For all you thinkers out there, I'd like you to tear my thoughts apart and point out errors...
This morning I felt like I had some important realizations about the nature of god and self, about why a god is necessary in a system with self/world duality, and how a conceptualized god can be real (even needs to be) to a conceptualized self without either of the two physically existing. To say that such a thing was possible only a week ago, I would not have believed you.
I believe that the foundation of this realization, for me, was laid in the philosophy of Buddhism and the principle of the embodied mind in cognitive science. That I have been reading about both is no coincidence. I was looking to Buddhism, specifically Zen and meditation, as a form of relief. Relief from anxiety is the best explanation, but anxiety has its causes. I like to think that much of mine stems from an eight year intellectual battle trying to rationalize theism.
How do I rationalize theism? First I need to ask, how do you rationalize self? By this I mean, how do you conceptualize yourself? Do you think of yourself as having a body and a soul? Certainly this has been the case since the days Descartes. But more recently, since the beginning of brain science, this has been changing subtly from that of body-and-soul to one of body-and-mind. As a contemporary example: our university has a newsletter titled "mind-body connection". And practices like yoga and meditation that are being popularized as a form of stress relief emphasize the nature of the mind-body connection.
I do not think we have gone far enough though when we pronounce a mind-body connection. It is not as if our body is the GE power plant and the mind is simply connected like a light to a wall. Our mind is IN our body. Our concept of self and world arise FROM our body, from experiences that we each feel. Our mind and body are one in the same.
On the surface this sounds sterile enough, but the implications are incredible. If mind and body are one, is there still room for a soul? If mind, self, and world view are formed from ONLY from bodily experience, where can we say that a soul exists and what purpose does that concept serve but to ease our fear of non-existence of self? Honestly ask ourselves, why would anyone conceptualize soul in the first place? Ideas and thoughts are generated by people. The concept of soul hasn't always been around. People invent concepts, words, and languages. Somebody saw a dog, conceptualized dog, and titled it "dog". Who thought they saw a soul, and why? Where is it?
I am going to move on to explain why it seems rational that the concept of a god should exist, even needs to exist, as a reality to a conceptualized self. To do this, let us leave the topic of soul for a more agreed upon topic, the concept of self, something we can all acknowledge.
So, what is your concept of self? Is your self your body? Is your self your mind? Is your self your soul? What is "self"? What part of you (your physical body) is the self? My point is, without any elucidation, that self is a purely abstract concept. There is no physical part of your body that any scientist could point to and say "Oh, here is the self. That is the essence of Aaron". Self has no physical manifestation. Self is a delusion.
I do not mean for you to think of delusion as something negative, as many of you will. Delusion can be helpful. A delusion is only a fixed false belief. Arguably the self is just such a thing and is helpful. It is a fixed belief in nearly everyone's mind. And yet where does it exist? It doesn't. It has no physical manifestation.
But this is not a problem. This does not mean we are crazy. We have existed with the concept of self for most of our life. People live their entire life this way. But there was a point where you did not yet have a concept of self because your brain and conceptual system had not yet developed enough to process a concept as intangible as self. Do you remember this time? No, we can't remember this time (being an infant) because most of our memory system is dependent on the concept of self.
If you can accept this point without further explanation (that the concept of self is a delusion), then we can move on. If not you should stop here, because now I wish to share with you how I reasoned from this point.
My first question after realizing that self is a delusion was, then, what is real? This is obviously a problem. But it can be answered by understanding the nature of the concept of self. The existence of self necessitates the existence of other. This is nothing more than a restatement of the definition of self. There is self and other and to be more clear, self and world. When I refer to a self/world duality, this is what I am referring to. We experience most of our lives as existence of self in a world.
Given that self is a delusion though, what about the nature of the world? Is this too an illusion? Surely the world is not an illusion because we can touch it! It is shared space! We can test it! It is real! Our bodies are real! Yes, certainly they are and also our minds. But our mind is our body, and our minds are formed by our interactions in the world.
I no longer naively assume that I am independent. Does any of you pretend that we can create anything of our own accord? Any art, any song, any words are all reflections of happenings that we have experienced. The world, especially family, diet, and culture define how our bodies and minds are formed. We are all the product of a physical world. We are the physical world.
We are the physical world. I said it twice because it is important. We are the physical world. We are physical beings. Our minds are shaped and molded by everything that happens to us, to our physical bodies. In this way the world and our bodies are part of the same thing. "We" are all part of this physical world, and yet at the same time "we" are not physical at all because "we", the concept of self, is a delusion and has never had any physical manifestation. There are simply bodies in the world reacting, just like fire reacts to water, like a rock to gravity, like a neutrino to the weak nuclear force.
The world is just there, just reacting, just changing. This is impossible to appreciate within the framework of delusion of self / world because it diminishes the value of self. To fully acknowledge the world is just happening pushes the self to the mirror, to the frightening mirror into which the self looks and realizes that there is no reflection!
"No! Not possible!" it screams. And so at this point it is either necessary to abandon the belief in a self (something not sanely possible in most cases) or to create/accept the concept of god and soul. Why can the self not see its reflection? Why does it have no physical manifestation? Because the self is a "soul"; one in this self/world paradigm is compelled to argue this point to maintain rational integrity. It is the only rational conclusion in this paradigm, the choice defined by the paradigm itself. The soul exists but is not "in this world" and so must have been created by something else not in this world: a god.
God is the most rational conclusion, and a very good one at that. It allows a "self" to maintain its rational integrity in the self/world duality by explaining away all the impossibly rational experiences necessitated by using that paradigm of framing the experiences of life as self. By this I mean the concepts of the concept of afterlife for self, that of justice enforced by an omnipotent being, and more generally the concepts of good & evil, all of which work very well for that paradigm.
I conclude that conceptualized self cannot rationally exist without a conceptualized god, or if it does it must live a life of anxiety struggling to explain the inconsistencies generated by that paradigm. But for the self to acknowledge that god is not real is to acknowledge the self is not real, an arguably difficult or impossible feat without an alternative explaining philosophy and supporting social structure.
For this reason, for all living in the self/world paradigm, as long as self is "real" (contradictory to all physical evidence) then god is too "real" (contradictory to all physical evidence). They exist in the same realm. We can have no hope to free the minds of others from the delusion of god as long as self is conceptualized and a duality of self / world exists.
