A Dialogue with an Atheist
Beyond the polarities of theism and atheism
I happened to read this article by Graham Pemberton who is very interested in nondualism and it is about why the atheists cannot get away simply by negating belief systems but have to answer the fundamental question on consciousness:
And this in turn referred to the original article by Benjamin Cain who made the claim that atheists do not have the same burden of proof:
I contacted him upon reading the article and we had a long, public dialogue that I thought would be of interest to a few — not just for the content but the possibility of having an in depth dialogue with differing viewpoints as long as we are ready to be open and inquiring.
SN: It seems to me you and most atheists are reacting to God presented in anthropomorphic terms. And rightly so because that has caused so much division, conflict, wars etc. If, on the other hand, the impersonal principle that is the metaphysical cause of all causes which is pure consciousness is presented as God in the right manner logically, then it may not be resisted at all. This is the essential truth of nondualism. That is there is only cause which is pure consciousness and that alone is nature and that of the universe. It is not just a philosophy anymore then but our own living reality. If we call that principle as God, that’s okay as long as the understanding is clear. And the hard problem of consciousness will be solved too. I have talked about nondualism and how it neatly resolves the hard problems of science in this article:
BC: I’ve written about that more mystical or Eastern view as well, such as in my long debate with Sender Spike (first link below). I’m not sure it would make sense to call that fundamental creative power “consciousness.” It would be like calling the universe a computer that processes information. These words have implications which wouldn’t make sense in the mystical context. Consciousness is part of the mind which requires a brain. So where would God’s brain be? The mystic has to say that matter is an illusion, which makes scientific progress hard to understand. I write about the hard problem of consciousness in the second link below.
But it’s true that not all theologies are equally preposterous, and atheists do often target the lowest hanging fruit.
Indeed, the best kind of religion or “spirituality” is the kind that doesn’t foster so much dangerous self-deception.
SN: I read the article on your long debate and also your comments. A few clarifications that I would like to make based on that. Eastern traditions have two main strands that are often confused to be the same here in the West including among the practitioners. One is based on mysticism. Yoga falls in this category. Other is based on inquiry. Advaita (nondualism) and Buddhism fall in the latter. Yogic mysticism emphasizes experience (called samadhi) while nondualism negates all experience and the experiencer too. They both share the preliminary disciplines such as ethical living, detachment from worldly pleasures, meditation etc. but their endpoints are vastly different. The yogic samadhi is essentially dualistic and caught in the division of the experiencer and experience. Nondualism is the recognition that the experiencer is the experience and both are illusory, being ultimately projections within samsara. It is important to be clear on that.
Your question on Consciousness is based on the common understanding as an epiphenomenon of the brain. There is a conscious experience projected by memory that we have and very much seems to be a product of the brain. But is the brain itself a physical reality as commonly assumed thus far in a Newtonian sense or just a wave in an all pervasive Consciousness that is the essential truth of all matter? You can read this interview with Donald Hoffman to get a neuroscientist’s viewpoint on the “case against reality”: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/
The question on God’s brain ultimately is based on materialistic thinking that presupposes matter as the first principle. If we inquire into our own essential nature which cannot be different from whatever we call God, when we ask the question ‘who am I’, we may find that it is Consciousness devoid of any content. That is what I meant by “pure” Consciousness. All information processing is content and that’s what matter is. And it has its place. So the realization of one’s nature as Consciousness has no conflict whatsoever with scientific progress. In fact, it may lead to better progress once the scientific community comes around as many argue.
One more clarification on the “Hindu yoga/paths” I saw referred to. There is no such thing. The way of inquiry is called jnana yoga (which is not the yoga of Patanjali despite the word yoga there). And all these paths are open to all and nobody self identifying as Hindu or Buddhist has any extra privilege. All that counts is the sincerity of the one taking up the inquiry or even yoga for that matter.
Also you ask in your article you shared:
>>Here, then, are some questions I have for the Eastern spiritualist. Is the talk of absolute reality as a tranquil state of transcendent consciousness meant to whitewash the existential, cosmicist implications of mysticism in something like the way the exoteric televangelist anthropomorphizes God, calling him a loving father? Why think that the source of the entire, mostly inhuman universe would be essentially conscious?
The equating of consciousness with ‘humanness’ is in fact anthropomorphic. Consciousness devoid of content is prior to humanness and there is no reason why ‘inhuman’ universe cannot be essentially conscious. In fact, if we look at the tremendous order of the infinite universe that is mostly inhuman, the most logical thing to arrive at is that it is an intelligent universe and intelligence cannot be an accidental byproduct of matter. It is far more logical for the source to be essentially conscious. The televangenlist relies on and propagates only a belief system which is thought to whitewash the existential, cosmicist implications as you said. The mysticist also perhaps does the same by lulling himself into a state of samadhi. Whereas inquiry into one’s own nature is not to believe anything or to experience anything which are both impermanent but to actually find out the one truth of the self, universe and God through inquiry.
BC: My pragmatic realism overlaps with Hoffman’s “user interface” view of perception and cognition. But I suspect the difference between materialism and metaphysical idealism is a word game. I doubt it’s meaningful to say that all that really exists is “consciousness” or that the physical constructs studied by scientists and encountered in ordinary experience are so illusory as to be epiphenomena, with no causal power.
The pragmatist would say that the physical, objective constructs are real enough for materialistic explanations to be useful. Thus, Wheeler contradicts himself in the intro to that interview when he says, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.” If it’s useful because that’s how it is under ordinary circumstances, then it can indeed be upheld on pragmatic grounds. There can still be levels of explanation, but one of those levels will be the ordinary materialistic one.
