How do we know what we know?

There are two separate lines of inquiry: outer and inner. Observing and testing the external world leads to knowledge about material phenomena. Looking inward offers mystical insights.

The scientific-materialist bias of our age has emphasized the former and undermined the latter, but this is misguided at best and oppressive at worst. Both avenues toward knowledge yield fruit, but they each also have limits. If we neglect or suppress outer data, as we’ve seen religions attempt, we end up restricted to mythic world views that blind us to real phenomena. On the other hand, if we dismiss inner inquiry as idiosyncratic and imaginary, we close off progress toward the wordless wisdom that offers genuine salvation to the suffering mass of humanity.

The scientific revolution, which began in the Renaissance, has taught us the value of the empirical method. Sensory input from the environment, often enhanced by instrumentation, informs investigators as they develop hypotheses. Conceptual models of reality then guide further observation and/or experimentation. The results of these tests either support the evolving theory or require changes in it. Over time, models that succeed in predicting results survive while those that don’t get revised or scrapped. As explained in the last essay, scientific concepts are judged on their ability to predict outcomes; they should not be mistaken for ultimate truth.

Science needs no justification from me. It’s power is obvious. The value of nonstop technological advancement might be disputed, but not the intellectual triumphs of physics, chemistry, biology, and so on. Never before have humans known so much about the fine details of space, time, matter, and life.

Valid science must separate observation from theory. For instance, the fossil record exists and documents that life has changed through time. To deny this implication requires painfully contorted reasoning, such as the idea that God placed fossils in the earth to test our fidelity to biblical truth. Petrified organic remains are objectively real entities. Natural selection, on the other hand, is an explanatory concept proposed by Darwin. It posits that successfully reproducing life forms pass their traits onto future generations, while the traits of those that fail to reproduce die out, leading to changes in species over time. This is a powerful notion that can be used to understand not only biology but also cultural evolution, brain processes, and many other phenomena. It appears to be an actual mechanism of change, but the concept remains debatable, at least in principle. Possibly some more comprehensive explanation will emerge in the future, though if a better theory does arise, it will likely include natural selection as a limiting case. (Much like relativity theory reduces to Newtonian dynamics when velocities are in the range of everyday experience.) In any event, the verified fact that life forms evolve over geological time is separable from theories that explain how this happens. External observations and the concepts they fuel can be recognized as distinct from one another.

Inner exploration operates very differently. Deep states of meditative consciousness and sudden mystical intrusions occur commonly and stereotypically, but they neither support nor require elaborate conceptual theories. The consistent and recurring themes of such states guide generalizations but not specifics. As I’ve said in many previous posts, the main features include recognition of the profound unity of the cosmos, realization of its inherent rightness, and awareness of pervasive love emanating throughout. Secondary elements may also arise, such as insights about transience, insubstantiality, and causality. Words are inadequate to the explanatory task at hand; verbal descriptions are mere shadows of the actual experience. Because language is so inappropriate, conceptual formulation quickly obscures the heart of realization.

In essence, inner inquiry leads to knowledge that is simultaneously observation and explanation, both comprehended on a level that transcends words. This doesn’t prevent people from writing volumes about mystical insights, but such efforts are only pointers to an experience that provides immediate understanding.

Note how different this is from scientific work, where observations generally seem confusing until a theory is developed to show their coherence. Mystical realization obviates the need for theory, because it comes fully packaged as both observation and insight. When conceptual frameworks are constructed, they become susceptible to debate. They leave the spacious meadow of directly realized truth and enter a forest of controversy.

There is an area of overlap between science and mysticism. We see it most clearly when creative theorists ponder nature until an insight abruptly emerges in consciousness. The greatest thinkers, like Einstein, recognize the source of such inspiration to be mysterious and beyond deliberate control. In an echo of the mystical experience, deep contemplation leads to sudden recognition of an elegant order in the world.

Similarly, mathematicians work with purely mental objects, yet time and again their internally referent constructions have proven applicable to natural, external processes. Thus, mathematical formulations developed by Bernhard Reimann were crucial to Einstein’s development of general relativity theory. Pure, abstract reasoning (i.e., inner exploration) led to a framework that predicted astronomical observations never previously encountered by humans.

Inner inquiry and outer empiricism work differently but show areas of overlap. Both enrich human knowledge and understanding. For a blogger obsessed with mental wellness, what most distinguishes the two is that successful meditative and contemplative explorations lead directly to peace of mind. External observations are seldom so healing, except when they prompt inspiration that emerges from the depths of consciousness. When that happens, we feel warm satisfaction similar to what arises when we open to the beauty of pristine nature. The inner heart of awareness can be summoned from outside, but it germinates within. Looking inward is thus the surest path to fulfillment.

Today’s post is just a (kind of) short addendum to yesterday’s treatise on conflict in mental health discussions. Mandy, my wife, pointed out another reason that people tend to cling tightly to narrowly defined solutions: fear of uncertainty. I agree with her that the discomfort we all have with ‘not knowing’ plays a role in the common scenario of debates about policy turning into heated arguments between adversaries who each are certain they have the right answer. Because uncertainty raises anxiety.

When quantum mechanics began to be elucidated early in the twentieth century, physicists started to see a fundamental role of chance in the structure and behavior of matter. The inescapability of uncertainty and randomness made Einstein uncomfortable. Even though his groundbreaking work on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect helped usher in the quantum age, he still wrote (in a letter to Max Born) that he was “convinced that [God] does not throw dice”.

