Food for thought:

“It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist, since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. It’s hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time!”

- Ron Carlson & Ed Decker, Authors, Fast Facts on False Teachings.

Note:

Of course, I don’t agree that one need to be absolutely certain there is no God in order to be an Atheist.

Absolute certainty founded on absolute knowledge of a subject is not a necessary prerequisite for one to adopt a particular philosophical outlook or world view. Ironically, it takes faith.

Interestingly, by saying the above I have both proven and disproven the premise of the quoted authors.

I love paradoxes. 

Ron Carlson, Ed Decker, Fast Facts on False Teachings

quantum physics, holographic universe, implicate order, david bohm, the secret, mind over matter, matter does not exist, matter is energy

View Video By Clicking Here -> Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about The Black Swan

Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Unpredictability, 9/11

Love is inward out. Giving. Selfless.

Fear is outward in. Receiving. Taking. Sucking. Selfish.

Both Love and Fear, and any other emotions that are derived from these 2 polarities, affect our DNA, which in turn influences the energy and matter surrounding it.

Love, a higher emotional frequency than Fear, liberates, expands and allows our DNA to evolve into higher and more complex forms.

There is nothing to fear but fear itself?

No…

Fear shouldn’t be feared.

Fear should be recognised for what it is, and out of love for oneself, be replaced with love.

And really, all you need is love.

all you need is love

…then I shall be its Destroyer.

Any one person’s perception can always be misleading or inaccurate, but the sentiments of fatalism are strong at this time.

The unchecked rise of unbridled capitalism might have been the biggest mistake of the 20th century and it may soon be that the likes of Carnegie and Ford would be remembered in the same light in the dark future as that of Hitler and Stalin in the present age.

What I write might be blasphemous to you, but the fulcrum of history has always been turned by blasphemers.

But I am not one of those rabble-rousers who would drain from the hearts and minds of my audience all notions of hope. Like I said, if this be the Age of Fatalism, then I shall be its Destroyer.

While we witness the compounding of contingencies that critically manifest themselves day by day from zealots, radicals, conglomerates, kapitalofascists, Nature itself, and the sundry assortment of dictators, tyrants and despots, the overzealous perspective skewering systems are subliminally and overtly injecting the venoms of cynicism and fatalism into the minds of the zombie masses.

The Authorities are elevated to a messianic level. For now, it seems our saviours seem to be those prancing around in business suits meeting in upscale places, eating less than 10% of the luxurious food being served to them on silver platters (and throwing the rest of the 90% away, presumably), whilst they talk about rising food prices and battling poverty.

On the other hand, a different party go overboard in rightfully denouncing the above mentioned hypocrites and become foul cynics nobody (or only the weird would) wants to hang around with.

Some would say that our planet is fast hurtling into destruction and that there is nothing we can do about it; others say nothing save for belief in some messianic doctrine. Some would say that it is headed for cataclysm and we can do something about it, but it is almost too late. There are also some who say that we are fated for destruction and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it (it’s just pre-programmed in the Mayan calendar).

We have no space on our crowded planet for fatalists as these.

My philosophical doctrine is this - every problem is a result of human folly and hence has a solution. The alleviator of every problem is always the erasure of ignorance. Undesirable occurrences that do not come about as a result of human folly are not problems at all, but challenges meant to test, elevate and cause the growth of the most sentient species on the planet.

So why worry? It may seem like naive pollyannaism but in truth the above philosophical doctrine is rooted in action. There is always something that can be done to alleviate any seemingly insurmountable problem.

Solutions are of 2 kinds (that I know of) - (1) solutions that attack the problem by going to its true source and eradicating its true source, or (2) solutions that are the antithesis / opposite / reversal to the very nature or essence of the problem.

Simplistic? Think again. Life is meant to be simple. Simplicity is absolutely normal. The very essence of nature is simplicity. Simplicity is the fractal building block of the Universe. We make things complicated. Our sentience, sapience, intelligence has always been a double-edged sword - this is natural, considering the dualistic nature of the Universe (read Surah Yaseen of the Quran).

