Atheology

Gödel’s Mathematical Proof of God’s Existence

Posted on May 13, 2025 by Dwight

In March of 1976, my advisor and favorite history professor, Edward Cashin, threw an end-of-quarter party for his students. At the party, one of the students learned I was an atheist and told me he had a mathematical proof of God’s existence.

Okay, what it is? I asked.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember it at the moment. Although he had it written down, he didn’t have the paper with him.

I offered that if the argument was to the effect that the existence of mathematics (as something beyond and outside of us) entailed the existence of a mind (God) beyond and outside of us, I was prepared to refute his proof.

But no, he said, it wasn’t that. It was a comprehensive logical-step by logical-step proof that I wouldn’t be able to refute.

Unfortunately, we never ran into each other again.

Logical proofs of God’s existence have been around for a long time, including Avicenna’s 10th century proof, Anselm’s 11th century ontological argument, Descartes 17th century efforts and Gottfried Liebniz a few decades later.

Around 1941 the famous mathematician, Kurt Gödel, began working on an improved version of Leibniz’s proof, though it wouldn’t be revealed to the world for another 20 years. Here I’ll review Gödel’s effort as presented in the October 4, 2022 issue of Scientific American, Can God Be Proved Mathematically? by Manon Bischoff.

There are 12 steps to the argument, so let’s dive in.

He starts with an axiom—an assumption, in other words: If ? has the property P and from ? always follows ?, then ? also has the property P. For simplicity, we can assume that P stands for “positive”. For example:, if a fruit is delicious, a positive property, then it is also fun to eat. Therefore, the fun of eating it is also a positive property.1

Already the argument is in trouble. Blueberries are delicious, therefore they are always fun to eat? Even when unripe or half-rotten?

True enough, blueberries—as I imagine them—are always delicious. But blueberries in the physical world don’t always live up to my mind’s expectations. Blueberries develop on the bush and are only delicious (if they are) for a short time between unripeness and rottenness.

Another example: If living things have the property of aliveness, and if death is inevitable for living things, then death has the property of aliveness.

Gödel’s mental categories don’t fit the biological world.

Okay, you might think, but God’s not part of the biological world. As long as the axiom is valid for God’s world, it’s okay. Right?

Nope. First, because we don’t know upfront that “God’s world” exists—that’s what we’re trying to prove. And if the proof we’re utilizing to prove God exists isn’t valid for the biological world, which we know does exist, why presume that it’s valid?

Gödel’s first axiom may always be true in the world of logic, but that isn’t the case for the actual physical, ever-changing world. Which is why science has to be empirical rather than rational when it comes to reality. There is a place for rationality and logic: to insure that our models are self-consistent and communicable, but whether the model fits reality is always an empirical question, not a rational one. And if God is part of reality, the same applies.

And this brings up another point: things in the actual physical world don’t have “properties” in themselves. Their properties come from our minds. Blueberries may be delicious to me, but not to my dog, or not to a flounder, no matter how ripe the blueberries be.

Even ripeness is a property bestowed upon fruit by the bodies & brains of specific species.

At this point, we can already see that Gödel’s proof is in serious trouble. But let’s give it a chance.

The second axiom further sets a framework for P. If the opposite of something is positive, then that “something” must be negative. Thus, Gödel has divided a world into black and white: Either something is good or bad. For example, if health is good, then a disease must necessarily be bad.2

For whom? Disease may be bad for me, but is it bad for the coronavirus?

I may find prime rib delicious, but the dead cow I’m eating probably objected to ending up on my plate. What’s good for me is bad for it.

As I said earlier, properties are assigned by brains/minds. Thus properties we think of as good or bad are necessarily experiences conveyed by third parties. Things are good or bad for them, from their perspective. And different species typically have different perspectives (especially when it comes to eating or being eaten).

Gödel assumes that all properties are “first party” properties—that they are innate in things, rather than assigned by the brains/minds of specific species. Water is wet. But wetness is an experience my body/ mind creates for me; it’s not a property of water. Healthy/Unhealthy, Good/Bad, Positive/Negative, these are never properties of things, but third party judgments by various bodies/minds.

Our estimation of Gödel is sinking rapidly by the minute. But let’s give him a chance to pull out of this nose-dive.

With these two premises, Gödel can derive his first theorem: If ? is a positive property, then there is a possibility that an x with property ? exists. That is, it is possible for positive things to exist.3

With flawed premises, you can only derive flawed theorems. Yes, it’s possible for positive things to exist—as a judgment by a body/mind. Gödel’s confusion about where “properties” of this sort exist makes him look silly.

A “positive” judgment about something doesn’t give that something the innate property of being “positive”. Its “positiveness” is a biased third party judgment. Blueberries are delicious! Maggots are delectable!

Now the mathematician turns for the first time to the definition of a divine being: x is divine if it possesses all positive properties ?. The second axiom ensures that a God defined in this way cannot have negative characteristics (otherwise one would create a contradiction).4

This explodes on Gödel even before it hits the ground.

Since in reality these so-called “positive properties” are third party judgments, contradictions are unavoidable in our actual reality. What is positive to the carnivore is negative to its prey.

A God who created an ideal world for carnivores will necessarily be seen negatively by those being eaten, no matter the level of carnivorian worship. Since the “properties” in question are third party opinions, and since there are multiple third parties, it is not contradictory at all for a divine being to be judged positive and negative, good and bad, at the same time. These are outside judgments, not innate properties.

The third axiom states that divinity is a positive characteristic. This point is not really arguable because divinity combines all positive characteristics.5

This is starting to turn into proof that God can’t exist. Ask yourself—What possible being who created our world can always and only be assigned “positive” properties from third parties?

What’s good for the lion is bad for the lamb. Any creator of a world where lambs are eaten by lions is inevitably going to be judged less positively by the former than the latter. As a primate, I’m never going to have a high opinion of the creator of the ebola virus. Its creation was a bad idea (although the virus would disagree, if it could).

Gödel argument is laughably bad. And it’s bad from the start. And it’s bad because he failed to understand that properties are assigned by bodies/minds—they are always third-party assignments.

Let’s continue with the presentation of his proof, although it’s already crashed and burned.

The second theorem now becomes a bit more concrete: by combining the third axiom (divinity is positive) and the first theorem (there is the possibility that something positive exists), a being x could exist that is divine.6

Divine for the lion perhaps; not so divine for the wildebeest running from the lion.

Gödel’s goal now is to show in the following steps that God must necessarily exist in the framework that has been laid out. For this purpose, he introduces in the second definition the “essence” ? of an object x, a characteristic property that determines all other characteristics. An illustrative example is “puppylike if something has this property, it is necessarily cute, fluffy and clumsy.

“The fourth axiom doesn’t seem too exciting at first. It simply states that if something is positive, then it is always positive—no matter the time, situation or place. Being puppylike and tasting good, for example, are always positive, whether during the day or at night in Heidelberg, Germany, or Buenos Aires.7

Okay, so now we’ve got Gödel eating puppies.

Seriously, this has no connection to the biological world. Blueberries are delicious, apparently, even when unripe or rotten. A person, once healthy, is always healthy. Once puppy-like and young always puppy-like and young.

It reminds me of the creationists who place species into fixed categories and insist that apes can only give birth to apes, humans to humans, and therefore evolution is impossible.

Logical containers can be useful for understanding the real world; however, in order for logical containers to be useful, mental flexibility is required.

Since “time, situation and place” (per Gödel) can’t affect how fast I am (if I have the property of being “fast”), it follows that if I’m fast on a racetrack, then I’ll be fast at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

It’s a method of reasoning which has no connection to physical reality.

If you have a supernatural worldview (mind before matter), maybe your counter is that reasoning doesn’t need to have any connection to physical reality. The divine is not physical, God is not physical. If I deem God to be “good” then God has the property of “good” and it’s not a judgment of mine.

This may be okay if I’m defining God for use within my model.

But does the model fit reality, that is, does it fit the external world?

Can anything (other than abstract categories) really have the innate property of goodness, or have any innate properties at all?

I realize the supernatural goal is to elevate mind or intelligence to divinity and then to Godhead, and claim this God created all. But at some point we have to expel this model out of our mind and into outside reality, else God only exists in our minds.

But once thrust into outside reality, positive properties like goodness become third party judgments, not innate. This is because properties are our mental creations, and we should want God to be more than just one of our mental creations.

We should want God to really exist outside of us.

Gödel can now formulate the third theorem: if a being x is divine, then divinity is its essential property. This makes sense because if something is divine, it possesses all positive characteristics—and thus the properties of x are fixed.8

With this step Gödel is making “properties” essential. A tree has the property of “treeness” and now we’re going to call “treeness” essential to being a tree.

Of course this is wrong. A tree doesn’t need “treeness” to be itself because “treeness” is something which exists not in it but in us: we think about trees and create the “tree” category in our minds.

Trees exist whether we think about them and place them into a category and declare “treeness”—or not. They exist whether we or any thinking animal exists—or not.

Things that exist don’t have innate properties and don’t need properties to exist: in short, properties come from minds and exist only in minds.

The next step relates to the existence of a particular being. If somewhere at least one being y possesses the property ?, which is the essential property of x, then x also exists. That is, if anything is puppylike, then puppies must also exist.9

If anything is dragon-like, then dragons must exist.

I just drew a dragon on the paper in front of me. My drawing is dragon-like; therefore dragons exist. This may seem slightly unfair, but remember that it is only in a mind that a property such as “puppylike” exists.

Properties are bits of mental currency, useful (hopefully) for thinking about things in the world, but properties exist in minds, not in things in the world. So properties can’t be essential to existence, and only someone with a supernatural worldview would presume otherwise.

Which is what happened here. Gödel has presumed upfront what he is supposed to be proving. If mind existed before matter, then yes, properties can be essential to existence. But if mind came later, then the things that minds think can’t be essential to the existence of puppies or dragons or anything not mental artifact.

According to the fifth axiom, existence is a positive property. I think most people would agree with that.10

I hate to be ornery, but even here I can’t agree. The existence of an arsenal of nuclear weapons is not a positive thing. From my perspective, the existence of disease-causing viruses is not a good thing. Nor earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes. I’m not keen on the existence of mosquitoes either.

