Amidst all of the clashes of worldviews that we observe in our global society, we can see that the world is suffering from a deep philosophical crisis, and we need a new approach to dealing with this. There are many ways of classifying and differentiating the most popular worldviews, and this allows us to see where people tend to agree and disagree on the most basic questions of life. We can seize upon the main points of disagreement among people, and we can identify these as ultimately the most significant causes of societal tension and unnecessary conflict.

People who hold these divergent worldviews also often have outrageously different opinions and this makes it very difficult to form constructive dialog between such groups. If we want to alleviate this tension and work mutual understanding, we need to set aside the notion that we have all of the answers. This is not to say that all worldviews should be treated as if they are equally valid nor that they are equally invalid. Sure, some worldviews would have to be more accurate and more representative of reality than others, and thus we can say that some are more true than others and that some are just largely false, but we all also need to accept that none of us really has the full truth. There is no problem with us having a high degree of certainty about the great questions of life, and thus we don’t have to pretend like we know nothing about the world, but we do need to maintain some room for doubt.

In an earlier post, I undertook a high-level survey of the most popular worldviews among humans throughout the world, including those in the category of faith-based religions and also naturalistic worldviews such as secular humanism, and this seemed to show that each of them has some inherent flaws. It doesn’t seem that any of the worldviews that enjoys popular support is both internally consistent and also provides sufficient and reasonable answers to the most important questions of life. There are internal flaws within both traditional religion and also with the most common formulation of secular humanism, and it is important for us to recognize why this is the case and for us to consequently recognize that we know less about the world than we might have thought.

Although the religious faithful quite often like to believe that they have the answers to the most important questions of life coming from their so-called holy book, the truth is that they do not, and this is causing big problems for the world. Any worldview that is based primarily on faith is antithetical to reason and evidence and would be incompatible with the findings of modern science. Any worldview that does not embrace modern science will lead many followers to be hostile and suspicious of the findings and recommendations of experts that our society dearly needs this day and age. This is not an attack on religion in general since some contemporary religious communities are embracing science and are finding ways for faith and science to coexists. There are, indeed, variations of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism that encourage open-mindedness, acceptance of modern science, and coexistence with followers of other religious traditions. The blind faith that many religious communities often encourage is, however, a serious concern for our global civilization.

The most common secular worldviews also have problems. Any worldview that only accepts the existence of the physical and material world that is known from objective science would inevitably leave out important areas of life, such as lived conscious experience. Since our firsthand experience is the very basis for our moral convictions, reducing this to the physical and material is quite problematic. The answer to the question of what is right and what is wrong needs to be treated with special significance, not reduced to brain chemicals, neurology, and evolutionary psychology, as many secular humanists would have it. Steven Pinker says that there doesn’t need to be anything nonphysical about morality in order to motivate people to gradually decrease violence and suffering in our global society. He gives many reasons for this trend, including education, reason, technology, overarching governmental control, peaceful commerce, etc. But if we continue with this naturalistic and humanistic worldview as the primary socio-cultural driver of pacifism, we will fail to make significant progress in the Twenty First Century. This worldview is fundamentally flawed in what it figures to be the foundation of universal morality because there is simply no coherent way for this to derive from the physical/material world.

This shortcoming is very significant because this question of how morality is related to personal experience is a primary motivating factor for many people. In many instances, those who don’t believe that there is a genuine connection between these two will lack meaning and purpose in their life and they won’t feel any significant connection to the greater world. This can then lead to self-destructive, pathological, and anti-social behavior.

Because of this fundamental flaw, naturalism and humanism will not resonate with enough people who are either deeply religious or are blinded by some form of identity politics and neo-fascism. We need to find a more enlightened worldview in order to be in a position to handle the challenges of our time and also those that we will be faced with in the coming decades. If we rely on naturalism and humanism as our primary intellectual tools, we will likely fail to make additional progress in our efforts to decrease violence, poverty, and suffering. More likely, the world will either stagnate or perhaps even get more violent, at least for the foreseeable future.

