Posted by Roberta Grimes • February 03, 2024 • 13 Comments
Human Nature, Understanding Reality
The Cruel War is raging, Johnny has to fight,
I want to be with him from morning to night.
I want to be with him, it grieves my heart so,
Won’t you let me go with you? No, my love, no.
Tomorrow is Sunday, Monday is the day
That your Captain will call you and you must obey.
Your captain will call you, it grieves my heart so,
Won’t you let me go with you? No, my love, no.
– Traditional, from “The Cruel War,” 1700s
We have reached a singular moment in history when a bioethicist writing for a prestigious journal actually can push literal human extinction as a rational idea, while at the same time the venerable Nobel laureate Sir Roger Penrose is pushing… Lord, having read this several times, I still have frankly no idea what it is that he is pushing now! To have been doing this work for as long as I have done it does give you some considerable perspective. I can recall the deeply rational eighties and nineties, and even the respectable aughts in mainstream science, when you eagerly read all the popular-science magazines as they hit your mailbox each month, and you would find article after article about the confident research that was being done then in all the key fields of scientific inquiry. It was the heyday of modern scientific research!
Origin of the universe and origin of life were of course the major fields, but there were many others, too. Human origins, speciation, and many more, and not a bit of craziness in the bunch. The researchers were young, and they were making confident predictions about how soon we would have established our big, definitive theories, backed by what would be solid scientific evidence. And very soon now, or by the turn of this coming century – or no, let’s say by 2010 at the latest – for sure we were going to know how life began. The Big Bang was going to be timed to the micro-instant. I used to love reading all their confident articles!
But then, gradually all the long years passed. Eventually, even 2015 came and went. Those bold young researchers became long in the tooth, and their confidently-set deadlines for their major scientific discoveries had long-since gone by without much notice, except perhaps by me. I wanted to know how life actually began! What we were getting, though, in our popular-science magazines was more and more ever-meeker-sounding articles about how many difficulties science was encountering in discovering the building blocks of life. And in solving basically every sort of unexpected scientific problem you can imagine.
Younger physicists and others in the hard sciences in particular were becoming ever more stymied, too, by declining educational standards. As a result of a combination of factors, mainstream science even today still has not yet managed to answer even one of those tantalizing Big Questions that just a few decades ago it had undertaken to address so confidently, and with such certainty about its sure ability to slay every dragon in the scientific woods. There has been a complete multiple-systems failure in materialist mainstream science at this point. And reading about it over the past couple of decades has felt very much like following the documentation of the gradual health-breakdown, and then the actual death of a longtime precious friend.
And meanwhile, The Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture in Seattle is doing yeoman’s work right now in the field of open-minded scientific research. It is carrying on where the closed-minded materialist scientific community simply cannot go, and investigating intelligent design theories and various hybrid solutions to the real-world scientific questions that mainstream science is now gradually coming to admit that perhaps it never is going to be able to solve. Mainstream science cannot answer these questions, and not because the questions are insoluble, mind you. But because more than a century ago, the mainstream science gatekeepers, the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals, decided to limit all mainstream scientists to finding exclusively matter-based answers to every scientific question that ever in the future is going to be asked.
This decision to hobble the work of all scientists forever into the future seemed to make sense to the scientific community of a century ago. Back then, the risk of perhaps inadvertently finding God was apparently a real one to the scientific gatekeepers of that day. And a century ago, Christianity seemed to be still enough of a rival that the mainstream scientific gatekeepers didn’t want to give Christianity even the remotest possibility of any more support. But for The Discovery Institute, the risk of finding God is not a bug, but rather it is a feature. And to read their frequent newsletters now, all full of breezy genuine news, feels like such a happy escape into some unexpected field of common sense!
What seems to have completely flummoxed the mainstream scientific community, to the point where hands are thrown up in a kind of end-stage frustration, is our wonderful all-purpose friend, fundamental Consciousness. I have taken to capitalizing the word “Consciousness” at this point, because of course at its highest vibration, Consciousness is in fact God; and we have lately come to understand that Consciousness, which also is our own personal sense of awareness, is really all that there actually is. It is apparent at this point that nothing else exists.
My dear Thomas’s proposed definition for Consciousness is the best definition that I have yet found. Nothing else can touch it! Thomas says, “Consciousness is an infinitely creative energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, governed by emotion and therefore self-aware.” Thomas also says that “Consciousness is all that independently exists.” And he tells us that “Consciousness is an aspect of the Mind of God,” and it includes all human Minds. But the problem is that mainstream scientists cannot understand Consciousness at all! And mainstream scientists cannot study it, since it gives them no material handle to grasp. What the materialist scientific community imagined about Consciousness five years ago is the same thing that it was saying about Consciousness fifty years ago, and even a hundred years ago. It still is mostly wrong, of course, but it remains the height of scientific understanding to this day. Which is to say that when it comes to their study of Consciousness, materialist scientists have made no progress at all in the past century.
