I’ve become a big fan of Robert Saltzman. So much so, after reading his The Ten Thousand Things and The 21st Century Self, I ordered what must be his longest book, Depending on no-thing — which is 607 pages long. But the 107 chapters are short, so I’m reading one a day.
This morning I read “The Milky Way.” Saltzman is interested in many of the same things I am, which made the chapter enjoyable.
He started off with some mind-boggling about the size of the universe. Our solar system is about 25,000 light years from the center of our galaxy. That alone is beyond our capacity to grasp. Us Homo sapiens are used to human-sized stuff that evolution attuned us to. Traveling at 186,000 miles per second for 25,000 years, and just getting to the center of our own galaxy — that isn’t something we can get our head around, especially since there are hundred of billions of other galaxies in the universe.
The galaxy nearest to ours, Andromeda, is 2,500,000 light years away. Regarding the entire universe, Google AI says: “We are 13.8 billion light-years away from the Big Bang in the time dimension, but not in a single spatial direction because every point in space was involved.”
Even the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is more than four light years away. And there are an estimated 300 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. The estimate used to be 100 billion, I recall, about the same as the number of neurons in the human brain. Saltzman, a psychologist, says:
And if we consider that each brain cell is connected to the others by many thousands of synapses, we might get a feeling for why it is said that the complexity of the human brain, a gelatinous mass that weighs around three pounds, is far greater than the complexity of our entire galaxy. In fact, it is said that the human brain is arguably the most complex entity in the known universe.
Leaving aside the bulk of those three pounds of jelly and focusing only on the cerebral cortex — which is a coating on the brain only six cells thick, largely responsible for higher intellectual powers (if that layer is damaged, the intellectual powers are damaged as well) — we are looking at perhaps 125 trillion synapses, which is more than the number of stars in 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.
Saltzman then discusses the religious belief that consciousness “is a gift from God.” While this assertion can’t be disproven, it certainly isn’t proven. He’s skeptical about all unproven beliefs.
I bring that same dubiosity to Hindu metaphysics. I cannot possibly falsify those beliefs, but certainly, i see scant evidence for them. And since Vedanta, like the Judeo-Christian-Islamic dogmas, makes big claims, it would need to put forth not just run of the mill so-called evidence like ancient texts and personal testimony, but big evidence.
Without that, we have only the unsubstantiated proclamations of gurus, hocus-pocus logic, and rabbits out of a hat. To be clear, without evidence, all one has is unsubstantiated belief.
No one, I say, knows anything about what consciousness “really” is or isn’t. In each moment, we experience only what we experience — perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. We may assume that those experiences arise and can be split off as the contents of an infinite container — so-called “pure consciousness” — that is larger than, separate from, and ontologically distinct from its supposed contents.
But that’s only dogma. And don’t we benighted humans just adore dogma, hierarchies, and splitting off one thing from another!
Since my previous post was about how a death occurred because two believers in esoteric Tibetan Buddhist dogma believed that karma was being burnt off and ignored obvious warning signs of dehydration, I resonated with a passage Saltzman shared about how animals demonstrate more wisdom than humans bound by chains of superstition and dogma.
Our dog will eat grass when she feels that her digestive system needs it. So along with other animals, she is wiser than religious believers who can’t learn from experience because their head is in the supernatural clouds.
This is a passage Saltzman shared from something Moises Velasquez-Manoff wrote in The New York Times. I found the piece, which is called “The Self-Medicating Animal.”
It’s worth considering the ways that animals, precisely because of their more limited intellects, might be more doggedly scientific than we are. After all, while animals seem to attend closely to cause and effect, learning from experience, people sometimes indulge a penchant for spinning out grand theories from scant (or no) evidence and then acting on them.
Bloodletting, for example, persisted for hundreds of years in Europe even though it almost certainly weakened and killed the sick. It was based on the ancient humoral theory of disease: Illness arose when the body’s “humors,” or essential fluids, were out of harmony, an imbalance corrected by draining blood, among other acts. Other ineffectual and even dangerous treatments include smoking to treat asthma and sexual intercourse with virgins as a cure for syphilis.
