If God exists how does he or she work? Rupert Sheldrake 2018

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We haven't talked about God a whole lot on here lately but, having steered into that territory a little bit here and there lately it seems like it's not a bad time to freshen up definitions.

Unfortunately this video has no farting, explosions, Victoria Secrets models mud or jello wrestling, or anything like that (maybe some crowd ASMR - the recording's a bit bad) so I get that this will be difficult if not untreadable terrain. Just throwing it out with anyone who has the patience or bearing, ie. that the conversation of 'A white bearded man in the sky who cares what you do in the bedroom' doesn't cut muster for any serious conversation on the issue.

A mortal, finite person who has never met the immortal and infinite God, except through largely apocryphal accounts written by Stone-Age, Bronze Age, and Iron-Age nomads thousands of years ago, is "splaining" God's activities and motivations through a medium of technology that was not even conceivable when the most recent apocrypha was written.

Yeah, that makes all kinds of sense.

NOT!

Cheers. The flatulence is covered now.

To me "God" is nothing more than the deity of a religion that has oppressed people like me for centuries.

My primary complaint/annoyance, and really the reason I'm posting this, is that so many of the people who fully scribe to the anthropology and superstition definition of God don't even have their anthropology right. The kind of syncretic outlook Rupert is talking about was the one that the Greeks and Romans held - ie. that everyone's pantheon of deities was largely the same and each had primary deities filling similar roles and functions. There was an admonition back then not to insult deities from another culture because the odds were too high that you'd be insulting one of your own deities in a different form.

Similarly a lot of what Christianity is built on are largely Platonist concepts. The Gospel of John and most of the Johnian writings were quite a bit like Platonism overtaking Judaism's main operating system. What their God became is much more what later peaked as the God of Plotinus. This is the sort of thing this lecture talks about, as well as how reductive materialism isn't 'science', it's composed of a lot of hand-offs built on a chain of assumptions that picked up steam in the 17th century with Descartes and continued to fracture not on empirical grounds but by the cultural preferences and explanations of the times. Reductive materialism is best described as a philosophy, one that got the high-hand largely for historical and cultural reasons, and one that like any other has to be assessed on its actual merits rather than having it be a foregone conclusion.

wow. yeah. that was tough to listen to.
Basically, he is working to hard to show that "god" is an ill-defined concept in traditional religions, that the old-man-with-a-beard is a creation of a time when western scientists and philosophers sought to define things with greater accuracy. His energy-flow example is quite a good example of what he's doing - sure photons convey energy and that energy ends up driving the human body and so on. But science has figured out that it all makes sense, in a materialist way, if one figures out what exactly is going on, meaning, if one can distinguish photons from chemical energy. And from gravity.
It sounds to me like he's trying to argue that god *really* is a metaphor for everything, and therefore, god exists.
Of course, if you are a reductionist materialist and are working to reduce the breadth of what your metaphors are describing, making a metaphor-for-everything a meaningless concept, then that "god" is a caricature of his god-of-everything.

He is right about his assertion that god meant something else to people. But his muddling of painstakingly drawn boundaries doesn't help much.

The good things about being Theistic and actually studying the Bible is that a person starts out knowing nothing about God, goes through a long stretch of time believing that one is learning everything about God, coming to the realization that what has been learned about God has been through other people's impressions, and then finally coming to one's own conclusion that one can never truly know or understand God.

By that time, one simply excepts as fact that God either does or does not exist, and that all known aspects of God are either inadequate (if you believe) or false (if you don't believe).

Bottom Line: No finite and mortal being can ever fully know or completely understand an infinite and immortal being.

I didn't take it that way, then again I can't remember whether he brought up panentheism in the talk or not - that's where he's coming from with it. To that extent he's arguing for something very real and conscious but it happens to be both an aggregate of conscious processes in the universe (participating in and aware of all of them) and, the pan-en-theism adds that he considers that there would be more mind, or identity, over and above this.

