So, first, a passing note. I think that the title “Physics and Consciousness” is so encompassing that I could literally write about anything and the title would remain appropriate. So my title is not very helpful. Oh bother. Nevertheless, I think that it’s a good theme to spin ideas off of.

Secondly, a summary of what today’s post will be about. I think I’m going to write about how God does (and does not) appear, how we would go about beginning to verify the reality or unreality of the objects of faith. I defuse the fate/free-will debate, and there is also a nice tangent about how predatory animals attack their prey. To begin, I recommend a read of the following article: click this!

In the study, researchers found that those who believe in God are just about guaranteed to be better, on average, at identifying subconscious patterns. Better yet, the study was independent of culture—they tested people in the US and in Afghanistan. What the study suggests is that people who see an underlying order to everything—not just people who think but really feel an intuitable unity, prior to concentrated analysis—are those who tend to believe in God. Essentially, this study implies a sense for divinity is very much the same as a sense for music. As music is to us raw pattern purely sensed, so too God is to us raw unity purely sensed. A person who believes in God is someone who can sense abstract patterns from the amalgamated nexus of their senses and thoughts, as if there is a music going on all the time all around them. This is the essence of faith in, of communion with God. As a side-note, I’m going to be using “God” a lot, and that’s not to the exclusion of “gods” or “spirits” or “divinities.” I’m most familiar with God. If I say God, I mean that with a sense of mystery, not with the sense of Are-You-A-Believer-Or-Are-You-Going-To-Hell? Imagine being a child asking the question of God’s reality, of the existence of demons or fairies—that’s what I’m getting at. Your preconception of God will interfere with the argument here. The point is not to classify God but to discover. This is searching out an alpine meadow for the presence of a flower species.

Now, before I go on, I must say I really like this study. It gets at some very important aspects of faith very quickly. For one, what I was just saying—though it is left implied, the study corresponds to the understanding of God relating to the world like the music of the entire cosmos.


Secondly, this study does not address in what way that intuited unity exists in relation to observation. Is the divine unity independent of observation, a construct of observation, a codependent phenomenon? Another thing, this study does not say that whoever tends to sense patterns subconsciously is likely to believe in God. Nor does it say what kind of God or gods or spiritualities. Presumably, the researchers studied monotheists, since Afghanistan is a predominantly Muslim country. I imagine that a different test would have to be developed to compare between polytheists/animists and monotheists. Definitively, such a study would open up understanding of how cognition and the structure of the world relate.

As an aside, that’s the whole value of medieval metaphysics for the modern era. There are countless elaborate studies into the relation between cognition and the structure of the outside world, though they are packaged as arguments about angels and God and souls. And though it would be at times rather frustrating to extrapolate the implicit structure of their visions from their explicit intent, it contains the formal stencils of varieties of worldviews. It would allow for analytic representation of human thought. Although such philosophizing often peregrinates, what psychology and neuroscience cannot do is give an accurate depiction of how information is experienced and organized from a first-person perspective. In this regard, philosophy is superior and is perennially valuable. In fact, if it were not for generations of quality philosophy, modern science would not exist in the first place. Philosophy established the ability to develop positive empirical knowledge. It was not in spite of the medieval metaphysicians but because of their dabbling and babbling that we today have science. This is blasphemous to pompous scientists, because it requires recognizing that all good knowledge begins clumsily and that the process is developmental. I digress.


Thirdly, this study does not describe the conditions for belief. It does not say that whoever tends to sense patterns subconsciously will believe. It says that whoever believes is more likely to intuit patterns. In circles of faith, especially the monotheistic, the way one comes to faith and approaches the divine is rather important. There are far too many debates about predestination and free will. Most of these debates can be defused by realizing that the argument is really about the way that conceptualizations of causality relate to preconceptualized information. If one believes in free will, they will do so because they do not feel life is boxed in. If one believes in fate, it’s because they feel there is a great reason for everything. It’s not an argument about God and souls, it’s an argument about how each person likes to relate the layers of their consciousness. And it’s a pointless debate because it’s like an argument between whether the eyes or the ears are the correct sense. Of course it’s wrong to see with your ears or hear with your eyes—fate and free will are observed by positioning the seat of one’s attention in different cognitive nodes. This, of course, blows up a sense of normalcy, the universe becomes chaotic, neither free nor determined, and it means that we are in the hot seat regarding how the entire universe happens.

Now, when people have this insight, the vast majority run away from it because it feels unstable. They will fall into thinking that the entire world is equivalent to the self, and they’ll either like or dislike that. This very very common confusion is one of the main hindrances to spiritual growth, though it does not happen in the manner that I’m describing. What I’m doing is describing its conditions, not its occurrence. A common experience people will have is a feeling of restlessness about the importance or unimportance of everything they’re dealing with. Analytically, that problem is represented as a problem of fate vs. free will. A philosophical discussion is not sufficient for dealing with the problem for most people, however. Most people (and most aspects of everyone) need to address this topic intuitively, in a form that is commensurate with their intuitions. Abstract discussions are not commensurate with intuitions. They can be true, but they are really representing an inner work, not themselves in a formal way. Patterns don’t exist as rational entities, though they can be identified as rational entities.

