FAITH AND SCIENCE

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A Guide to Finding Faith



Scientific advances in recent centuries have made the idea of God only more plausible.

“If appreciating some of the ideas in St. Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ was enough to make you a Christian,” a friend said to me some years ago, “then I’d be a Christian. But a personal God? The miracles? I can’t get there yet.”

Whenever I write about the decline of organized religion in America, I get a lot of emails expressing some version of this sentiment. Sometimes it’s couched in the form of regretful unbelief: I’d happily go back to church, except for one small detail — we all know there is no God. Sometimes it’s a friendly challenge: OK, smart guy, what should I read to convince me that you’re right about the sky fairy?

So this is an essay for those readers — a suggested blueprint for thinking your way into religious belief.

But maybe not the blueprint you expect.

Many highly educated people who hover on the doorway of a church or synagogue are like my Augustine-reading friend. They relate to religion on a communal or philosophical level. They want to pass on a clear ethical inheritance to their children. They find certain God-haunted writers interesting or inspiring, and the biblical cadences of the civil rights era more moving than secular defenses of equality or liberty.

Yet they struggle to make the leap of faith, to reach a state where the supernatural parts become believable and the grace to accept the impossible is bestowed.

For some, this struggle just leads back to unbelief. For others, it can be a spur to act as if they believe, to pray and practice, to sing the hymns or keep kosher and wait for God to grant them faith in full. This is often the advice they get from religious friends: Treat piety as an act of the will undertaken in defiance of the reasoning faculties, and see what happens next.

I’ve given that advice myself. But there’s another way to approach religious belief, harder in some respects but simpler in others. Instead of starting by praying or practicing in defiance of the intellect, you could start by questioning the assumption that it’s really so difficult, so impossible, to credit ideas of God and accounts of supernatural happenings.

The “new atheist” philosopher Daniel Dennett once wrote a book called “Breaking the Spell,” whose title implies that religious faith prevents believers from seeing the world clearly. But what if atheism is actually the prejudice held against the evidence?

In that case, the title of Dennett’s book is actually a good way to describe the materialist defaults in secular culture. They’re like a spell that’s been cast over modern minds, and the fastest way to become religious is to break it.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/opin ... 778d3e6de3

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Evolution and Faith

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv_PfN4quhM

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Everything from animals to plants to atoms has consciousness, a scientific theory that is gaining momentum

Eric Ralls
ByEric Ralls
Earth.com staff writer

Consciousness is usually treated as a human problem, tied to brains and behavior. Yet for centuries some thinkers have quietly asked whether experience might reach far beyond our skulls, right down to the building blocks of matter.

That radical possibility – panpsychism – holds that every bit of the universe possesses a flicker of experience, however faint.

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Interest in the idea has surged again as researchers wrestle with the “hard problem of consciousness,” the stubborn mystery of how physical stuff gives rise to subjective feeling.

If neurons alone cannot fully explain awareness, might awareness already be lurking everywhere, waiting to be arranged into minds like ours?

Panpsychism through the ages

The question is older than science itself. Thales of Miletus, puzzling over magnets in the 6th century B.C., claimed they must carry a soul because they move iron.

A generation later, Anaxagoras said that “everything contains a portion of mind,” foreshadowing today’s talk of micro-experiences combining into richer ones.

Greek Stoics spoke of the universe as a living creature animated by “logos,” the rational breath binding all things. This principle was thought to permeate all matter, giving rise to the interconnectedness of all things.

Plotinus kept the thread alive in late antiquity, arguing that the cosmos emanates from a single living “One.”

His influence resurfaced in the Renaissance when Giordano Bruno pictured an infinite universe teeming with worlds, each ensouled.

Such views clashed with the mechanistic models that soon powered modern science, but they never disappeared.

From magnets to monads

During the Enlightenment, René Descartes sliced mind from matter, pushing consciousness into an immaterial corner.

Even so, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz answered with “monads,” indivisible units that mirror the entire universe through their own tiny perception.

By the late 19th century, William James, Gustav Fechner, and Alfred North Whitehead were again arguing that feeling might be woven into nature’s fabric instead of perched on top of it.

Their intuition found fresh urgency once Charles Darwin showed that life, and by extension minds, evolve. If consciousness blooms gradually, perhaps it never strictly begins; perhaps it intensifies as matter organizes itself.