As far as we know, consciousness is associated with life, and life evolved on this planet. Why suppose, then, that nonliving things are manifestations of consciousness? It’s anthropocentric to project consciousness onto inhuman nature, because the kind of consciousness we’re most acquainted with is our personal case.
What exactly is consciousness that has no content or neurological substrate? I understand that because of the hard problem of explaining consciousness, our self-awareness can alienate us from our bodies. But experiencing things is indeed different from explaining them. The question is whether metaphysical idealism makes any sense.
Still, for all my criticisms of this idealistic or monistic standpoint, I’m not as opposed to it as I am to theistic religions.
SN: Words like realism and idealism are misleading actually, because ideal is a projection of human thought in all realms. And what’s real is independent of what our idealism states. Be that as it may, why is it not meaningful to at least inquire into whether physical constructs of ordinary experience are in fact illusory, epiphenomena?
The ordinary materialistic worldview is apparently real and certainly one level of explanation and a useful one too. But the point of that quote is that it is not viable at the ultimate level in the light of quantum physics and all the weird properties of matter that we have seen in experiments after experiments.
Consciousness associated with life is one with specific content, limited by the processing abilities of each organism. And nonliving things do not have that kind of consciousness surely. But should we at least not explore whether the perfect order of the infinite universe with all its physical laws is therefore intelligent and essentially conscious? Being conscious does not mean there is an entity who is conscious. Even at our experiential level, thinking does not mean there is a thinker. Thinking happens and we superimpose a thinker upon the thinking. Neuroscience is very clear that there is no self or center in the brain that thinks.
Rather than conclude that the apparent reality is all there is or take comfort in belief systems which atheists are right to criticize, we need to be inquiring both individually and collectively into these questions on what is real, really.
BC: I’m not opposed to the inquiries. Instead, I’m raising doubts about the power of language to capture what even mystics agree are ineffable or transcendent matters. We’re barely able to understand the meaning of quantum mechanics, and our commonsense notion of “matter” falls apart since the relevant units are both particles and waves, or they’re something else entirely. So what does it matter whether we’re metaphysical materialists or idealists, when fundamental reality transcends are parochial conceptions? What is language doing in reference to that level? Are these theories we’re having or myths we’re spouting?
It’s the same with consciousness. If by “consciousness” you mean something apart from the commonsense feeling of being aware and alive as a relatively (not absolutely) unified self, it makes little sense to say that consciousness is the source of all nonliving things (because our kind of consciousness requires hardware which would already had to have been evolved or created). If you mean something more technical than that, we could just as well choose a different word to avoid misunderstanding and equivocation.
There may be no absolute center or dominant power in the brain’s neural processing, but we do experience ourselves as individuals. There’s a limited unity of that experience. What’s the difference, then, between calling that experience “illusory” and calling it an emergent, natural construct? That’s what I kept asking Sender Spike. If that experience is real enough, then the universe doesn’t derive from consciousness in the same sense in which our behaviour does.
What the monist would need is some meaningful overlap between the fundamental and the emergent kinds of consciousness.
SN: We can certainly agree that the power of language gets very limiting when it comes to such discussions on transcendent matters. And every word is so loaded that it proves to be a very hard medium to communicate beyond a point. And yet it is the only tool we got (beyond the rare mystic silence). So I agree it’s important to acknowledge this epistemological problem we face.
As for consciousness, yes I meant something more than the commonsense feeling of being aware and alive. That is the function of brain and memory which we can loosely called the mind. We have a mind that nonliving things don’t. But what I call consciousness is beyond the mind. One way to look at it is as the inherent intelligence in matter. Our mental awareness has nothing to do with the intelligence of our own body cells nor with the stars and galaxies.
It’s true we experience a relative unified self or center as an individual and whether you call it illusory or an emergent, natural construct, it amounts to the same. It is emergent and not inherent. A chain made of gold is only an emergent construct, inherently it is gold. The emergent construct is real enough for our transactional functioning. But it is not real in the ultimate sense as neural studies show. Recognizing the lack of a unified individual self in the ultimate sense is an important part of the inquiry toward understanding who we are.
BC: You’re equating the natural order with “intelligence.” One word is more neutral than the other. I’ve heard Christians likewise speak of the “rationality” of nature. The laws of nature were once identified as social laws or divine commandments. So this language is slippery, and the question is whether scientists and philosophers can explain the natural order without positing the priority of such mental categories.
SN: It requires philosophers and scientists to look at this order without mental categories yes, but also beyond all categories. The language of intelligence is admittedly slippery but to say natural order can also be misleading as it reflects a closed materialistic worldview that order emerges magically out of inanimate matter. The key point is that intelligence doesn’t imply someone wielding it which is where dualistic religions bring in belief systems. The insight of nondualism is that intelligence IS the wielder. Just like the dance IS the dancer and non-separable.
BC: “Natural order” is more minimalistic, so if that were interpreted as being exclusive and atheistic, I can see how the term wouldn’t seem so neutral. But the scientific explanations are all tentative. We can be more confident that there’s a natural order (as in a series of patterns or regularities) out there than we can be of a universal intelligence operating throughout the galaxies. The latter is more speculative, given how “intelligence” is used in cognitive science. Talk of intelligence here would imply theism, not just monism. At least, the question would be whether you can have intelligence without life.
SN: I agree that the explanations are all tentative. But the patterns are observable which at least should keep the mind open to the possibility of an intelligent or a conscious universe. Such a conscious universe need not be theistic at all in the dualistic sense of that word but simply monist or nondual. This has been the realization of seers and mystics for millennia. But now we have reached a point where mainstream science is interested in at least the possibility. If we remain open to it, we can perhaps come upon the biggest breakthrough in science and all the possibilities it opens up technologically, ecologically, politically and all other aspects of living.
Thank you to Benjamin Cain for an open, honest dialogue and to anyone else who made it through thus far!