Abstracting the word “existence” from things said to exist—it seems to be a semantic exercise at most.

From this one can now conclude that God exists because this being possesses every positive property, and existence is positive.11

Well, there’s the completed train-wreck, laid out for your entertainment.

You might wonder, do people actually take silly arguments like this seriously?

And the answer is, they do.12

They even write about it in Scientific American.

As it turns out, Gödel’s logical inferences are all correct—even computers have been able to prove that.13

Logically valid, and yet false. Which happens when your premises have no connection to reality. Consider the following valid syllogism:

All mortal beings are human
Rolly-polly bugs are mortal beings
Therefore rolly-polly bugs are human

The first premise is not factual, but the logical inference is correct. Garbage in. Garbage out.

And this is what Gödel has given us.

This does not settle the final question of the existence of one (or more) divine beings. Whether mathematics is really the right way to answer this question is itself questionable—even if thinking about it is quite exciting.14

I wouldn’t say that thinking about it is exciting. It’s a garbage pile of confusion.

Starting with deifying properties and pretending they have real (as opposed to imaginary) existence.

Of course I’m not saying that the things we imagine don’t exist. They exist in our minds, in our models—which may or may not have any useful connection to reality outside our minds. To determine if there is a useful connection, empiricism is required.

In short, God’s existence is a factual question, and logical argument can’t settle it.

That logical argument can’t settle it might be a clue. That is, it might be useful evidence for us to consider.

If mind came first, why can’t logical proofs like Gödel’s settle the issue? Why should empiricism be necessary to determine facts? Why doesn’t rationalism suffice?

So how should we proceed?

First you have to understand the two competing models: mind first and matter first. You have to unravel what circumstances and predictions would flow from each. Then you have to examine evidence from the world and see which fits better.

Which, by the way, is how scientists work.

Manon Bischoff, Can God Be Proved Mathematically?, Scientific American, October 4, 2022. We are told, “This article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission.”

I should add that a logical proof of God’s existence is an exercise only someone with a supernatural worldview (mind primary or mind before matter) would embrace. Only rationalists, not empiricists, in other words, since empiricists would understand that God’s existence is a factual question, a question about the nature of external reality—not a question which can be answered a priori. We learn immediately that Gödel’s approach is mind first.

Ibid.

For example, see https://mindmatters.ai/2021/06/godel-says-god-exists-and-proves-it/ and https://www.templeton.org/news/is-there-a-god-shaped-hole-at-the-heart-of-mathematics?gad_source=5&gad_campaignid=22361053108&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIqMis8duRjQMVPrZaBR3NoSOtEAAYASAAEgIqBvD_BwE and

Bischoff, op. cit. See also https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/presse/informationen/fup/2013/fup_13_308/index.html

Ibid.

This was first published in my Substack, Preface to Atheism—https://dwightlyman.substack.com/p/godels-mathematical-proof-of-gods

Posted in Existence Arguments, Ontological, Preface to Atheism, Theologians | Leave a comment

Realism & Epirealism

Posted on May 13, 2025 by Dwight

Let’s start with one of the first questions that comes up in philosophical inquiry—Is there a real world external to my sensual experiences and thoughts, or is everything only in my head?

This presents us with the first meaning of “realism”—belief in the existence of a “real” world independent of my thoughts and experiences. This can be generalized as belief in the existence of an external observer-independent world.

In effect, this sets up a ledger with a vertical line down the middle. On the right side of the ledger we have our thoughts and experiences—ourselves as observers. On the left side we have the proposed observer-independent world. “Realism” in this sense is the belief that there is something on the left side of the ledger in addition to our thoughts and experiences on the right side.

Confusion

Historically philosophers have made claims about the nature of stuff on the left side of the ledger and called those claims “realism” as well. This is the source of all the confusion.

For example, Plato and his followers concluded that behind our sensual experiences as observers there existed eternal forms. He surmised that these “forms” existed on the observer-independent side of the ledger, i.e. they were “real” independent of our thoughts and experiences.

Pythagoras and his followers concluded that there were eternal mathematical truths independent of us as observers, thus placing these on the left side of the ledger. Later philosophers referred to things of this sort as “universals” and concluded that universals are observer-independent and thus “real” and thus, again, located on the left (observer-independent) side of the ledger.

Today, most philosophers and scientists place scientific concepts (such as atoms, elements, electrons, protons, photons, molecules, genes, etc) on the observer-independent side—this is usually called “scientific realism”.

The result of this terminology is that if you take a position which rejects forms realism, mathematical realism, or scientific realism, you are called an anti-realist. But philosophers who take these “anti-realist” positions are almost always still realists. They still assert that there is an observer-independent reality on the left side of the ledger.

I am among that number.

I embrace realism. What I reject is the assumption that forms or universals or scientific concepts or information—or whatever else is being incorrectly pushed over to the left side—belongs there. I believe these belong on the “observer” side of the ledger and should not be moved to the observer-independent side. I think this movement is a category mistake.

Is there really confusion?

Yes, and examples are everywhere. Here’s one, which comes from an article in New Scientist, September 7, 2024, called “Reality’s comeback” by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan.

“Realism is, loosely speaking, the belief that the world exists independent of us and that there is a truth about how things ‘really’ are,” says Sabine Hossenfelder at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. “It is a philosophical position, not a scientific one, though I suspect that most scientists are realists.”1

Notice that Hossenfelder confuses realism (belief in an external, observer-independent world) with the secondary claim that “there is truth about how things ‘really’ are.” These are separate assertions, but the article conflates them into a single assumption. In this article Padavic-Callaghan also misunderstands Niels Bohr2, who in fact understood the importance of not conflating physical reality with our model or understanding of physical reality—a point she (and the scientists she quotes) fail to appreciate.)

So there is a terminology problem. If you lack the language to distinguish a from b, and conflate both with a, your ability to usefully understand a or b will be stymied.

I propose a solution

We should use the term epirealism (epi-realism) for any add-on assertion about the nature of the left side of the ledger. “Epi” is a prefix meaning “upon” or “on top of” and so epirealism is any position which makes an assertion on top of the existence of an observer-independent reality. It is realism plus a positive assertion about the nature of what is on the left side of the ledger.

The general position I take (along with many others termed “anti-realists”) is that the observer-independent side of the ledger must be imagined as strictly and literally observer independent. That is, we must remove all our observer biases from our understanding of what it is. This is not so easy to do, since the abilities we evolved to have, our observer-abilities, are unavoidably biased.

If we push our experiences (such as experiences of objects, properties, relationships, information) to the left side of the ledger, we are putting them where they don’t belong and don’t properly exist.

Of course we (including our thoughts and experiences) exist as part of the observer-independent world, but the point here is that the “observer” part of us must properly stay on the proper side of the ledger—this is precisely because the “observer” aspect of organisms such as us evolved to be a stand-in for an otherwise inscrutable external world.

Recap

We all have an “in here” composed of experiences and thoughts. One of the first questions we may ask is whether “in here” is all that exists—or are these experiences and thoughts “about” an external “out there” independent of our world “in here”? If we decide that there is an “out there” independent of our “in here” then we have adopted realism—the belief in an observer-independent reality.

If we decide that some of the things we experience or conceive of “in here” actually also exist “out there” then we have added additional beliefs onto our realism. These additions should be referred to as epirealisms so we don’t confuse things. Epirealisms are assertions about the nature of the observer-independent reality.

If we don’t make this distinction, then we end up with each advocate of realism defining advocates of realism who don’t accept his or her claim about the nature of observer-independent reality as anti-realist, when in fact they are realists (just not members of his or her cult of realism).

New Scientist, September 7, 2024, cover story “Can we solve quantum theory’s biggest problem by redefining reality?” (actual article is titled, “Reality’s comeback”) by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan.

Padavic-Callaghan quotes Bohr: ‘“It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is,” he said in an often-repeated quote from the early days of quantum theory. “Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”’ She then proceeds: “But many find [Bohr’s] viewpoint deeply unsatisfying and want to believe in a world composed of sensible objects that exist independently of what we know about them. They are, in other words, realists.”

Bohr was a realist. But he fully understood Alfred Korzybski apparently forgotten aphorism, “The map is not the territory.” Scientists (including quantum physicists) create maps—and then test to see how well the maps (models) work when traversing the territory. And then they improve the maps. Bohr realized that even the best map could never equal the territory, and this is because the territory remains fundamentally different in nature from the nature of any possible map or model.

This was first posted in my Substack, Preface to Atheism—https://dwightlyman.substack.com/p/realism-and-epirealism

Posted in Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Preface to Atheism, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Primacy of Mind

Posted on May 13, 2025 by Dwight

The crucial difference between a supernatural and a natural worldview is this: the former embraces the primacy of mind, and the latter denies it. The crucial distinction is not about God, but about mind.

In other words, the atheism resulting from a natural worldview doesn’t merely reject divine mind behind existence, it rejects any role for mind—or its patina (information, intelligence, universals, concepts, cognition, etc)—behind existence. Did mind come into existence later on? Absolutely. But it wasn’t there originally. That’s naturalism.

But atheism based only on doubt and not on naturalism leaves a role for intelligence behind existence. It rejects God, but doesn’t reject the possibility of the God’s-eye view. And so, although it is atheism, it’s atheism within an overall supernatural worldview.

Many atheists hold this position: rejecting God but not rejecting the God’s-eye view (or at least the possibility of the God’s-eye view).

Why?

Primarily it’s an unwarranted fear that science requires the possibility of a God’s-eye view. And this fear is the result of recognizing that what scientists attempt to construct is just that: a God’s-eye view of existence.

It’s called objectivity and it’s the goal of scientific thought.

But the possibility of constructing a God’s-eye view crashed and burned when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Objective thought as a goal didn’t crash and burn, but as something achievable, as an actual possibility, it disintegrated into flotsam and smoke.

And this was because evolution eliminated the rationale for postulating intelligence behind existence. It exposed us as biological beings, as fundamentally bodies rather than minds. After Darwin, primacy of mind could be—almost had to be—rejected. And because of this, a coherent natural worldview became achievable once again.1

The educated world is only beginning to catch up.

