A rationalist but non-materialistic view, in short

by Sylvain Poirier

Here is the short summary of my convictions, to let readers quickly figure out where I locate myself in the landscape of philosophical positions.
It may indeed be hard to figure out because this kind of position is not well represented in the media. Many of these answers are already present here or there, but the precise combination, even if it has members, is less explicitly popular as such, and many would assume them contradictory. On the contrary I see these compatible, even if some paradoxes remain.

To be short here, I'll just put the claims.

So here are the points:

On rationality

• The below articles are not faith articles - as I reject all attitude of faith. Instead, they are most often conclusions I happened to reach and see as rationally proven out of long careful (logical and empirical) examinations, thus do not depend on any unproven assumptions that may be worth any reasonable doubt, though the full justifications would often require much longer developments to explain (as well as further details on the positions), many of which can be found in other articles of this site (though the "full completion" may be an endless task).
• The careful practice of the scientific method, is by far the most efficient means humans have at their disposal to discern the truth on difficult truth questions, those difficult truth questions that humans may have to deal with for all purposes that we may be on Earth for and able to deal with.
• This scientism I'm endorsing should not be misinterpreted as any claim of reducibility or of simplicity of the world, but is primarily empirical claims of the observed, carefully verified (not assumed !)
• heavy failures of all non-scientific methods to do any better than scientific ones for the understanding of the stakes of life and morality;
  
•  success of reason to understand, well, quite much, and way beyond (and clearly refuting the naive guesses of) all "spiritual" inspirations: it is possible for the reason of some humans (with the scientific method, intelligence and professionalism, and eventually several generations of researchers) to resolve many questions and approach perfection (infallibility). 
• Difficult truth questions are not all questions, so that scientific practice is not relevant to all purposes. For example art requires a lot of skills; tastes can't be argued, and music composition requires its own sort of non-scientific geniuses; but however complex, professional and valuable, these do not fall in the category of "truth questions", thus are no counter-example to the claim that the scientific method is the only way to resolve difficult truth questions; this does not make them miraculous or transcendental things either. (But this remark is probably trivial for everybody.)
  
• The nature and power of the scientific method (intelligent reason + observations) may be theoretically explained with a reference to the principles (guidelines) of Logical Positivism, and as a careful examination of arguments and observations, and systematic tracking down of any risk of error.
  
• The "scientific method" is a living practice adapting the understanding to the observations, that needs to be practiced for being properly understood. It is NOT a mere algorithmic application of any pre-established set of formal rules, but a full creative adventure (unlike religious faith which turns out to be much more robotized, repetitive and less imaginative than the scientific endeavor). No list of principles can ensure their own proper application, nor replace their living practice.
  

On metaphysics

• There are 2 fundamental kinds realities ("universes" with their own kinds of objects having their own kind of existence) : the mathematical (objects and systems), and the conscious (events). Even this claim of metaphysics can be formulated in a logical positivist way : "Consciousness does not obey any algorithm" (not even a probabilistic one, and escapes any physical description), so that "Artificial Intelligence cannot pass the Turing Test".
• Each of these realities (mathematical and conscious) is subject to its own time, in independent but similar ways (among other similarities they have despite their fundamental difference). In each, time is the framework ordering all existence : an event A happens before an event B, if A exists relatively to B. Concerning mathematics, this and other metaphysical aspects of the mathematical world (the question "which is the right view in philosophy of mathematics ?") can be investigated by mathematics itself.
• The laws of physics are wonderful mathematical theories, that may be qualified as an aspect of God's mind (a sort of Deism), an underlying logical structure affecting and connecting all perceptions of incarnated individual consciousness.
  
• The physical universe has a mixed nature, of mathematical objects receiving conscious existence by some conscious act of "perception". To say roughly, it is the trajectory of a visit of consciousness in the mathematical universe. I see 3 main sources of evidence for this fundamental distinction between mind and matter : pure ontological reasonings − interpretation of quantum physics − Near Death Experiences. Thus, conscious behaviors are not any emerging phenomenon from physical processes. Instead, as a fundamental ingredient of existence, only affected but not created by material structures, consciousness was already present since the Big Bang, and (progressively along time) provides "from the outside" the "real existence" of the physical universe and its thermodynamic time orientation.
  