My manifesto is this - to overcome all our present limitations and challenges and to grow as a species, the way is not to increase intelligence, but rather to get our present level of intelligence first in order, putting things in perspective, rearranging, recompartmentalising, ‘defragging’ our minds (if you will allow the computer metaphor). The solution is not to increase intelligence quantitatively but to increase the quality and usefulness of our intelligence.

A hard drive saturated with all the knowledge in the universe would be of no use if its data is not arranged in a practical and useful manner.

Imagine if we are to do what we do every new year, every day, to celebrate the cyclical dawn of a new day.

Imagine everyone going, “Happy New Day!” and receiving SMS’s or MMS’s from your friends and loved ones, wishing you a “Happy New Day. May the new day bring you prosperity and the fulfilment of all your dreams”.

Imagine irrationally exuberant people organising parties and countdowns and beach bashes, bands performing every midnight to celebrate the coming of the new day.

Ah… Don’t listen to me.

I’m just trying to contradict the status quo. Acting different.

Happy New Year. Happy New Month. Happy New Week. Happy New Day.

Try not to die. Stay alive. But just in case you do die the next second you read this (which is entirely possible), do relish this very moment right now and smile with your last breath.

Still alive? Congratulations.

This is a sundry post, but I hope it would be the impetus for discussion, debate or at least some imaginative thought.

On a whim, I decided to find out all I can about the era of 10,000 BCE; I was probably inspired by the grossly inaccurate and unhistorical 2008 movie, 10 000 BC.

You know how Wikipedia is - as I was reading about the things that happened to humankind and the planet around 10,000 BCE, one thing led to another - I was reading entries about Persia, Asia, Egypt, the dog, the goat (which was domesticated in Persia), Confucius, Buddha, Laozi (might not be correct spelling), Socrates, Mahavira, Zoroaster until eventually I decided to reduce all the potentially blogworthy and interesting Wiki entries to only 2 - Asian Century and Golden Rule.

Read the entries. They make interesting boredom-killing reading, especially Asian Century.

I don’t know if I had speed read about it from Newsweek or from the newspapers, but I’ve always had this gut feeling that the 21st century will be the century of Asia, an Asian century, in which Asian culture, peoples and philosophies will dominate the planet.

Besides this, I’ve also been having this ’sense’ that the 21st century will also be the century of the Muslims, pretty much like the 20th century was somewhat the century of the Jews. Now, don’t take this offensively - there is no anti-semitic or pro-Islamofascist sentiment here.

Why did I say the 20th century was the Jewish century? Because Israel was ‘founded’ (with much violent controversy) in the last century and, like it or not, Israel and the Jewish people have, in one way or another, attracted the most attention in international affairs militarily, politically and socio-religiously. I can be wrong. It might be selective observer bias. But consider these points - the United Nations (or League of Nations) was founded after World War II, in which millions of Jews were slaughtered by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. In a way, the formation of the UN was in response / a reaction to the terrible atrocities inflicted by Hitler. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in the 40’s and one of its influencing factors was the Holocaust.

Now, why then do I say the 21st century can be the century of the Muslims? First of all, I realise that when I said the 20th century was that of the Jews, I was referring to the Jewish people, their ethnicity (and nationality), and not Judaism, while I refer to Muslims per se when I said century of Muslims. Of course, Muslims consist of people from all nations and races.

An obvious ‘excuse’ for the 21st century being that of the Muslims would be, of all things, 9/11. Again, this can be selective observer bias, and it is entirely justifiable for me to be in error. We can see a significant amount of attention (either positive or negative) being paid to Islam - to the Muslims, its laws, its beliefs, its history, its ‘founder’ (the Prophet), its code of morality, its positions on such critical human issues as civilisation, human rights, freedom, politics, its future and so on.

There have been positive and negative (polarities depend upon perspective of observers) developments in the Muslim world - the Ummah - and I can only hope that the final outcome be good not only for Muslims but for human civilisation in its entirety.