Coherent natural worldviews were articulated by pre-Socratic and later Greek philosophers, as well as the Charvaka in India. I’ll write more about these in the future.

This was first published in my Substack, Preface to Atheism—https://dwightlyman.substack.com/p/primacy-of-mind

Posted in Naturalism, Preface to Atheism, Supernaturalism | Leave a comment

A B C Realities

Posted on May 12, 2025 by Dwight

In my previous posts, Are Mountains Real? and Roundness & What is Real, I employed the philosophical definition of realness. But this differs from the normal use of the term “real,” and that might be confusing to some readers.

In Roundness & What is Real, I explained

Whenever philosophers (or anyone for that matter) asks if something is real, what they are actually asking is a different question: where does something exist? The philosopher’s question, Is roundness real? is, in other words, the scientist’s question, Where does roundness exist?

In general, something might exist outside of us (outside of our thinking and observing), or it might exist within our thinking and observing. When philosophers debate realism, they are debating whether or not something exists outside of our thinking and observing—out there in what we usually refer to as the physical world.

Of course, we also exist within the physical world, and this means that our thinking andobserving exists within the physical world as well. Even our nightly dreams occur within the world, since it is where we exist. In this sense, even our dreams, hallucinations and delusions are real.

But saying that everything we experience or imagine is “real” deprives the word of any value. What is valuable is to figure out what we (our bodies, brains and minds) bring to the table when we observe, experience, think about the world, versus what’s out there independently of us.

Philosophers employ the terms “real” and “realism” to debate this important issue.

Thus if you conclude that roundness is something which exists wholly independent of us as bodies, brains and minds, then you believe roundness is real. If you believe mountains exist wholly independent of us as bodies, brains and minds, then you believe mountains are real.

In my articles, I argued the opposite: that in fact roundness and mountains are dependent on us for their existence, and thus are not real in this philosophical sense. Again, real here means “exists in the observer independent world independently of our bodies, brains and minds”.

But if something is not real in this sense, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Mountains aren’t real, but they do exist as common human experiences. They are “real” in this latter sense, as common human objects of experience. Same with tables, chairs, roundness, etc.

One might also note that humans commonly create pseudo “real” things, and do so knowingly and deliberately. A nation is such. Governments and their laws are such. Political borders don’t have real existence, but do have this sort of (hopefully) agreed upon existence.

Is a nation a real thing? It certainly doesn’t have external observer-independent existence. But nations do exist in human consciousness, taken collectively. You might say, they exist if we think and say they do, and if we act accordingly.

What exists, and where does it exist?

My position is that there exists an external, observer-independent reality, which we call the physical world. Thus I embrace external-world realism.

Our biological bodies exist within this observer-independent world (in the sense of being external to our brains/minds when they serve as observers). Thus our bodies are real.1

I embrace naturalism, which is the claim that the external, observer-independent reality is primary. Which is to say, it existed first and biological entities like us evolved later. And then some biological entities like us evolved brains. And then some biological entities like us evolved brains that began producing consciousness.

In my version of naturalism, consciousness evolved as a stand-in for the observer-independent reality. Sensations and feelings are produced by our brains, and present a model (simulacrum) of the world which our brains use to make better decisions for our survival.

And then some biological entities like us evolved brain-producing consciousness which went a step beyond sensations and feelings, and began producing thoughts, concepts and understandings. Tacked onto our stand-in, these enable a continually-improving model of the world and even more complex decision-making. (And of course enable the creation of pseudo “real” things like nations, governments, political borders, laws, etc.)

Put in a chart, the worldview I’m presenting looks something like this:

Pasted Graphic.png

“A” Reality – Primary physical ever-changing stuff existing now, about which we can only say that it is not “B” or “C”

“B” Reality – Sensual consciousness, the simulacrum created by conscious organisms to “stand in” for “A” reality so that they can successfully survive, evolve and thrive within “A” reality [cf. Parmenides’ way of appearances]

“C” Reality – The underlying structure (logical, mathematical) of “B” reality, which itself is discernible and knowable using the expansion of consciousness (“B” reality) available to human organisms because of their ability to introspect and reason about “B” reality and to test the consequences within “A” reality [cf. Parmenides’ way of truth; Plato’s forms; scientific knowledge via pragmatic empiricism]

I split C Reality into C- and C+ in the chart.

The chart is not perfect. Consider it a first draft.

For one thing, nothing is to scale. The external observer-independent reality is vast compared to an individual organism or its brain—that’s not evident here. For another, it looks like “C” is built on top of “B”—I included brown dotted lines to indicate that both are produced in parallel by the brain.

On the left and right sides, I added downward-facing arrows for perception and introspection. Note that I show no way for perception to plumb the nature of external observer-independent reality, beyond the brain’s use of pragmatic empiricism to align its simulacrum (model) with what works for the organism.

Ideally, a chart like this would link “B” and “C” to the specific brain sections employed to stage them. (My assumption is that the brain’s process for creating consciousness “stages” the specific consciousness produced using corresponding areas of the cortex/neocortex. Although a specific conscious experience does not equate to a specific brain state, there will be a specific brain state employed to create that consciousness. Sections of the neocortex are thus seen as staging areas for specific experiences of consciousness.)

My hope is that the chart helps the reader understand the version of naturalism I’m presenting in this SubStack.

This aligns with David Hume’s philosophical skepticism. He also carved out an exception for biological organisms. He wasn’t skeptical about their realness.

This was first published in my Substack, Preface to Atheism—https://dwightlyman.substack.com/p/a-b-c-realities

Posted in Naturalism, Preface to Atheism | Leave a comment

Questioning Direct Realism

Posted on May 12, 2025 by Dwight

In his book, Seeing Things As They Are [Oxford Press, 2015] John Searle says that objects in the observer-independent world cause our subjective visual perceptions. And that as a consequence, seeing is knowing.

For example, when I look at a mountain, the mountain is a real object which causes my visual perception. The difference between this and hallucinating a mountain is that the hallucination is a subjective perception which was not caused by an actual external mountain out there.

Sounds good, right?

But what about when I see a mountain in a painting or a photograph? I’m sure Searle would agree that this is not an hallucination. And yet, it’s also not an actual mountain out there in the observer-independent world. So what in the photo caused me to perceive a mountain object?

The answer has to be that the same process is occurring when I see an external mountain as when I see a photograph (or holograph) of a mountain. My biological visual system creates a mountain object in each case from the photons sampled at my retinas.

In Searle’s account, the primary (and I guess secondary properties) of the physical mountain cause my perception of the mountain as an object. But in the case of the photo or hologram, there is no mountain with primary or secondary mountain properties. So the properties of the photo mountain or hologram mountain aren’t causing my mountain perception, because they aren’t mountain properties at all.

Instead, my brain creates the mountain object when sufficient patterns of photons are sampled by my retinas. As we know, a painting or photograph or hologram of a mountain is designed to create a sufficient pattern of photons to entice my brain to create a mountain object.

So I think Searle simply has it wrong.

Of course we know why he makes this error. Like all of us external-world realists, Searle wants to be able to say that there really is an existing external world out there.

Direct realism (seeing is knowing) allows us to confirm the common-sense view we all have that we are seeing an actual world when we open our eyes, and that objects in that world are directly causing our perceptions. We are designed by our evolutionary history to experience vision this way—it is preeminently useful to us as organisms that we see a world of objects and interact with them.

But direct realism can’t actually be the case.

Paintings, photographs, holograms, virtual reality headsets demonstrate the problem. They enable us to see objects that don’t actually exist as such. And in doing so, they reveal that we don’t actually see “things as they are”.

Objects are constructed by the brain. And so are their properties.

Two Questions

(1) So how do we know what, if anything, is really out there in the observer-independent world?

(2) How do we know that there is an observer-independent world?

The second question is trivially answered if naturalism is correct.

Since we are physical ourselves, and since our brains create our sensations and perceptions from sampling physical stuff (photons, we now understand) external to us, and since consciousness and all its accoutrements are produced by the brain and not located outside the brain, there must be an actual external world of non-consciousness stuff, which we call the physical world.

(Bishop Berkeley tried to present an alternative in which God’s consciousness is the source of an apparent non-consciousness world around us, and this possible alternative needs to be considered and evaluated, but the much simpler alternative is to suppose an external world of non-conscious physical stuff—it simplifies everything.)

That’s our answer to the second question.

The answer to the first question is pragmatic empiricism.

Imagine our sensations and perceptions to be a brain-produced stand-in for a physical world we can’t directly or even indirectly perceive. Immediately we face the question: how can we know anything about this external world?

First, the stand-in is our knowing of it. The stand-in is presented to us as a surrounding world.

We move and act within this apparent surrounding world, and since it turns out there actually is a real, unknowable, imperceptible external and surrounding world, the stand-in serves its purpose pretty well. Evolution has ensured this.

The brain pragmatically constructs the stand-in as a simulacrum which combines sensual experiences (vision, hearing, touch, etc) with construction of objects and their properties, and associated understandings (meanings/acquired knowledge) which make the stand-in increasingly useful to us as organisms.

What is the “criteria of truth”, that is, what makes the simulacrum fit for purpose, so that it more or less usefully stands in for the external world?

It’s this: that we are always pragmatically updating the simulacrum (updating our understandings and meanings) to improve its usefulness to us.

The scientific endeavor takes this a step further, adding instrumentation to extend our sensing (sampling) capabilities and applying a collective concept of usefulness to achieve point-of-view invariance1 in that regard.

I call this naturalism based on scepticism (which of course means philosophical/Humean scepticism), but you can see that it’s based on pragmatism as well. In my mind, pragmatic empiricism is the best description of how we go about fitting our simulacrum to the otherwise unknowable physical world.

Additional Evidence

Producing consciousness is a slower brain process. It doesn’t happen simultaneously with our sampling interactions with the world around us. It takes half a second or so for the brain to produce our vision and other conscious experiences. Fortunately the brain can react faster than this, and in emergencies it will. For example, you might touch a hot stove and almost instantly retreat you hand before feeling a burning sensation or seeing your hand touch the stove. The brain does this non-consciously, which is faster.