When the fundamental dogma that governs all your work is materialism, you have no way to study what is in no way material. So then you look at Consciousness, and you assume that actually there must be nothing there to see. Most scientists therefore assume as a matter of professional certainty that it is impossible for anyone to understand what Consciousness is, where it comes from, how it interacts with our human brains, or really anything whatsoever about Consciousness. And since Consciousness is foundational, this hampers the materialist scientific community’s understanding of a number of other things as well.
For example, here are three areas where materialist scientists are not going to make much headway until they are willing to deal with the active primacy of non-material Consciousness:
It seems as if God has been hiding in plain sight all along, and in fact God found that to be easy to do, until at last we all focused our attention on Consciousness. It was only when mainstream science attempted to understand what materialist thinking cannot conceivably understand, while at the same time traditional religions attempted to pin down and create their own dogmas around what is spiritual, and therefore altogether ineffable, that both traditional materialist science and traditional dogma-based religions both lost the ability to make sense of reality, pretty much simultaneously. Consciousness then entirely escaped the ken of both scientists and most conventional religionists once they tried to find a way to understand Consciousness using their own archaic modes of understanding. Whereupon, both scientists and religionists realized that they were out there beyond their depth altogether.
But some highly visionary scientists at the Discovery Institute managed to make the stretch. It is laughable that the atheist position has for so long been considered by so many to be some sort of default position, and a position that we had to assume must be right, when we see now how easily a new age of visionary scientists who are willing to allow for a designer wherever a designer is naturally found, and they are not at all flummoxed by old superstitions, can make such extraordinary scientific strides! Science is, and science always should have been by definition nothing more nor less than the intellectually free and independent pursuit of the truth wherever the truth may lead. And with the Discovery Institute, that joyous pursuit can at last eternally be humankind’s default scientific position.
Of course there is a Designer behind the extraordinarily complex and fine-tuned design that is the reality in which we live! No one can be a part of this world to adulthood without coming to understand that certainty. You don’t gaze at a great stone castle, or a cathedral in all its magnificence, without knowing that someone must at some point have chiseled and formed its blocks and established the master design by which they all were set in place. Someone drew the designs for the windows, and cut the glass, and set the pieces of glass in place. Whenever you see a design to anything, you know that there must have been a Designer.
What the death of mainstream science’s materialism-obsessed nonsense can mean is a bright new day of healthy, fearless, and entirely facts-based scientific research for all of humankind.
I’ll tie back my hair, men’s clothing I’ll put on,
I’ll pass as your comrade, as we march along.
I’ll pass as your comrade, no one will ever know.
Won’t you let me go with you? No, my love, no.
Oh Johnny, oh Johnny, I fear you are unkind,
I love you far better than all of mankind.
I love you far better than words can e’re express!
Won’t you let me go with you? Yes, my love, yes.
– Traditional, from “The Cruel War,” 1700s
While reading the beginning of this weeks posting I asked my “Alexa” to play the song you referenced as the words were familiar. It played two versions and the one by ‘Peter, Paul and Mary’ was definitely the one that I recalled from many years ago! Oh the memories that song provided.
Thank you Roberta, as always, for your profound, thought provoking writings which I look forward to upon waking every Sunday morning before the sun rises!
Oh my dear Susan, I thought afterward that this song and this blog post made rather an odd pairing! It is Thomas who puts them together, usually. And he even generally chooses the pictures, and he loves that picture of the Jewish boy with the Palestinian girl. He thought they went perfectly with the song. But, why did that all work with the death of mainstream science? He considers all of it to be a war, apparently, going back for more than a century. It never has made any sense at all for mainstream science to be fighting this nutty intellectual war against the discovery of the primary role of Consciousness, a discovery which of course was made by the great quantum physicist Max Planck more than a century ago. So to Thomas, all of this made sense!
Dear Roberta, The purpose of my comments is to reinforce your dismay at the materialist approach of standard “science.”
