, par excellence. And he knows that there are a lot of Republican voters who are like him in their pragmatism."

Lakoff argues for this characterization by citing several broad policy statements that Trump has consistently repeated in his otherwise chaotic speeches:  support for Social Security, standing up to Chinese trade practices, cutting taxes, reforming immigration policy, law and order, etc.  Is he right?  Perhaps, but the ugly campaign Trump is running looks anything but pragmatic.  In any case, Trump, whether seen as pragmatic conservative or proto-fascist or loose cannon, is nobody's Family System man, and when his pragmatic pronouncements are arrayed against his bizarre and inconsistent ravings about everything and everybody he doesn't like, it is doubtful that any label can stick to him for long.

"Understanding Trump?"  Good luck. 

AI and the (non-)Mystery of Consciousness

On Wednesday night at the Philosophers’ Cafe meeting, Patrick Conroy gave us an excellent overview of the hot and very contentious issues regarding the present status and future prospects for artificial intelligence (AI).  The complexities of the topic include definitional questions - ‘artificial,’ ’intelligence’ ’singularity’ - the present capabilities of today’s supercomputers, the startlingly ambitious predictions about AI’s future, whether a machine can become conscious, what kind of intelligence is being discussed, concerns about losing control of ‘rogue’ or ‘malevolent’ machines, and many others.

Radical opposition to the strong or true AI project from critics like me turns on the fact that vast resources - billions of dollars - are being spent on research that is decades away, if not longer, from producing the promised super-smart machines at a time when the institutions for helping people become smarter are being systematically defunded by a neoliberal business class that regards workers as disposable people.  On purely philosophical grounds, the project looks idiotic when, as many critics have pointed out, we don’t even understand human biologically based consciousness very well, much less what consciousness would be like as an “emergent property” of electronic complexity or as an upload from a brain to a central processing unit.  Are the dreams of superconscious computers at all realistic?  I think not.

The so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness is thought by many to hold the key to understanding the prospects for AI.  “How can a physical brain produce non-physical consciousness of mental events?”  So says the classic problem, with no definitive answer anywhere in sight, leading to general agreement by optimists and pessimists alike that consciousness is mysterious.  With at least one exception:  Galen Strawson, analytic philosopher and literary critic who currently holds a chair in philosophy at the University of Texas.  In a recent piece for the New York Times, Strawson makes the startling claim that consciousness “is utterly unmysterious” and that the Hard Problem has migrated somewhere else.  Let’s take a look.

Our source is:  Galen Strawson, “Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery,” New York Times, May 16, 2016.

GS says consciousness the only thing in the world we can claim to know.  “It is utterly unmysterious.”  Referencing Bertrand Russell a century or so ago, he appears to be invoking Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.    He is right, of course, in the sense that my immediate experience of anything is right there for me in the field of my awareness, effortlessly apprehended, requiring no reasoning or interpretation.  I look across the street and see a blue object and instantly recognize it as a car, but even prior to the act of recognition I am immediately aware of (acquainted with) a blue patch in my visual field.  I see it naked and exposed just as it is.  That I am seeing a blue something or other is, as Strawson says, utterly unmysterious, completely present and clear.  Similarly, if I am thinking of 5 + 3 = 8, I am  immediately aware of thinking “5 + 3 = 8.”  There is nothing mysterious about my direct experience of my own thinking.  There it is, just 5+3 = 8, pure and simple, all by itself.  I have no need of proof that I am thinking that thought, and no one can disprove it.  The same is true for any other experience:  feeling a pain in my toe or hearing a police siren, etc..  As GS says, I know these experiences immediately, because “having an experience is knowing the experience.” 

Frankly, I find the phenomenon of ‘having an experience’ pretty mysterious.  For example, who or what is this ’I’ that is having the experience? However, let’s go along with GS for a while, granting that immediate experience is unproblematic. But now he executes an astonishing right angle turn: as if by automatic transmission, he shifts the Hard Problem away from consciousness and parks it in the physics lab. By contrast with consciousness, he says, what is “deeply mysterious” is the “nature of physical stuff.” He cites Richard Feynman’s assertion that no one understands quantum theory. Hence, no one understands matter. Then GS quotes Russell for an exception: “The nature of physical stuff is mysterious “except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff.”  A “startling statement” indeed, but what exactly does it mean?  

It seems to mean (on materialistic premises) that, whereas the objective study of matter - particles and forces in physics - continues to reveal more and more mysteries, there is a subset of physical objects not studied by physics, namely experiences, that we do know perfectly well - no mysteries, as noted above.  So when we “have conscious experiences we learn something about the intrinsic nature of (some) physical stuff, because “conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff.”

Here is the argument:

1.  Conscious experience is a form of physical stuff.

2. When we have conscious experiences, we have direct knowledge of the intrinsic nature of those experiences.

3. Therefore, when we have conscious experiences, we have direct knowledge of the intrinsic nature of (some) physical stuff.