For the panentheism I'm not 100% sure whether I'd agree, I'd simply say I don't know for sure but pantheism, panentheism, polytheism, or animism in relationship to a view of the universe that's not native materialist all seem like distinct possibilities. If I lean on my own encounters with non-biological/non-circuit intelligence, such as the times I've had successful theurgic workings or woke up in the middle of the night with something greeting in me in one way or another it seems like most of it was imagery, intense and minds-eye visual data, thoughts and emotions quite orthogonal to my own (usually less pessimistic), and perhaps most interestingly when I was in touch contact it was a sensation akin to static electricity albeit atmospherically laden in the personality sense. Whatever it or they are seem to be held down to the laws of thermodynamics (ie. they behave in a natural manner) and that suggests to me that if we were looking for signs of what we used to deem the 'supernatural' it's really aspects of the natural that we've mangled. I think everything I just described, assuming autonomous reality, fits into functionism or neutral monism well - panpsychism perhaps being the worst fit because it doesn't seem like there's any sort of 1:1 binding with matter. Functionalism suggests that there's technically nothing wrong with overarching canopies of cognition, that combination happens all the time (good news for anyone whose trying to figure out how a bunch of cells makes 'us'), and that the city, the country, the planet could be aware of us and you could go straight up the line to solar systems, galaxies, etc.. If I had to venture a guess as to what a 'God' would be I'd likely have to say the self-aware superset of all of that makes the most sense.

None of this is to 'make people believe', I wouldn't think that for a second (and I'm pretty sure more people than not don't reason their way into opinions - whether religious or secular, I see it all day in my non-internet life as well as online), but I do think there's a lot of room to purge the dross - ie. in 2018 there shouldn't even be a trace of the tired old dipole 'It's either all reductive materialism or the bible is the perfect word of God'. Too many people have raked through these concepts and done most of the cleanup already. If we're thinking about asking questions about a God it's probably better at this point to at least ask interesting ones and keep people like Spinoza, Whitehead, etc. in mind when we do that.

I'm somewhat struggling with your experience of waking up in the night and encoutering ... something.
Mainly because, a few years ago I worked on a film called "devil in the room" - an animated documentary horror short film (yes, that's a thing. we made it a thing!). See if that one fits what you have experienced....

And, admittedly, I may be a subroutine of a giant machine that one day will utter the word "fortytwo".
Presumably in the form of repeatedly switching the earht's magnetic field, sending electromegnetic waves through space. Which earth scientists will be very confused about.

That actually doesn't even contradict my materialist persuasion.
But you gotta give me that materialism has found the causes of a lot of things that were once considered inexplicable and divine, and it also has, by now, found the the neuronas that fire to create certain behaviours, and scientists have put some electricity through people's brains and their arms twitched or some other behaviour was provoked - an the patients insisted that that was exactly what they had always wanted to do - no doubt.
There is so far ample reason to assume that everything, including consciousness, can be explained by matter alone.
And there is always the question where one would draw the line and stop inquiring.
As in: let's assume consciousness is inexplicable by materialism. At what point do we accept that it is and stop spending money on research?
We haven't explored the brainall the way to the quantum level yet, and we haven't figured out all about the connectome, and so far we don't have a great high resolution real-time imaging technique.
There's no reason to jump to the conclusion that consciousness is inexplicable by materialism, yet.


But given Rupert Sheldrake's other works and opinions and his questionable experiment set-ups, I think that's not what he's talking about. I think he's not after finding out what can and can't be explained by matter alone.

Materialism or science? I'll admit that materialism gave people more motivation to do rigorous work on a lot of things that they may have found really tedious otherwise. Aside from that - we've had this huge leap in discovery through reductionism and by assuming reductive materialism as it was something that hadn't properly been tried before and there was a lot of low-hanging fruit to pull down, of which there's probably at least some left. What reductive materialism did for science is made the level of analysis much more easy to speak about and the rules of engagement much closer to fool-proof.


Until, or unless, you have ample reason to believe that there's more to the story. Unfortunately that's not a portable or transferable thing. Everyone has their stories, often enough it's scary just how unexamined those stories can be. Leading to the next bit:


I posted a video in the science forum, a conversation between Michael Silberstein and Richard Brown, where this sort of thing came out vividly. The first half of the conversation went pretty well because they kept to physics and Michael was describing his take on the block universe, Minkowski space-time, his take on how dark matter was best described, and it was only when they got to the back half, on consciousness, that they got to a snag where they just couldn't progress. Richard is pretty close to where you're at, in the sense that his intuitions are so well covered by reductive materialism that he doesn't see a whole lot more to examine - ie. it just 'feels' natural, he suggests that causal closure has been proven in lower life forms, not yet in us but that there's no reason to believe otherwise, and when confronted with the issue of strong emergence he thinks that the emergence of wetness in water is a great example and that consciousness is, if not just like the wetness in water, it's really close. Michael OTOH comes at it from the neutral monist direction where his take is largely similar to my own, ie. that you can't pull something out of a natural world devoid of it without some slight of hand and your forced to chase it down toward the fundamental layers and ask what it's comprised of and where that's present in nature (his take - largely going on there really being no 'stuff' he doesn't agree with panpsychism but finds neutral monism better fit for a back ground that's neither wholly matter nor mind). I'm somewhat at this point accepting that people are destined to talk past each other on this ad infinitum, ie. whatever this is about it's too deep down or formative for arguments to be persuasive.