A professional baseball batter can’t rely on the simulacrum to swing the bat because vision is too slow. The half-second delay will not lead to success. But although consciousness is a slower brain process, it allows us to rewire our neurons (we call it learning), and the brain can now use those new neuronal connections to react quickly (outside of consciousness).

The process of learning to drive a car demonstrates the same thing. A beginning driver is hyper-conscious of everything (perhaps stressfully so) until their constant conscious effort has rewired the brain enough that aspects of driving can be handled outside of consciousness. Eventually driving becomes “second nature” in the sense that most of the initial hyper-consciousness is no longer necessary.

In short, learning a skill requires the effort of consciousness, but once a skill is learned the brain can forego most of that consciousness, and thereby speed up its actions and reactions. In this we start to see one of the key roles of consciousness: it is to rewire the neurons in the brain so that future actions can be done more quickly, outside of (by-passing) consciousness.

Thus consciousness is employed by the brain to improve not just the usefulness of the stand-in (its fit to the external world), but to improve (and speed up) future actions and reactions within that world.

Back to John Searle

How can Searle address the issue of drawings, paintings, photographs, VR headsets causing us to experience the same “objects” we experience when directly looking at the external world?

He might do so by stressing “the distinction between object and content”2 Searle maintains that those who advocate alternatives to direct realism often fail to make this distinction.

For example, if I see a man in front of me, the content is that there is a man in front of me. The object is the man himself. If I am having a corresponding hallucination, the perceptual experience has a content, but no object. The content can be exactly the same in the two cases, but the presence of a content does not imply the presence of an object.3

Obviously, seeing the photograph of a man or seeing a VR image of a man cannot be considered (in Searle’s sense) an hallucination. So there will be a corresponding objectfor the perceptual experience of seeing a man. But here, Searle can say that the object is not a man, per se, but rather a photograph of a man or a hologram of a man, etc.

So far so good.

But notice now that there is a causation problem. Searle maintains, when we are not hallucinating, that objects in the external world cause our perceptual experiences.

But it seems to me that the existence of photographs and VR headsets demonstrates that it’s not objects which cause our perceptual experiences: it’s photons. And the photons are decidedly not the objects we experience.

The issue I’m raising here is not how do we distinguish between a virtual reality object and a real-world object, though that is an important issue. It’s rather, how can we seriously maintain that real-world objects cause our perceptual experiences, given this situation?

Yes, Searle is correct: as organisms we do believe by default that our perceptual experiences are caused by external objects in the world. But this is not in dispute.

What is in dispute is whether, in fact, external objects can actually cause the perceptual experiences we have of those “objects”. It seems obvious to me that they cannot, and that all perceptual experiences are in fact hallucinations.

At best our visual hallucinations are “caused” by the collection of photons at our retinas. Nevertheless, our visual hallucinations are produced by our brains, and populated with objects likewise produced by our brains.

Yet it’s photons, not objects out in the world, which trigger this chain of events.

Primary & Secondary Qualities

Searle’s brief discussion (in the last chapter) about Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities is interesting. He notes, usefully, that

If you look at the lists of Primary and Secondary Qualities, you notice several things. First, each Secondary Quality is from one sense only. Colors are from sight, | sounds from hearing, odors from smell, tastes from taste. The Primary Qualities are accessible at two senses and always the same two, sight and touch. For each of the traditional five senses, there is one, and only one, Secondary Quality, with the exception of the sense of touch. That is why I think texture ought to be listed as a Secondary Quality, though Locke does not so list it. Why is it important to be accessible to two senses? And the answer is that it is part of our concept of a material object that it has these Primary Qualities and that our basic dealings with material objects are based on a coordination of sight and touch. When Locke says that they are inseparable from the object in whatsoever state it might be, he is getting at this conceptual point.4

My dictum is that whatever is “part of our concept of a material object” belongs to usand not to the external object. It’s constructed by our brain, not delivered to us by the object.

And this means that the “properties” of an object do not come from the object: they are created by our brains and experienced in consciousness, stored in memory.

Primary and Secondary Properties exist in here, not out there. Which means any “object” which is dependent upon its “properties” to exist (e.g. as a concept) exists in here, not out there. If we are to talk about objects out there, they will be objects without properties per se.

Consider this from a review of the Apple Vision Pro by Johnny Dodd for Peoplemagazine.

Then I spotted the virtual butterfly. It was flapping around in the distance, oblivious to the massive creatures nearby. At some point I stuck my hand out and watched it slowly land on my finger. And that’s when it happened. The moment its six spindly legs made contact with my finger, I could literally feel it touching my skin. The experience was gloriously perplexing and in the months that followed I convinced myself that I must have somehow imagined the whole thing.

Three weeks ago I was invited back to Apple’s L.A. headquarters to get some more time with the Vision Pro—and all I could think about was that damn butterfly. After putting the device through its paces and checking out some of the latest tweaks and new content, I asked my handlers if I could have one last encounter with their virtual winged insect. And sure enough, the moment it alighted upon my finger, it happened again. I could feel it.

And that’s when I realized that, of course, I was imagining the whole experience. That’s how powerful the Vision Pro is at re-creating the reality of meatspace (a.k.a the physical world). It serves up a jaw-droppingly realistic artificial world and my brain — doing what my brain always does — just filled in the gaps5

Our brains don’t perceive the physical world but rather create a sensual “experience” to stand in for the world, and this makes virtual reality devices possible. Ask yourself, how did Dodd’s brain “perceive” a butterfly landing on his finger from the digital 0’s and 1’s processed by the M2 chip in the Vision Pro?

It didn’t.

Rather, his brain constructed the butterfly on the finger (and the tactile sensation that went along with it) from his retina’s photon sampling. The M2 feeds the 0’s and 1’s to the OLED displays in the headset and this turns on and off millions of photon-producing pixels which then get sampled by the eyes.

No more nor less than what the brain is always doing as we move about in the world.

Species-Specific Vision

Photon-producing screens, whether CRT, LED, OLED etc, are designed and manufactured specifically for the benefit of human photon sampling. They are fine-tuned to meet our hominid-brain requirements. This makes it likely, indeed certain, that these photon-producing screens won’t work as well for other species.

If your pets seem disinterested in the tv in your living room, remember that it probably doesn’t produce the color range their brains expect when sampling photons. RGB works for the cones existing in human eyes, but other species have additional types of cones which collect photons our eyes can’t.

Even more importantly, their brains may use different rules to construct scenes.

Donald Hoffman identified 35 rules6 the human brain uses to construct vision. The less evolutionary history we have with another species, the more likely it is that their rules for constructing vision will differ from ours.

The Vision Pro is just the latest in a long line of human inventions designed to “trick” the human brain into seeing virtual (or imaginary) objects. The earliest cave paintings were an ancient equivalent to the Vision Pro. They worked, because the brain doesn’t just create a visual scene. It populates that scene with objects.

Draw an outline of a horse in the sand, and my brain doesn’t see a meaningless squiggle, it sees a horse. And it recalls horse-related meanings.

This tells us that the brain applies (or at least tries to apply) an “objectification” process to everything we see. We don’t see a meaningless scene. We see a scene of objects and potential objects. This is what makes vision useful to the organism: it creates meanings, and meanings suggest actions.7

See Victor Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?, Prometheus Books, 2006.

John Searle, Seeing Things As They Are, Oxford Press, 2015, p. 35.

Ibid., p. 35.

Ibid., pp. 233-234

https://people.com/apple-vision-pro-headset-review-8557794

Donald Hoffman, Visual Intelligence, Norton & Company, New York, 1998.

Technically, meanings trigger feelings and the nature and intensity of those feelings suggest actions—although some automatic brain reactions bypass the feeling step to maximize the organism’s responsiveness (this is the goal of learning a new skill).

This was first published in my Substack, Preface to Atheism—https://dwightlyman.substack.com/p/questioning-direct-realism

Posted in Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Preface to Atheism | Leave a comment

God’s Gender

Posted on May 12, 2025 by Dwight

From the beginning, Christians have insisted that gender is not about genitalia.

Today, all of a sudden, most American Christians have changed their minds.

Christians insist, now, that sex and gender and genitalia must all be about the same: you can’t have a sex or a gender that doesn’t correspond to whatever your genitalia is.

Make that your genitalia at birth. As determined at conception.

Christians didn’t used to believe this.

Christians didn’t believe this in the 1980’s when I was a young atheist trying to make sense of Christian beliefs.

Back then, I thought I was being smart in pointing out that God should not be referred to as He or Him—for the obvious reason that God, by definition, doesn’t have a penis.

Shoot, God doesn’t even have a body.

My Christian friends pushed back intelligently, explaining that one’s gender was distinct from one’s sex: that, in fact, gender was not tied to genitalia at all. And this distinction was why God, body or not, could be masculine. And was masculine as a matter of religious faith.

Okay, I could see they had a point.

This was the 1980’s and I (who previously had never thought about the distinction between sex and gender) was forced to realize that the issue was more complex than my simplistic gender = genitalia assumption.

So I backed off on referring to God as It.

Fast-forward to today.

Now most Christians have changed their mind. They have decided that sex = gender = genitalia is exactly right.

Even more so, it’s got to be the genitalia you were born with.

Here’s the new Christian theology: If you were born with a vagina (or with XX chromosomes, in some accounts) you are the female sex and gender, and if you were not then you are not. If you were born with a penis (or with XY chromosomes, in some accounts) you are the male sex and gender, and if you were not then you are not.

What about God?

Was God born with penis or vagina or chromosomes of any sort?

No.

God wasn’t even born.

Therefore: God is neither male nor female, neither masculine nor feminine.

Hmm….

That’s right, Christians now think the atheist back in 1980 was right all along.

God is an It after all.

Here’s my modest proposal:

I propose that atheists—and transgender people and Democrats and old-fashioned Christians—start referring to God as It in every instance.

And each time a Republican refers to God as He or Him, call them out for their wokeness.

Indeed, thinking the way these Christian Republicans think, it should be illegal to misgender God as male or female.1 (Certainly it’s blasphemous, so why not write it into our laws? We are a Christian nation, right?2)

God is an It. This is their theology.

If you refer to God as He or Him, you are being woke (separating gender from genitals)—and we will call you out.

We should do this repeatedly. Maybe they will start to understand (or remember) why they used to believe that gender was not about genitalia or sex chromosomes.

