Knowledge and Belief

I wonder if, I suspect, I believe, I know

Every thinker must have moments where one wonders if some bizarre idea that one has never thought of before could actually be true. Sometimes the notion is quickly forgotten  and dropped, perhaps sometimes it stays in her mind for a while. The possible number of metaphysical or theological ideas that are of this type must be enormous, especially to those who do not adhere to any particular religion. I recall that the late Stephen J Gould commented somewhere that anyone could think of a dozen different plausible religions “before breakfast”, and I think that is true for some people with active and questioning minds.

I want to suggest that the title of this post represents a sort of spectrum of thoughts about the absolute nature of things, ranging from the willingness to briefly consider an idea up to “knowing” that some idea is true.

Let me plunge ahead into an example that will illustrate what I mean. Take the supreme question that dogs all of serious human thought, that of whether there is a God. (Let’s not worry for the moment about whether such a question refers to a coherent being). We know that humans in the western world generally have a high degree of belief that there is such a transcendent being. Many would defend or justify their belief as being based on a “faith” that such a being exists, and many would feel that the significance of their lives is centered on this “faith”, even going so far as to say that they have an actual personal relationship with this God.

No doubt there are some---perhaps an extreme minority--that might say they only “suspect” that some kind of a being fitting the generally accepted notion of “God”  exists, stopping far short of an actual belief in it. Or, some (atheists and agnostics) might at times “wonder if” there could be something to the idea.

I am pretty sure that a sizable percentage of those professing belief would even go so far as to say they “know” that such a being exists. But I want to say that they really do not “know”, while admitting that it would be reasonable for some to say that they “believe” that God exists.

In much the same way, there are those of the mirror image who (1) insist that they know that there is no such being, or (2) believe that there is no such being, or (3) suspect that there is no such being, or (4) wonder about there being no such being. This last category might refer to a person who was raised in, and continues in, some religious tradition, but has occasional doubts that flit through his or her mind.

I was in a small gathering of philosopher friends a few days ago, and I floated the idea that consciousness is so mysterious, and seemingly so deeply imbedded in the universe (e.g., as suggested by quantum mechanics), that perhaps, as far as we know, ones consciousness continues in some unimaginable manner upon death. One of my friends insisted that no, oblivion follows death of a human. Now from where I sit, this certainly could be true, and it would very likely be the belief of the majority of people in the Western world that are professional scientists or philosophers. But of course this is not an issue to be decided by majority vote.

I insist that none of them really “know” that oblivion follows death. (it is such an odd thing that they would only “know” the truth of the opposite if, when they die, they find their consciousness somehow still intact).

I think it will be clear from what I have written above that I do not deem “faith” to be a valid way of acquiring knowledge, or of validating ideas. Faith, if it has an rational meaning at all, refers to a way of trying to make ones belief a constant mental attitude in spite of the vicissitudes of happenings in actual life.

One could cite examples of things we can say we “know” are true. For example, the fact that the sun rises in the east. But this is not known only as a result of experience, but is strongly supported by the model of the earth in an orbit around the sun. In other words, there is a highly coherent model that super-cedes the mere observational fact, and makes it virtually certain. To doubt this fact would really be proof of insanity, assuming that one has some minimal level of exposure to the idea of the solar system.

So as we humans go about our lives, we necessarily have to hold certain beliefs, although with varying degrees of certainty. Without such a set of beliefs, it seems unlikely that we could act or accomplish anything. Some of these beliefs are no doubt often of a metaphysical, or a religious kind, and hence are beliefs about an unseen world. I suspect that many of these might be better described as hope or fears. Probably many of these beliefs are not essential to our lives, and perhaps not even consciously examined to any great extent. Many of them will change over the course of our lives.ß

A Set of Beliefs on Interesting Questions

I am pretty sure that each of us humans carry around with us a set of beliefs, each with varying degrees of certainty, about the truth of certain of life’s “Big Questions” (or in some cases these might be more properly called “Interesting Questions”). Is there a God?, is there an afterlife?, Are UFOs real?, and so on. In some cases, ones belief about each of these is well thought out, while there are no doubt some that have not been consciously considered. Surely, there are some that have not even been thought of at all.