That's a strange argument - logically valid, yes, but we can’t help but sense that there is something seriously wrong with it.  First of all, it seems odd for GS to say that in our everyday lives, as we move about our world seeing, hearing, tasting, and doing things, we know in each and every one of those experiences exactly what matter is; we experience the ‘intrinsic nature’ of matter directly.  But if we enter a laboratory to do some physics, we are immediately confronted by a deep mystery; we do not know the intrinsic nature of matter, even though that’s what physics is supposed to tell us.  This is not a fatal objection to Strawson’s argument.  It just seems odd.

More serious is Strawson’s failure to provide any supporting argument for his first premise.  Like nearly all of his materialistic brethren, he simply asserts that consciousness is physical, because in fact it cannot be proven.  Employing the old principle that what is easily asserted is easily denied, we can comfortably reply, “Sorry, consciousness is not physical.” We could go for coffee at this point, but wait … GS says we have made a “Very Large Mistake.”

The Mistake, he says, is to think we have only two choices when confronted by the Hard Problem:  dualism or eliminativism (consciousness is unreal). In search of a third alternative, GS tries the  old ‘you can’t prove the opposite’ ploy.  He writes:

…. Many make the same mistake today — the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can’t be physical. We don’t. We don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, except — Russell again — insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience. …. we don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff in spite of all that physics tells us. In particular, we don’t know anything about the physical that gives us good reason to think that consciousness can’t be wholly physical.

This looks suspiciously like the fallacy of reasoning from ignorance.  But even if it’s not, it’s absurd to claim that, although we don’t know the intrinsic nature of matter (as opposed to its surface appearances), there is nothing in what we do know (from physics) about matter that gives us any reason to think that consciousness can’t be physical.  That’s like saying that although we don’t know the intrinsic nature of justice, what we do know gives us no grounds for judging rape to be unjust.

Of course physics gives us no reason for thinking consciousness can’t be physical.  Physics is about the physical.  It has nothing whatsoever to say about what may or may not be non-physical.  That’s a question for philosophers, not physicists, and as a philosopher GS is simply wrong:  we have plenty of reasons for thinking consciousness is not physical, but those come from philosophy of science, not physics.  All we need is some basic understanding of consciousness and of the structure of scientific method, both of which we have in plentiful supply, as GS himself  knows.

Having written about this at length in earlier posts  (October 9 and 20, 2015), I will content myself here with just two arguments.  First, consciousness is subjective, physics is objective.  Studies of physical matter and studies of consciousness are carried out from two entirely different perspectives, one that looks outward toward objects that are publicly observable; the other looks inward to a domain that is entirely private, unavailable to direct access by anyone else - the world of my sensations, thoughts, imaginings, and feelings.

The subjective cannot be reduced to the objective, if only for the simple fact that in order to carry out the reduction, the philosopher has to use his own “I think…” which is his consciousness and which cannot be made both subject and object at the same time.  He could claim coherently, if absurdly, that other people’s consciousness is nothing but brain events, but he cannot make the same claim about his own without committing a performative contradiction.  The act of saying, “I am just a sequence of brain events” exposes its own absurdity instantly.

Second, the “rules and equations” of physics are useless when aimed at my experience of tasting garlic or the twinge of jealousy I feel when my girl friend spends too much time talking with another guy.  Those are real experiences, not abstractions.

Nor are the biological concepts of neuroscience any help.  Biological concepts refer to entities like cells, which have mass, and energy transfers between brain cells that can be measured by instruments.  The taste of garlic on my tongue or my thought of the square root of 2 have neither mass nor energy nor any other physical characteristic that can be observed or measured.  What has no physical characteristics cannot be physical.  Therefore, consciousness is not physical.

With his current line of thinking, GS thinks he has laid the Hard Problem of Consciousness to rest.  I sympathize with his wish to do so, but the path he has chosen leads nowhere.  His argument that we do not know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff except when we are having conscious experiences, if not entirely nonsensical, looks like a sophistical trick to recast the Hard Problem of Consciousness as something other than it is.  The reasoning seems to work only because it begs the question by assuming what the argument is supposed to prove.

Speaking of the Hard Problem of Consciousness, let’s take a quick look at what it is and why it causes such headaches among philosophers.  It is usually stated:  “How does the brain produce consciousness?  How does a physical, biological organ give rise to non-physical conscious experiences?”  When a philosophical problem resists solution for a very long time, one begins to suspect there might be something wrong with the question.  As I have argued in earlier posts (October 9 and 20, 2015), there is indeed something very wrong with the Hard Problem, namely its underlying assumption that the brain produces or gives rise to consciousness.  Far from being self-evident, that belief is really an article of faith, an a priori assumption that just has to be true, because materialistic philosophers really, really want it to be true.  But what if it’s not true?  After all, no one has ever seen a brain produce a thought, and no one ever will for the aforementioned reasons.

What if ‘produce’ is a flawed metaphor for the relationship between the brain and the mind?  If that is the case, then not even a million years of philosophizing will reveal how brain-producing-mind takes place.  So where does that leave us?  We have the honest confession from from physicists themselves that physical matter is intrinsically mysterious.  We also know that the Hard Problem has survived Prof. Strawson’s deconstruction effort.  

Looks like Mystery is Us - still.                                                                                                                                             

ARE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES REAL OR ILLUSORY?

