how to save the world

more ruminations trying to make sense of what cannot make sense

four worldviews of the nature of reality: (I) conventional wisdom, (II) emerging scientific consensus, (III) limbo, (IV) radical non-duality

In a recent comment, Vera asked me why I asserted that animals have no “selves”.

As an animal lover and a believer that animals feel pain and feel emotions, this is a subject that bothered me a lot when I first came upon the message of radical non-duality. How could those speaking about this subject be so sure that only humans have the (illusory) sense of self and separation? And how can any creature function without a sense of self and separation from everything else?

When I spoke to Jim Newman and Tim Cliss about this, their answer was that no creatures (humans included) actually ‘have’ selves, and that nothing is really separate. They suggested that it takes a very large brain and a lot of constantly reinforced conditioning from birth to create and sustain the illusion of the separate self, and only humans seem to have the proclivity to do so.

How can we even function without a sense of self and separation from everything else? Solely by our conditioning, it would seem. Jim and Tim assert that there is no sense of a self or separation ‘there’, and there doesn’t need to be. This model we have of a separate body under our control, with a self at its core as its ‘managing director’, is just an invention. The self doesn’t actually do anything. In the story of the person, the body acts (as a result of its conditioning, given the circumstances of the moment), and the ‘self’ then rationalizes that action as being its decision, after the fact. The self is completely non-essential to the effective functioning of the body, and it (the self, the ‘me’) is just a “useless piece of software” as Tony Parsons has described it.

Everything is already whole and complete. There is only ‘everything’, which is actually an appearance of nothing. ‘Everything’ has no parts, nothing separate, no direction or purpose or meaning or intention, and it is not going anywhere in time or space.

How did our brain manage this astounding trick of the imagination, inventing the idea of self and separation and convincing other human brains that these ideas were really true? One could argue that it was an evolutionary misstep, a spandrel — “let’s try out this model to see if it helps our species survive” — that went terribly wrong. But that would suggest that evolution in time is real, and it isn’t, since there is no time, no causality and nothing really happening. Evolution is just another attempt to make sense of patterns our brains perceive and conceive. It’s just another story.

The jump to the uncompromising message of radical non-duality — that there is no reason, purpose or meaning for anything — is just a ‘bridge too far’ for our apparently thoroughly conditioned separate brains in separate selves to countenance. And even that assertion is another story, another step across non-existent stepping stones in the sea of everything-just-as-it-is. Conditioning, after all, implies causality and change over time, and these are just appearances and illusions born of faulty sensemaking.

About seven years ago, I ‘had’ what is often described as a ‘glimpse’ — the sudden disappearance of ‘me’ and the obvious realization that there is nothing real, nothing really happening, nothing separate, only appearances. It was astonishing, unarguable, and the thought over and over was “How could I not have noticed this before?” At the time, I wrote about this:

• It felt more like a ‘remembering’ than an ‘awakening’. Some memories of very early childhood (some of which had been just a blur until then) and a few memories from more recent, very peaceful times, flooded through my body, which felt ‘flushed’ in the way it feels during a sudden ‘aha’ moment, or during feelings of intense love.
• It felt amazingly free of anxiety or fear, very peaceful and joyful in a ‘boundless’ kind of way. Everything was awesome, more-than-real, unveiled, unfiltered and just, in a way, ‘perfect’, exactly as it was. Not blissful, just… this.
• There was no temptation to grasp onto it lest it be quickly lost again. It was clearly always here, everywhere, not ‘going’ anywhere, accessible always. My self would have been anxious not to lose it, but my self was, in that moment, not present. The glimpse was completely impersonal, not happening to anyone. A silly grin came over me, and stayed for hours.
• If this is a glimpse, it is not my first, though this one seemed to connect, through those suddenly recalled memories, to past glimpses. It felt wonderful, but also completely ordinary and obvious. Oh, that! Of course; how could I not have noticed?

At the time, the story I made up to try to make sense of this is that somehow the normal ‘default’ neural sensemaking pathways of my brain had been circumvented, and instead what was being revealed was what actually was, story-less.

Over the intervening period, there have been two significant shifts in my worldview. The first, prompted largely by Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s book The Secret History of Kindness, was giving up my strongly-held belief in free will. Robert Sapolski’s new book Determined reassured me that that shift made sense.