Science meets philosophy today

Modern neuroscience attacks the mystery head-on. Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin put forward Integrated Information Theory (IIT) in 2004, claiming that a system’s consciousness equals the amount of integrated information it generates, a value symbolized by “Φ.”

High Φ signals a richer, more unified experience; low Φ signals a dim one.

Crucially, IIT treats consciousness as “intrinsic and independent of external observers,” meaning it could arise in any structure – animal brains, artificial networks, or, in principle, a block of silicon – if the informational web is tight enough.

Researchers are now testing IIT’s predictions with brain-stimulation experiments and computer models.

Some early results suggest that loss of consciousness, as in deep anesthesia, coincides with a sharp drop in measurable integration. The data are tentative, but they push the theory beyond armchair speculation.

Inside information integration

IIT also tries to map the quality of experience: different shapes of integrated information should correspond to different qualia, the raw feelings of color, taste, or pain.

That ambition draws praise for its clarity and criticism for its boldness. Skeptics note the difficulty of calculating Φ in real systems and ask whether the math truly captures subjective life.

Yet the framework has already inspired machine-consciousness tests, raising practical as well as philosophical stakes.

If IIT holds up, panpsychism gains a scientific foothold, because the theory does not limit consciousness to biology. Wherever the right informational architecture appears, experience could spark.

Quantum puzzles and panpsychism

A more controversial route links mind to quantum mechanics.

Physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff propose the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory, which places quantum computations inside neuronal microtubules.

When enough microtubules entangle, they say, an “objective reduction” occurs, collapsing superposed states and producing a moment of awareness shaped by “quantum gravity.”

Many biophysicists argue that brains are too warm and noisy for prolonged quantum coherence and that microtubules are unlikely qubit hosts.

Supporters counter with new work on room-temperature quantum effects in photosynthesis, suggesting nature might pull off similar tricks elsewhere.

So far, definitive evidence for Orch-OR is missing, but the debate keeps the link between physics and consciousness on the table.

Why does any of this matter?

Panpsychism alarms some thinkers who worry that ascribing feeling to atoms cheapens the concept of consciousness.

The main technical hurdle is the “combination problem”: even if electrons feel a whisper, how do countless whispers merge into the loud voice of human thought? No consensus mechanism exists.

Still, the position refuses to die because it offers a clean way around dualism. If experience is not tacked onto matter but rides with it from the start, the gap between mind and world may shrink.

Philosophers compare the shift to realizing that heat is molecular motion rather than an extra substance called caloric. Whether the analogy holds is an open question, yet it shows why the stakes are high.

What’s next for panpsychism?

Future progress will rely on sharper experiments and clearer concepts. Neuroscientists are refining Φ-based metrics, while physicists hunt quantum signatures in biology.

Philosophers, for their part, are re-examining ancient ideas with modern logic, asking whether panpsychism is a genuine explanation or a verbal sleight of hand.

Wherever the search leads, it forces us to face an unsettling possibility: consciousness might be less a rare jewel than a basic note in the cosmic score.

If so, the challenge is not to grant minds to stones but to understand how nature composes simple tones into the symphony we call waking life.

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https://www.earth.com/news/what-if-ever ... npsychism/

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‘Science is a human endeavor’: astrophysicist uses art to connect Black and brown kids to the Stem fields


Dr Nia Imara in a studio with her artwork in Oakland, California. Photograph: Courtesy of Dr Nia Imara

Through her book, Painting the Cosmos, and her non-profit, Onaketa, Dr Nia Imara hopes to introduce underserved youth to the sciences

When practicing funeral ceremonies during the antebellum period, enslaved west Africans mimicked the sun’s rotation as they danced counterclockwise in hidden clearings. They would sing and shuffle their feet to the beat of the drums in a ring shout, a ritual to honor the deceased that originated in Africa and which is still practiced by the descendants of enslaved people in the south-east US today. For the bereaved who grieved the recent death of a loved one, their practice orbited around the setting sun.

So begins a chapter about our closest star in Painting the Cosmos, a recent book by UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist Dr Nia Imara. The book blends science and art in an ode to the diversity of the cosmos. While touching on astronomical tidbits, such as the fact that scientists measure the rate of the sun’s spin by tracking the sunspots on its surface, Imara demonstrates the influence of astronomy on life and culture throughout history. She compares the sun’s rhythmic cycle to the repetition found in the Black artist Alma Thomas’s abstract paintings of space, and the patterns in the west African Bwa people’s multicolored wooden masks depicting the sun and nature. As a painter and one of the only Black female astronomy professors in the US, Imara focuses on the contributions of Black and brown artists and scientists throughout her book.