And why being woke is maybe intelligent.

Let’s treat it as a guerrilla campaign to knock some sense into the Christian world.

Yes, some Christians misgender God as female and not just male. I was born into Christian Science, a denomination which every Sunday presents the “spiritual” translation of the Lord’s Prayer, beginning, “Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious…” in place of “Our Father which art in heaven…” As far as I know, this has never been controversial.

I kid. Writing theological positions into Federal law is a good way to push Christians into war with other Christians, given that there are 45,000 denominations all with differing theologies. Those of us who are non-Christian might not be happy either.

This was first published on my Substack, Preface to Atheism—https://dwightlyman.substack.com/p/gods-gender

Posted in Preface to Atheism, Sexuality | Leave a comment

Two Types of Atheism

Posted on December 17, 2024 by Dwight

There are in general two types of atheism.

atheism from burden-of-proof skepticism
atheism from natural worldview (naturalism that entails atheism)

20th century atheism was almost entirely the former.

The 20th century champion of atheism from skepticism was Antony Flew. The position he advocated consisted of two questionable assertions. (1) that the burden of proof is on those who say there is a God, and (2) that theists had failed to meet that burden.

Shortly before he died, Flew changed his mind about number 2 and decided that theists had indeed met the burden—at least for a God like Aristotle’s. Prior to this, however, Flew was probably the most prominent atheist arguing from skepticism. His approach was flawed from the beginning, but is pretty representative of a lot of “thoughtful” atheism you will run into today. (I put thoughtful in quotes because although it may be thoughtful, it is not sound. As I will explain.)

So why is Flew’s “burden of proof” assertion unsound?

Let’s start by presenting his argument. He takes the concept of burden of proof from the legal system. When someone is accused of a crime, they are presumed innocent until sufficient evidence is presented by the prosecution to show that they are guilty as accused. In other words, the burden of proof is on the prosecution, not the defense.

And there is a sound reason for this: presenting sufficient evidence that you did not commit a specific crime is often difficult if not impossible. Perhaps you have a strong alibi—disinterested witnesses who can testify that you were elsewhere at the time of the crime, for example. But if you have a good alibi like this, the police probably already weeded you out as a suspect. Police are almost always going to arrest suspects who don’t have a strong alibi and who can be imagined as having motive.

But does not having an alibi make a suspect guilty? Would anyone consider it reasonable to assert that whoever can’t provide proof that they were elsewhere Friday at 3 pm when the bank was robbed, must therefore be the robber? Of course not. We require evidence that links suspects to the crimes we suspect them of. Otherwise we will jail a lot of innocent people.

So the burden of proof rightly falls on the prosecution, not the defense, in a criminal trial.

Flew argued that a similar burden of proof applies to propositions about God. In his analogy, asserting that God exists is like asserting that a crime occurred and that the burden of proof lies on the person making the assertion.

It is unreasonable, he goes on, to expect the other side to have to prove a universal negative. If you claim that a pink unicorn exists, it’s got to be up to you to provide evidence for that assertion. It’s not on me to survey the entire world in order to prove you are wrong (and allow you to say, nice try, but you overlooked the unicorn because it didn’t want to be seen).

Therefore Flew, and many atheists today, assert that the burden of proof must be on whoever asserts that something exists. Claim that God exists? Then it’s on you to prove it.

So why is this mistaken?

I think the best way to demonstrate the problem with Flew’s burden of proof argument is to point out that this is not actually the way burden of proof works in the sciences. In the sciences, burden of proof rests on whoever is contesting the scientific consensus. When flat space was the consensus, the burden was on Einstein and others to cast doubt on the consensus and to provide a more convincing alternative.

If he had looked to science instead of using the legal system for his burden of proof analogy, Flew would have more reasonably placed the burden of proof on whoever kicks against the consensus. And it makes practical sense: if most people disagree with you and you want to change their minds, it’s on you to present the evidence and arguments that will change their minds.

As long as the context of the conversation about God is an intellectual discussion and not a criminal courtroom, the burden of proof naturally falls on those with the minority position.

(Though I would argue that intellectual honesty means that it falls on all of us regardless of the popularity of our positions.)

Flew’s 2nd assertion—that theists had not met the burden of proof—was wrong-headed as well. Of course we shouldn’t forget that Flew changed his mind at the end, yet that was equally wrong-headed for much the same reason.

What is wrong-headed about it is that it pretends that there is only one side to the story (a proposition) which is either sufficiently proved or supported by evidence, or not. Flew thought the only proposition in question was “There is a God” and that either its proponents presented sufficient proof—or they did not.

Again, the sciences don’t work this way: in reality there are always competing propositions, and evidence which supports one proposition may be reinterpreted to equally support a different proposition. If you pretend that there is only one proposition in question, and good evidence is presented for it, you may entirely miss the alternative that is also consistent in its own way with that same evidence.

There is also a more obvious mistake that arises, in this instance, from atheism based on burden of proof skepticism. This is the assumption that if logical arguments for God’s existence are unsuccessful, the burden of proof is not met and therefore we should not assent to believing in God. But this is specious. Logical arguments for God can never be successful precisely because they are logical arguments.

God’s existence is a factual question, and logical constructions cannot adjudicate factual claims. It’s as simple as that.

The relationship between minds and the world minds exist within is necessarily empirical. There are two types of knowing—rational and empirical—due to the reality that minds evolved later. Minds produce logical, rule-based, coherent understandings (rational knowledge), but have no way to determine the usefulness (truth) of what they know except via interaction with the surrounding world.

Constructions of knowledge therefore must be selected based on their empirical usefulness within the world. And importantly, they are tested not against the world (there is no singular way to do that) but against other possible constructions of knowledge.

When Karl Popper says that knowledge can’t be verified, only falsified, this is what he means (or at least what he should have meant). If not-A (or B, C , D or other subset of not-A) is more useful within the world than A is, then A is falsified, and not-A (or the specific subset that was more useful) must get our focus.

Human knowledge constructions are infinite—we are capable of thinking of anything minds like ours can construct—because the world we exist within is fundamentally a black box, and what is most useful could turn out to be anything. This is why our knowledge capacity evolved to be so flexible. It has to be, for our survival.

Or rather, species with inadequate mental flexibility won’t reproduce as successfully, and will be replaced by natural competitors.

Why are we the only surviving hominid species? This might be the reason: we were more flexible empiricists. We could create a greater variety of rational explanations than other hominids, and reject less useful explanations more readily than others hominids could. This, perhaps, was our superpower.

This superpower developed in us (I believe) thanks to synesthesia enabling extensive language development. This would have started with synesthesia-style associations of unique visual objects with unique human utterances—in short, with the innovation of uttered names for everything important we saw or interacted with in our world. The brain’s capacity for synesthesia fused the name with the visual object, and thus the underlying basis for extensive language and knowledge-building was set in motion.

But we needed to be able to flexibly change our opinions as we interfaced with the changing world, or as we migrated into new parts of the world. Homo Sapiens was better at this than homo Erectus, and probably better than homo Neanderthalensis. And yet we’ve never been perfectly efficient at changing our beliefs as we interact with the world, and the persistence of outdated religions are evidence of that.

Which brings us back to topic (before this side-excursion). Logical constructions can never settle factual claims about the world.

Example: All valid logical arguments for God contain premises that belong to a supernatural worldview and that do not belong to a natural worldview, so such arguments always presume what they are meant to prove.* Thus their inevitable failure.

But this means that the inevitable failure of Aquinas’ Five Ways is not grounds for skepticism. Logical arguments can never prove a factual claim anyway, so failure of any and all logical arguments for God is beside the point.

For theists and atheists this is both good news and bad news.

The bad news is that most of the “thoughtful” arguments about God are a waste of time, but the good news is that this colossal waste of time is an important teachable moment which can redirect us to the real issues and factual evidence pertaining to the question of God’s existence.

What we really ought to be doing is comparing natural to supernatural worldviews so we can determine which is a better fit with the world around and within us. Which approach best fits the evidence we have?

This makes for a substantially different conversation than the ones atheists and theists have had in the past.

But there is a barrier preventing us from having this new conversation. Almost nobody understands what a natural worldview entails. We are experts on supernaturalism, familiar with it from every angle, but of naturalism we understand almost nothing. This makes a judicious comparison impossible.

So naturalism and its underlying premises need exposition.

Which is the purpose of Preface to Atheism.

Posted in Atheology, Naturalism, Preface to Atheism | Leave a comment

How I Found Ungod

Posted on December 17, 2024 by Dwight

[Old piece of writing from one of my mid-1990’s websites—yes, it’s a spoof, but one with a philosophical/atheological point to make (see first footnote explaining the origin and concept of “Ungod”).]

Excursions Near the Temple of Gloom

or

How I Found Ungod

by Eltanin al Rastaban

While romping through the highland jungle near an archaeological dig (yes, years ago I was Indiana Jones, so to speak), I stubbed my toe.

On a rock. A remarkably smooth rock, in fact. As I checked the surface for the remains of my toenail, perhaps thinking it could be reattached with a little scotch tape I had on hand, I observed some oddly invisible, cryptic characters on the edge of the stone.

Retrieving my slightly rusty trowel, I quickly dug the stone out. Since it was located in the disturbed soil of the surface there was no need to do more than note its coordinates in the forest. Eagerly, I began to study the mysterious markings on the rock.

I said earlier the characters were invisible, and indeed they were, except to the faith of an atheist. When I showed the stone to my archaeological compatriots, not one of them could see any markings or letters at all, since they lacked atheist faith. Indeed, their jealousy of my ability to see characters on the stone quickly led them to dismiss me from the team.

Now I admit their petty jealousy perturbed me. Nonetheless, I retreated to my trailer and began the task of recording and translating the message on what would later become known as the Rock of Ungod.

The result you see before you, referred to variously as the “Word of Ungod,” “Ungod’s Atheist Teachings,” or the “Ungod Commandments.”

I present them together with my own explanations, for I have discovered that by simple, sincere atheist faith, I’ve gained the uncanny ability to comprehend exactly what Ungod was trying to say.