“In the absence of any reason for disbelieving, we should believe that the experiencer is telling the truth.”   -  Philosopher Charles Swinburne

This was the topic of the Philosophers’ Café in May.  I began the meeting by asking, “How many of you have had what you consider to be a spiritual experience?”  At least two thirds of the group, including myself, answered in the affirmative.  I was not surprised.  Spiritual experiences (SEs) are quite common, and there is a huge literature of stories about them dating back thousands of years.  I cited just one example - the famous account by Richard M. Bucke of his experience of “Cosmic Consciousness” in his book of the same title.  (http://sacred-texts.com/eso/cc/cc05.htm, pp. 9-11)  The story is too long to reproduce here, but if you take the time to read it, you will find that Bucke’s description of his extraordinary experience and his subsequent interpretation of it contain nearly all of the features common to SEs discussed in the literature and in this essay. 

Stories of SEs have been part of human experience since the earliest days of homo sapiens.  We have numerous records of shamanic spirit possessions, sacred visions and voices, ecstasies, mystical experiences, trances, psychic phenomena, altered states induced by drugs, music, poetry, and art - all have been thought of as spiritual by one person or another.  But what does that mean?  Obviously, these are not all the same. Are they all spiritual?  If so, what makes them spiritual?  This is one of the first questions we must ask in seeking a philosophical understanding of these extraordinary phenomena.

Our topic is:  Are spiritual experiences real or illusory?  Clearly we need some degree of agreement on what a spiritual experience is.  To arrive at that was my aim in the first hour of the meeting.  Then in the second hour we tackled the question of whether or not SEs are real.

What is a spiritual experience?

Rather than lead off with a formal talk, I asked the assembled philosophers to share with us their ideas about what a spiritual experience is.  What ensued was one of the best PC discussions in recent memory.  Several people shared their own SEs with the group.  The quality of the answers suggests that many people take spiritual experience seriously and know a lot about it.  Answers to the question included the following:

Spiritual experiences are:

· Universal:  all human experiences are spiritual; we are spiritual beings.

   · Extraordinary:  different from ordinary religious experiences - prayer, ritual participation, etc.
   · Transformative:  SEs often cause a radical change in a person’s life.
   · Physical:  SEs are just an unusual type of brain activity.
   · Profound:  they often reveal deeper connections between self and world.      
   · Culturally interpreted, usually in a religious, but sometimes secular, framework.

Except for the claim that SEs are nothing but brain events, all the ideas listed above seem right to me.  To that list I would add a few additional characteristics that would probably elicit general agreement:

Spiritual experiences are:
   · direct experiences, not the result of reasoning; hence non-rational;
   · brief in duration;
   · ineffable to some degree;
   · ecstatic:  SEs often induce states of extreme joyousness or bliss;
   · noetic:  the individual believes they have learned something significant about reality and self.

Specialists in the study of spirituality or mysticism find it useful to classify the different types of spiritual experience and to rank them according to some criterion.  For our purposes, it may be enough to distinguish two broad categories: dualistic and non-dualistic.  In the dualistic type, the individual has an extraordinary experience of being directly in contact with a divine being or a transcendent reality which is felt to be separate or distinct from oneself.  Supernatural visions of Jesus or Krishna or other holy person would be of this type.  Such experiences are emotionally powerful and even physically shocking, as in the case of St. Paul who, we are told, fell from his horse upon hearing the  voice of Jesus from the heavens.  A striking contemporary account was posted by ‘Steve’ on a spiritual website: 

“I had an intense vision of a shining cross that felt almost physical..a feeling as if I had been struck.  l had been reading a book on Billy Graham as I was searching for a belief system at the time.this was 40 years ago, yet I am still searching. I have no doubt that God is everywhere,but I feel that I received a message...yet failed to respond..as I don't know why it happened.”

Nature mysticism might also fall into this category.  In an ecstatic experience while walking in a forest, for example, a person may experience herself as a small part of the vast Web of Life but intimately connected with all other natural beings.

Non-dual mysticism is an experience, spontaneous or induced, of the dissolution or transcendence of ego, in which the individual intuits himself as identical with the Ground of Being or the Supreme Identity.  Hindu ‘moksha’ and Zen ‘satori’ are enlightenment experiences of this type.

It is to these two broad types of SE that I will direct the question “Are spiritual experiences real or illusory?” in what follows.

Are spiritual experiences real?

Is any experience real?  This may seem a startling question, but serious doubts about this come from two quarters.  The first is from the wisdom traditions themselves which claim that our ordinary experience is unreal or illusory in the sense that it hides the Truth about our real nature from us.  The second is from the materialist camp of academic philosophers and scientists.  Enamored of high-tech neuroscience, they assert that conscious experience is not what most people think it is.  Consciousness, they argue, is nothing but the buzzing of brain waves in response to external stimuli.  Subjective experience, therefore, is an illusion that neuroscience will one day dispel completely.

Standing aloof from this controversy for the moment, I want to distinguish two meanings of the word ‘real.’  When we ask if a spiritual experience is real, we can mean “Did it actually occur?”  To doubt this is to believe the experiencer may be lying.  Assuming we are not in the grip of an extreme cynicism, we can take Swinburne’s maxim as a reliable guide in most situations, especially when so many people claim to have had similar spiritual experiences.