What are your thoughts on this?  Please use the comments feature to join the conversation.

We are in the early stages of founding a nonprofit organization.  The central mission of this project is to promote peace and resolve conflicts on a society-wide scale through the development of inner awareness, effective communication, and mutual understanding.  We work to accomplish these goals through research, the production of educational materials, and the promotion of critical thinking skills to help people sort out fact from fiction and to peacefully coexist with others who come from different walks of life.

We have created a GoFundMe page to raise funds for the legal and consulting fees we’ll need to make this a reality: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/the-enlightened-worldview-project-foundation

The most significant problems in our global society we seek to address through our work:

• Misunderstanding & miscommunication
• Fear, anger, and tribalism
• A highly charged social atmosphere, damaging our public discourse
• Weaponized news, misinformation & hyper-partisanship
• Seemingly incompatible moral & philosophical frameworks

Our objectives:

• Mend Divisions: Build bridges between communities and peoples with different ideologies and worldviews
• Improve Communication: Study the dysfunction in public discourse and recommend new methods of dialogue
• Reduce Conflict: Work toward peace in our global society through reason, understanding and empathy
• Connect Thought to Action: Explore the frontier where the mind meets the social landscape
• Increase Personal Growth: Promote inner peace through awareness and mindfulness

Our core values:

• Non-violent communication
• Peaceful coexistence
• Critical thinking
• Truth-seeking
• Mindfulness

We will work to educate people on these matters:

• How science works and how to discern legitimate science from pseudoscience. We believe that when someone understands the scientific process and how scientists do their work, they will more likely appreciate and accept consensus scientific views.
• How journalism works and how to discern credible information from misinformation. We want to help people sort out fact from fiction when they are constantly being bombarded with information, not all of which is true.
• How to develop greater self-awareness and mindfulness. We believe that such people will have more success in expressing their thoughts and feelings and will also understand other people at a deeper level.
• How to recognize that all people, even those who come from different walks of life, have shared core values. All people, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, and class background can find points of agreement if they can effectively communicate with each other.  People who identify their shared core values are more likely to live in peace with others.

We are looking to add to our team these types of partnerships and relationships:

• Fiscal sponsorship by an established nonprofit organization
• Donors who recognize the social dividends that this project can provide
• A nonprofit incubator to help establish and grow our organization
• Collaborators in video and podcast production
• People interested in joining our board of directors

If you would like to get involved in any way, or to learn more about any of this, please email us info@enlightenedworldview.com

In last week’s post, I started to analyze the question of how the natural world coincides with our inner experiences. There is no easy answer to this, since our lived conscious experience seems to us distinct from the natural universe, which by all accounts is entirely mechanistic. We narrowed this down to a dilemma between two possible interpretations of the reality: naturalism and idealism. As was pointed out in the prior post, these terms have a specific meaning in the context of this discussion. What we are calling “naturalism” means that everything in existence is understood to be material substance and governed by natural, physical processes. What we are calling “idealism” is the belief that our subjective, first-person experiences should be given special significance and where something immaterial and nonphysical is assumed to exists in some form.

When we fully examine the implications of both naturalism and idealism and try to evaluate which of the two makes the most sense, it seems quite bewildering. Naturalistic worldviews involve a physical universe that features material substance that is comprised of atoms and subatomic particles whose behavior is entirely governed by natural laws. Everything is ultimately deterministic, so there is only one genuine possibility for how the future will unfold. People’s feelings, values, hopes, dreams, choices, etc. are all 100% determined by natural processes and there is only one possible way that the future will unfold, regardless of what anyone wishes to believe. Modern science has given us an abundance of evidence that the universe is deterministic, including the human brain and all bodily functions. A lot of theories about the supposed nonphysical aspects of consciousness have been proposed, but science has never found evidence for any of this. Within naturalism, the only things that truly exist are mind-independent facts. Minds are simply meat computers and their values, wants, needs, desires, and rights are nothing at all more than opinions that have no bearing on reality.