Ungod’s Brevity

It has been asked how so much information could have been found on a single rather small stone. It is simple. The invisible characters on the stone magically grouped themselves in layers over one another, alternately rising and falling as I needed. Reading the holy writ of Ungod was more like unpeeling an onion, albeit a somewhat magical one, and less like making pressings of gravestones or, for that matter, reading pedestals. Thus the Rock of Ungod has a clear edge over the tables of Moses or the tablets of Mormon. After all, their technology was stone age. Ungod’s is information age.

A word about the pre-Mayan language on the tablets. In most languages, ancient and modern, a distinction is made between nouns and verbs—or more accurately, between objects and their actions. Here that is not the case. Remarkably, their word for an object always includes its action or behavior as well.

In a sense there are no verbs in this language because nouns already include the verb: we might call them noun-verbs. What almost serves the place of the verb, however, are characters that indicate the existential or logic state for each noun-verb in the sentence. These are:

happens
moves
happens-not
moves-not
happens-if
moves-if

Though there may be other logic-states, they are not found on the Ungod stone. In the deciphered passages, the logic states follow [in brackets] in the same order as the noun-verb to which they apply.

Any noun-verb that changes or exists (or is provisionally presumed to exist, in some contexts) is assigned the logic-state of moves. If it is non-existent, it is assigned the opposite state of moves-not. On the other hand, when a noun-verb is assigned the logic state of happens, it becomes a reference to the noun-verb’s experience itself—or the experiencing of it by some sentient being. This will become clearer as we look at the sayings.

The first 8 sayings of Ungod are as follows:

1) Gods Ungod-living [moves-not] [moves]
2) Gods Head-thinking Body-being [happens] [happens-if] [moves]
3) God-giving Ungod-living [happens] [happens-not]
4) Body-being Head-thinking [moves-not] [happens-not]
5) Body-thinking [happens]
6) Body-thinking Pond-changing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]
7) Body-being Ground-dancing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]
8) Body-being Corpse Corpse [moves] [happens-not] [moves]

The Atheist Teachings of Ungod — Explained!

1) Gods Ungod-living [moves-not] [moves]

Translation: “There are no Gods but Ungod”

Since Ungod is no god, this pretty much sums up atheist worship.

Ok, you’re right. Atheists do worship the pink unicorn and great fisheye, I admit that. But most of all atheists worship Ungod. Or they will as soon as they find out about her, because. . . ok, because Ungod is naked.

That’s right, not a stitch on. And can Jehovah and Allah and Buddha say that?

2) Gods Head-thinking Body-being [happens] [happens-if] [moves]

Translation: “If God had a brain, He’d have a body.”

And if he had a body, he’d have to wear clothes. Or else go stark naked like Ungod.

What Ungod means here is that she is a much better choice for human worship because she can be naked. Whereas God, poor bodiless entity that He is, hasn’t a thing to hang his clothes on.

Oh, and the part about a brain? Obviously if God had a brain, He’d give himself a body. Who wouldn’t? It makes things so much easier, starting with what to do with your hat. But God doesn’t have a body, and consequently he doesn’t have one very important thing that comes with bodies: a brain.

And without the brain, he’ll never think to give himself a body.

Talk about a vicious circle!

Ok, there’s one other little problem with not having a body. You can’t exist!

Why? Because you can’t do anything—because you don’t have any parts to do anything with. No body, no brain, no you.

Which makes what to do with the hat the least of your worries.

3) God-giving Ungod-living [happens] [happens-not]

Translation: “Service to God is disservice to Life”

How’s that for a bumper sticker.

If you put it on your car, will you find your windows smashed and tires flat? Probably, says Ungod. If you belong to God, any truth but His makes you angry, since it threatens you with eternal punishment.

“I am a Jealous God,” says God. “and since I only exist as an idea in your head, I will strike you with all my wrath if you think unGod-like ideas!” Serve God, and you serve an idea-virus. It invades your head, destroying any thoughts incompatible with it, barring the ears, eyes, nose and mouth from anything Ungod. What you believe is more important than how you live.

Poor Ungod! She thinks ideas should serve you, not you them.

Instead of getting stuck on your beliefs, she thinks you should be free to abandon them as soon as the wind changes—or a better idea floats by.

But God, that destructive virus, wants to rout everything out the human mind but Him. Think God ideas, or go to hell. Believe and worship God ideas, and be rewarded with the only existence that really, really matters: afterlife.

Ah, afterlife! The City of Dis. Heaven at God’s right hand. Cloudy, wispy angels braying in your ears! God, God, God, God all day long in your ears.

Heaven indeed, if you’re the God-idea virus. But hell, sheer hell, if you’re the ears.

Such is service to God.

You can’t have two masters. Serve life, or serve God. Take your choice.

But is life a master? Ungod is telling me she didn’t write that.

“Life is us in our aliveness, that’s all,” she says. Can you be your own master?

You can, you absolutely can. But only if you are virus-free.

Service to God is disservice to Life. If you are all goo-goo eyes over heaven, over the sweet fantasy that you will have eternal life without pain or effort or bathroom visits—well, the result is that you pay that much less attention to life. You care that much less about things on earth. After all, the real show is in heaven.

So if a few million people starve here, a few million more get tortured there, what does it matter? This is only life. And by dying, they’ll just get to heaven a little quicker—. That wonderful place where they’ll have the angel-braying God-virus in their ears all day, and running out their noses. The real show!

Of course, life on earth isn’t entirely useless. I mean, its a great opportunity to build religious schools and indoctrinate as many billions as possible with the God-virus.

We need those billions in heaven. God feeds on them. It’s His only source of sustenance.

But wait, Ungod…

Wait.

A few exist who believe in God but also seem to care about those starving and tortured millions. And actively try to help.

They are called liberals.

If they serve God, how can it be that they care so much about life, about helping other people here on earth?

They serve two masters, says Ungod. The God-virus only got half their brain. Or got brain but not heart. Or they have an active immune system.

Whatever.

The point is that all the others who serve God are engaged full time in a frontal, full-scale attack on liberals. And now you know why.

4) Body-being Head-thinking [moves-not] [happens-not]

Translation: “Thinking is something that bodies do; therefore without a body to do the thinking, thinking can’t exist.”

Ungod’s construction here is a little inexact (hey, Ungod is anything but perfect!) but what she means is that thinking only happens in certain animal brains, and then only when those brains receive adequate nutrients and caloric energy. Which means, gosh, thinking is a physical process!

Ungod’s point is that since God is not a physical being, lacks a body and therefore lacks a brain (not to mention other appendages), God can’t think.

Thinking can’t happen, she’s telling us, unless a body does it. And God doesn’t have one of those. He’s not a body-being. (And He’s never gotten over it, either.)

Ungod’s meaning really goes much further than this, though. If you bob your head and try to pick up the faint vibrational hues and radiances of her words, the following revelation leaps upon you:

Information doesn’t exist out in the world. It is only a human—perhaps only a hominid, perhaps only a mammalian—characteristic. Information happens only in our imaginations.

This is made explicit in the very next words on the Rock.

5) Body-thinking [happens]

Translation: “Information happens!”

Information happens! Isn’t that the truth of it? But what the hell. . . !?

Let me explain. Ungod means information is an internal experience we have, not a set of “facts” about the world. Information is not “true” says Ungod, except as a bit of common human experiencing.

Don’t let this confuse you, says Ungod. She means that information is always a comparative: instead of being True or False, an information-experience is instead more true (or less true) than some other bit of information experience.

And information is species-specific, and therefore species-limited. If you can grasp this, and its consequences, you’re getting close to the beating heart of the Rock of Ungod.

6) Body-thinking Pond-changing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]

Translation: literally, “Meaning swims in the dark pond of living.” But it’s fuller meaning is roughly as follows:

“One thing life can never be is meaningful. Only language can be meaningful. Even then, only to the extent that it dips into the dark pond of life.”

Ah, the meaning of meaning, whatever that means!

Ungod is saying, “Look at that oak tree!”

And she means that the words “oak tree” are meaningful, for they are symbols which point to—reference, in fancy talk—the tall woody object gracing Ungod’s front yard. “Oak tree” is meaningful because it references something, and when you hear the words you know that it is not the words themselves, “oak tree”, which Ungod wants you to embrace. Rather, she wants you to glide into her front yard and hug the tall woody thing.

Words are meaningful because they point at things—real things. And the value of the phrase “oak tree” (or more accurately, its source of value) is that real thing in the yard. The real thing is in itself valuable, and the words about it are meaningful because they point at the value.

This boring-sounding stuff is very important to Ungod, and she will get very angry at you if you let on that it bores you. So you better snap to and pay attention, or you’ll soon have naked Ungod to pay.

That’s better.

Now, what if we said the tall woody thing in Ungod’s front yard was meaningful? Before, we said it was valuable, and that the words about it were meaningful. But what if, instead, we said the tall woody thing was itself meaningful?

This would be the same as asserting that Ungod’s tall woody front yard thing referenced or pointed at something else. And that to hug her tree is really to want to hug the something else that the tree references. In this case, it is not the tree which is the real thing, rather, the something else which it references is the real thing.

This, you may recognize, is the usual viewpoint. Sometimes people will claim that the real tree references some abstract or ideal tree in God’s mind. Sometimes they will say it references God Himself. Either way, the touchable, physical tree in the front yard has been rendered meaningful, its value removed to another realm.

Wrong! wrong! wrong! says Ungod. “Evil! And nothing but evil!” she shouts!

She is here to tell you, for the sake of life and all that is wonderful and all that matters, that the tall woody thing in her front yard is meaningless.

Meaningless, meaningless, meaningless.

It has to be so.

If it is meaningful, then it is not the real thing. It is not what is valuable, something else has been given value instead.

Real things are always meaningless. Instead of referring to something else, they are themselves IT.

If you are meaningful, you have no value from yourself, but only from what you reference. You are nothing but a symbol, a word.

Which is the great lie of theism.

Theism says our whole world, life, laughter, love and all, is nothing but meaningful. It says that all value comes from God. That God is the real thing, and that earth and earth life is but a symbol of that, at best pointing to God.