This past year, the Nobel Prize was awarded to physicists for experimentally demonstrating the principle of quantum entanglement. Qunatum entanglement develops when a single entity , say an electron, is split into two or more pieces. According to the well established principle of energy conservation, the remnants of the split particle contain the energy possessed at the time of splitting. What was experimentally demonstrated was that when one of the remnants is energeticaslly observed, so that one of its features (say particle spin, for example) is observed, then the other remnants must instantaneously odopt complementary spins, so that the energy of the original particle is maintained. The problem for materialism is that the signaling between/among particles is instantanous, even it the particles are separated by light year distances. Now, while quantum entanglement has been experimentally demonstrated, there are no materialist theories how such signaling is faster than the speed of light by being instantaneous. As far as I know, I offer the only plausible theory for why it takes no time for the particles to signal eachother, but my theory relies on my understanding that time does not flow in the world of consciousness (an observation reported by all who have had near death experiences, or just Out of Body Experience. The particles exist in the material world as a shadow of their existence in the world of consciousness, as I have explained in my text on Space, Time, and Consciousness.
Regarding the origin of the material world, the Big Bang Theory completely fails to explain where the singularity ame from (the emouimosly dense mass of energy that was supposed to have exploded). In fact, there is a principle I discovered that actually excludes the possibility for creatures existing within any world to observe how their world came about. Here is a summary of a chapter from my text about this principle:
” 6. An Absolute Limitation to the Rational Analysis of Experience, Consciousness, and World Origin: the Principle of Interior Unknowability.
After working for approximately a decade to produce a defensible theory for how the world came to be, I realized that I had made zero progress. I questioned why that effort was entirely futile, and came to an interesting conclusion — the question itself implied an observational framework external to a Creation event, but scientists could never in principle locate externally as “privileged observers” to be able to see what happened. Thus, a new postulate for the metaphysics of creation was defined. This postulate was termed the Principle of Interior Unknowability (PIU). It was argued that the PIU stands on two legs of support.
The first leg is an analogy posed about fishes born in a fish tank having no opportunity ever to locate outside of their tank. From their interior location in the tank, they (or scientists in the material world) would never be able to learn where it came from or how it was made; the same argument applies if the world were instead conceptualized to be infinite with no boundaries.
The second leg is a conjectured analogy with Kurt Godel’s Theorem of Undecidability, developed while he was working on his Incompleteness Theorems. This leg of the argument for the PIU reasons that postulates, axioms or assumptions based on internal observations of our world, applied to mathematically model its creation, are susceptible to creating a paradox (historically known as the Liars Paradox) by self-reference. To escape the potential for producing a valueless or misleading paradox, information would have to be gathered external to a system to be used for modeling its creation. ”
As individuals humans who own our individual consciousness, it functions in what I’ve termed the Universal Field of Consciousness, the UFC (really, the mind of God). As human, we cannot locate ourseves external to the UFC to be able to observe how it functions. Thus, while we may became aware that we have consciousness, we cannot apply material science to study it.
Consciousness, the mind of God, is the basis for all that exists, including the material world as its shadow.
Bravo, my dear wonderful Jack! Wow!! I await your expected Nobel Prize announcement!!
Dear Roberta, The purpose of my comments is to reinforce your dismay at the materialist approach of standard “science.”
This past year, the Nobel Prize was awarded to physicists for experimentally demonstrating the principle of quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement develops when a single entity , say an electron, is split into two or more pieces. According to the well established principle of energy conservation, the remnants of the split particle contain the energy possessed at the time of splitting. What was experimentally demonstrated was that when one of the remnants is energetically observed, so that one of its features (say particle spin, for example) is observed, then the other remnants must instantaneously odopt complementary spins, so that the energy of the original particle is maintained. The problem for materialism is that the signaling between/among particles is instantanous, even it the particles are separated by light year distances. Now, while quantum entanglement has been experimentally demonstrated, there are no materialist theories for how such signaling is faster than the speed of light by being instantaneous; in addition, there are no theories about the nature of the signal.
As far as I know, I offer the only plausible theory for why it takes no time for the particles to signal each other, but my theory relies on my understanding that time does not flow in the world of consciousness (an observation reported by all who have had near death experiences, or just Out of Body Experience. The particles exist in the material world as a shadow of their existence in the world of consciousness, as I have explained in my text on Space, Time, and Consciousness.
Regarding the origin of the material world, the Big Bang Theory completely fails to explain where the singularity ame from (the enormuomosly dense mass of energy that was supposed to have exploded). In fact, there is a principle I discovered that actually excludes the possibility for creatures existing within any world to observe how their world came about. Here is a summary of a chapter from my text about this principle:
” 6. An Absolute Limitation to the Rational Analysis of Experience, Consciousness, and World Origin: the Principle of Interior Unknowability.
After working for approximately a decade to produce a defensible theory for how the world came to be, I realized that I had made zero progress. I questioned why that effort was entirely futile, and came to an interesting conclusion — the question itself implied an observational framework external to a Creation event, but scientists could never in principle locate externally as “privileged observers” to be able to see what happened. Thus, a new postulate for the metaphysics of creation was defined. This postulate was termed the Principle of Interior Unknowability (PIU). It was argued that the PIU stands on two legs of support.