In any case, one must realize that the degree of knowledge and intelligence varies to an enormous extent across the span of the human race. In some cases, a particular human might have expertise on a particular subject that allows him or her to make a highly informed opinion (however, that does not necessarily mean it is highly likely to be right).

For most of the questions considered here, nobody knows whether the answer is a definite “yes” or “no”. I thought it would be an amusing exercise to consider  a set of certain “Big” questions, and muse on them myself to arrive at a qualitative and (hopefully) honest opinion about the truth or falseness of each.

I emphasize that my answers are subjective. I do not claim to have any special knowledge pertaining to most of these questions, and I offer my opinion in a spirit of humility. I do not wish to offend anyone with my takes on these.

There are of course a great many additional, important questions that can be asked. I am under no delusion that these constitute a “complete set”.

In what follows, I consider UFOs, NDEs, the existence of God and/or an afterlife, Artificial intelligence, cyborgs, nuclear war, meteor impact, life on other planets, the origin of human consciousness, the odds we are living in a simulation, plus a number of other issues.

These question are in no particular order. 

• Have we been visited by Aliens; are UFOs alien spacecrafts?

I believe this is extremely unlikely. What appear to be habitable planets are too far away for the distance to be traversable by alien crafts subject to the limitations of light speed. Also, consider the likelihood that, if there were such aliens, why would they deem the human race to be worthy of such close examination? We wouldn’t depart from an expensive and important voyage of our own to investigate, say, an anthill, would we?

But lets admit that if we do have, or have had, alien life forms on Earth it would be stupendously exciting news, probably by far the biggest news of all time. Because of this, I suspect wish fulfillment inclines so many people to fervently believe in UFOs, alien visits, etc.

Furthermore, the vast percentage of humans are unreliable witnesses. This includes military and civilian pilots, and even astronauts, who testify that they have direct experience of UFOs.

Regarding the widespread belief that the US government is hiding remains of an alien craft (and associated alien bodies) that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico many years ago: as with any “conspiracy theory”, the odds that if there really was a such a crash of an alien craft, so many people would be involved in the “cover up” that it would be bound to come out into the public. And furthermore, why would the US government want to hide such an occurrence from the American people?

So, I am inclined to believe the official version, namely, that the incident was a crash of a weather balloon.

• Are “Near Death Experiences” (NDEs) real?--i.e., are  they an indication there is a life beyond this one?

I am very skeptical that these are real, and not some illusion created by, or in, a dying brain. For one thing, I have never heard a metaphysical or theological argument explaining (or justifying) how God (or the Gods) would be motivated to give some nearly dying humans a preview, or a peek, into “heaven”. I suspect the apparently widespread belief in these, and the large amount of literature about them, is motivated by wishful thinking, since they are always offered as proof of a life beyond the present one.

The persons claiming to have experienced these transcendent events could be (1) simply lying in order to, for example, sell a book about it, or (2) imagining the event, being partly confused, unconscious, or otherwise deluded by their mental state at the time the “near death” event occurred.

In conclusion, I do not believe NDEs have any objective reality, and they are not proof of a life beyond the present one.

• Is there intelligent, conscious, advanced life in the Universe outside of Earth?

I do not have a strong belief here either way. Part of me is inclined to think that the answer is almost certainly “yes”. This is because we now know that life is (at least partly) a biochemical phenomena, and these or similar chemicals are bound to be richly distributed throughout the entire universe. Once life takes hold, Darwinian evolution would take place, and quite possibly, on a time scale of perhaps a billion years, result in intelligent life.

But on the other hand, we just do not have any quantitative idea as to what the probability of life forming is; this probability is a multiplicative factor in the well known “Drake equation”, which purports to estimate the probability of a planet having life. Along those lines, we could imagine this probability being sufficiently small so that there would be no life predicted to be anywhere else. So, if our planet turns out to house the only life in the entire universe (or even multiverse?), not only would that be amazing, but also a bit scary. Maybe even a bit depressing to some of us.