Animals no doubt blunder in their attempts to self-medicate. But humans seem to be unique in their capacity for clinging to beliefs and theories about the world, even when facing evidence that refutes them. Consider those religious sects that refuse modern medicine altogether, favoring prayer instead, and whose believers sometimes die as a result. Chausiku [a chimpanzee] and her kind would probably never err in this way, simply because the medicine that chimps practice derives from what they’ve learned through trial and error, not from untested explanations for how the world works.
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“The medicine that chimps practice”!
Yes, humanity has struggled to find effective medical treatments. Yes, it’s true that when better treatments were discovered, the scientific community tended to resist them. For example, as late as the 1940s, bloodletting was still mentioned in medical textbooks.
(By the way, the medical community of today still practices bloodletting. It’s called therapeutic phlebotomy and is useful to slow infections, reduce high red blood cell counts, help arthritis symptoms, and more).
Yes, the medical/scientific community of today still makes mistakes. Gross mistakes, like sanctioning the gender reversal procedures for children, and making children wear masks and stay out of school for 2 years.
We humans are flawed, and we make mistakes in our trudge toward medical progress. But this doesn’t mean that chimps are medical savants, or that when a dog eats grass, he’s somehow wiser than we are.
We tend to forget how blessed we are to live in an age of medical progress. It was only a few years ago that there were no vaccinations from terrible diseases like polio, no antibiotics, no anesthesia, no insulin. Surgery and dentistry were barbaric. Medical science today is light-years ahead of what it was 100 years ago. Chimps and dogs had nothing to do with that. They aren’t “more attuned to reality,” whatever that means. We live in a world where nature is trying to kill us. We can try to attune our consciousness to our inner chimp and dog wisdom, but it will have no effect on diseases and parasites and broken bones and the 1000 other pitfalls that flesh is heir to.
Nevetheless, I take your point about these Tibetans tragically putting religious theory ahead of medical science and common sense. That’s why I love what the Dalai Lama said about how he’d rather hospitals had been built in Tibet, rather than more temples.
Enjoyed this post, Brian, and the attached NYT article as well.
Loved Saltzman’s no-holds-barred saying-it-like-it-is as regards all of religious halfwittery. And I liked that he did not go for just for the oafish, low-IQ, downright stupid Christian/Abrahamic superstitions; but also the more exotic, more esoteric, and more sophisticated Vedantic/Advaitic nonsense as well. Agreed, all unsubstantiated dogma is just that, unsubstanted dogma, nonsense. That we can directly refute biblical foolishness, while we cannot directly refute Advaita, does not therefore mean that Advaita isn’t nonsense. Given zero evidence, it is just as fictive as is the oafish Christian dogma.
And the NYT article was completely fascinating! Self-medicating animals, that’s something I hadn’t ever heard of. Completely amazing! Wonder how they actually do that?
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While fully, like FULLY appreciative of both the linked article, as well as your post and Saltzman’s quotes that you present in it: but some small, incidental points of disagreement:
One: I don’t think the tentative explanation put forward, as quoted in the article, linking instinct arrived at via evolution, really makes much sense. I mean, sure, evolution does create effects that tend to boggle the mind: but still, chimps evolved directly to recognize when they’ve been afflicted by some parasite, and then to seek out some particular otherwise-poisonous shrub that works as antidote for that particular parasite, that seems like stretching it, I don’t think evolution works that way. I’m guessing this has got to be learned behavior, and a function of socialization. Just like us humans cannot really evolve to directly and instinctually use money: what we can evolve to is a capacity for such: and the gap between capacity and actualization is traversed via socialization. …But of course, I’m no expert, and if the instinctual-thanks-to-evolution explanation is actually the considered view of evolutionary biologists — as opposed to merely speculations by primatologists, which is all it appears to be basis the article — then I’m happy to defer to them, obviously.
Two: I wouldn’t be overly hard on us humans. Early humanoids were kind of chimp-like, ape-like, after all, in terms of just what we were like. And, as I recall, there’s evidence that Neanderthals, and other humanoids, did engage in religion-like, worship-like rituals. So that the absence of overtly religious nonsense in chimps and apes may simply be a function of their somewhat lesser mental capacity than the genus Homo, and not necessarily of their somehow being more empirically based per se than us humans.