Naturalism does seem to be the most reasonable conclusion based on all objective evidence, but if we take stock of all of the implications then this seems like something that hardly anyone truly believes. Nearly all of us are concerned about sustaining life, avoiding suffering, and promoting freedom. Nearly all of us recognize that rape, torture, mass murder, and genocide are evil. Most of us believe in some notion of equality among different people and in human rights. Lots of people have genuine concerns about poverty, malnutrition, health care, and education, especially among children. Lots of people are very deeply concerned about animal welfare and about the environment, including sustaining ecosystems and protecting endangered species. Then there are ethical concerns that are not quite as widely held among the general population but are common among people who have a naturalistic worldview, including concern for social justice and opposition to the ethics that come from religious dogma.

From one’s own first-person perspective and also from the standpoint of empathizing with the experiences of other people and with animals, these moral concerns are appropriate. But the problem is how these experiences coincide with reality. Within a naturalistic worldview, there is no deep reality to any of this. Secular humanism does incorporate genuine ethical concerns such as those mentioned above, but this is usually based on a naturalistic worldview, which means that such concerns cannot be understood to be derived from genuine features of the universe. Within secular humanism, our beliefs about atoms, molecules, and life forms can be true or false if they correspond to reality, but our beliefs about rights and wrong are ultimately based on popular opinions that are seen as necessary for peaceful coexistence. The humanist ethical framework might be effective in compelling people to respect each other’s rights and to get along most of the time, but disagreements will inevitably arise unless our moral convictions are understood to ultimately derive from indisputable aspects of the world, not just on popular opinions for the purpose of convenience. In fact, we are seeing that humanistic ethics too often leads people to have either nihilistic or intensely self-centered behavior, and it has become increasingly difficult to convince people to believe in a greater good.

Some idealistic worldviews do provide a way for moral concerns such as those listed above to be just as real as the physical world, but we would have a hard time finding any such worldview that seems to have much scientific evidence in its favor. But admittedly, this does depend on what we consider to be evidence. We might consider our own first-person experience to be a certain kind of evidence, and likewise if we can empathize with other conscious beings, then we can consider that evidence as well. None of that would be truly objective evidence, but we could consider it to be a form of evidence, nonetheless.

If we do this, then the most baffling realization is that these two perspectives on the world end up having enormous evidence on their side, yet it is also seemingly impossible that they could be coexistent in the same universe. It is seemingly impossible to reconcile these two perspectives and thus to have a worldview that includes the genuine existence of all that is understood to exist based on overwhelming evidence. If we go with a naturalistic worldview, then it actually doesn’t matter the outcome of any of the various moral dilemmas and quandaries and challenges that people often ponder and worry about. If you think about how any of those outcomes might play into a naturalistic worldview, they are all irrelevant. But in our hearts, we know that they are relevant in some important way. Not necessarily all of those listed above, but every single rational human being should be concerned about at least some of them. And so are we delusional if our worldview might happen to be incoherent? Are we suffering from cognitive dissonance? Or instead is it that we haven’t yet come to a full understanding of how these moral dilemmas and challenges do in fact play into the ultimate reality?

What are your thoughts? Use the comments feature to join the conversation.

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A few weeks ago, I laid out some of the major points of disagreement in this world. These can be thought of as dilemmas because so much unnecessary conflict in our world hinges upon whether someone believes in this or that.

Some of the dilemmas that were identified in the previous section are closely related to each other, with significant conceptual overlap, and some of them are dependent on other dilemmas. We want to narrow this list down to the crux of the matter, which would be the most consequential dilemmas that lie at the heart of the clash of worldviews. Indeed, the interrelated dilemmas that pit religion, spirituality, faith, and dogmatism against science, reason, and secularism seem to be at the heart of one of the greatest overarching conflicts of our age. If we look closely at the dynamic of the religion/spirituality vs. secularism dilemma, we will find that this is actually not the deepest and most consequential dilemma. Some thinkers like to focus on the science vs. faith and reason vs. dogmatism dilemmas as the most significant of our age, and there is no doubt that science and reason are underappreciated by large swaths of the global population. We can certainly acknowledge that reason is far too often lacking, and that dogmatism is far too pervasive among people and that this does cause unnecessary conflicts and suffering, but focusing on that issue distracts us from the biggest problem of them all.