Of course, one has to distinguish conscious, intelligent life from purely macrobiotic, non sentient life. I am restricting myself to the former, since Darwinian evolution would surely eventually lead to intelligent life.

One must also acknowledge the (remote?) possibility that life here was seeded by a supernatural, one-time, interaction with a supernatural entity. Or, as some SciFi writers (e.g., A. C. Clark in 2001) have suggested, seeded or started by some highly advanced alien civilizations.

In conclusion, I am going with a “yes” here to this question--- i.e., there is likely to be conscious life elsewhere in the universe. But we will in all likelihood never confront it, or interact with it in any way.

• Will the human race create AGI?

Here the “G” refers to generalized intelligence, which would go beyond just a robot-like mechanical capability. It would involve deep understanding on the part of the AGI platform, and probably even consciousness. The character ‘Data” in Star Trek the Next Generation would represent the AGI idea quite well. (see the episode “The Measure of a Man” for an emotional and gripping depiction of the issues associated with this idea).

I have no strong view either way on this question. I have several young, bright friends who strongly believe that AGI will be created “soon”. But there are highly intelligent skeptics as well.

The downside to such AGI creations is well known: these creatures might, once they attain maturity and sufficient numbers, take one look at the history and behavior of the human race, and decide that we are a huge mistake, and quickly move to eliminate us from the planet.

In effect I will take a “pass” on this one, even though I am inclined toward the skeptic side.

• Will we enter a post human phase where AGI machines and biological human bodies are combined in some manner (for example, like Star Trek’s “Cyborgs)?

This one seems easy to answer, since this “bio-mechanical” phase is already well underway. Artificial limbs, and even artificial organs, are almost commonplace, and are surely bound to become even more so.

I must add that it seems unlikely that artificial brains will be installed, since, as understood at the present time, the brain is what determine individual identity.

• Is consciousness generated entirely within and by the brain, or is the brain (acting as an antenna) and picking it up from a pervasive consciousness “field” of some kind?

It is not clear to me that this question can be answered scientifically, partly because consciousness does not seem to be objectively observable. But it does not appear that anyone, even among the most hardened materialists, have any idea how the gray matter alone would generate consciousness (this of course does not rule out there being such a mechanism).

The internet abounds with sites claiming that the brain is an antenna, picking up consciousness from a field. Some of these sites appear to be rather “kooky” New Age sites, but that is not true for all.

I don’t know which is right. So I am going with a “tie”, even though I slightly incline to the “brain as an antenna” idea.

• Is there a God (or gods)?

This is surely the most important metaphysical question confronting all humans, one we must surely all begin to answer to ourselves in some early phase of adult life. Of course, we must acknowledge that many people the world over are taught, virtually from infancy, that the answer is “yes’, and quite often such people seem to retain this belief their entire life, without, it would seem, ever questioning it.

Now consider the term “God” (or Gods). Here there is a lot of ambiguity, or lack of clarity, as to what we mean by the concept. So let’s restrict ourselves to a God along the lines of that of the Abrahamic religions. Basically, this would be a Being (admittedly unimaginable to the human brain) infinitely good, infinitely powerful, and infinitely wise, that made the Universe.

Well, I really do not know about all of that. But I must quickly add that I do believe something of the sort in that I believe in a transcendent being that had something to do with the creation, or the existence of, physical reality, and that such a Being is on the whole good, and cares about humans (maybe even cares about all living creatures in the universe).

Why? Well, I am sure it has part to do with my upbringing in a Christian family, which I radically broke from in my mid teenage years. It might have even more to do with my particular emotional makeup, whereby I do not think I can bear facing a universe where there is no transcendent realm and/or transcendent being, only the brute physical (and uncaring) materialistic, physical realm. So I admit I have a huge bias here, in that I very much want God to exist.