Theism insists on moving value away from lovely earth to a non-physical so-called “spiritual” world—a place of God and angels and dead souls. In theism, this realm of death after life is believed to be what is ultimately real, and all the things of earth and cosmos are reduced to being merely meaningful, drawing what paltry meaning they can from what is euphemistically referred to as “after-life,” the unholy realm of God and angels and dead human beings.

Oh, the great betrayal of life that is theism!

Stark naked Ungod, let her nakedly come forth and show us how to value life instead of death, let her uncover before us a path to the wonderful laughter and love and livingness of being real things. We are beautiful body beings, all of us, in imperfect body-being ungod life.

Oh come forth, and step into the meaningless world of being valuable, of being value itself. Of being ungod life!

Naked Ungod herself is telling us so.

No wonder atheists worship her.

7) Body-being Ground-dancing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]

Translation: “To realize we are body beings is to realize life takes place here on earth and not elsewhere.”

Ungod is a body being. You are a body being. I am a body being—at least, last time I checked. A body being is the antipode of a spiritual being.

Ungod’s language may seem strange at first ear, but it is the strangeness of real things. Listen to Ungod strangeness.

She is telling you that a spiritual being is one whose final and only home is after life. (Ask any Christian, ask any theist, they will all admit it!) What they want, what they yearn for, what they worship is after life.

And “after life” means, well, come on! It means what follows upon death. The world of after-existence. The world of the dead. Theists say God lives in this realm of death, which is after-life or after-existence—and atheists agree entirely.

The difference, of course, is that theists insist that the realm of death (after-life, after-existence, call it what you will)—theists claim that it really does exist. That it is really some kind of place, spiritual and bodiless and yet somehow we’ll be ourselves and have spiritual bodies, though never having to eat or defecate or spit.

While atheists—lacking all practical common sense—conclude that death is actually death, and that after life is actually after life, and therefore not life at all.

And they conclude, most non-sensible of all, that having a body and being a body being is what it’s all about, and that without bodies, being feeling and doing anything would be exceedingly difficult, devoid of pleasure and satisfaction.

Oh those atheists! Where is their common sense?

Now, Ungod admits that it seems undesirable not to live forever. To lose our bodies and all their wonderful feelings and thoughts, to lose our loved ones, to see all our bodily pleasures and preferences come to an end—it does not seem desirable.

But Ungod’s point is that theists believe all these bodily things come to an end at death as surely as non-theists do.

The proof is in the ground. In the dead body itself.

It’s dead. We put it in the ground and years later, if we dig it up, it’s still there—partially decomposed, claimed by bacteria, molds, and bugs—but still dead.

The news is bad whether you are atheist or theist. Though of course theists try to disguise the bad news as good news. You were never really a body being at all—they chant.** You were a spiritual being, and the spiritual part continues to live—forever—in that realm of death called after life. Sitting smugly at God’s right hand (or was it left?).

The atheist, more accustomed to honesty, says “Yes, we die, and it’s a bummer. Death is final, for the body never recovers from the grave. And body beings that we are, when the body is lost veritably we are lost, our thoughts, our dreams, our hopes, our pleasures, our memories, our loving—all the wonderful aspects of body-being, lost when being a body is lost. Our very selves lost.”

Strangely, Ungod doesn’t cry.

Ungod chortles, and skips, and smiles.

Why?

Ungod knows a secret.

It’s written in the Rock.

8) Body-being Corpse Corpse [moves] [happens-not] [moves]

Translation: We never experience our own death, no matter how many come to the funeral.

Not that we don’t die, but that we never know we have died.

How can that be? Of course we know we die

Ungod, however, means “know” in the sense of experience. Body beings never experience their own death.

They experience the death of others, but not of themselves

Which means that, in our experience, we live forever. Not so, of course, in experience of others, but what do we care. That’s their experience, not ours. And we will experience their deaths, but they will not.

Experiencing, in other words, has a strange eternal quality

To the experiencer it never ends, this business of experiencing

And there it is: eternal life, right here on earth, in our bodies; we never needed heaven after all.

—Eltanin

FOOTNOTES:

* The concept of Ungod was born in a comment I made regarding a couple of posts by Kornform in an America Online forum.

Kornform, God & Ungod POSTED 4/22/94

Kornform: >>>There almost certainly are a lot of things beyond our knowledge actually existing, but we cannot talk about them beyond just speculating. One cannot say “there is X” without experiencing x with some sense perception. If x is beyond our knowledge then you obviously haven’t experienced it, thus cannot say it exists. This goes for gods.<<<

And:

Kornform: >>>Look, reality is out there and we discover it. We won’t know it unless we experience it by sense perception and analyze it by reason. There might be some realities which we will never be able to detect, in which case there’s little utility in discussing it.<<<

My comment:

Well said.

If God is defined as something which is not capable of being experienced, then that god is simply the unknowable. Unknowable whether it has consciousness, unknowable whether it is a being, unknowable whether there even is such a thing as the unknowable. This means that the only rational attitude concerning claims about any God who cannot be experienced is absolute skepticism.

Interestingly, there is a way to avoid this result of absolute skepticism concerning God. Absolute skepticism results because God is defined as not capable of being experienced. However, God can always simply be defined differently. It might be worthwhile to make a thought-experiment along these lines.

Thought-experiment:

Let us define God as the unknown, but not the unknowable. That is to say, let us define God as that which is detectable by sense experience, but which has not yet been detected. There are several important points to this definition of God: (1) God is a physical or empirical entity, thus God is knowable and can be proved to exist, (2) God is everything which we have not yet detected by sense experience, thus God is the unknown but knowable (doesn’t that sound religious or something?), (3) nothing we already experience and know is God, but it used to be God before we came to experience and know of it.

Thus, by this definition, God is physical; the scientist always seeks God; and God dies as soon as It is experienced and known.

An atheist will rightly object that to call this God leads to semantic confusion and amounts to dishonesty in public discussion. I concur, so instead of calling this definition “God”, I suggest we call it “Ungod”.

No one can deny that Ungod exists. Yet Ungod is entirely unknown. Once known, that bit of Ungod dies, or ceases to be Ungod, which is the same thing, I take it. (Thus Ungod dies all the time, so Ungod is that much better than Jesus, who only died once.)

My questions:

Can a rational religion be built around Ungod?

Is belief in Ungod theism or atheism?

What does it mean for theism if in order to define God in a way that is consistent and can be proved to exist, we must end up with a definition like Ungod?

By the way, we only know the existence of other beings by experiencing their behavior. Sense experiences inform us of that behavior, and thus satisfy for us the question of their existence. Note that thinking is a special case of experiencing. When we think thoughts or feel emotions, our thoughts and emotions are ours, not some other being’s. In this special case, we experience our own behavior firsthand—which proves our own existence, of course, but can never prove God or some other being’s existence. For it is our behavior and not God’s which we are experiencing when we think thoughts or feel emotions.

This seals the door on theism. Unless God is defined as detectable by sense experience in some way or another, the result must be absolute skepticism about claims concerning God, even the claim that God exists. In short, the rational theist must become an atheist. Or redefine God as something empirically detectable: i.e., as a physical entity.

Another way to look at this viewpoint. Every perception involves two elements: the behavior which is perceived, and the experience of perceiving it. Thus when I see Mary walking down the street, her behavior is what is perceived, and I, the perceiver, have an experience of perceiving her. Thus, experiences are always experiences of something, which is always some kind of behavior. Now, in the special cases, the behavior which is experienced lies not outside, but inside. When we think or when we feel, the experience we have is of our own internal behavior.

This is why I draw the very important conclusion above: when we experience things outside of ourselves, what we experience is outside behavior, which in turns proves the existence of something. It is quite valid to have faith in our sense experiences for this reason. But when we feel or think, the behavior which we experience is our own feeling or thinking processes. These in turn prove our own existence (as if that were necessary!) but cannot of course prove the existence of anything outside us. To say that the source of the behavior we witness when we feel or think is God, or something external to us, is simply to mistake our own internal behavior and experiencing for something alien: it is a category mistake.

** Ok, some theists fib and claim those of us who are saved will have our bodies in heaven—but when you read the fine print you discover that almost all the wonderful things we love to do as bodies (eat, sleep, have sex, etc.) are forbidden. Even the ground to stand on is taken away, replaced with insubstantial clouds. No matter how you slice it, you only get to be a “spiritual” being in heaven—not a body being. And that removes all the fun.

Posted in Non-Existence Arguments, Religion, Religious Atheism, Unsacred Texts | 1 Comment

Coherence of Naturalism

Posted on December 8, 2024 by Dwight

One of the fundamental “facts” about existence we all experience is that physics trumps sentience. As a consequence, physics trumps goodness, trumps morality.

A single example should suffice. When a murderer points his gun at a saint and pulls the trigger, physics controls the path of the bullet without regard to the goodness of anyone in its path. Furthermore, the damage that bullet inflicts on the body of the victim is inflicted without regard to the goodness of the victim.

This is simply how our world works. It is built in that physics trumps sentience, trumps goodness, trumps morality.

Naturalism provides a coherent explanation for this: physical stuff came first. Sentience evolved afterwards within certain species as a method of improving decision-making and thus survivability as a species. But since sentience evolved later on, it is necessarily subservient to physics.

Incoherence of Supernaturalism

However, every supernatural worldview which puts goodness on top faces a coherence problem as a consequence of the reality that physics trumps sentience: They all want to make sentience primary in a universe where it obviously isn’t.

So the first incoherence is : why didn’t God (the original primary sentience) create a world, instead, in which sentience trumps physics? In which goodness is on top?

A possible explanation is that goodness is simply not preferred. Okay, but why should we sentient beings choose a worldview in which goodness could have been preferred, but was not? And how could such a worldview be coherent?

With naturalism, sentience is not on top of physics, for the obvious reason, and we just have to accept it. But with supernaturalism, how do we explain this situation if everything started with almighty goodness?

And if everything started with almighty evil instead, why should we worship or acquiesce to such an almighty.

If alternatively there are co-evil/good almighties, or if the almighty is amoral—how does such a worldview cohere better than naturalism?

So really, only a supernaturalism which starts with almighty goodness can appeal to us. But how to make it coherent? That’s the problem.

If we start with goodness, then there must have been a fall from that original goodness to arrive at the universe we have. But this inevitably introduces incoherence.

