Debate on God with an Irish scientist friend

His post to a neuroscience discussion list:

Why not get rid of God altogether? And indeed get rid of the self altogether? We may eventually catch up with Buddha  

Another guy's post:

OK, I'll bite. Where self is the primary object of consciousness in the sense of "self-awareness", you can't get rid of self without also getting rid of consciousness. But you can't get rid of consciousness, because it's the primary experiential fact of your mental existence.

My response:

We all come from different cultures. You may be amused to consider what a big difference it makes that Yeshua and I have different associations ("meanings we hear in our minds") when people use the words "bite," "God" and "consciousness." Do we even live in different cosmoses, some real and some less so?

"Bite": Yeshua and I have spent many hours poring over real-time data (>1khz) from brains of rats and mice, and remember very well what Pribram and Freeman said about those creatures. Most important: how 99% of the human brain is equivalent (at the level of mass action and primary learning systems supporting brain level consciousness) structures. We have seen lots of political leaders REALLY bite (really exercise brain structures they don't advertize), so when a human promises to act like our leaders.. some of us might take that seriously. But I will try to be discreet about it. 

"God": Some would say it is just a fine point. What is the difference between getting rid of the word "God" and getting rid of God? I would sooner ask what is the difference between a sane or sapient organism and one who does not make this distinction. It is in fact all about differences in how we use words, in how we use loaded words central to the relation between our values and feelings (in 99%) of our brain and what we say to ourselves in words or other symbolic reasoning. We have a very serious problem with sanity or sapience in decision making in this world, and the need for folks who make the distinction and learn a higher level of discipline is very important in a very practical way. 

Since I learned a fair amount about the spiritual side of life (say, in the fall of 1972, after some new experiences), I have had very deep but quiet respect for those ancient Hebrew mystics who simply did not use MANY of the names translated as "God" out loud, because of the terrible confusions and false associations. Only after the relation with my wife became closer, and many years of Quakers, did I feel it would SOMETIMES convey more truth than entropy when I use that word out loud.

Above all, if we are sapient/sane, we will never forget that "God" is JUST AN ENGLISH word, defined by social conventions which themselves are variable and untrustworthy, embracing a wide VARIETY of legitimate possible definitions. For this particular word, legitimate definitions (in human cultures) include a mix of real things, mistakes, ill-defined noises and fuzzy mixes. A sane human would not embrace ALL of these definitions, and would be very careful in using the word for that reason. 

Sean has criticized certain Hindus for worshipping "God" defined as "consciousness" equated to"the Absolute." In truth, I have seen SO much variety in people who call themselves Hindus -- likewise for Christians, for Moslems, for scientists, and even for oil company people. But sapience demands that I show SOME (variable) degree of respect for people who assume different meanings to the word "God." 

What I would assume is NEITHER the "empty" universe of Einstein (the most nonspiritual of the four great founders of quantum mechanics, the others being De Broglie, Schrodinger and Heisenberg) NOR the purified ultra formal cosmos... of certain formalists all over the world. Rather, per my papers for the Stapp issue of Activitas Nervosa Superior or Cosmos and History, I generally associate the word with THREE real entities or forms:

(1) Our noosphere, surprise. (Teilhard used the term "the Son" at times, did he not?) A real person, in my view. A real brain too, maybe dark matter and such, but a real personality.

(2) Less precisely -- "our Father" (as Jesus would put it, but he was not 100% alone), our ancestral link to the larger species of noospheres of which our own is just one juvenile member;

(3) MAYBE the cosmos as a whole, depending on your arbitrary taste in definitions, recalling that a Lagrange Euler equations represent the limit of intelligent systems in the limit as uncertainty goes to zero. Don't underestimate those PDE! Or the adjoint momenta or "qi"which are part of that.

Should I even say this is actually the"Holy Spirit" of that other trinity? An interesting thought.

I interpret the various 'gods' of narrow religions mostly as archetypes, as patterns WITHIN the noosphere, somewhat similar to associative memory, often just a kind of mental image reflection of something more objective.

 

All for now. Best of luck,

   Paul

 

Try it and you become a self-negating nihilist, opposed to your own existence and existence in general. Spiritually, that's not a good or rewarding place to be.    

Why not get rid of God altogether? Because when properly defined, God coincides with the Absolute, the wellsprings from which you flow. (Any separation of God from the Absolute would imply that there is something higher and more comprehensive than God, namely the Absolute, which would contradict the definition of God in virtually every major strain of monotheism.) By denying God, you deny your own highest (absolute) level of Self, and again you become a nihilist.

There's not a Buddhist alive who can rationally deny any of this. Any Buddhist who claims otherwise is peddling sandalwood-scented mumbo jumbo, in which case he is responsible to defend it. (This includes the Buddha.)