And three: I realize this is probably hyperbole, and rhetoric: but even so, in as much as it directly bears on what science is: No, neither dogs nor apes are better “scientists” than us humans. Their absence of superstition is no more than a subset of their absence of abstraction. And while science is certainly about empiricism: but it also is about abstraction, and about extrapolation and inference and complexity. After all, you cannot really have science, not really, without hypotheses: and hypotheses are abstractions. If we’re content to merely do direct, single-step empiricism: then while we’ll be rid of superstitions, sure; but we’d be clueless about most of what we know of the universe and our place in it. What we need is abstraction and inference, and complexity as well, that is wedded to empiricism; and not empiricism to the exclusion of abstraction and inference and complexity. (Again, probably Saltzman is simply employing hyperbole, and rhetoric: but this might appear to be a misrepresentation of what science is, and therefore worth commenting on.)
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Sorry, huge comment! Like I said, I loved both your article and the NYT piece, and found them great food for thought.
(And again: those points of disagreement were incidental, and do not in the least take away from the larger point of your post, or from my complete appreciation of it.)
It’s interesting to watch the mind in action. Saltzman does his best to use what his intellect can accept in casting judgment on the beliefs of others, and the various opinions formed from what science has taught about the galaxies around us. Those judgments naturally, are limited, but it doesn’t stop him from projecting onto others his own unfounded and in some cases disproven opinions.
He writes from above
*No one, I say, knows anything about what consciousness “really” is or isn’t. ”
He cannot know what everyone else knows. It would have been wiser for him to limit himself to just what he knows.
He writes
” In each moment, we experience only what we experience — perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.”
We exist at multiple levels. What our brain perceives and records and which does in fact condition us happens before we get the abridged filtered version. Neuroscience has known this for years. Our level of wakefulness determines how much of that we perceive. But all of it conditions our thinking.
He writes
” We may assume that those experiences arise and can be split off as the contents of an infinite container — so-called “pure consciousness” — that is larger than, separate from, and ontologically distinct from its supposed contents.”
The degree to which our experiences are connected, and the degree to which we can raise our awareness is not fully understood, so why pad judgments about that? The notion that consciousness is entirely separate from reality is his invention. They are inseparable IMHO.
” But that’s only dogma. And don’t we benighted humans just adore dogma, hierarchies, and splitting off one thing from another!”
So this is how he dismisses the beliefs of others, many of whom spend their lives refining their capacity to understand and expand their experience to share things Saltzman can only connector about.
Bur why conjecture? Why even put conjecture to paper for others to consume. They can consume a deeper, expanded level of their own experience by exploring through meditation practice, through investigation, and yes, through science. Let’s keep conclusions to what is known, and admire with awe the unknown we ourselves have access to, and by proceeding there raising our own consciousness, through experience and education, not parochial opinions.
Opinions are a step below knowledge : Doxa is below Episteme.
I greatly appreciate what Saltzman aims at with regard to evidence rather than belief, he says: –
“I bring that same dubiosity to Hindu metaphysics. I cannot possibly falsify those beliefs, but certainly, I see scant evidence for them. And since Vedanta, like the Judeo-Christian-Islamic dogmas, makes big claims, it would need to put forth not just run of the mill so-called evidence like ancient texts and personal testimony, but big evidence.”
He reiterates this in conversation with a reader: – “I’m not interested in proving anyone wrong, I’m interested in what holds up under investigation – especially when the need for belief is set aside.”
Most refreshing. Also, in a review sample of Saltzman’s ‘Depending on no-thing’ he says: – “When one is not looking for any escape at all, but finds oneself participating in whatever thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc. make up the constituents of this very moment, without any hope of things getting “better,” including that one will “eventually” be “enlightened,” then one is in the moment, and it is only in the moment that anything true, anything real, anything that is not escapism and fantasy, will be found.”
I like that he recognises the only thing we can ever really know, is that which arises in the present moment: – “In each moment, things simply are as they are, whether “I” like it or not. That under-standing is not something to be “realized” at some imagined future time after sufficient “practice,” but is a simple recognition of the mysterious, ineffable suchness of this moment. In that recognition, there is no thought of meditation, no practice of meditation, and no meditator or doer of anything else. The entire experience of being this particular point of view one has learned to call “myself,” feels unchosen, unfathomable, and mysterious to the nth degree. In the face of that, what exactly will you practice?” ― Robert Saltzman, The Ten Thousand Things
I will do what the author requires , totally ignore him.