When asking whether SEs are real, philosophers usually have the second meaning of ’real’ in mind, namely interpretive validity.  For humans, interpreting our experiences is unavoidable.  We cannot help but try to give some cognitive meaning to them, especially extraordinary ones of the kind we are discussing.  For example, philosophers are right to be skeptical of what we might call deity mysticism: claims made by people about their visions, voices, and other alleged supernatural phenomena.  Someone may interpret a vision of a being of awesome power and radiant light as an encounter with Jesus Christ - not just an imaginary Jesus, but the real Jesus appearing in the person’s visual field like any other person.  The usual objective validity tests are appropriate here:  Did anyone else witness the event?  Can the experience be replicated?  Could it be accounted for by some unusual conditions in the environment or some abnormal physical state of the experiencer?  Cultural relativity is another problem.  How is it that Christians in western countries always see Jesus or the angel Gabriel or some Christian saint but never the Hindu god Krishna or the fearsome Kali with her garland of skulls and skirt of severed arms?

Supernatural interpretations of dualistic mysticism, whether Christian or Hindu or other, come from the individual’s religious culture, usually a mythic frame of reference.  As such they are non-rational and therefore provide no evidence for rational assent.  ‘Pre-rational’ is a better characterization for reasons which we will see in a moment.

In a different category are the non-dual types of profound insight experience usually called ‘mystical.’  Mystics of this type do not describe their experiences in terms of visions, voices, or revelations from beyond.  They do not attribute their occurrence to any external source.  Many of them do not describe their experiences at all, reflecting the verse of the Tao Te Ching which cautions:  “Those who know do not speak.”  Deep mystical insight is a matter of absolute subjectivity, and those who do decide to describe their mystical experiences for teaching purposes always insist that their explanations are inadequate and paradoxical, beyond the reach of language and of reason itself.  They are properly termed trans-rational.  Study of texts and philosophy are useless.  Students are told that they must experience spiritual awakening directly for themselves by means of a deep interior investigation of their own minds.  Although enlightenment experiences can happen spontaneously, people usually need guidance by a master who will instruct them in specific spiritual practices and validate their experiences when they occur.

So what has philosophy to say about mystical experience?  Not much, because those who “know” are quite happy to admit that their interpretations are non-rational and therefore beyond the grasp of rational philosophies.  Buddhist masters, for example, willingly embrace the prevailing scientific theories about the cosmos, life, and the evolution of humans.  They are unfazed by the charge that their “philosophies” are replete with irresolvable paradoxes.  Zen masters challenge their students with ‘koans,’ paradoxical stories or sayings intended to defeat the rational mind.  Adepts and masters of all the traditions draw attention to the limitations of reason, its relativity and incompleteness, and its total inability to grasp the nature of Ultimate Reality.

As trans-rational direct apprehension of Original Mind, mystical insight transcends the domain of reason which is limited to the relatively superficial features of the sensory world and of rational thought.  Suddenly it’s not so clear who is the victim of illusion.

Direct experience is not accessible to the eye of reason.  The rational point of view is objective, the investigation of phenomena from the outside; whereas the vantage point of mystical insight is radical subjectivity, the view from within.  Meister Eckhart wrote, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which He sees me.”  There is no scientific procedure that will yield that kind of result.

When asked why anyone should believe such claims, the mystics say, “Do not believe them!  See for yourself.  Try these practices.  In time, with dedication and patience, you will realize Enlightenment.  You will see eye to eye with the Buddha, who is none other than your True Self.”

For the skeptic to set intellectual argument aside and actually walk the walk of spiritual practice herself is to practice what Ken Wilber calls ‘good science,’ in this case good spiritual science.  The approach, he says, is exactly analogous to the standard experimental method of physics, chemistry and the rest.  The seeker is offered a hypothesis:  If you want a glimpse of Ultimate Reality, you must take up this meditation practice.  Check it out for yourself; perform the experiment.  Then seek out confirmation of your experience with one or more members of the community of enlightened beings.

So, are spiritual experiences real or illusory?  As we have seen, countless people have told their stories of extraordinary experiences, and, for the most part, we have no reason to think they are lying.  Many of those accounts fail the validity tests available to science and philosophy and are therefore justly called illusions.  Others, however, those I have called mystical are beyond the reach of objective truth-tests.  To validate them requires direct experience of Ultimate Reality which, we are told, is available to anyone who has the courage and the dedication to undertake the recommended practices.  When confronted by such claims, mere philosophy must honestly admit, “I don’t get it.”

 * * * *

I concluded the meeting with the following remarks:

It is difficult to imagine the evolutionary history of human culture without spiritual experiences.  The founders of the great religious traditions were all inspired by profound experiences of the Sacred.  However, until recently such experiences were thought to be available only to special persons:  medicine men, saints, and mystic sages.  Everyone else was expected to be only religious, not spiritual.