I actually think it's much easier for someone whose not a reductive materialist, who has no problem deep-diving through psy data and studies, or statistical anomalies that keep showing up in certain work (even when performed by people who don't believe in it whatsoever), to then read the peer reviewed journal articles of the sort that would suggest to some that the world is fully physical and mind emergent from brain cells than vice a verse. It's tough to put my finger on exactly why but it seems like when most people are native materialism absolutists that decision is pre-cognitive in a way that there's very little, barring the absurd, that would cause them to even properly test that assumption.

I'd also going to ask this. You mentioned above the idea that at some point we should just stop researching - that we have all of the answers we need. It would be perfectly fine for people to opt out themselves and say that it's not interesting, OTOH it would be strange for them to make that decision for other people. Not sure what basis would be given for that authority or how exactly someone would provide an argument, steeped in due diligence, that would suggest that they have the right to bar certain enterprises on the grounds that they believe it to be ground that's completely covered. I have to add that there are also a lot of high quality arguments as to why other doors of exploration need to be open, especially in the interest of pursuing new discoveries and potentially new discoveries applicable to tech.

I'm not as up on his research and so far I haven't heard anything about it that impressed me all that much (though I have heard he's done good work in more standard biology). I didn't post this for his science creds though, rather I posted it because I thought he brought up some ways of looking at the issue that were useful and I think better than what a lot of people tend to often bring on forums like this.

By drawing Jesus faces on pizzas.

how would you explore, if not by materialist/reductionist methods?
as what you are talkiung about is per definition immaterial ..... I mean... science is the way of narrowing down one tiny thing and then to use that thing to see what other things you can narrow down... or, as one of the early Quatnum physicist described it (i forgot which one): that at the level of quantum physics, the tool used to investigate and the result are to be understood as a unit, inseperable from each other...

meditation can't really tell you about the world outside - your research is inseperable from the tool you're using - your brain, your thoughts etc. .... and being neurodiverse, I don't think that my experience of anything is 'absolute'.

The low hanging fruit that have been explored sccessfully are all things at a scale where the tool used for exploration is somewhat negligable, meaning: using light to see something usually doesn't do much to macro-scale phenomena - but using photons to look at other photons screws up the measurement.

so... when talking about emergence, first we need to chart all the ways matter can interact with each other - and only once we've run out of possible combinations of matter interaction, and there's still something going on that can be perceived in some way so we can agree on what we're even trying to figure out, then we can talk about non-materialism.

as for now, our concept of existence will become first a matter of statistics and probabilities, before we have the need to move beyond that.

It's a bit telling that you'd ask that. Statistical analysis had been the primary tool for decades and likely will continue to be until or unless they're able to use that to get a hook into something more amenable to reductive analysis.


Is there any good reason why that shouldn't go on in parallel with well-built experiments exploring more complex phenomena?

it was meant as an honest question - I'm thinking in the ways of a materialist, and I just can't come up with any, because frankly, I'm not fully understanding what I'd be looking for



what kind of more complex phenomena are you thinking about?
And yes, there are good reasons: the very idea of anything nonmaterial can be used to justify not getting into materialist research -meaning: I bet ten bucks that soemone will use this to tell a woman that whatever she's suffering from is not a medical thing at all.
I mean... the idea that there is such a thing as a psychosomatic disease held back research on these diseases for decades. When a young doctor and an old pathologist figured out that there's an awful lot of bacteria in the stomachs of people with stomach ulcers, the medical establishment still insisted that stomach ulcers were psychosomatic and fundamentally can not be understood through something mundane like bacteria.

... how do we distinguish non-materialism from magical thinking? so far, we're struggling to draw a line between emergence and magic, but we have figured out that matter isn't magic.

Ah, it's okay - go back and read my response. I gave statistical analysis as an example, you can measure occurrences against probability and see if there is any persistent skew against random chance.


All kinds of people have perverse boxes that they want to permanently jam the world into. It's up to people around them to actually figure out if what they're saying makes sense. If statistics are forbidden for finding emergence because they're not the result of microscopy I'd have to put the above in the perverse/ridiculous pile.

fair enough.
statistics is a legitimate way to do things, - I do believe that climate change is real, even though it is basically a figment of statistics.
While writing that, I'm realizing that maybe the things we're looking for - emergent phenomena, that aren't quite graspable with microscopes, are what timothy morton calls hyperobjects



I'm currently fighting myself through the book of the same title - it's really hard for a non-native speaker.