The most central problem is that we lack inner awareness and we don’t have the tools to effectively communicate our inner experiences with each other. This is probably one of the main reasons why many people are reluctant to embrace science and instead prefer the comfort of their faith and one of the main reasons why people of different backgrounds in life fail to effectively communicate with each other.

If we had the ability to better understand our own experiences and to adequately communicate such details with each other, including with people who have different worldviews than ours, and if we could also better understand their inner experiences, then we could build bridges between communities and we could alleviate and avoid conflicts. This is because those on all sides of the religion vs. secularism divide have inner experiences from which they derive their sense of right and wrong, but we aren’t acknowledging this, and we aren’t putting sufficient effort into trying to better understand these experiences. If we can’t understand these experiences ourselves, then we could not expect to be able to communicate such details to others, much less to build a shared understanding of such knowledge.

Some might take issue with the contention that these conflicts stem so much from the lack of inner awareness. The objective sciences, notably including evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, have allowed us to understand the inner workings of the human brain to a large extent, including our inner demons that tend to lead to conflicts and also the so-called “better angels of our nature”, which have been instrumental in leading to greater peace and harmony in the modern world. This understanding, however, stops short of determining what is objectively right and wrong.

In the purely physical sense, which is the only way we can really understand things objectively, there is nothing in the world that is right or wrong and there is nothing that is good or evil and nothing ever could be, as judged entirely by physical realities. The sciences that are driven by a commitment to objectivity allow us to understand so much about reality, but they do not give us tools to judge that any physical state of affairs is objectively better than any other.

In the purely physical sense, atrocities such as mass murder, rape, torture, and genocide are simply physical states of affairs. The most detailed objective understanding that we can have of these sorts of events would show that they are nothing more or less than complex changes in the configurations of atoms and subatomic particles. If we can envision peace and happiness among large numbers of people, this could actually be understood in quite similar terms, if we are only considering that which can be known objectively and that which would be the purely physical realities about such a hypothesized scenario. Indeed, global devastation and world peace would both have similar definitions in a purely objective and physical sense because they would both be nothing more or less than some complex configuration and change of atoms and molecules and other things that are known to exist in a purely physical sense at the smallest level.

How can one of these scenarios be objectively better than the other? We know, we certainly know, that the peace and happiness scenario is much better than the mass murder, rape, torture, and genocide scenario, but on what grounds do we make this judgment? We do not make this judgment based on any objective criteria. It is obvious that we know this because of how it feels to be such people who would be dealing with either scenario. In one scenario, people suffer excruciating suffering and death. In the other, people live happy and fulfilling lives. These two scenarios are indeed very different, but we wouldn’t notice this difference by studying the molecular and subatomic level. We would notice a difference at the biological level, but since this is understood to be entirely derived from the molecular level, this difference is not something that would carry any objective value. The two scenarios would be different in the biological sense, in that one of the two would involve living people and the other dead people, but that fact would not get us to the point where we could judge that the living and happy scenario would be valued above the suffering and dead scenario. We just could not derive objective values from objective facts. It is only when we imagine what it would be like to experience such things, to be the people in those places, and to feel those things, that we have the ability to make this type of judgment.