• The idea of a timeless God that would have created time but remains "outside" it, and any idea of knowing for sure the future in advance (reliable prophecies), is nonsense (the only possible "external view" on a series of events is the retrospective one), since time is the framework of existence, not the other way round.
• Darwinism is essentially correct. Animals have an immaterial soul and an afterlife too, with no fundamental difference of nature with us. Animals received souls early in the course of natural evolution (probably in early vertebrates or even earlier - I am not sure for the case of insects). Both the development of this "place for the soul in the brain" (incarnation) and the specific character of this place as a "jail" of the soul (the hardness for the soul to get out, the confusion between interests of the soul and of the body), are darwinistically explainable (without intelligent design), by the selective advantage of the brain structures having this property.

On afterlife

• Reincarnation most probably exists (in some cases ; I personally met a few people carrying traces of past lives), aside some kind of heaven (life without physical body, and even maybe outside this physical space). This is a quite simple and natural idea, whose details I find no interest to investigate ; unlike reincarnation, the Christian idea of a bodily resurrection is nonsense, both physically and philosophically (you can see its true nonsense in the views of Jehovah's witnesses)
• Access to heaven is not conditioned by religious beliefs; generally religions have probably no clue about what the fate after life may depend on. Still (in spite of all the nonsense I observe in the world in general and in "spiritualities" in particular) I dare to hope that for this, some kind of morality matters (but religions do not help much to find the right morality either).
• If some hell exists, it probably only lasts for some time before some kind of escape.

On miracles

• the difficulty to provide scientific evidence of miracles,
• the heavy absence of intelligent design in the course evolution as observed in biology,
  
• The absence of some expectable consequences of divine miracles (destiny is not significantly affected by any sort of divine intervention to any seriously, morally defensible extent)
• The usual "main lesson" of most NDE testimonies, namely for more altruism and less material vanities, indeed worthy of respect, are still rather trivial and finally disappointing in the long run, even if these values could be somehow missed by these people before the experience
• Other observations of how some miracles seem to happen; for instance, the opinions of people to whom miracles seem to happen (such as catholic saints) that, contrary to their own opinions are usually quite stupid, grossly lacking any decent wisdom and clues about the real world and its real problems

On religions

• The Bible and other religious books are man-made, not divinely inspired. In particular, Exodus is a tale. The existing truths in some religions (the difference between mind and matter, the worthiness of doing the good to others and to respect nature, the existence of afterlife and reincarnation including for animals) are just a few basic clues that can be easily said and naturally grasped by some people's intuition; they are no sign of any higher wisdom, nor of the truths of the other claims in the long version of the doctrines.

• Religious doctrines (objects and rules of faith), historically emerged and developed as described by memetics (the concept of Darwinian evolution of beliefs as mental viruses in the cultural space)
• Religious faith is based on (made of) ignorance (naive guesses never checked), logical fallacies, terrible conceptual approximations and circular arguments; its pseudo-logical structures are those particularly efficient at providing (mistaken) self-satisfaction to ignorant people, excuses for them to feel proud of their baseless convictions, not question them but try to propagate them without any care for reality check. So its apparent success to resist criticism is actually based on the way its concepts are so powerfully misleading on a rational level.
  
• In particular, religious doctrines successfully delude believers to view their faith as the opposite thing to what it really is : as if it was a practice and perception of a sort of alien nature above reason, while it actually is only a pseudo-logical system below reason and in the ignorance of it ; the reality is that this deluded view of their own faith works in practice as an excuse for them to refuse checking and correcting the logical mistakes at the basis of their convictions. Under the excuse that the map is not the territory they reject good maps but end up adopting wrong ones instead, not that they think bad maps are good, but because the very assumption of possibility to do better without a good map is an illusion anyway. Like a labyrinth, faith can be much more correctly understood from the outside than from the inside.
  
• Faith is baseless and fragile: if a Christian properly understood a sufficient (big !) amount of quality skeptical arguments, he would deconvert. This regularly happens, however there are many possible obstacles preventing this from happening, obstacles which are often worsened by the details of the religious doctrines themselves.
  