I agree with the so-called ‘progressive’ Muslim liberal thinkers that we as a people should do some serious and critical self-examination and subsequent improvement, but, having that fundamentalist (which does not equate to radicalist or extremist) and orthodox (not referring to its originally Christian context) streak in me, I ‘respectfully’ disagree with their notions, suggestions and ideas for doing so (e.g. calling for a radical redefinition of all Islamic principles and free-for-all ‘Ijtihad’ for every Muslim man, woman and child).

In comparison, while my so-called Jewish Century came about in a sense as a response to a terrible atrocity happening to them (the Jewish people); my so-called Muslim Century shall come about as an act of self-correction and in some aspects as a response to external factors.

I hope not to be misunderstood, however. While I am a Shia who awaits the Advent of the 12th Imam, the same way some Jews and Christians await the coming of the Messiah (whoever that person is going to be according to them), my idea of the Muslim Century is not one in which the supremacist ideals of a portion of the Muslim population are unleashed upon the world, where suddenly you see a population explosion of angry-looking men in white with turbans and beards, and women in various fashions of the burqa.

I would cringe at that thought.

The Muslim Century need not be a century that sees a massive adoption of the Islamic faith by more of the populace, but one that sees the coming of age of the Muslim Ummah (a real one, finally, after over 1400 years since the time of the Prophet [p] and Ali) as a significant contributor and cooperator in the family of humanity.

As for the merits of the Silver Rule versus the Golden Rule, I urge you to read those entries for a comparison.

10 000 BC, Wikipedia, Asian Century, Golden Rule, United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

I just couldn’t put down reading The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath. At the front cover, there is a blurb by Michael Ruse, Professor of Philosophy in Florida State University, saying, “The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist, and the McGraths show why.”

TDD is a short book, and my reading of it so far has been smooth, quick and painless - like a good laxative that clears your system of that filth which has been accumulating for an unhealthy length of time. While - if I can remember - I could understand 98.765% of what Dawkins was trying to say in TGD, it kind of forced me into taking up yogic positions in a mental, conceptual sense.

While I did not become an avowed convert to the Dawkinsian Messianic Movement to wipe out religion off of the face of the Earth and cleanse the Godmeme virus off of the minds of a majority of Man (just joking, my NDA - Non-Dawkinsian Atheist - friends), I did appreciate achieving the objective which I had set when I had intended to read TGD - to allow my mind to try a world view familiar to Dawkins (that is, his notion that there is no such thing as order or beauty - these are human-generated concepts, by-products of Darwinian evolution, to put it plainly and unjustly).

His arguments against God and religion are the same-old, same-old ones I’ve encountered from my years of polymathic reading. The only fresh thing I procured from TGD in the theological (or Atheological) debate was his spin on the old “…Then Who Created God?” question - that if, according to the Intelligent Design theory (anyway, ID is NOT the ONLY conceptual model on the theists’ side of the debate; there are far too many others), Life as we see it is functioning far too complexly for it to have come about without an Intelligent Designer, then the Intelligent Designer Itself is more improbable than the Universe / Life that has supposedly come about from It - so the question begs, Who Designed the Designer?

For the theistic counter / rejoinder to this question, read McGrath’s TDD. But then I guess most people won’t, so I’m just going to spoil it for you here… It seems in our efforts to understand the universe we are in, we encounter the problem of explanations perpetually requiring an explanation themselves. Explanations always have to be explained in an infinite regress.

In physics, the search for the Grand Unified Theory, or GUT, still eludes scientists. At this point I’d like to recommend the reader read Paul Davies’ book, The Cosmic Jackpot or its alternate title, The Goldilocks Enigma, for an understanding of the problem that the very notion of the (existence of the) GUT poses. Even if we find the GUT (assuming there is a GUT), then ultimately what makes that GUT the GUT? Optimistic GUT-ists say the GUT, when found, will express itself in the simplest, most beautiful truth, such that it needs no further explanation - therein lies the problem - it sounds very much like the theist’s argument saying, “God is the Necessary Being, the Ultimate Cause, His Existence needs no further explanation.”

But then theistic, spiritual or religious scientists will simply say, the GUT is (essentially a description of) God.

I highly doubt we will ever find a true GUT, only an increasingly complex series of explanations for explanations for explanations ad infinitum.