The idea of a non-deterministic universe strikes many as unsettling, to say the least. One of the objections to the theory of natural selection has always been that ‘believers’ insist that ‘God’ has orchestrated the creation of the universe, the earth, and life. Natural selection postulates that random mutations and probabilistic sorting of genes form the raw material of changes in life forms. If the mutations or gene combinations are advantageous, they get passed on to subsequent generations in larger numbers than if they cause the organism problems. With thousands and millions of iterations, these changes add up to dramatic alterations in living forms and ecologies. But the underlying engine of change, by that view, depends on haphazard events. This assaults the worldview of those who believe in a ‘hands-on’ God who directs events and answers prayers.

Some day I will write about how I believe how the universe may accommodate both probabilistic development, universal consciousness, and a certain kind of facilitated (rather than completely random) progression of history. My point right now is just that since the dawn of human self-awareness, people have had a strong need for predictability, and for a sense that they are not just adrift in a sea of chance. We prefer certainty over doubt, black and white over gray.

I heard an interview with a scientist who has written about why people need to be right. Despite a lot of internet searching I can find neither the scientist’s name nor the book, if it was a book, or I would reference them here. But the basic idea seemed to be that if you see a lion approaching, you need to ‘know’ without taking time to think, that the proper response is to flee. She who doubts hesitates, and she who hesitates is lost. Once decisions start being processed through cognitive and analytical channels, reactivity slows down, so that if an instant choice must be made one had better have a predetermined action pattern in place. There seems to be an innate demand for strong conviction.

So opening our minds to the possibility that our survival mechanism (whether medication, a specific kind of therapy, or a spiritual philosophy) might be fallible becomes quite difficult. We would rather hold tightly to the belief that our ‘answer’ is comprehensive, our world predictable, and our emotional safety assured.

So if I wrote yesterday’s post again, I would include our inherent uneasiness with uncertainty as another of the reasons why people become so bound to constricted views. A tightly defined, closed off ideology feels safer than one that is wide open, and leaves us aware of our vulnerability. We’d rather sit in a watertight box than risk feeling adrift in the random currents of fate.

For once, I am going to try to keep this short. I’m thinking under 500 words (or so).

Spirituality seems to be a popular topic among blog readers. The first time I blogged about it, a couple of days ago, the number of visitors shot up by almost 100%. Nothing succeeds like success, so I’ll continue in that vein for a little while.

If I could get paid for hours spent thinking about metaphysics, I wouldn’t be worrying about my finances. I admit that armchair philosophers are a dime a dozen, but I do believe my past provided insights that help lend consistency and logic to my ‘theory’. The framework that I have constructed builds on my long study of science (especially biology–see ‘About‘), and also the spiritual ‘psychosis’ I mentioned before. Some day I’ll go into a longer description of my ‘visions’, which in addition to hallucinatory experiences, also connected with real-life events in a kind of spooky, serendipitous way. For the purposes of building a model of creation that works for me, the significant part of my ‘awakening’ was what I described before as “all time (from the first infinitesimal fraction of a second after big bang until the present moment) and all space (from an impossibly small subatomic scale out through the full span of the universe) [hovering] in my awareness at the exact same time, like an instantaneous glimpse of all creation.”

The effect brought home the unity of the universe, and the collapsability of time. I did not see into the future, naturally, but I sensed its presence. I realized that from the right perspective, it would be possible to observe the full sweep of the universe’s history, from beginning to end, as a single unit. And not just on one scale of size, but simultaneously sensing the smallest subatomic entities (possibly ‘strings’, if string theories are correct), and the entire macroscopic universe, including each galaxy, quasar, black hole and every other kind of celestial object. If there is a consciousness watching our experience unfold, it would ‘see’ creation as a single entity in all its dimensions (four macroscopic–including time–and possibly many more on subatomic scales). Of course, I am not talking here about such a putative ‘awareness’ observing creation from a physical vantage point, and certainly not a point in time. As I’ll go into another time, I suspect this consciousness (assuming its existence) is not just watching the universe as if it were a movie, but is also the reel of film, the movie screen, and the projector. That seems to me the only kind of omniscient mind that could actually exist. When I believe my psychosis connected me to something ‘real’ (rather than just showing me new circuit paths in my brain), I feel blessed with to have glimpsed the cosmos through (let’s go out on a limb here) God’s eyes. It was, I suspect, similar to the epiphany people have when facing imminent death, when their whole lifetime is seen in an instant. Only I didn’t die and the life wasn’t just mine, but that of the entire cosmos. And for that instant, I understood that I was the cosmos, too.

Yes, the experience had ‘psychotic and grandiose’ stamped all over it. But at the time I only knew that God had blessed me with a special sight. Now of course, I cannot be sure. In fact, it is perhaps likely that I simply experienced a kind of seizure that distorted my conscious mind (which doesn’t mean deeper principles weren’t at play). But it felt as real as daily life and left me convinced of its veracity. So I like to take it at face value and see where it leads in terms of generating a metaphysics. I do not claim originality; only the way I write about these ideas is mine alone, not the concepts themselves. So far, it probably sounds like pantheism. Yes, I believe something like that, but there is more. This (sort of) short post is the introduction to what I have come up with. Stay tuned.