For Imara, it’s important that young Black and brown people also see people in the sciences who look like them. That’s why she created the non-profit Onaketa in 2020 to offer free science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) online tutoring for Black and brown youth throughout the nation, who are mentored by scientists of color.

a women looking through a telescope


Dr Nia Imara looking into a telescope at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California. Photograph: Courtesy of Dr Nia Imara

“Oftentimes when we’re taught science and math in school, the focus in our textbooks and in the classrooms is on the contributions of white folks, and it’s really important to show people that science is a human endeavor,” Imara said. “Astronomy is often considered the oldest science, and certainly people from all over the world have made really valuable contributions.”

Diversity is necessary for harmony in the universe, Imara argues in her book. Our solar system consists of eight planets of varying sizes, temperatures and features. “If you change any one of these eight planets, or you didn’t have one of them for some reason, that would have serious implications for the development of life on Earth,” Imara said. Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, has a large gravitational influence that deflects meteors that would otherwise hit the Earth’s surface; and if Saturn were any smaller that it currently is, the Earth’s orbit around the sun would change and might no longer hold liquid water.

“One of the things that science has taught me is that there are so many metaphors like this in nature,” Imara said. “And if we take them to heart and apply them to ourselves here, I think that would really go a long way in how we treat each other, and how our society works.”

‘Where do we fit into the universe?’

Imara became interested in astronomy at a young age as she pondered existential questions about human life: “What is the meaning of all this, and where do we fit into the universe?” As a sophomore in high school, she took a physics class that answered some of her fundamental questions.

“My relationship to science now has evolved so that I don’t think any more that science can answer all of these big, deep questions, which are often very religious, very philosophical and even moral in nature,” Imara said. “But I appreciate science and nature even more for the metaphors that it has to offer and also because of its ability to connect to people.”

a painting and space

A painting by Dr Nia Imara, and photograph of a celestial body. Photograph: Courtesy of Dr Nia Imara, Nasa

More than two decades ago, Imara began practicing visual art as a way to exercise another side of her brain and heart. Art, she said, has helped address some of her queries about human connectedness that science failed to answer. In her book, she writes that art and science haven’t always been viewed as diametrically opposed. The Great Pyramid of Giza, in Egypt, which was built as a tomb for Pharaoh Khufu 4,500 years ago, merged science and art as the tallest building in the world until the 1800s. The monument displays precise geometry, and its shape nods to Benben, which was the first mound of land to be created according to ancient Egyptian religion.

For Imara, the Great Pyramid is “emblematic of how this incredible society brought together so many fields that we often treat as disparate. And it still blows my mind to think about the precision with which this monument was designed, conceived and constructed with all of the alignments with the cardinal directions, and the really precise alignment of air shafts within the pyramid to certain constellations and stars that were important to the Egyptians.”

In pursuit of highlighting the achievements of Black and brown scientists outside her work as an astronomer and visual artist, Imara turned to education to create opportunities for marginalized youth. So she launched her organization Onaketa to offer personalized Stem tutoring to Black and brown youth. Middle and high schoolers are partnered up with Black and brown scientists who tutor them online on a weekly basis for up to a year. Over the past five years, six tutors have mentored more than 100 students throughout the country.

“Most of our students have never encountered a Black or brown scientist as a teacher or as a professor,” Imara said. “To have somebody who is also a mentor who can guide them and show them new possibilities for themselves is really important.”

three women with books

Onaketa’s annual Dream Big book fair in April 2024 at the Studio One art center in Oakland, California. Photograph: Courtesy of Dr. Nia Imara

Imara sees the program as a way to “encourage Black and brown youth who have been actively discouraged and undermined from pursuing these fields. It’s a matter of putting that attention, resources and love towards people who have been actively underserved.”

Chima McGruder, an Onaketa mentor since 2021 who has a background in astrophysics, said that along with tutoring students in math through the program, he also serves as a role model for students who can see themselves in him. He’s built up strong connections with some of the students whom he’s mentored for several semesters. “A lot of them don’t get support that they would otherwise in math, or just someone who they can look up to who is not their parents,” McGruder said. “I find those interactions very rewarding and it actually makes me feel like I’m making a difference.”