I believe the problem lies not in the elusive existence or absence of an Ultimate Explanation but in the notion of explanation itself. Why explain? Of course, in many instances in life, explanation is needed, but to a practical limit. You don’t see the judicial system investigating the genetic make-up of a criminal’s ancestors or her specific neuronal misfirings at age 7 when she was most mentally malleable to explain why she did it or if she did it. You limit investigation only to the empirical data you can collect and study. But you don’t question whether or not the criminal’s parents existed and investigate / debate that.

The underlying law of all existence is causality (things happen because other things happen to cause them) but the word causality itself conjures a confusing and misleading idea that it is a rigid, unilinear thing. The act of explaining is a conscious act of looking back at the line of causality in reverse, finding the causes of things via clues and patterns. Explanation exists because there is existence and existence functions through causality. Here, we find ourselves trapped in tautological territory…

The Dawkins Delusion, Alister McGrath, Michael Ruse, The God Delusion, Grand Unified Theory, GUT, Paul Davies, The Cosmic Jackpot, The Goldilocks Enigma

Innumerable scientists, philosophers, theologians, religionists, atheists, theosophists, teleologists, geeks, mathematicians, quantum physicists, geniuses on wheelchairs, apes, dolphins, amoebae, artists, thinkers, inventors, baby universes, Artificial Intelligences, subatomic particles and neurons have asked the question - Is The Universe Absurd? Or is there a Purpose and Reason to it all?

I had just completed my reading of yet another intelligence-raising book by Paul Davies called, The Cosmic Jackpot. Next to Hyperspace (by Michio Kaku), The Physics of Immortality (by Frank Tipler) and perhaps The God Delusion (by the godfather of godlessness, the Honorary Sir Richard Dawkins), I dub it as one of the most significant books I have ever read.

To sum all 315 pages of the book up, I quote only 3 words that make up a simple question, “How Come Existence?”. It might be the new question that replaces ”To be or not to be?” as the most significant question of all time (if that Shakespearean line was the most significant one of all time in the first place).

Reading this book has confirmed a notion I have had for a while that is now transformed into a belief that even the most respected scientists of our time, with their so-called objective reasoning, are not free from some form of ideological or philosophical bias. There are areas that scientists would not dare or bother to venture into, where philosophers take over, but then there are also places where philosophers just give up and leave the game to (usually escapist) speculators.

Taking a step back, I realise how funny this antic of humans is to try and understand the nature of existence. Most of us think in terms of words. We use words to rationalise. Sometimes words take on a vivid image in our minds and those images may or may not be useful. The more advanced amongst us thinkers use mathematics to understand things. Mathematical symbols are simply the cousins of words.

Words. Numbers. Symbols. Images. Analogies. All these are tools that might have helped us evolve from simplistic beasts whose only concern was survival and procreation (if you follow the Darwinian line) but like Einstein himself said, “We cannot solve problems from the same level of thinking with which we had created those problems in the first place…” (not his exact words).

I am a practical optimist. I believe there can be no end to how deeply the human mind can fathom the important questions of existence, but to go further, we need better tools, better models, better conceptual infrastructures and better processes. Perhaps, where mathematics, cosmology, musing philosophy and physics have left off, neuroscience should take over…

Is The Universe Absurd, Paul Davies, The Cosmic Jackpot, Hyperspace, Michio Kaku, The Physics of Immortality, Frank Tipler, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, How Come Existence?, ”To be or not to be?”, neuroscience

I am thinking of writing a book. I shall call it The Book of Questions.

It won’t be an academic essay type of work, nor am I going to explore the pro’s, con’s, validities or lack thereof of theoretical philosophical, cosmological, semantic, semiotic, scientific, cosmological, ad infinitum, concepts and notions.

It shall be a fractal of questions.

I shall ask one or a few questions which then branch out into a network of independent and interdependent and interlocking and overlapping questions, creating even more questions and more questions, ad infinitum, ad absurdum.

It might be the greatest work  of my life yet.

I think I am Socrates reincarnated.

Book of Questions, Socrates