We do make such judgments in life, but these are not mind-independent and thus they are not objective. We can try to use reason and objective science to try to determine guidelines for what is right and wrong, but this endeavor is not going to be very effective because any such line of reasoning is ultimately incoherent since it runs up against the age-old “is-ought” problem. We can only use reason and science to understand the way things are, not the way things ought to be, at least not based on the common understanding of contemporary science, which is usually understood to be entirely focused on objective study. If we tried to examine where our sense of right and wrong ultimately derives, we would have to admit that it would be closely tied to our own inner experiences and the inner experiences of others. Our preferences, our values, our wants, our needs, our rights, our hopes, our dreams, and our fears all depend on us being conscious minds. It is true that these things can be studied objectively and scientifically, but only to a point.

The problem is that these experiences are not objective because they are so dependent on direct first-person experience. And thus, this seems to more centrally hinge upon the objective vs. subjective dilemma and also the material/physical vs. immaterial/nonphysical dilemma. We can conflate these dilemmas and we can describe the outline of two opposing worldview types, wherein nearly all fully fleshed-out worldviews that enjoy popular support among people will conform more or less to one of these two.

On the one hand we have worldviews based on objectively known facts and where it is assumed that everything in existence is material substance and governed by natural, physical processes, and we can refer to this type of worldview as naturalistic, since nature is central. On the other hand, we have worldviews where subjective, first-person experiences are given special significance and where something immaterial and nonphysical exists, and we can refer to this type of worldview as idealistic. We’re using this term not because such worldviews are highly optimistic (as that is one sense of the word “idealistic”) but because ideas are their main focus. Note that this is conceptually distinct from the similar word “idealist”, which in certain philosophical concepts refers to the notion that everything in reality is ultimately reducible to ideas or subjective experiences. We are only using this term to denote a type of worldview in which something nonphysical exists, and this term encompasses diverse worldviews including idealism, dualism, and various religious and spiritual belief systems. There is a lot of diversity among idealistic worldviews and some of them in fact do not deny the existence of the physical universe and also some of these worldviews might consider the nonphysical to be somehow natural, but we are reserving the term “naturalistic” in this context to denote the types of worldviews that only recognize the existence of the natural material/physical universe.

When we fully examine the implications of both naturalism and idealism and try to evaluate which of the two makes the most sense, it seems quite bewildering. I’ll save for next time the analysis of naturalism vs. idealism.

Can ethics be objective? Let your voice be heard in the forum.

We can say that our brains are essentially biologically-based machines and they share functions with some non-biological machines.  It is often helpful to use analogies to computer hardware and software as a means of better understanding the features of the mind.  As it happens, most computers have functions that are analogous to the cognitive functions that we are considering here.  Computers and brains are quite different at the physical level, but they have a similarity at the computational and information processing level.  For computers, the functions are usually implemented with silicon-based transistors and circuitry embedded onto a chip, while similar functions are implemented with neurons and other biological matter within the brain.

Generally speaking, computers have components through which data can be inputted and gathered, which can be likened to our sensory perception, since both instances involve raw external data being gathered and stored internally.  In both instances, the machine senses certain things in the world and it then stores information about this in some sort of short-term or long-term memory.  Naturally, computers take internally stored data and execute computations on it to produce new data, which can then also be stored.  This process can be likened to the analytic function that our minds have, since both cases involve some sort of logical analysis of existing data and the derivation of new data, new conclusions, and deeper understandings of the world that could not be directly perceived or gathered from any input device.

Also, computers run on a set of instructions that are stored as programs, which can be likened to the psychological processes that drive our behavior.  Computer instructions can sometimes be programmed into volatile memory sectors, or they can be embedded within the chip itself.  In the former case, the software instructions can change, whereas the latter case involves innate instructions that were always present on the chip from when it was fabricated, and these are immutable.  Embedded instructions can be likened to the innate capacities of our psychology, since both cases involve instructions that drive behavior and that are present throughout the life of the machine and that generally do not change.  Programmed software can be compared to the aspects of our psychology that can be learned and changed through our experiences in life.  For both computers and for brains, if some idea or concept is being considered for a future action, it might have come directly from innate capacities or analyzing concepts or from external perception.  Quite often, the conclusions and actions made are the result of all three of these functions working in conjunction in complex ways.

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