If something can’t be perceived either directly (like rocks) or indirectly (like the subatomic particles that make up rocks), then there’s no reason to believe that it is real — where “real” means being part of the natural world.
Many things exist without being real in that sense. Fairies. Unicorns. God. Heaven. These are mental concepts, abstractions. They exist in human minds, but not in the world at large.
Yes, a concept can become real if there is evidence for it in the natural world.
Einstein’s theory of relativity moved from mathematical abstraction to reality when observations and experiments confirmed that the theory’s predictions reflect what happens in the world. So far, religion is batting .000 when it comes to supernatural concepts being shown to exist in reality.
I’m enjoying reading The Blind Spot by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson in part because their critique of science reminds me of critiques of religion, the blind spot being a failure to recognize the importance of direct experience in knowing the truth about reality.
Hypotheses are easy to come by.
Scientists suggest there could be a multiverse, a vast collection of other universes, perhaps so many that anything that could happen does happen somewhere in the multiverse. Cool idea. Problem is, there’s no demonstrable evidence of the multiverse.
Religious believers do more than suggest that supernatural realms exist in addition to our physical universe. They claim that these realms not only exist, they are more real than the natural world. Problem is, there’s no demonstrable evidence of supernatural realms.
The authors of The Blind Spot discuss “the surreptitious substitution” in an early chapter. This is a notion of Edmund Husserl, an Austrian-German mathematician and philosopher who founded the discipline of phenomenology. They write:
In the development of the modern scientific worldview which Husserl regards as beginning with Galileo, the abstract and idealized representation of nature in mathematical physics is covertly substituted for the concrete real world, the world that we perceive. The perceptual world is demoted to the status of mere subjective experience, while the universe of mathematical physics is promoted to the status of objective reality. Thus, according to their way of thinking, temperature or the average kinetic energy of atoms or molecules is what’s objectively real, but the feelings of hot and cold are mere subjective appearances.
Of course, if people didn’t experience hot and cold, there wouldn’t have been the successful attempt by scientists to learn what produces our sensation of temperature. So the kinetic energy of atoms and molecules is real, and the sensation of hot and cold produced by variations in kinetic energy also is real. In a sense, subjective and objective are two sides of the same coin of reality when it comes to temperature.
But with the supernatural, there’s only subjectivity. Objectivity is lacking, because the supernatural only exists in human minds, not in the natural world. However, this doesn’t mean that only things that can be directly perceived are real. There’s also “observations of perceptual signs.”
Just as deer tracks in snow point to an actual flesh-and-blood deer, the trails formed by particles in a cloud chamber point to electrically charged particles, say the authors of The Blind Spot.
These tracks belong to the real world of human perception. Our perception of them is a kind of “seeing as”: we see the droplet trails as tracks. We have good grounds for seeing them this way and for inferring that they are caused by particles. Just as we can tell that a deer went up a hill by seeing its tracks in the snow, so the physicist can see that the particle is a positron from the shape and orientation of its condensation trail.
The shape of the trail functions as an “indicative sign” of the particle, to use Husserl’s term. This kind of perception — perceiving something as the sign of something else, “indicative sign consciousness” — is fundamental to how we perceive the world.
…We’ve been arguing that we can have good reasons for postulating the existence of unobservable entities, but that these reasons depend essentially on direct experience — our experience of perception (seeing the tracks of particles) and our experience of action (spraying electrons). Thinking that elementary particles and fields of force are real, however, does not imply that the world we perceive is somehow less real than these entities.
But that’s exactly what many, if not most religions, do: assume that our direct perception of the physical world is less real than a hypothetical supernatural realm for which there is no demonstrable evidence. Which makes religions much more out of touch with reality than the scientists who consider that fundamental particles are more real than the perceptions of people who observe the tracks of those particles in a cloud chamber.
“I’ll believe in it when I see it” is a much better guide to religious experience than “I’ll see it when I believe in it.” However, most religions elevate blind faith over wide-eyed skepticism. That’s why I much prefer science to religion. It’s a far superior means of knowing reality.
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“…We’ve been arguing that we can have good reasons for postulating the existence of unobservable entities, but that these reasons depend essentially on direct experience — our experience of perception (seeing the tracks of particles) and our experience of action (spraying electrons). Thinking that elementary particles and fields of force are real, however, does not imply that the world we perceive is somehow less real than these entities.”
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Nice to read that scientists like Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson can speak of direct perception as pertaining to the world we perceive. And it’s somewhat refreshing to know that not all physicists see their hypothesis and math as being more real than the world we inhabit and perceive. They put their case well and quite simply through the example of deer tracks.
And yes, the parallel with religion and evidence is pertinent. This also applies to the many spiritual organisations that abound, along with their often exaggerated claims and misguided interpretations of certain practices. Eastern practices such as Zen, non-duality, oneness, no-self, and meditation have generally become fashionable, with many, many teachers out there who, for a price, can help one become liberated from the woes and cares of life.
It’s become normal to practice in order to enter a mental world where one imagines that the everyday reality of nature (incidentally with all its quite natural pains and sorrows, joys and pleasures, death and disease) can be transcended – including death.
“I’ll believe in it when I see it”
Even seeing is second hand. And only yields a belief.