In parallel, I was delving deeper into, and thinking more about, the message of radical non-duality (I call it a message, rather than a theory or worldview, because it’s just in-your-face obvious to those who have ‘lost’ their sense of self, and hence cannot and need not be defended with ‘evidence’ or ‘logic’). The cold-sober ‘glimpses’ were all the evidence I needed. And I realized that if there is no ‘one’, no separate self, then there can’t possibly be any free will either. My instincts, and my various explorations, seemed to be converging on agreement with the radical non-duality worldview, even if it had only been ‘obvious’ during the ‘glimpses’.

Except. Except my sensemaking mind is conditioned, driven, compelled to try to make sense of this worldview. And it cannot. No one will ever convince anyone else that the illusion of the ‘me’ and of things being separate are just what are apparently happening, without any reason or purpose or meaning. It’s just too bald, too pat, too empty, too useless. And totally unsupported by what we consider ‘evidence’.

So I’m left in a kind of limbo state, intuitively and intellectually drawn by the message of radical non-duality as a worldview, but still compelled to try to reconcile this message with emerging science and logic. Like most limbos, it’s unsustainable and precarious. All the science in the world can only produce additional stories that, while they may seem to align with the radical non-duality message, are actually completely incompatible with it.

So, neuroscientists may provide evidence that there is no ‘self’, but that evidence is just a story about events that happened in time to bodies and brains; radical non-duality asserts that there are no ‘real’ bodies or brains or time or things really happening. And physicists may provide evidence that there is no real time, but that evidence is just a story about particles and waves and quantum states; radical non-duality asserts that there are no ‘real’ particles or waves or states or things really happening.

Stories are at the crux of what I describe as the ‘limbo’ state, shown as worldview III in the chart above. Stories are how we make sense of the world, how we explain causality, and the past, and imagine the future. But these stories are all fictions — there is no real causality, no time, no separate ‘actors’ really doing anything, no evolution. There are not even real brains, because there is nothing separate at all. ‘Brain’ is just an artificial label we use to tell our stories. I have shifted my worldview from I to II to III, but the limbo worldview is impossible to sustain. And there is no bridge, no ‘path’ to the radical non-duality worldview IV. Not even ‘faith’. I can’t just decide to see what I can’t see. And without seeing it, it’s impossible to believe. No matter how intuitive or elegant it is. No matter how much I want to believe it. I’m caught in limbo, perhaps until I die. (There may be no cure for the self, but there are much worse fates imaginable.)

Although it’s just another story, one can make sense of the ‘fact’ that our illusory sense of self and separation emerged, and that this “useless piece of software” has endured for millennia (not long in terms of the history of life on earth, or even the history of our species), and (in the story) this ’caused’ a huge amount of suffering to all the creatures of the planet ever since. But my Entanglement Hypothesis provides no solace, no way out of the limbo. Just another story.

So back to Vera’s question: A ‘self’ is just an invention, a story, a fictional character, dreamed up in large brains to try to make sense of the brain’s sensory perceptions and conceptions, something to put at the centre of its entirely imaginary model of what reality actually is. No more real than a character in a play or movie that we presume to depict some real happening.

Wild creatures have no ‘selves’ because they have neither the capacity nor the need to concoct such a fanciful fiction. Like humans they have well-honed instincts and are conditioned and feel, intensely, sensations like pain and pleasure, and emotions like fear and anger and sadness, and probably others like enthusiasm and equanimity. But they probably don’t feel emotions like hatred or chronic anxiety about the future, or shame or guilt or envy, since these emotions require a sense of linear time, a sense of permanent disconnection from ‘everything’, and a propensity to judge things as good or evil. I think they are fortunate to have been spared the curse of believing in a separate self that underlies these suffering-filled emotions. And they are no less sensate than humans for that (probably more sensate than us, without the veil of self and separation to keep them from really being in the world). Melissa’s book, which describes animal behaviour in detail from the perspective of an animal lover, has convinced me of that.

Of course, they can be conditioned, just as we can, to react in ways that we might anthropomorphically construe as revealing the existence of a ‘self’ in them. But instinctive and entrained reactions of fear and joy and responding to one’s given name do not require the affliction of a self. Just ask Tim, or Jim, or Tony, or the other messengers of radical non-duality who are, like wild creatures, not so afflicted.

A brief review of Robert Sapolsky’s new book Determined, plus some other thoughts on the subject of free will.