You might fall into one of four categories:

1) Intuited freedom is rich, conceptual determination is poor. – You believe in free will.
2) Intuited freedom is poor, conceptual determination is rich. – You believe in fate.
3) Intuited freedom is poor, conceptual determination is poor. – You believe in a meaningless universe.
4) Intuited freedom is rich, conceptual determination is rich. – You believe in a beloved universe.

If you don’t identify subconscious patterns, you probably gave up reading this article after the first two sentences, and would therefore not belong to any of these categories, at least not explicitly. For those who don’t identify subconscious patterns, they would not be able to be categorized into one of these, because the kind of awareness they are disposed to is buried or nonexistent.

All of this is to say that the inner machinations of how one comes to faith depends on what faith they select and on their cognitive tendencies. Each faith has specific structures of cognition they implicitly advocate, which draws in different kinds of people. However, there are often more cognitive similarities than differences between different faiths—Islam and Christianity, for instance. There are tendencies that people are attracted or repelled by, which leads to believers or unbelievers in various circles. Thus, there is no particular mechanism for evaluating how one comes to faith. The only way one would know about the process of believing is in their particular conditions and the types of narratives that give them access to subconscious pattern-identification. Just like certain smells can bring specific memories flooding to mind, so too different narratives can activate different states of consciousness. This is the whole reason that people like stories.


Fourthly, the fact that the divine election vs. self-determination debate is entirely an argument about cognitive dispositions does not answer whether or not divinity is real. Is a particular state of consciousness sufficient for empirically observing a god? Is God limited to one state of consciousness? Is God observed as a function? Is God the same thing as ideals except projected onto a universal entity even though God is not real?

The ideal vs. divine argument is null. Whether the ideal is charged with a universal or personal significance is not about what’s real and what’s not, it’s about which scale you want to look at. The self is a world just as society is a world. So we can check that off the list. If we’re going to see if divinity is real, we must recognize that existence comes in various shades. A paranoid schizophrenic does not believe in false entities, they live in a world that is different than a normal human is designed to live in. For the person with mental illness, their illness is not their having unreal illusions—those illusions are real images to them. Their illness is that something is awry in the way they process different realities. Their personal reality prevents them from accessing outer realities. That is something just about every single human being experiences. The fact that a schizoid person puts those limitations to images may make it harder for them to live, but it does not make them any more in error than the rest of us. The way that they process different frames of information (and, MORE IMPORTANTLY, the way that people who don’t process information their way treat them) leads to something more inhibiting than the rest of us. Their vision is deeper and so their difficulty is deeper. With regard to the cognitive functions, ideals are secular equivalents of divinities in every aspect except the inwardness or outwardness of their existence.

That’s still a big difference, you might say. I would come back at this and say that divinity or ideality would be tested for by seeing if it exists merely within or also outside of principles. Again, whether something is an ideal or a divinity is not so much a question of reality or unreality but a question of location, of dimension, of condition. Once the appropriate dimension is identified, the relationship between that dimension and the objective environment can be understood. It’s pointless to look for a divinity in a dimension it does not appear. But once that dimension is identified, the extent to which its conditions relate to other environmental conditions can be tested for.


Still, it seems that to put nightmares and rocks on the same playing field goes against what we mean by real. A nightmare goes away by waking up and rocks don’t. Well, rocks do go away, they just take a really long time or a lot of heat. Furthermore, dreams don’t dissolve into thin air. They alter our brain structure, our behavior. They have a real effect on our bodies. They’re not unreal, they just exist as food for thought. The brain’s computations deal with dreams as patterns of physical energy. That patterns can affect our behavior tells us that information is real in some way.

But aren’t patterns just patterns? Math is not real, it’s just talk, after all. (I don’t believe that, by the way. My reasons become apparent: why is there order in life when everything else is given to decay? Why can the brain facilitate thought?) This, my friends, brings us to one of the most sapient questions humans have ever asked. Can patterns be more than thoughts? This is how one would begin to test if God is more like a rock than a dream. It’s foolish to think that high amounts of attention must be prolonged to sustain the existence of a god. Perhaps such effort would facilitate awareness of God, but if that God ceases to exist with the relaxation of effort, it would suggest that either the natural state is inherently opposed to God (which many do believe) or that your god isn’t real except as a dream. For a spirit or a god or God, any kind of spirit, to be more than a dream, it should be possible to relax attention into intuitive patterns that are still there. It should be possible for human consciousness to dissolve and that entity to remain. That’s the definition of something being more than mere phenomenon, it’s what we want to mean when we say something is real. If humans went extinct, and a tree fell in a forest and there was no one to hear it, would the forest exist in the first place? That’s what’s at stake when we ask if someone’s belief in divinity is real. We don’t just mean real as phenomenon, we mean really real. Like bigger than anyone real.