Nowadays the situation is vastly different.  Because we have access to all the world’s spiritual traditions as well as the great contributions of western psychology and philosophy, we know that SEs are part of the birthright of all human beings.  We also know that while a spiritual experience is only a brief opening to Spirit, techniques such as meditation and yoga, are widely available to help us transform our entire lives in the direction of ever-increasing truth, freedom, beauty, and goodness.

Mystical experiences in particular and the spiritual philosophies that flow from them reveal the higher potentials of human existence.  At the very highest level, mystical experiences awaken us to the constricting smallness of our ordinary selves with their egocentric desires and habits.  They point us toward what the sages have always told us is what we really desire - union with the Infinite.

This ennobling yet mysterious ideal is captured nicely in a poem by the 20th century Tibetan lama and Buddhist master, Kalu Rinpoche:

You live in illusions

                     and the appearance of things.
                    There is a Reality;
                    you are that Reality.
                    When you recognize this,
                    you will realize that you are no thing
                    and being no thing, you are Everything.

 

SEARCHING FOR GOFFMAN

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts.  

              -  William Shakespeare, As You Like It

One of the themes of postmodern philosophy the general public does not want to hear about is the deconstruction of the self.  Your self - the person you think you are from birth to death -  we are told by postmodern sages, is nothing but a socially constructed concept or image or narrative shaped by historical forces and concealing numerous biases and strategies of deception.  The self until recently had been conceived as the independent ‘I’ of Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum,” the sovereign individual as in ‘rugged individualism,’ the John Galt of Atlas Shrugged, the bearer of the universal human rights and freedoms ensconced in the world’s constitutions and charters.  That sturdy, enduring self or ego, the postmoderns tell us, does not exist.  It’s an illusion.

The theory behind this claim is called social constructionism.  There are at least two versions.  Whereas some postmodern thinkers use deconstruction to expose the self as a creature of Eurocentric triumphalism and male chauvinism, Erving Goffman took a more empirical, sociological approach.  Goffman, termed by some “the most influential American sociologist of the 20th century,” made his mark with a book titled The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  He argued that humans in social situations constantly position themselves to be perceived by others in the best light possible by taking on roles appropriate for the given social context, much as an actor adopts a persona or mask in a stage production.  Different masks are required for work, parties, official gatherings, school classrooms, etc., sometimes juggled one after the other depending on who is encountered in fast-changing interactions.  Although Goffman did allow that in one’s private life, the masks can be dropped and a person can be herself,  he nevertheless drew the conclusion from his dramaturgical analysis that there is no True Self, no enduring entity answering to the pronoun ‘I.’*  The self just is a collection of masks and nothing more.  Many other contemporary thinkers have taken the same view.  Philosopher Julian Baggini states the  no-self argument with startling candor on Ted Talks.

The first thing to notice about this argument is that Goffman’s conclusion does not follow from his premises.  Granting for the sake of argument that:

People perform various habitual roles in different social situations,

it does not follow that:

There is no such thing as a person’s true self.

Goffman states his argument from an objective, sociological standpoint, but one’s true self, if it exists, will not be revealed by any objective approach because ‘self’ is essentially a subjective concept.  ‘Who am I?’ can ultimately be answered, if at all, only by me.  Objective facts do not lead necessarily to subjective conclusions.  I may infer from Donald Trump’s rhetoric that he is a racist, but that may only be one of his masks.  Perhaps deep inside he is not a racist; only he can know for sure.

A recent lighthearted summary of Goffman’s theory appeared recently on the Aeon Magazine website.  (Press here to see the two-minute video.) It hinted at a second serious flaw in the no-self position.  Who exactly is telling us this story?  A social role called Erving Goffman?  Is Goffman himself communicating behind a mask?  His theory says he is.  Does he actually consider himself to be just a mask labeled ‘Sociologist?’  If so, can we be sure that, behind the mask, he is telling us what he actually believes?  If he insists, “Yes, yes, I am telling you the truth,” can we be certain he has not just put on another mask labeled ‘Truth Teller,’ which conceals another mask labeled, perhaps, ‘Very Insistent Truth Teller,’ and so on?  This is the dreaded quicksand of infinite regress—masks behind masks behind masks indefinitely.  That might suit impish deconstructionists just fine, but Goffman wants to be taken seriously as a sober-minded scientist. Like ourselves, he can’t live with an infinite regress. 

Another big problem.  Can Goffman deny the existence of his selfhood without committing a performative contradiction?  Here’s what I mean.  A performative contradiction occurs when someone states a claim that is falsified by the act of stating it.  For example, if a person says, “I will not mention Susan’s divorce in this conversation,” the contradiction between the statement and the act of saying it is immediately apparent.  (This is different from a logical contradiction, which is a clash between two statements both of which cannot be true.  For example, “Socrates was a Greek,’ and ‘Socrates was not a Greek.’)  Similarly, if Goffman is required by his theory to admit, “I am just a mask,” he would appear to be uttering something equivalent to “I do not exist.”