Of course, this question has a lot to do with whether there is an afterlife. I suppose it is possible to believe there is a God, but no afterlife. But my impression is that this view is rare these days, although it seems likely that the Hebrew Old Testament writers, who definitely believed in God’s existence, had no concept or belief in an afterlife or a “heaven”. Personally, I tend to believe that if there is, in some sense, a God, then there is an afterlife for all rational beings, here and elsewhere (non human animals pose difficult issues, and I will not go into that here).

From circumstantial evidence alone, I am inclined to agree with Scott Adam’s avatar in God’s Debris (a free book on the internet) that very few people actually do believe in God’s existence. They may say they do, but Adams’ avatar points out that there are many advantages to saying they believe (sometimes even fooling themselves).

Before leaving this issue, I must mention the controversial “Pascal’s Wager”, whereby Blaise Pascal presented an argument that you really could not lose by believing in God. I will not go into any details on this argument here, because it would take me too far afield to do so. For those especially interested in it, a vast amount of material about it can be found on the web. But I will just say here that I find Pascal’s argument completely unconvincing, and I believe there are a great many fallacies wrapped up in it.

• Is there life after death?; Does our consciousness continue on after our bodily death?

It might be noted that these are slightly different questions. For example, ones consciousness might continue on after death, but not necessarily in a form that would, in common sense terms, constitute a continuation of an individual’s life. There is a question of whether the individual’s identity is carried over in the transition, for example.

My strong suspicion is that one cannot really escape from conscious existence, even through suicide (Hamlet’s soliloquy is very insightful on this). I am strongly driven toward the idea that all individuals (not just human individuals, perhaps those in other galaxies also) have some kind of permanent soul, which has eternal existence. If this were to be true, then the answer to the question is necessarily “yes”.

This question is closely related to the question whether there is a God/Gods or not, since if there is, it would seem likely (at least if the God is anything like the traditional model) that this God/Gods has arranged for a more permanent existence of his creatures.

Now this brings up the issue of whether there could possibly be some kind of judgment by God on the worthiness of an individuals life, and an associated consignment to a “bad place” (Hell) or a “good place” (Heaven). I completely reject as a lie the view that bad people go to “Hell”, a place of eternal suffering. Belief in that would be an affront to God (if he exists), because even a partially morally good Being would never subject a conscious creature to such everlasting punishment.

Now, if the punishing environment were of finite duration, that might be different. One can surely think of a great many people that would seem to deserve punishment for some finite time interval, perhaps with the punishment ceasing at such time that the evildoer truly repents in his/her “heart” (as would presumably be known to “God”).

Let’s buy, for the sake of argument, that there is a “heaven” (roughly in the traditional sense of the term in the Abrahamic religions) for humans. What could this be like? Could the inhabitants still do evil things (and maybe be “thrown out”?). Can natural disasters still occur that might result in the “second death” of some? What would prevent an individual from growing weary of such “blissful existence” after eons of time in heaven? Could a person who was deemed “good” upon admission eventually be corrupted and become morally bad? Would the inhabitants have “free will”?

These are all very difficult questions, and so much so that they render the entire concept of heaven dubious and perhaps even incoherent.

In conclusion, I believe it likely that in some way a person’s identity and consciousness continue on after death, but I have no idea what kind of existence this might be.

• Are we likely to be living in a “simulated” world, as many have suggested to be the case?

This is a very difficult, perhaps unanswerable question, and I warn the reader that it will not be answered satisfactorily here.

Many brilliant scientists and philosophers have considered this question, many of them holding that the world as we know it is almost certainly a simulated one. Even though the arguments that lead them to that conclusion seem sound (or at least plausible), I must admit that I have a great deal of trouble imagining it to be true. What we think of as reality just seems “too real” to me.

Now, it should be realized that the Abrahamic religions (as well as some others) argue that the world was created by a transcendent being (or beings), and that, in that view, the world would be a type of simulated world. It is my understanding that these religions imagine the world we all know will “pass away”, and perhaps be replaced by a new world (another simulated world?).

This even brings up the question of what would a simulated world even mean.?