Science has already proven that what we see as solid objects are mostly empty space. But few believe it.
You will know it when you become it. That’s spirituality.
As l understand it, solid objects are composed of swirling atoms that conjoin together to make the reality of the physical world we inhabit and experience. Wonderful, but no mystery involved.
And yet, all we can ever truly know is that which arises in our own present moment. It is tempting, yet quite usual to want to inject something more onto everyday reality and call it spiritual.
To experience the truly meaningful is to experience one’s own aliveness as it is, in this moment – not how we imagine or think it is.
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Hi Ron E.
You a wrote
“And yet, all we can ever truly know is that which arises in our own present moment.”
I honor that. We each have our own view of reality.
But we don’t actually have a different reality.
We can know that we don’t know.
We can begin to see our own prejudices and limitations. We can begin to perceive the experience of others, and realize how our actions affects them. And how little we knew, and even less, how little we understood of what was right in front of us.
We can awaken from yesterday’s ignorance. That is wisdom. That is the path of enlightenment.
Anyone who emerges from addiction understands what I have said. Anyone whose blinders have been removed understands how ignorance, which is fueled by pride in one’s own view, believing they know; how all the ills of our time emerge from that. And how education, knowledge, real knowledge, is the foundation of learning more about truth.
How all human suffering is made so much worse by human ignorance and self-justification when we are less than a thimble of atoms.
And how seeing the truth liberates anyone.
As for all solid objects being mostly empty space, a mystic sees it, just as you and I see solid objects, they see fields of energy. They see the truth. You and I see what our senses report, a constructed reality to suit our limited capacity.
If all the people of the world were condensed into just their atoms and all space removed they would in total be no Larger than a sugar cube.
But as they are fields of energy, and that space is not actually empty, but a doorway for infinite alternate universes all within the space, bird occupting different planes of detectable energy or matter, when you see it, then any presumption of “all we can know” seems incredibly isolated when the truth is we are all part of the same, actively.
I’m absolutely ecstatic that God isn’t real and religion is completely based on something that doesn’t even exist . I don’t want information that I have to die to find out. While false idols are flying around in private jets and taking a tenth from suckers that should be giving all . Happy birthday to the greatest nation on earth. The United States of America
The multiverse theory is just a kicking the can down the road avoidance of the question of How everything came to be.
“But that’s exactly what many, if not most religions, do: assume that our direct perception of the physical world is less real than a hypothetical supernatural realm for which there is no demonstrable evidence.”
Actually, you’re doing the same thing when positing that our apparent selves are nothing but an illusion, and that free will doesn’t exist. How can an illusion without any agency have “direct perception,” much less a grasp of (your favorite word) “reality”?
Aside from my philosophical reservations on what is/isn’t reality, I must agree that we should trust our senses (including our common senses) over grand spiritual claims.
Two reasons top of mind. One is that I’m reading a book about the life of the Indian guru Meher Baba; “The God-Man” by Charles Purdom. Meher Baba is popularly known as the kindly “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” guru of The Who’s Peter Townsend. Followers of Meher Baba are known as “Baba Lovers” and indeed, love is the main focus of their religion. No meditation, no rules, just love Baba. Sounds great, right?
But in Purdom’s biography, I find out that Meher Baba led an astonishingly capricious career as a guru, running his followers ragged for decades with his incessant demands for austerities and personal service. Meher Baba generally doesn’t come up as a “bad guru” because he wasn’t tied to any sex scandals. Nevertheless, this account of his life reads like a tragedy to me, a tragedy about people who defined “Reality” as the apparent fact of Meher Baba being God, and all his madcap demands (such as not speaking to anyone for a year) as being more important than the obvious obligations of normal daily life.
The other thing is a video I just happened upon, about why India gets so few tourists. The video’s content is damning enough, but more so the comments section (which includes offerings from Indians on why their nation is egregiously inept, rude and filthy, so much so that the supposedly “Land of Spirituality” is also the #1 country people think of when asked which nation in the free world they would decline to ever visit, or ever visit again.
Pointing this out isn’t meanness; it matters. If the spirituality of Bharat has produced such dysfunction, it’s fair to ask why that is, and what it says about India’s otherworldly spirituality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3pDDw4XH-4
If only trusting our senses would lead us to do the right thing. But all too often it just leads us to making excuses for our own failings.
Excuses for the harm we cause others.
And then we aren’t really trusting our senses. Then we are denying them. When they report what we don’t want to hear or see.
The idea of a greater truth than our present understanding is just an invitation to look more carefully, not just at those around us, for better discrimination will indeed do that. But to start with the man in the mirror.
That’s too high a bar for some. So they choose not to believe in anything more than what they can see.
And so, if hundreds of thousands of children are now dying because of something Elon Musk did on purpose, and they crave a new Tesla, so then those children don’t exist for them.
The whole world operates this way.
Belief can be corrupted. But it can also be the royal road out of harming other innocent people. To believe in something more than oneself. To love something or someone more than oneself. That’s the road to our own liberation.
The cost? facing the guy in the mirror with severe scrutiny, forgiveness, encouragement and expectation to become what it truly means to be a human being. To make compassion for all life your god, your Master.