In order to convince the rest of us that we are something like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, Goffman has to deal with the pesky feeling of ‘I am’ that we all have moment-to-moment at least during our waking hours.  Whenever I wish I can report to myself or to others what I am or what I am doing.  The popular custom of continuous texting gives self-reporting more air time than at any time in history.  A texts B:  ‘What’s up?’  B replies, “I’m fixing dinner.”  Five minutes later, A:  “Hey, I’m watching the hockey game.  What are you doing?”  B:  “I’m eating dinner.”   This “I am” could be prefixed to anything we are doing at any time, and we are convinced that this ‘I’ that I am is the same ‘I’ that I mentioned or felt or intuited five minutes ago or five days ago, perhaps even five decades ago.  Yes, the self undergoes many changes over a lifetime, some quite dramatic, but unless we suffer serious brain damage somewhere along the way, the sense of our core identity over time for most of us is very hard to dislodge, even if difficult to explain. 

Actually, our sense of self-identity needs no theory to support it.  It is a simple feeling of being that is ever present in our waking lives and even when we are dreaming.  “I am” seems to be the enduring background of our entire lives, the organizing principle of all our thoughts, feelings, memories, decisions, and actions.  Prior to any of those activities is this simple ‘I amness.’  Prior to taking on any social role—father, friend, business manager, socialite, cook, etc.— you simply are this ’I,’ the actor who executes the parts in your social drama and the one who is aware of yourself performing the roles.   Without that sense of being you, the agent and experiencer of all the role-changes life requires of you, your social process would be utterly incoherent, something very like insanity.

Although everyone has access to the sense or intuition of their enduring selfhood, that doesn’t mean they understand it or how it works.  Most of the time we identify with a particular role or set of roles that we think define us and are only dimly aware of the foundational ‘I amness’ that provides the ground of all our conscious activities.  If this Self is not a role or an emotion or a thought, what is its function?  An ancient Hindu philosophy, Vedanta, provides the answer:  ‘I am’ is pure awareness, the One who notices or observes or is aware of everything that happens in your life but is not involved or active in any of it.  For that reason, Vedanta calls it the Witness.  The Witness has no thoughts or feelings but is aware of all your thoughts and feelings.  It makes no judgment about what you do but merely observes your actions.  It is not a role that you enact in society, but it sees your roles just as they are.  The Witness, according to the tradition, is your True Self.

Philosophers say that the Witness is ontologically prior to any thinking, feeling, sensing, imagining, or role-playing that you may experience day-to-day, moment-to-moment.  If you were not already aware of what happens in your experiential space, you could not think about what is happening in the experience or have any feeling about it.  For example, while on a walk in the local park, you look up from the pavement and see a rosebush in full bloom.  Just there, in that indivisible moment, you are purely aware of the flowers.  The reaction follows in a flash: “Beautiful!” First the awareness, then the feeling.

This bare witnessing is the reason you can remember past experiences.  During the racketball game yesterday, you were completely immersed in the activity.  You were the player, dodging, leaping, making shots.  At the same time, unnoticed by you the player, the Witness was noticing everything you did and filing it away somehow in memory.  This doesn’t mean you will remember everything - some people can apparently - but without the Witness dispassionately recording your performance, you could remember nothing at all.

All of the foregoing is what philosophy tells us.  But you don’t have to rely on mere speculation to apprehend the reality of the Witness.  You can directly experience your ’I amness’ whenever you have a quiet moment.  It’s not complicated.  Sit in a quiet place, relax, and just begin to notice what comes up - bodily sensations arise, thoughts, feelings, memories - one after another, never the same moment-to-moment.  Let them go; try not to analyze or judge them.  Before long, you will realize that you are not any of those sensations, thoughts, feelings, or memories.  You are the Witness of those, the ‘I am’ that operates above and beyond the stream of ever-changing experience, noticing all of it, recording everything like a video camera, without judgment, without preference, without emotion.  Pure awareness, pure ’I am’ - that’s who you really are. 

The Witness is always on duty, usually in the background, a perspective on all you do but hidden from your ego-self in the stream of everyday experience.  The Witness is not a social role that you can take on and take off. It is not any particular mask that you might use to present yourself to the world.  It is not even your ‘authentic self,’ for that too may be just another mask or a delusional self-image.  

Imagine Erving Goffman searching among his masks for his true self.  Like most of us, he did not know how or where to look.  It was there the whole time, “hard to find, but impossible to avoid.”

____________________________

* For a humorous portrayal of one man's attempt to 'be himself,' watch the video Just Be Yourself  here.

DOES GOD EVOLVE?

This was the topic discussed at our January Philosophers' Cafe.  The following contains the text of my opening presentation.  - C. Marxer

God has evolved right along with humans.  Like us, his precise origins are lost in the fogs of prehistory.  His lineage can be dimly traced back through many generations of animal ancestors and nature spirits, worshipped by ancient hunting/gathering clans and tribes.  When people invented farming, the nature spirits were replaced by more anthropomorphic deities.  These tended to be power gods bent on outdoing competitors and helping their tribes or chiefdoms conquer territory, enslave enemy peoples, and set up permanent kingdoms.  Our God was one of those.  Let’s begin with his first appearance in history.