Many fictional works, both films and novels, depict convincing  visions of how reality could be simulated. For example, Vanilla Sky, Total Recall, the Matrix, , the “Holideck” of Star Trek, are films that depict it. Phillip Jose Farmer’s River World and Terry Schott’s The Game (a free Kindle book) are a couple of examples of books that involve technological simulation of worlds.

• Will we be able to learn how life on earth started , assuming it started via natural processes?

Hmmmm....I wonder if anyone really cares about the answer to this question except for (1) ardent religious scoffers and militant atheists, who argue that life does NOT require supernatural intervention to begin, and (2) evolutionary biologists, who, as scientists, are quite rightly are obsessed with how such an amazing phenomena such as life could have spontaneously arisen. 

• Will we ever be able to travel to other worlds?

This seems to require that we find a way to exceed the speed of light? (such as by using wormholes, as depicted in Star Trek and other Sci Fi works.

• Can we (the human race) create consciousness artificially?

I have argued above, and elsewhere on this blog, that we do not have any way to determine if a system is conscious or not. This is because consciousness is entirely subjective, and only known to the system itself.

But if the platform (i.e., AI system) seems conscious, and for example, passes the Turing test, we will surely have to, on moral grounds, assume it is conscious, since to assume otherwise to result in evil consequences if we have assumed wrongly.

I am inclined to think that no, we will not artificially create consciousness. But we may be forced to act as if we have.

• Will we learn, or come up with a plausible answer to the metaphysical question, “why is there something instead of nothing?”.

I do not see how the methods of science can be used to answer this question, which is indeed one of the most perplexing questions we human can imagine. Seemingly, any plausible answer would have to assume the existence of laws of reality, thus being circular.

The psychologist William James considered this question, and felt that it was the “darkest” question that the human mind could consider. I believe that somewhere the philosopher Heidegger wrote that this question is the most important philosophical question.

However, can I please direct my readers to my previous blog post, where I suggested an answer based an eternal, necessarily existing, abstract realm of ideas, a plausible answer that avoids any circularity.

• Will the human race become something like the cyborgs depicted in Star Trek?

Well, the essence of those creature in Star Trek is that they are designed to only care about “the herd”, or the collective set of all the cyborgs. That is, they do not seem to have the concept of individual identity (as I recall, there is one exception to this).

The culture of the human world, at the present time, seems to have a considerable amount of momentum in the collectivist direction, especially among those on “the Left”. It is to hoped, however, that this will soon be reversed, and the world culture will continue along the line of the individualism of the Enlightenment. So hopefully the human race will avoid the collectivism of the Star Trek cyborgs.

But the other aspect of the cyborgs is that some of their biological organs have been replaced by technological ones. As discussed above, I do feel that that will come to pass in the future of humanity.

• Will the human race be exterminated, or made to revert to a primitive, stone age-like, existence, due to nuclear war, asteroid/meteor impact, AGI attacks, or disease? 

I am confident that the human race will make it past what Carl Sagan called the period of technological adolescence, and will thereby avoid a “Dr. Strangelove”-like nuclear extermination. However, some of these other dire effects are probably beyond human control, at least for the near future (we do not have any way to “steer” meteors away from a collision path with earth, for example).

It is to be hoped that by the time asteroid impact becomes a threatening issue, earthlings will have the means to direct it away from earth.

The disease pandemic is of course a real concern. I do not have any idea how likely it is, on a global scale, but of course I hope it never happens.

Many science pundits believe that AGI poses a huge threat to the human race. However, my personal feeling is that, unless some or all of these platforms are programmed to attack humans, they will never actually achieve consciousness, and hence will be unable to make a decision to wipe us out.

“Why does the the Universe Exist”?