The problem is that we could only identify divinity as archetype. What a human identifies as divine is something that feels simultaneously more vegetative than plants, more predatory than lions, more cosmic than the land, the sky, the sea, the sun, the heavens, more seamless than time, more expansive than space. One might say that this is simply the archetype of consciousness itself, awareness of the general form of the human substrate as the gateway to the entire universe. And is this not what predominates so many religious narratives? A perfect human whose stature is divine revelation. This is not to falsify the names of the major prophets of the world, nor to turn their respective faith-systems into a denatured mush. It is to say that there is a ground for measuring the validity of divinity that is inherent in all world faiths. To the extent that one measures up to the general form of human substratum as a representative of the universe, one reveals the Spirit of God. Do not now start entangling your mind with arguments about whose religion is superior or how this would create division and argument. Just pause the thought right where I left it. That it is possible to evaluate the divinity of an experience or a person. It would be astronomically difficult to catalogue every area of a person’s life that must become enlightened, holy, etc. and then use that data to measure divinity. Not to mention it would be very frustrating to create a metric that accounts for how different everyone’s view of divinity is. Nevertheless, the principle is there. I think there is an easier way, and it has to do with predators.


Dogs attack in angry waves. It’s an emotional attack that gives a person opportunities to strike back. Their legs and belly and throat are unstable and vulnerable. One can even smack them in the muzzle during an attack to much effect. Dogs lunge and retract, lunge and retract. Dogs focus in on the sense of overpowering you. That’s why they will bark at you from a window. They want you to feel their power. They’re less interested in actually defeating you as they are in making you feel defeated. Once you walk away from their yard, they give a few extra barks and finally shut up.

Bears also attack in angry waves, but not so much in cycles of lunging as it is a kickboxing match up close and personal. The bear will smack you to pieces. But they are targeted on your prey instincts. Generally speaking, with the exception of polar bears, bears go after you because are (1) bothersome to them and (2) appear potentially defeatable. Bears will attack relentlessly unless or until you aren’t bothersome or defeatable. If you’re doing nothing that upsets them, they have no reason to attack. If you appear too big to potentially defeat, they’ll flee. If you appear dead, there’s nothing for them to attack. Their interest is more in power than you yourself. Bears are a bit like dogs in that regard. The bear, essentially, wants to be able to overpower you. Unlike the dog, they’re not interested in you feeling their power. The bear wants to feel the ability to overpower. Once you dismantle that ability, even by doing a silly action like playing dead or spreading your arms, they give up. Also, bear spray works way better than gun shots. Their noses are sensitive.

Snakes—snakes will attack out of impulse, and depending on the species they will be more or far less aggressive (usually, they’re quite skittish). Serpentine impulse can be like a mousetrap or a match lighting. If you spring the trap, the snake will strike out. If you bother the snake, the match will strike. The conditions must be just right for the anger to kindle and not snuff out. And just as a match has only so much stick to burn, the snake will calm down after being bothered even if you’re still right in front of them or even holding them. They can be reignited, but each impulse wave is not deliberate or principled. They lash out of fear and necessity and have no interest otherwise.

Cats, however, are far different. When being attacked by a mountain lion, one will note the great directness and forcefulness with which it is attacking. Its powerful arms extended prevent a quick blow from stopping it. Jumping from above or below, its strike is intended to be destabilizing. There is little one can do without a weapon or friends to help. Its teeth and claws clamp down immediately upon impacting the prey. If it stumbles onto its back, it is even more poised to attack, all four claws become available for use. It can circle around you, jump to a higher height, chase you around obstacles, jump past you. It knows how to read you and your intentions. It knows exactly how to overwhelm you. If it experiences retaliation, unlike a dog or bear, it will not step back and lunge again. Rather, the mountain lion will reposition itself while doing whatever it can to remain in control of the prey item. The cat is not interested in reacting to fear as the snake, feeling power over you as the bear, or communicating dominance as the dog. The cat is actually interested in objective control over you. This specific ferocity makes them extremely dangerous. However, the moment you make them feel controlled, they turn flighty and run sideways, tail-puffed, to a corner as fast as they can. Even mountain lions are scaredy-cats. It’s ironic, the cat wants objective control over you, but the moment you give them the impression that they don’t have it, they disappear. Their behavior does not follow a two-way principle. Their predation tactic is not their flight tactic; cats tend to be hypocrites. I do wonder if there was ever a predator on earth with the ferocity and flexibility of a cat combined with the indifference of a snake, a creature that was so given to controlling prey and so effective at doing so that it remained locked in combat without regard to the strength of the prey’s response—nothing would be more terrifying. May I recommend Roger Zelazny’s Eye of Cat.

Like a mountain lion attacking its prey, serendipity that consistently defies ascribed meaning and transcends contexts is the strongest evidence for God. If there are spirits who are persistent beyond observation whose appearance fades and shifts like the aggression of dogs, bears, snakes, then the discovery of a catlike divinity would make such softer spirits believable. If one smells of catnip, however, is another matter.


October 18, 2020
San Luis Obispo