Deep Consciousness and Waking Consciousness

 My background is in mathematics, where there are axioms (which are as few as possible) and there are proofs based on rigorous definitions. And nothing else. You don't really get to even make a conjecture without overwhelming evidence, and that conjecture is worthless compared to a proof. I try very hard to liberally interject conditionals into factual statements: "it appears that", "you might want to consider that", "conceivably", etc.

But I also realize that I can use different epistemologies for different purposes. It has become useful to me to distinguish between truth and fact, making a distinction between the epistemological aims of my spiritual journey from the epistemological aims of my scientific journey, which are not always congruent. When I was working on my math Ph.D., I would work on very difficult math proofs, the kind of problems that took weeks to solve. I would sit down for four-hours stretches, and sometimes make a breakthrough, but often not. I would have to live with the problem for long stretches of time.

In solving a difficult problem, one's mental hygiene needs to be immaculate. I would have every definition and theorem that might be useful to its solution memorized, not merely by rote, but so that I could take those theorems and definitions apart and put them back together again in my mind. Even still, often I would run through scenario after scenario, speculation after speculation, and test them over hours and even days. After much exertion, rest, exertion and rest, I would sometimes suddenly have an insight, and the whole solution would be revealed to me in its entirety, in a flash. It was orgasmic. Sometimes it would take me hours to unpack what I had received and put it in a form that was intelligible to other mathematicians (i.e. writing up the solution), but when I got one of those flashes, the problem was solved in my mind.

I talked to my advisor about this (who, incidentally was a staunch atheist), and he told me that, in his observation, humans in their waking consciousness are just not very smart. We can be disciplined and rigorous, and we can work hard at something. When we work hard on a problem, some deeper consciousness within notices that we are struggling with an idea, and decides that maybe that idea is interesting, and begins to pay attention to that idea. That deeper intelligence is very smart, and it can solve these kind of problems almost instantly. It transmits a solution to the waking consciousness in a very concentrated burst, and then is gone, leaving the waking consciousness to shape that burst into something that works for it.

That is an astonishing description of a mental process, and it should be rightly met with deep skepticism. Had I not experienced it directly over and over again, I would probably dismiss it out of hand. When I was a grad student, I discovered a book by Jacques Hadamard called "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field." Hadamard was a student of Einstein and Poincaré. He interviewed them and other mathematicians about how they create proofs, and their answers are quite similar to the above. Almost an oracular relationship takes place, where the mathematician courts a muse, who provides answers after sufficient supplication. That's very strange, but the testimony of some of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century attest to this peculiar mental phenomenon.

When I was studying for my comprehensive exams, I would study by reading old exams going back twenty years, and try to solve those problems in preparation for my exam. These problems were so hard that if I spotted them for the first time while sitting for the exam, I might not be able to solve them. So I studied by solving as many of these problems as I could, and hoping that by memorizing their solutions, I could solve something similar if it appeared on the exam. I was studying for an algebra exam, and I worked on one problem for four hours straight, and got nowhere with finding a solution. It was 1:30 AM, and I was exhausted, so I dragged myself away from my desk and put myself to bed. Asleep, I dreamed the solution to the problem. I felt a blissful glow in the dream, and in the midst of that feeling, a voice said, "That's the real answer to the problem. Wake up, schmuck, and right it down."

I did, and went back to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I looked at what I had written, and it was a concise and elegant solution to the problem, a six-line proof. Astonishingly, that problem, nearly verbatim, showed up on my exam, and I gave the dream solution. My professor later told me that I gave the most elegant solution to the problem he'd seen in twenty-five years of grading.

That's very strange, and it has bothered me for a long time. Poincaré describes something very similar in his anecdote about creating the Theory of Automorphic Forms. Recall that the word "genius" originally referred to a spirit creature that a person could communicate with who would give him knowledge. Socrates, in Plato's "Trial of Socrates", refers to a "daimonion" who always gave him advice and had never failed him. I think Socrates was playfully exteriorizing a mental process that he relied on, but a mental process that transcended the ego-driven consciousness that is the waking state for most people. The direct experience of such mental phenomena has convinced me that there is more to consciousness than the waking state, and made me eager to explore these different states of consciousness.

But it is unsatisfactory to describe these mental workings as either "belief" or "knowledge". Something else is going on. The flashes I received could have been mental garbage, and indeed, they were worthless before I was able to shape them back into mathematical proofs, which shaping was the result of my training as a mathematician. The speculative burst of insight that caused Picasso to paint Guernica, or caused Miles Davis to record Bitches Brew would have been worthless if bestowed upon someone with no particular talents.