Did almighty goodness lose its way? Did it create other sentient beings who turned out not to be so good? But why?

Were they jealous of almighty goodness? But why?

What did they lack? They wanted power? But why?

What would it give them that they needed? And why should they have needed whatever it was?

In a universe where physics trumps sentience, such wants and needs are understandable—that is, in a world already fallen from goodness. But in a world not yet fallen, how to explain such needs and wants?

In fact, it seems that as soon as almighty goodness creates physics, and allows sentience and goodness to become subservient, the fall occurs. This can only be seen as an unforced blunder by almighty goodness.

And if it was a necessary rather than unforced blunder, it puts into question the primacy of almighty goodness. That is, it introduces incoherence.

We are told that almighty goodness is in a cosmic battle with evil, and that—somehow—we are necessary to assist in the battle. But how we can contribute is not explainable. We are told that almighty goodness became one of us to entice us to join its side and help in the battle. But how can we add to the unlimited power of the almighty? Infinity can’t benefit from having a few finite numbers added to it. The story is incoherent.

Or we are told that almighty goodness became one of us in order to show us the way back to goodness and earn a place at its side in heaven. However, the fall happened when a physical world was created in which physics trumped sentience and goodness. So the only way to undo the fall is remove the physical world—created as it was by almighty goodness—from the picture. So why then was the physical world created, why does it exist as it does?

Furthermore, if sentience is freed from physics at death, and can then experience full goodness in heaven, why not just have heaven—and only heaven?

If earth was created to test our suitability for heaven, why? Earth is nothing like heaven, so it can’t be a worthwhile test for suitability. Earth would need to be a bodiless realm to become a suitable test for heaven in this case.

And if we say heaven is like earth and itself not a bodiless realm, other incoherences are raised. If heaven is a bodily world where sentience/goodness trumps physics, why did almighty goodness bother to create earth (where physics trumps sentience/goodness) in addition to heaven? (And again earth can’t serve as a suitable test for heaven in this case.)

Furthermore, bodies suitable for earth (bodies which evolved to survive and reproduce) don’t make sense for heaven.

At every step there is incoherence.

In contrast, naturalism is coherent at every step. It may not be what we want to hear, but it coheres.

Posted in Afterlife & Immortality, Christianity, Ethics & Morality, Islam, Moral, Naturalism, Non-Existence Arguments, Preface to Atheism | Leave a comment

Skepticism, Pragmatism and Empiricism

Posted on December 4, 2024 by Dwight

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) turned consciously to pragmatism to rectify what he saw as mainstream epistemology’s crucial mistake: naively conceiving of language and thought as ‘mirroring’ the world. Rorty’s bold and iconoclastic attacks on this ‘representationalism’ birthed a so-called neopragmatism to which a number of influential recent philosophers have contributed (e.g. Hilary Putnam, Robert Brandom and Huw Price). Other pragmatists have objected to Rorty’s blithe dismissal of truth as a topic better left undiscussed (Rorty 1982), and have sought to rehabilitate classical pragmatist ideals of objectivity (e.g. Susan Haack, Christopher Hookway and Cheryl Misak). These philosophers are now sometimes referred to as New Pragmatists.1

I think Rorty gets a fundamental point right: “mainstream epistemology’s crucial mistake: naively conceiving of language and thought as ‘mirroring’ the world.” It’s not a mirror of the world, rather part of a neuron-constructed stand-in (or model) for a world that is in its nature unknowable.

When I read the Stanford article on pragmatism, I notice an inadequate emphasize on the biological nature of experience—by which I mean, a failure to realize that all experience is created by the brain, and therefore all knowing is (1) species-specific and (2) a stand-in for the world, not an interaction with the world.

Yes, we exist within the world and interact with it, but our minds do not interact with the world. Our bodies sample the world in various ways (collecting photons, etc) and from those samples our brains construct our senses (which are the first level of the stand-in). On top of the first level (possible only because the first level is sensual, that is, composed of qualia) objectification occurs which creates objects with properties—and this enables knowing (including cognition, language and concepts, etc).

Where pragmatism comes in is that the whole aim of this sensual/objectification/knowledge/memory/learning system is to benefit us in navigating an otherwise unknown/unknowable world.

Where skepticism comes in is that the whole reason we evolved this sensual/objectification/knowledge/memory/learning system is precisely because the world is fundamentally unknowable, and the system stands-in for the world in order to give us a map/model we can “know” and utilize to navigate. Thus knowing is extremely valuable to us, and yet we never know the external world “as it is.”

We can’t know the world as it is because it is not composed of the same stuff as knowing. The world is physical, and knowing is sensual and mental—the stuff of consciousness.

And right here we have the central hypothesis of naturalism: that knowing is the stuff of consciousness, and that the world is not. The hypothesis says that the world (devoid of consciousness) existed, and then some organisms in the world evolved neurons able to create consciousness within themselves.

And that is where consciousness exists, in there with the neurons creating it. Consciousness interacts with those neurons, is bound to them. And so consciousness—from senses to meanings to emotions—interacts only with neurons within organisms in the physical world. There alone is where sensations exist, mathematics exists, information exists, meanings exist.

Immediately, you likely object that information exists in books, in computer files, in road signs, even in flowers and trees and bugs and so on. Yes, we talk that way. But it doesn’t.

Information, like all consciousness, is an experience created by neurons in our brain. Yes we have invented an ingenious thing called written language which allows us to modify the world around us in a way that enables us to share common information experiences between us, inside our collective brains. We talk very inexactly when we call written words or symbols “information.” They are the code that enables each of us (if we know the language or code) to have similar information experiences. Similar thoughts.

This is an important point worth repeating. Meanings don’t actually exist on the paper or the screen. Meanings only exist in us when we read words on the paper or screen. If we are a foreigner, or a non-human species who only sees squiggly crud when looking at the screen, its “meanings” aren’t experienced.

Writing is a code to generate shared meanings in our brains. Don’t know the code? You won’t experience the meanings.

You might argue, well, our consciousness interacted with the physical world when we wrote words on the paper. No, we interacted with the paper, our consciousness did not. Its only role was within our brain, which in turn decided to move our arm and fingers to write on the paper. We interact.

In contrast, our consciousness is a tool used within the brain by the brain. A tool for the brain. Just as the brain is a tool for the body (among other roles, the brain is the body’s decider).

Modern neuroscience makes these points clear. As Jeff Hawkins, author of A Thousand Brains (2022), explains

There are no sensors in the brain itself, so the neurons that make up your brain are sitting in the dark, isolated from the world outside. The only way your brain knows anything about reality is through the sensory nerve fibers that enter the skull. The nerve fibers coming from the eyes, ears and skin look the same, and the spikes that travel along them are identical. There is no light or sound entering the skull, only electrical spikes.2

He continues

“And since we do not perceive spikes, everything we do perceive must be fabricated in the brain. Even the most basic feelings of light, sound and touch are creations of the brain; they only exist in its model of the world.”3

This means that we don’t perceive the world; what we perceive is instead a sensual “stand-in” for the world, a “virtual reality” created by the brain. Hawkins again,

“The truth is, we perceive our model of the world, not the world itself or the rapidly changing spikes entering the skull. As we go about our day, the sensory inputs to the brain invoke the appropriate parts of our world model, but what we perceive and what we believe is happening is the model. Our reality is similar to the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis; we live in a simulated world, but it is not in a computer—it is in our head.”4

Thus, we do not “perceive” the world around us; what we “perceive” is a virtual reality or simulacrum created by the brain and which evolved to stand-in for the world. It provides the organism (hopefully) with a reliable basis for action.

In this context, philosophical skepticism begins to make a lot of sense.

Again, this bears repeating. Biological organisms like us have no way of perceiving or knowing the organism-independent external (“physical”) reality. What we know is the “virtual reality” and corresponding cortical “model” which the brain creates and presents to us from hints the body has obtained via its sense organs. This virtual reality is what we naively mistake for the external world around us.

From this it follows…

(1) Knowledge is part of a stand-in the brain uses in order to improve its decision-making.

(2) There is no direct interaction between the stand-in and the world outside us.

(3) The “physical” world outside us is not what we actually “know” (even though it’s what we are concerned with). What we know is the brain’s stand-in.

(4) We make the stand-in more useful by acting in the world—that is, testing for usefulness and modifying the stand-in accordingly.

Again Hawkins

Recall that the neocortex is constantly making predictions. Predictions are how the brain tests whether its model of the world is correct; an incorrect prediction indicates something is wrong with the model and needs to be fixed. A prediction error causes a burst of activity in the neocortex, which directs our attention to the input that caused the error. By attending to the mis-predicted input, the neocortex relearns that part of the model. This ultimately leads to a modification of the brain’s model to more accurately reflect the world. Model repair is built into the neocortex, and normally it works reliably.5

I call this pragmatic empiricism—which turns out to be the method of the sciences.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Pragmatism, captured August 22, 2024. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/

Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, (2022), page 173. See https://www.numenta.com/resources/books/a-thousand-brains-by-jeff-hawkins/

Ibid, page 174.

Ibid, page 175.

Ibid, pages 178-179.

Posted in Naturalism, Nature of Knowledge, Preface to Atheism | Leave a comment

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Confusion

Is there really confusion?

I propose a solution

Recap

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What exists, and where does it exist?

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Two Questions

Additional Evidence

Back to John Searle

Primary & Secondary Qualities

Species-Specific Vision

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There are in general two types of atheism.

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Excursions Near the Temple of Gloom

or

How I Found Ungod

by Eltanin al Rastaban

Ungod’s Brevity

The Atheist Teachings of Ungod — Explained!

1) Gods Ungod-living [moves-not] [moves]

2) Gods Head-thinking Body-being [happens] [happens-if] [moves]

3) God-giving Ungod-living [happens] [happens-not]

4) Body-being Head-thinking [moves-not] [happens-not]

5) Body-thinking [happens]

6) Body-thinking Pond-changing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]

7) Body-being Ground-dancing Ungod-living [happens-if] [moves] [moves]

8) Body-being Corpse Corpse [moves] [happens-not] [moves]

FOOTNOTES:

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Incoherence of Supernaturalism

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From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Pragmatism…

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