The free will “belief spectrum” (my own construction, and subject to revision)

In recent years, scientists and philosophers, often on opposite sides, have been weighing in more frequently on the subject of whether or not we have “free will”; that is, whether we have any control or agency over what ‘our’ bodies (including ‘our’ minds) apparently do, or responsibility for what they do (or fail to do), and whether we can act with intent. (This definition can be problematic, but whole books have been written just on that, so I won’t try to address that here.)

Philosophers (like members of all the social pseudosciences) can only espouse theories, which cannot be either proved nor disproved, so these theories are really nothing more than reasonably informed, well-considered opinions. Still interesting and sometimes useful, nevertheless.

Scientists can do marginally better, since a requirement of ‘good’ science is that its hypotheses must be based on some evidence, and must be falsifiable. So scientific theories are by nature always tentative and temporary, awaiting new theories that better fit the available evidence, or new evidence of their falsehood.

The distinction gets muddy, however, in the case of scientific hypotheses that cannot be either proved nor disproved “with current technology”, clever weasel words that allow “theoretical” scientists to falsely claim that their theories (like string theory) have a “scientific” basis, when they are substantially no more testable or scientific than the opinions of those in the pseudosciences.

In recent years, on the subject of free will, most philosophers have signed up as “compatibilists”, meaning that, using some rather excruciating intellectual and linguistic gymnastics, they would have us believe that, although reality is largely deterministic, there is still kinda some room for a little personal free will. (Philosophy has always been a tough gig, so you can’t blame them for waffling sometimes to avoid alienating their followers.)

For most of my life, I was a staunch believer in free will, and took delight in ridiculing the Skinner behaviouralists in the 1960s and 1970s when they were in vogue. So, in the above chart of attitudes about free will, I was in the “most people’s view” (column A) camp. Philosophically, I described myself as a phenomenologist — “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Both its absolutism and its romanticism (I still love David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous) appealed to me.

It was another book, Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s The Secret History of Kindness that got me to reconsider the arguments of behaviouralism, including behaviouralists’ rejection of the idea of free will. The idea that everything we do is demonstrably (if not provably) a consequence of our biological and cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of the moment, struck me like a bolt of lightning. Melissa’s book helped me leap over the compatibilists’ incoherent waffling, and appreciate the arguments that some physicists and other “real” scientists were making about why there is actually no free will. I liked their arguments (summarized in column D) better than those of neuroscientists (column C), as the latter group’s credibility had been tarnished by early studies of ‘brain scans’ that proved to be seriously flawed.

So suddenly I found I had made a 180º turn in my worldview, from believing absolutely that we had free will, to believing absolutely that we do not. Suddenly it made sense to me that everything was determined (ie it followed from what came before) but not determinable or predictable (since the number of variables comprising what came before was effectively infinite). That was fully consistent with my study of complex systems and how they work.

Suddenly my instinctive (and conditioned) skepticism of the value of punishment and incarceration as a means of dealing with crime made sense (though incarceration may still make sense as a preventative measure). It was like a light went on: We are all doing our best, and no one is to “blame”.

And suddenly the idea that time wasn’t real, and was just a construct of the human brain, completely unnecessary both for a scientific explanation of the nature of reality, and for our successful functioning as living creatures, made sense.

These changes to my worldview also resonated strongly with the message of radical non-duality, whose speakers asserted clearly and consistently that there was no free will, and no such thing as time. They also made it clear to me how the message of radical non-duality is utterly different from the religious (eg some forms of Buddhism) and spiritual (eg Eckhart Tolle, Rupert Spira etc) ‘forms’ of non-duality (Column G), which assert that there is a followable ‘path’ to the ‘enlightened’ realization that everything is one (or ’emptiness’, or however ‘non-duality’ is defined).

So now I’m sitting in a kind of limbo. I’ve made the leap to no-free-will, totally conditioned, no one to blame, doing our best, and time as just a construct. But it’s another leap from there to the claim of radical non-duality that there is no me, that there is nothing ‘really’ real or ‘really’ happening (only ‘appearances’), and that there is no meaning or purpose to anything. I’ve tried to articulate these assertions on these pages since I first discovered them seven years ago. But since they only make intellectual and intuitive sense to me, rather than being ‘obvious’ or being supported by ‘evidence’, I’m not able to make the argument for them very convincingly. Perhaps no one can. Still, I can’t shake the sense that they’re correct.

So I’d kind of hoped that two new videos and one new book on the subject of free will might help me formulate and reconcile these positions better.