The first leg is an analogy posed about fishes born in a fish tank having no opportunity ever to locate outside of their tank. From their interior location in the tank, they (or scientists in the material world) would never be able to learn where it came from or how it was made; the same argument applies if the world were instead conceptualized to be infinite with no boundaries.
The second leg is a conjectured analogy with Kurt Godel’s Theorem of Undecidability, developed while he was working on his Incompleteness Theorems. This leg of the argument for the PIU reasons that postulates, axioms or assumptions based on internal observations of our world, applied to mathematically model its creation, are susceptible to creating a paradox (historically known as the Liars Paradox) by self-reference. To escape the potential for producing a valueless or misleading paradox, information would have to be gathered external to a system to be used for modeling its creation. ”
As individual humans who own our individual consciousness, consciousness functions in what I’ve termed the Universal Field of Consciousness, the UFC (really, the mind of God). As human, we cannot locate ourseves external to the UFC to be able to observe how it functions. Thus, while we may became aware that we have consciousness, we cannot apply material science to study it.
Consciousness, the mind of God, is the basis for all that exists, including the material world as its shadow.
But I’ll bet that nothing you publish ever gets noticed, does it? These people are philistines!! They live in their silly closed little world. John Lennon said it best when he said that they are real nowhere men, singing their little nowhere songs to nobody.
Dear Roberta, As you know, God knows everything that is, so our own personal discoveries are simply that. What we can and should do is to share our understanding regardless of the established religions and sciences who guard their privileged but false version of the truth. It is thus wonderfully ironic that such ignorance of artheists, agnostics, and humanly twisted versions of the Bible and Koran God is actually the product from these tiny specks of God’s own consciousness–a cosmic joke played to God’s own amusement.
Eventually, we all pass and then reunite with our God Creator, after which we go on to next play the “game” of life again here on Earth many times, and also on other worlds. How ironic too that we may say with our language that existence is eternal, infinite in extent, but also realize that time does not actually run for God’s consciousness, but exists only as Now.
What is unfortunate is that society’s war against each other according to their warped versions of religion, causing needless pain and suffering for our mortal bodies.
Ah, my dear wonderful Jack, you are more large-spirited than I think I might be, were I in your position!
“Mainstream” materialist science is taught in such a way that any attempt at discussing even the possibility of Consciousness as the foundational and basic fabric of the Universe is met with derision and ridicule. The materialist approach is to essentially say that if you’re implying that there is Consciousness, or God, that you’re not intellectually bright enough to explain things in terms of chemistry and physics. You’re dismissed as an unsophisticated troglodyte leaning on superstition and beliefs that don’t yield to materialist methods of investigation. Any aspiring PhD candidate can’t afford to do anything except the party line, and if granted a teaching position or a research job, must be very careful to toe the party line or be denied tenure or permanent employment.
The fact that mainstream science has gotten mired in the dogma of materialism is tragic. Dogmatic thinking is the natural enemy of learning and progress. However, it’s refreshing to see that determined and open-minded researchers are starting to point out the flaws in materialist thinking.
Oh my dear wonderful Mark, so perfectly said! I hear from people inside the scientific community who say the same kinds of things. Quite so. The world that they are creating is artificial, and eventually it will fall apart of its own dead weight. But meanwhile, quite sadly, a lot of careers are going to waste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXFeLwRssnI&t=1s
I my 20 years of the study of numbers, it became clear that inherent in the structure of numbers, there is a fantastic all at once order of many phenomena that clearly show a non-human intelligence at the heart of it.
And of course, one hubris mathematician, without truly reading the entire book from cover to cover, belittled it, I think simply because I challenged certain mathematical and clearly human limited logic invented dogmas, which obviously cannot be true when you discover the harmonious principles at work. Such dogmas are based on the idea that prime numbers are totally randomly distributed, or that any pattern, at best, is just coincidental.
Anyone studying the numbers and patterns operative in our solar system alone will also be awed by the harmony of numbers involved.
Anyway, more and more scientists are openly and certainly supporting the findings of the Discovery Institute, where a friend of mine works, and it’s only a matter of time when the eyes of the world will be opened to the reality of a Loving Divinity, Designer, Creator, Intelligence, Artist, Musician, etc.
Scientists have just observed that tomatoes and tobacco plants emit sounds when they are under stress (e.g., lack of water or extreme temperatures), which certain animals and insects can hear.
See e.g. here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-_AGgoJ3VA
Dear Roberta. Careers going to waste; busily tailoring the emperor’s clothes.
Oh my dear Ray, I love this! “They are tailoring the Emperor’s Clothes.” How perfectly said!