This is a follow-up to the 4-Part Series which offer a practical path to loving your life every day.
Click here to read Part 1.
Click here to read Part 2.
Click here to read Part 3.
Click here to read Part 4.
 
The first four blogs offered a snapshot of how to be happy in life, even when things aren’t going well. It all gets much clearer in the books offered on WelcomingPerspective.com. But those books also tear a big hole in our badly outdated beliefs about truth, God, and the human mind. This blog explains how these foundational beliefs of science and religion are mistaken.

Until five hundred years ago, thinking people assumed that truth was largely based on pure reason, revelation, and intuition, Since then we have discovered that it comes almost exclusively from evidence. But our concepts of truth, minds, and God are still based on pre-Renaissance beliefs, ignoring what science has discovered about information processing and the brain. By re-thinking them, we can open the door to a better world.

Truth. We still hold tightly to the notion that there is an absolute Truth. Science deals in theories and approximations rather than truth. Even principles such as E = MC2 are merely theories, forever subject to being replaced or modified. Truth is an invented standard for beliefs, and almost all beliefs about the world are expressed in invented, imprecise meanings. Mathematics and symbolic language use precise meanings, but they only tell us about the real world when we combine them with ordinary language.

A meaning has no content, except as part of an entire mental model of the world. A meaning like apple depends on meanings about color, nutrition, seeds, and so on. When we say that a belief is true, we ought to mean that it works powerfully within our model of the world. But we sometimes have two competing models, each one having advantages and disadvantages. Until modern times, we believed that Euclidean geometry was the Truth. It still has its advantages, but so do various non-Euclidean geometries. Relativity theory and quantum theory provide the same answer to many (but not all) questions. Each of them has its advantages.

Our scientific model is so powerful that you might assume that it can be perfected. To the contrary, we know that it will never quite work. Its foundation is the notion of causality, which fits imperfectly with reality. With the subatomic particles of which everything consists, causality does not work at all. Each time you repeat an experiment, you get any of thousands of results. The best we can do is to predict a statistical distribution of results. And causality does not even quite work with big things. ‘Randomness’ simply means “what is left over beyond what any causal theory can account for.”

Truth is sometimes said to be the correspondence between a belief and the facts of the matter. But you cannot quite lay one on top of the other, because facts are physical, and beliefs are meanings. Instead, we assess the truth of a belief by its power to predict, such as what will happen in an untested situation. Where each of two models has its advantages, or where they predict identically but cannot be combined, it might never be possible to prove that only one of them is true. We are about to discuss that as to brains versus minds. A better approach is to say that any model must be internally consistent, and with two conflicting but equally powerful models, there might be no way to tell whether only one is true. Truth is merely a construct, which means an invented concept. Other examples of constructs are causality and the center of gravity of an automobile.

Minds. The notion of a single Truth leads us to try to make sense of minds, free will, and good by the principles of the physical sciences. But it is unlikely that the laws of physics work tell the whole story for nonphysical things. One popular solution is dualism: in addition to the physical realm, there is also a nonphysical realm, occupied by spirits, souls, and qualia. Another solution, accepted by some scientists and philosophers, is that there are no such things as minds, free will, or good. But there is a third possibility that makes far more sense than either dualism or radical materialism.

The problem arises when we assume that there must be a real entity in the world behind each of our valid constructs. This, of course, is nonsense. An automobile has a precise center of gravity, not because there is any such entity in the physical world, but because we invented that construct such that everyone would agree on its location. The construct of a curvature of space works precisely, but there is no need to assert that empty space has an actual bend to it, as if emptiness had a shape. Time is a construct of unlimited value, but no one will ever capture any of it in a bottle. Such constructs have enormous truth value, without which we could not understand the world. But we don’t need to worry about whether there are metaphysical entities that correspond to each construct.

The brain is a physical entity, understood by causal principles. Like a computer, it simply does what it is programmed to do, with no need to be conscious or have free will. The mind, of course, freely envisions what you want and chooses the best way to pursue it. And yet mind and brain seem to precisely mirror each other. This paradox is stumping science and philosophy. But it disappears when we accept that there could two valid but irreconcilable models. The mental model uses different constructs, such as minds, free will, and good, and they are every bit as valid as time and the curvature of space. Both models are powerful, and we can only speculate whether there are actual metaphysical entities that correspond to the constructs of either one.

Besides our causal model, people have always used an intentional model. It is extremely powerful, and has some major advantages, but it is time that it be made more precise, using the scientific method. It revolves around the construct that there is a standard of objective wisdom with some upper limit that we might call ideal wisdom, although it is almost certainly rather fuzzy. We must accept the validity of objective wisdom in order for there to be personal understanding or any basis for choosing what to do next. Evolution just naturally selects those intentional creatures with a greater capacity for objective wisdom about surviving and thriving.

Do not get stuck on whether there are metaphysical entities behind minds, free will, or good. A Venus’ flytrap has no brain, but our intentional model makes sense of it as recognizing that this fly might be food, and then intentionally trapping it. The same behavior can be explained with our causal model, and each has its place.

The causal model portrays us as robotic, conditioned to do whatever makes survival more likely. The intentional model portrays us as rational, seeking to survive, and sometimes seeking happiness. It has constructs such as meanings, beliefs, and desires. The notions of truth and minds are our own inventions, serving vital purposes, as do the constructs of our causal model.

God. There is value in the various beliefs about God as a Being with a Mind, ruling from a nonphysical realm such as Heaven. We relegate those beliefs to faith, because they go beyond what we can learn from the evidence. But there is substantial evidence that God is a valid (and central) construct of our intentional model, without dealing with whether God is a Being.

In the intentional model, you are an “I” who relates to the world from a personal perspective, in a particular place in space-time, with a particular history and a particular model of things. This “I” is a valid and necessary construct, and the same is true of “we”, as in, “We want to move to Vermont.”

You have a mental model of the world. It is the lens that brings things into focus when you pay attention to them. When you see a red object, your model might assert that it is an apple, and that it is desirable for filling your empty belly. You intend to develop wiser beliefs and desires, so that your lens can serve you better. The Victim and Welcoming Perspectives are two different lenses that reveal rather different realities.

Each of us uses a personal lens. As you grow in wisdom, your lens improves in the direction of being an ideal lens, as a limit. Ideal Wisdom is our construct for that ideal lens. As the ideal of the lens used by your community, it brings the importance of the common good into focus. Since there can only be wisdom from a perspective, it is natural to conceive Ideal Wisdom as God, a Being with an Ideal Mind, beckoning each of us to become higher selves and recognize the importance of the common good. We have no scientific basis for determining whether God is a Being with a Mind or merely our personalization of a valid scientific principle. But we do know that Ideal Wisdom is profoundly valid as a construct. That is, we know a great deal about God, without addressing matters of faith.

Summary. Some of our fundamental concepts take forms that no longer serve us. Truth is centrally important, but as our tool rather than a metaphysical ideal. Minds and causation are just as valid constructs, so that there is no conflict between a robotic brain and your personal free will. And God is central to having lives that work, whether or not as a Being with a Mind.

Visit Chuck Turner’s website here: WelcomingPerspective