The first of these is a video that Bernardo Kastrup made recently, on the Essentia vlog. I really enjoyed this video, which covers an enormous amount of ground very succinctly, and is much more accessible, I think, than his written work. On the issue of free will, his impression is that it really doesn’t matter very much. He acknowledges that we as ‘individuals’ have no agency, but that’s because the whole concept of an individual is, to him, misleading. There is only the universe, a single massively-complex organism playing itself out the only way it can. We are just aspects of the universe and its playing-out. But just as behaviouralists say that our conditioning determines everything we do, yet our conditioning can have an impact on others and vice versa, Bernardo sees us and all our actions as ‘input variables’ that can affect other ‘input variables’ as the irreducible universe plays out. So those effects can change how the universe plays out. No agency, no ‘free will’ as most would define it, yet change can happen.

What I found most provocative in Bernardo’s explanation is that despite having no agency, he believes that in our internal “struggle” to make sense of the universe playing itself out, we have personal responsibility to express that struggle as effectively as we can, so that the ‘input variables’ that our struggle and our witnessing of the universe playing itself out, produce, will affect others in “responsible” ways and ‘positively’ affect how the universe plays itself out. We are like violins being played, he says, and our struggle is to be played for the benefit of the entire orchestra. And he says he has no difficulty, and very much enjoys, living in accordance with this worldview.

Then I read the new book by primatologist and neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, which he discusses in this excellent interview by Nate Hagens. I’ve been following Robert’s work for years, and I found his uncompromising take on free will quite refreshing. Like Bernardo, he has little time or patience for compatibilist thinking. Unlike Bernardo, he does not believe we are in any way “responsible” for what we think or do. Like Bernardo, he thinks punishing criminals is wrong-headed. But unlike Bernardo, he doubts that the threat of punishment has a deterrent effect. Though, like Bernardo, he agrees that it still makes sense to limit the freedom of people we collectively believe are likely to continue to perpetrate serious harms against others — but as a preventative measure, not a punitive one.

And, like Bernardo, he believes we cannot “choose” to change or improve our behaviour, but that we are constantly conditioning each other, and hence changing each other, with unforeseeable consequences for ourselves and the world in which we live. As he puts it: “We don’t choose to change, but it is abundantly possible for us to be changed.” He cites the remarkable changes in our attitudes toward sufferers of epilepsy and schizophrenia (not to mention towards LGBT+ folks) as examples of how this unfolds, and asserts that we are in the process of similar positive changes in our collective attitudes towards sufferers of PTSD, and in our previous wrong-headed propensity to blame parents (eg of autistic children, by giving them vaccines) for the biological misfortunes of their descendants.

The book is exhaustive and exhausting. Like his last book, Behave, the latest tome is heavy on the biology that underlies our behaviour, and rigorous and exhaustive to a fault. But it’s designed to pass muster of critics from many disciplines, and you can safely skip some of the more technical sections without losing the thread. It’s entertaining, humble, and ferocious in its arguments, many of which are provocative and in the face of the thinking of the majority of philosophers and a large number of scientists, even in his areas of specialty. Absolutely worth a read if you care about the subject. Nate’s interview, linked above, will set the stage for your study of it.

His view of the human condition is refreshingly stark. He writes:

What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me.

But while Bernardo claims to be quite comfortable with this struggle to come to grips with a worldview that often doesn’t seem to make sense, Robert says that “99% of the time I can’t achieve this mindset, though there is nothing to do but try”. (Not that he has any choice, of course!) It takes a particular kind of confidence and courage to write a 500-page masterpiece on a subject, and then conclude that while he’s absolutely convinced of the truth of his belief, supported by mountains of scientific argument, he has to admit that almost all of the time he continues to act as if he (believes he) has free will.

…..

So I remain in the limbo between having accepted our complete lack of free will (Columns D, E and F of the chart above), and seeing as “obvious” that we have no real selves to even have free will (Column H). My ongoing discomfort stems in part from the realization that many of the arguments of both the for- and against-free-will camps, depend utterly on the acceptance of time and causality as being real. Throw out the stepping stones of linear time and causality, and the entire debate about free will gets either really murky, or completely moot.

Still, somehow, thanks in part to the contributions of these two gentlemen, the gap between no-free-will and no-one-to-have-it doesn’t seem nearly as great as it did. And, as limbos go, it’s not as uncomfortable as I would have imagined.