 Apparently God—called El or Yahweh in the old days—was born into a dysfunctional family of Mesopotamian deities about 4000 years ago.  He grew up in a tough neighborhood.  In order to protect his Chosen People, called Israelites, and receive the worship to which he felt entitled, he had to do some terrible things like wipe out a few tribes and kill the firstborn of Egyptian families.  As a result of all that nastiness, he developed some unfortunate character traits:  narcissism, jealousy, impulsive anger, bossiness, misogyny, sexual prudishness, and a fondness for murder and genocide.  His early career was marked by many triumphs and humiliating defeats at the hands of other gods. 

Finally sometime in the sixth century BCE, Yahweh became the chief god of the Jews and the only one whose existence they would acknowledge.  After a few more decades, Yahweh became fed up with the stresses of his job and decided to let the Jews fend for themselves.  As usual they made a mess of things, so God decided to intervene one more time.  He sent his only-begotten son Jesus to set things right, but that didn’t work out very well, either.  So the Heavenly Father recalled his son, quit the earthly life altogether, and retired to heaven to become the One and Only transcendent God of the whole universe.  Good career move.

God is acknowledged as the One Supreme Being today by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. He no longer meddles in human affairs or performs miracles to prove how awesome He is but prefers to rule from an infinite distance through the laws of nature and the instructions of the various priests, preachers, prophets, popes, and imams who serve as His ministers on Earth. 

Philosopher and filmmaker Woody Allen once allowed that God is not evil, that the worst you could say about him is that he is an underachiever.  I disagree.  I think God is a case of arrested development.  His evolution from polytheism to monotheism indicates a certain gain in maturity, but he seems to have exited the world before attaining his full potential.  So we must ask:  what kind of a god is God these days?  Is he the best that he can be, or is he still a work in progress?  What would his psychograph look like?  Does he need therapy?

Like that of humans, God’s psychological development, has been uneven.  

For example, the level of humanity’s cognitive development is very high.  Literacy rates worldwide are at record levels, and among the intellectual elite we have advanced logic, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, technology, and Scientology.  The level of God’s cognitive development is also very high (according to some, he knows everything).

On the other hand, the level of humanity’s moral evolution is unimpressive -  approximately that of an average 14-year old with anger management problems.

God, too, has evolved morally to about the level of a 14-year old, but with precocious power (some say He’s omnipotent).  Anger management problems are the least of his disorders.  I mean, look at what he allows to go on around here:  massacres, genocides, suicide bombings, American imperialism, and Donald Trump.  God apparently still hates pagans, unbelievers, idolators, homosexuals, transvestites, masturbators, fornicators, birth controllers, African Americans, Syrian refugees, Palestinians, and Muslim women.  In fact, he seems not to think very highly of women in general, ever since that minor transgression in the Garden of Eden.  He just can’t get over it.  Also, although he is supposedly pro-life, he aborts millions of unborn humans every year in procedures called miscarriages.

Here’s another of God’s adolescent traits.  The Heavenly Father is more like a Heavenly Voyeur (some say he knows and sees everything.)  He seems to enjoy watching us screw up.  He also likes to watch humans and animals suffer so-called natural disasters such as falling from high places, sinking in quicksand, being eaten alive, suffocating in sandstorms, drowning at sea, burning to death in fires, succumbing to horrible diseases, and fatally ingesting peanuts.

However, God is not entirely disengaged from his creation.  Just as humans love board and video games, God is obsessed with planetary games, usually of a violent sort, such as whipping up monstrous storms, earthquakes, tidal waves, floods, plagues of locusts and pine beetles, species extinctions, and global warming.  One of his favorite games is World of Warfare, which now looks to become as eternal as he is.  He’s saving his absolute favorite for last, called the Rapture, which He wins by destroying the world.

This is all pretty immature.  Like us, God has a long way to go.

*  *  *  *  *

This somewhat cheeky account elicited a wide range of challenges:

  -  “Ideas about God change, but God Himself is eternal and unchanging.”

  -  “God doesn’t exist; ideas about God change in response to changing social, economic, and political conditions.”

-  “What about other gods in other traditions?”

-  “What about the God of the heart or feeling?”

-  “I have conversations with God every day, so this topic is irrelevant.”

-  “God is not necessarily a ‘He.’”

Surprisingly, no one accused me of shortstopping the story with the death of Jesus, the Son of Yahweh.  What about Jesus’s legacy?  What about Christianity?  What about the good news of universal salvation in the Gospels?  What about the Social Gospel and Liberation Theology? Isn’t God now the loving Heavenly Father and, being so, has he not achieved full maturity in his moral development? 

I confess to the crime.  God’s biography does not end in the first century CE. Jesus corrected the bad reputation his father had acquired over the centuries, proclaiming that God actually loves people and has prepared a new destiny for them: “For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” (John: 3:15, New International Version)  Jesus further announced that the old, severe Mosaic law was to be enhanced by a new law of love extending even to one’s enemies.  We can justly call this a considerable leap forward in moral maturity.

Unfortunately, Jesus had preached a mixed message.  Yes, he enjoined his followers to love God and to love their neighbor as themselves and even to love their enemies, but he also said he came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34).  Furthermore, those who rejected him, he warned, would suffer eternal hellfire, a terrifying doctrine much emphasized by the Christian Church which took Jesus literally in his comment about that “sword.”  Crusades and inquisitions followed a few centuries later.  So this new God was not so different from the old boss God.  He still demands exclusive obedience and faith and continues to allow the horrors I listed above (and many others). 