Going back to my split between "fact" and "truth", I would say that the proof I discovered is a fact. The description of these mental processes is a truth for me. Truth is somewhat subjective, and fact is objective. That does not make truth inferior to fact; in this story, the fact comes out of the truth, but the truth was only useful for me, whereas the fact anyone could use. Everyone understands (or should understand) that it takes rigor to come up with facts. I would assert that it takes similar rigor to handle truths, and that most people fall upon their truths almost haphazardly, without scrutiny, mental discipline, or circumspection.

Truth and Fact

I wrote to Andrew Sullivan, and he used what I wrote in a blog post. This was in my original email:

As my friend, Dr. James Tresner says, there is a difference between truth and fact, and fundamentalism and fanaticism stems from a confusion between the two. Evolution is a fact. The story of the Fall is true. Interestingly, the Fall is treated very differently by Muslims, Jews, and Christians, who each have their own truth about the Fall. Religious truths can differ from poetical truths, but both truths resonate in the person who contemplates the truth in question. The legends of Hamlet, Luke Skywalker, and Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker are true, even though none of them are factual (although the existence of Amleth of Denmark was most likely a fact, if Saxo Grammaticus is to be believed). Forcing the Fall to be factual is crazy, and makes for craziness. When believers try to force fact to succumb to truth, or force truth to succumb to fact, they can leave a trail of blood in their wake.

The sign of a civilized person is to allow others to have different truths than themselves, and to respect the truths of others, even when they differ from their own, especially when that respect is reciprocated.

Ignorance is ignorance of fact. A Pashtun soldier who does not know how to count to ten is ignorant. Superstition is ignorance of truth. People who think their Creator created their daughters with flawed genitalia that require clitorectomies or worse in order to be presentable are superstitious. Fanaticism is confusing the two and insisting that others do as well. David Barton is a fanatic, as was Lenin. Notice that the fundamentalist and the militant Atheist both confuse truth with fact, the fundamentalist by insisting that truth overwhelm fact, and the militant Atheist by insisting that fact overwhelm truth. Neither, usually, have solid epistemological grasp of truth or fact.

On another blog, this quote, selectively edited, has sparked a new discussion.
On that blog, I wrote:

I am the writer of the quote listed as “Sullivan’s reader.” Jerry quotes me partially, cherry-picking that portion of my comment that supports the argument that Sullivan is an idiot, and removing the rest. This is intellectually disingenuous. A defense that the mental contortions of religious believers is equally mentally disingenuous does not mean that selectively editing what someone wrote in order to win an argument is not disingenuous.

I am not a Christian. I blog a lot about belief and atheism. While personally a theist, I feel at home among atheists and agnostics as long as they are not antitheist, and therefore hostile to my personal practice. I regard the story of existence from the Big Bang, through the formation of the sun and the earth, through the evolution of life on earth and the emergence of humanity to be a Creation Story more profound than that in the Bible. I have a math and science education, and my work is in medical software. I have never read this blog previous to someone notifying me that I got quoted here.

I place value in spiritual progression, which is hard to define. I would regard our consciousnesses as evolving over time, and just as vertebrates would be unimaginable in a world of blue-green algae, the further scope of higher consciousness is unimaginable to those who dwell in the righteous indignation of bivalent value systems (us vs. them). If you asked a paleolithic hunter-gatherer ten millennia ago to describe a skyscraper, they would have trouble doing so. Similarly, humans have always had trouble describing the future evolution of consciousness. That narrative is deeply flawed, and has often led to brutal ideological wars. At my current level of understanding, it makes subjective sense for me to work with the God metaphor in analyzing the trajectory of consciousness, both personal and global. I do not insist that anyone else does, except insofar as to show how it has been useful to me. The Christian metaphor does not make sense to me, and I don’t use it. I often find in conversations with antitheists that they argue with my religious beliefs as if they were Christian, projecting Christian belief onto my belief as if Christianity were the only possible theism. I think that is sloppy.

Jerry’s omissions in quoting me are striking.

Most of the posters vehemently object to any distinction between fact and truth. I call this a flat epistemology. It flattens truth until it is congruent with fact. My understanding is that truth and fact overlap, but are not congruent. As a theist, my understanding is theocentric. As annoying as that might be for an atheist who wants to argue with me, I cannot come up with a definition of truth that excludes Deity, just as I cannot adhere to an ontology that excludes Deity. Truth to me is a bridge between ontology and epistemology, whereas fact is entirely epistemological (and mostly phenomenological). When William Preston writes about Masonic ritual "imprint[ing] upon the memory wise and serious truths," he does not mean that it adds to the phenomenological data gathered in the mind of the candidate. Freemasonry depends upon the distinction between fact and truth, since Masonic legend contains many factually untrue propositions (which has often driven Masonic historians to despair), none of which falsify Freemasonry.