• It protects its weakness by lots of diversions from serious examination: lack of time dedicated to the issue ; excuses to not bother learning the skeptical arguments to a sufficient extent ; bad luck to have only stumbled on a bad sample of these arguments and wrongly concluded that was all ; improper use of reason (lack of the needed accurate reasoning skills relatively to the difficulty of the problem), that fails to perceive the full meaning and strength of some arguments but misinterprets them or does not correctly sorts out correct arguments from fallacies ; lazily assuming any opposition to be based on the stupidest mistakes or wrong attitudes (of course, religious people believe that their view is right; therefore logically, opposite views must be based on mistakes, but this picture is assumed, not verified); attitudes of (arbitrary) personally attacking people (as sinners, having wrong hearts, being biased...) as an excuse to not seriously examine their arguments. There is no bad "judging" intention here however : it is just too awful to imagine the risk for sincere dedicated people to be abandoned by God in a mistaken view, thus, assuming a view to be mistaken, one cannot expect its followers to have been serious dedicated people. And since spiritual people view themselves as very good and polite people when they make these very well-intended dirty insults to their opponents which they sincerely see as dirty shit because Jesus said all non-believers are dirty God haters which we should try to love anyway, there is no available possibility to go imagine things otherwise; the legitimate anger provoked by this condescendence gives them one more excuse to (wrongly) discard the opponents as "angry people full of hatred" and so on.

The sense and problems of life, morality

• The purpose of life on Earth is to live a life on Earth in agreement with morality, thus contribute to make the Earth a better place according to one's abilities; not to focus on afterlife, which will care about itself, and should not be so unfair as to require from us any other duty which we could not easily guess and would diverge from verifiable morality issues. Morality makes objective sense: the purpose of morality is rather obvious : general well-being, universal utilitarianism (contrary to the Christian view promoting the selfish attitude of raising the purpose of corrupting God by forced praise and other tricks for getting personal salvation, even if they would not describe it this way, above any care for the general welfare).
• Suffering makes no sense: if it did, there would be no good and bad, and thus no right and wrong either, and no sense of striving for a better world.
• The Problem of Evil remains a hard problem: if the universe is ultimately made of consciousness and a very intelligent one in its applications of the laws of physics, and if the souls of humans and animals come from this underlying conscious reality rather than material processes, then why is the fate of living beings in this world so hopelessly devoid of any trace of this intelligence ? This keeps troubling me.
• We should be careful not to jump on any "easy" solution to this problem (or to any difficult paradoxical situation), as this usually leads to ideas that may superficially seem relatively satisfying, but only because it merely displaces and hides troubles from the consideration of some aspects while staying unsustainable for other reasons; and do not fit reality when checked in more details. Some kinds of scientific or empirical verifications (other than "what would look nice") are needed to check the validity of any try of a deduction, explanation or completion of the picture, otherwise it would be too unreliable speculation.
• Different people have different needs. We cannot make general statements on what should be seen as everybody's "real needs" in their place. Instead, some properly conceived space of freedom is the best tool to adapt actions to the diverse needs, as well as to develop a space of experimentation.
• The proper exercise of morality, in its try to approach the truth in issues of concern, cannot be reduced to the strict obedience to any set of formal rules (as life is full of different cases, contexts, needs and exceptions) - but this is no surprise since this is already the case for the scientific method itself.
  
• Some people obviously have some sort of lack of moral sense (though the exact nature of this lack may be unclear), but this is also obvious and any care about this is probably hopeless in the short term;
• The moral qualities of human actions, as they contribute to welfare, vary between individuals. This may depends on the intrinsic goodness of individuals, but also (to a larger extent in average) on their intelligence and knowledge of causalities, to discern the right and efficient ways to fulfill the good purposes. Both aspects can themselves depend on culture/education, genetic factors (humans genetically differ from each other like they genetically differ from animals !), maybe past lives or other mysterious causes, but also a lot of chance.

Science and morality

• As concerns the majority of people with a moral sense (where they are a majority...), the remaining hardest aspect of morality (the means to satisfy the above purpose in non-obvious cases) is that of a "scientific field" (in a wide and sometimes informal, implicit sense). This is the general problem of understanding causalities in complex systems (economics, politics, technologies, environment, culture, misunderstandings of the personal tastes and experiences of others...) and thus which actions would best serve this purpose. So, a scientific problem.
  
• Science is not responsible for the disasters produced by the misuse of technologies through bad policies, because the political leadership is not dominated by scientists, and nobody yet gave scientists the mission to redesign the structure of the political decision process.
  