As I said earlier, this God still has a long way to go.  My Christian critics are right about one thing, though:  there is a larger story to tell about the evolution of God, but what many don’t yet recognize is that the Abrahamic God represents just part of it.  Developmental psychology, anthropology, and spirituality tell us that over some 200,000 years human cultures and their God(s) have evolved through at least 6 identifiable stages or structures, each of which represents an advance over the previous stages while retaining the most important features of those stages.  In the following brief summary, I will continue to use the name ‘God’ as convenient shorthand for the various stages of spiritual development and to stress the underlying unity of the evolutionary story. 

The overall pattern of the evolutionary story is that of thesis, antithesis, synthesis; or emergence, crisis, transcend-and-include.  All cultural stages—the archaic, the magical, the mythic, etc, eventually encounter problems that can’t be solved at their level of consciousness.  A higher level then emerges along with changes in technology and social organization.  The God of the earlier stage is replaced by a more adequate God who helps the society to stabilize itself at the higher level.  Magical God evolves to mythic, mythic to rational, rational to pluralistic, and beyond.

First to appear (emerge) in humanity’s spiritual story is the magical God of the survival clans of ancient times.  It was perceived as nature and ancestral spirits which could both harm and benefit the group.  Shamans exercised supernatural power through visions, rituals, curses, and spells.  Eventually, crises of various kinds, e.g. population growth, required God to exercise more power.

With the emergence of larger tribal societies and chiefdoms comes the magical/mythic God, still polytheistic but more anthropomorphic and more powerful.  He/she required worship and sacrifices in return for protecting the tribe from enemies, demons, dragons and other horrible beasts, and natural disasters.  The young Yahweh was just such a god, a warrior god, as we have seen, endowed with great magical power over people and nature.  Again crises forced God to adapt and vanquish rivals.

Next to appear is the mythic God, often portrayed as Creator and Ruler of the world whose Sacred Power and Absolute Law is revealed in scriptures or through prophets. His plan for the salvation of all is administered—often brutally—by emperors, kings, or religious authorities who claim to rule by Divine Right.  This God was virtually unchallenged for hundreds of years until the myths began to crumble under the assault of a new, naturalistic engine of truth—science.

The modern era saw the rise of a rational God who relies on the scientific method as the sole source of truth about the world.  This God is dismissive of magic and myth, which are seen to be literally false.  He prefers rational discourse to religious command as a means of achieving cooperation in human affairs.  Salvation in the form of endless Progress is promised by the God of reason and technology.  This structure dominates in today’s globalized civilization, but is now facing multiple serious crises.

A few decades ago, a pluralistic or holistic God appeared, taking a broader perspective than the analytic and materialistic rational God, who was perceived to be shot through with gender, racial, and ethnic bias; its economic system guaranteed to produce gross inequalities and class conflict.  Rational God was also oblivious to its destructive effects on the environment.  The new pluralistic God identifies itself with the Great Web of Life, seeing all things and people as interrelated and interdependent.  Relativism, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, feminism, truth and reconciliation, environmentalism, animal rights, consensus decision-making, and emotional sensitivity are among its principal values.  All positive and noble in theory.  Unfortunately, pluralistic God’s political correctness, extreme relativism and deconstruction, narcissism, and contempt for all other Gods seems now to a growing number of thinkers to be an obstacle to the more radical approach needed to effectively address the various crises the world now faces.

In response, just emerging now among a small but growing  number of individuals worldwide is an integral or holistic God that discovers the patterns that connect the previous stages with one another in a coherent, global evolutionary process.  He/she/it preserves all of the life-enhancing traits of earlier Gods, while critiquing those aspects of the mythic, rational, and pluralistic Gods that lead to environmental destruction, military and culture wars,etc, blocking solutions to the wicked problems we face in today’s world.  Integral God uses information from all major cultures, traditions, and academic disciplines and fully honors all higher spiritual levels and states of conscious development.  He/she/it is taking the first steps toward a Theory of Everything that has wide applicability to the problems faced by a fragmented, broken world.

If this story is accurate, we can see that God has indeed evolved, not really with us, as I said initially, but rather in us.  The history of God is our history.  It should be clear by now that I have been extending the name ‘God’ far beyond the Yahweh or Allah of the Abrahamic religions.  If ‘God’ makes you uncomfortable, you can substitute ‘Spirit,’ ‘Consciousness,’ or some other term that feels better to you. 

Whatever term you use, the story will be the same, the story of an evolving universe that seems to have put humans at the cutting edge of creative advance where the next stage will emerge.  Will God have a central role to play in the coming transformation?  If so, which God?

*  *  *  *

Sources:

For more on Yahweh’s moral development from an atheist perspective, see Robert Wright, The Evolution of God.

Good introductions to Integral Philosophy can be found in  Steve McIntosh, Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution and Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything.

Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview is an award-winning documentary featuring comments by 15 scholars, journalists, and philosophers on why a radical new vision for the world’s future is needed.  It can be viewed free at http://crossroadsfilm.com/.