A wild speculation as to why “There is Something Rather Than Nothing”?
(that is, “Why does the the Universe Exist”?, the “ultimate question)


The basic ideas in this approach:

That there is a timeless, non-physical realm of mathematical and logical relationships. These are relationships that do NOT need any kind of physical realm to be realized in. For example, the axioms and theorems of Euclidean geometry are true, and do not need any kind of a matrix of realized things to be true. “Pi” is the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter in any possible reality. This idea has been discussed by Roger Penrose, for example, who has called himself a “tri-alist instead of a dualist, because he believes in this third, abstract realm of ideas (the other two being (1) the materialistic universe, and (2) the realm of conscious beings. Rather along the lines of Descartes and his famous “dualism”.) . Of course, Plato also seemed to believe in this realm, and his belief would run counter to his teacher Aristotle’s view that the mathematical relations are merely abstracted from observations made in the physical world, and no have no basis or reality otherwise.


Here I am thinking along the lines of Max Tegmark, who, if I understand him, says that it is not at all odd that our mathematical concepts work to describe the physical world: It is not odd, because, in a very real sense, the physical world IS mathematics. Now what this would mean, exactly, I m not sure, but I can at least imagine that is true in some sense. After all, we are thinking loosely, creatively, and to some extent poetically. This subject can not be put in a syllogistic manner, with tied up with bows and ribbons on the package.
I suppose I must confess that here I am trying to come up with a way to provide some kind of an answer, however heuristic, to the “Ultimate Question” in the title to this post, which has nearly driven me bonkers since I was a college student becoming interested in philosophy and metaphysics. Now I am old, and dammit, I want some hint of what an answer might look like!


The third piece of the meta-model is hinted at in Stephen Hawking’s famous question: “Who is it that has ‘put the fire in the equations’ to make the world based on these equations actually acquire reality”? Several possibilities can be discerned here: 
(a) if the realm of pure math and logic is consistent, then the world based on them MUST exist (I must, for the time being, ignore the problems brought up by Kurt Godel about mathematical consistency). This first possibility would not require any kind of agency.
(b) Or, maybe there is in fact an agency: perhaps there is some kind of “gatekeeper” (God or Gods) that decides which of these equations to implement. I suppose such a gatekeeper could be viewed as a “God” or Deity of some kind, although it is not clear that the gatekeeper need be “conscious” in any way we can understand. Also it might be possible that this gatekeeper could be, along polytheistic lines, a pantheon of Gods or Deities.


Now turning to what is surely the most enigmatic aspect of all: Conscious minds that perceive the mathematically constructed physical world. Indeed, in the absence of reality-perceiving Conscious minds the Ultimate question does not even make any sense, since nothing would be perceived as existing, and the question doe not arise.
 My idea here is that God or the Gods have built a sort of “consciousness field” into the mathematically constructed physical universe, and once evolution has produced suitable living platforms to absorb some amount of this field, conscious individuals come to inhabit the world and ask philosophical questions such as the one under consideration here.
Now there are many variations that can be imagined here. My favorite is that there is what Lord Dunsany called “The Sea of Souls”, which might consist of a large number (maybe an infinite number) of disembodied souls, or spirits, that are vying in some manner to be selected to occupy a conscious “body” in the (some) world. These souls would probably be immortal, although to sure, their realization as a physical body could be killed or terminated via interactions in the world they temporarily occupy. It would just be that they would be returned to “The Sea of Souls”, and there await there chance to be instantiated in the world (or some other world), perhaps after some kind of review, or critique, of their behavior (while they were in the world) with the God or Gods.

In summary:
The idea presented above is that there is a timeless, necessarily existing, realm of abstract mathematical and logical relationships, and these are selected (by a God, Deity, or panel of Gods or “Overlords”) to be mathematically consistent to form a world. Well, there could be a great many ways (again, maybe an infinite number) that these relations could be extracted out, while remaining fully mathematically consistent, to form a great number of mathematically consistent worlds.
 Sentient beings are selected in some manner to occupy life within these worlds, and are carefully isolated from each other, although they all bathe in, and couple to, the consciousness field created to fill the universe.

The souls are considered to be immortal, having existed eternally before and after any of their time spent in a world. (this also solves the problem of free will, since they would not be bound by “nature or nurture" acquired while in a world.