• There are more possible scientific ways to work and produce technologies for making this world a better place, much more efficient than spiritual ways, especially in matters of political decision process and opening a more flexible and adequate space of freedom to fit the diversity of needs. Progress requires intelligence and creativity, and thus a space of individual freedom of thought away from cultural and bureaucratic determinations.
• There are discrepancies between science and most of the current teaching systems, which contribute to a misunderstanding (and a degraded image) of science by parts of the general public (in addition with all the calomnies against science propagated by religious doctrines, unfortunately not as actively debunked as needed)

What is wrong with spirituality/religions, in short

Spirituality is a naive guess of trying to do good, to become better and raise one's mind above the ground, and there may be no theoretical explanations of why it does not work, however this fact is overwhelmingly verified by experience: in spite of the huge energy investment of so many millions of people who gave their life to it since millennia, Spirituality in all its forms utterly failed its proclaimed mission, both in theory and in practice: it utterly failed to theoretically understand life and morality with its main troubles and possible solutions; and to bring an inch of progress to the sense of life, human understanding, overall psychological well-being and workable civilization on this planet. There are much more important fundamental truths they completely missed such as

• The real picture of human life
• The possibility to bring much bigger progress by scientific and technological means : see this analysis of moral issues and how the solution to change the world is stupidly ignored
• The correct way to argue for the immateriality of the soul and God's existence

• Wait for God to help the world in their place,
  
• Anyway blindly expect wishful thinking to magically help as if life worked like a dream according to superstitious-like laws of nature,
  
• Feed assumptions of absolute self-powerlessness (and absolute powerlessness of their God) in the face of what goes wrong, and satisfy themselves to blame the world's troubles on people who disagree with them;
• Pray, focus on how well they feel themselves in their own hearts
• Lose their minds in endless artificial labyrinths of moral complexes, playing absurd endless games of inflating and deflating guilt feelings in the void (disconnected from any effectively meaningful reasons to judge in a way or another); discussing the blame on human nature and personally judging people for what goes wrong, no matter how irrelevant this factor may be, and to wonder how guilty, innocent or forgiven should people be seen for the faults they may have committed (with no sense of distinction between real faults and imaginary faults supposed to matter in superstitious ways); and thus how should they be expected to be judged or not judged by God after death (or how will it impact karma...)
• Just stupidly reproduce in others the same creed one already received from others. No matter that such desperately non-creative works of identically reproducing something in conformity to a given standard should rather be a work for machines, not for any noble mind.

Spirituality is just a very unfair, biased lottery, whose main fruit is that of giving vain pride (self-satisfaction, moral superiority complex coupled with a technical inferiority complex for putting the blame of troubles on others) to some people for their baselessly assumed "higher wisdom", and humiliating its opponents and its victims who failed at the test of its ranking system, and/or whose life happens to be destroyed by its false/failing help/quest.
In particular, it more often works to provide its vanities to people whose psychological type is NFJ-A (iNtuitive, Feeling, Judging and Assertive; though some spiritualities such as those around the slogan "The Power of Now" also praise not intuitive but Sensing people), who are most likely to sincerely pretend that they met God without due evidence for this; and humiliate the rest of people under its teachings that these other people cannot get the impression of succeeding at, no matter how seriously they try. For example, Turbulent people being more careful and demanding from themselves, would not easily dare to claim that they found God as long as it is not clearly the case, and may thus endlessly lose and humiliate themselves in harder and harder tries in this quest which cannot actually succeed, unless of course the goal is reduced to a set of clear formal rules that can be followed without looking for any subtle evidence of miracles/success.

About the "fallen state" of the world

So, our fallen state is especially that most (but not all) people in the world are dumb almost like animals (which should be expected because of common ancestry...), unable (or unwilling) to think rationally so that they are clueless about the main stuff in morality and the understanding of the world. I sketched one big aspect of it here and also there I investigated some stakes of civilization which may come by a little thinking effort that most people are too dumb to make. Somehow it is a bit similar to a disconnection from God, but... here is a word I propose to describe it : orphanage. I find it interesting as it combines several features that I find appropriate:

• Orphans are usually not guilty of their parent's death or being abandoned by them; it is just a fact given without explanation.
• It is not curable : no matter how hard they try to dream about their parents, won't resurrect them.
• All we need to do is to cope with it and to grow up
• By a diversity of circumstances, some happen to cope better than others
• Coping better is not necessarily a sign of wisdom. For example some species of animals don't care about their progeny, so they are orphans by nature but well adapted to this condition. That does not make them wiser than humans.
• There are possibility to organize society for coping better with this fate, but mistakes remain possible in trying to do so. But scientific research was not developed enough to bring good solutions there yet.

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