McGruder said that it’s important to expose Black and brown students to Stem fields at an early age since they are largely underrepresented in that sector. While Latinos compose 17% of the workforce across all jobs, they only represent 8% of people in Stem occupations, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center analysis of employment data. And Black workers make up 11% of the workforce and 9% of Stem workers. A diversity of perspective ensures that products and medicines are applicable to different populations, since some diseases have a correlation to race, McGruder said: “Who you are and what your background is plays into the things that you create and the standards that you make.”

Toward the end of the chapter about the sun’s rhythm in her book, Imara reminds readers that everything they see is a reflection of the sun’s light. And just as the star’s own cycle waxes and wanes, so do the moments of our lives, Imara writes in the book: “A government bent on war and defense will see a potential enemy in everything, including phenomena caused by the innocent sun. An enslaved people see in the same sun a powerful symbol that connects them with home, with their ancestors. It offers a perpetual reminder that life occurs in cycles – rhythms – and thus, their peculiar situation is not permanent.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... osmos-stem

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Psychedelics Blew His Mind. He Wants Other Philosophers to Open Theirs.

An intense exchange with Marilyn Monroe sounds silly. But in a new book, Justin Smith-Ruiu is dead serious about what we might learn from altered states.

Video: https://vp.nyt.com/video/2025/09/12/149 ... _1080p.mp4

By Emily Eakin
Emily Eakin is a senior editor at the Book Review. Her book “The Frenchmen,” about the postwar French philosophers who took over American culture, will be published next year.

Sept. 21, 2025
Nearly everyone struggled during the pandemic, but Justin Smith-Ruiu’s struggle took a particularly disturbing form. An American philosopher who teaches at the University of Paris, he was on a fellowship in New York in March 2020 when the city shut down, stranding him in a rental apartment in Brooklyn. He caught Covid the same month, and though he recovered from the virus, he sank into a deep, existential despair.

His job, his career milestones, even the homes, schools, hospitals and other institutions around which human social life revolved: All of it suddenly seemed flimsy and meaningless, like so much make-believe. “I had the sharp sense that the things that we take to be real just aren’t real,” he told me. “It was quite extreme.”

Smith-Ruiu, 53, could have sought counseling or joined the Great Resignation by quitting his job. Instead, he turned to drugs — first cannabis, then psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and, finally, muscimol, a psychedelic made from another mushroom, the fly agaric.

Yet his interest in mind-altering substances was as much professional as personal: His crisis of belief in the world around him was also, he concluded, a problem for his field. Philosophy is concerned with some of the most fundamental questions — about the nature of reality, time, the self and other minds. So why did the discipline automatically exclude from consideration experiences that challenge, in spectacular if temporary ways, our basic understanding of these concepts?

This conundrum led first to a story in Wired magazine, and then to a book: “On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality,” which will be published on Tuesday. Why assume that our minds, in their sober “default state,” are naturally designed to grasp reality as it really is? Smith-Ruiu asks. Why not “explore all the modes of consciousness available to us”? What might they tell us about “the relationship between mind and world?”

Image

The cover of “On Drugs,” by Justin Smith-Ruiu.

Propelled by lofty ideas, Smith-Ruiu’s book lands with a dignified rustle amid a growing din. Enthusiasm for drug-induced mind expansion has lately reached a fever pitch, the ranks of seekers swelling to encompass not only Oregon clinics for the terminally ill but also Elon Musk and much of Silicon Valley, as well as Wall Street boardrooms, church pulpits and Capitol Hill — an unlikely new vanguard of psychonauts pursuing an unholy mix of spiritual gain and maximum profit, not necessarily in that order.

Investment in plant-based psychoactives is up, spurred in part by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s suggestion that some psychedelics should be legal. (His son took ayahuasca in Patagonia and returned home a changed man, doing the dishes and taking out the trash; who wouldn’t be in favor of such a drug?)

Recent converts include the former Trump administration energy secretary Rick Perry, a vocal promoter of ibogaine, a psychedelic derived from the bark of an African shrub that, he told Joe Rogan, has shown “stunning ability to bring people back to normalcy, to reset their brains, to literally give them their lives back.”

Smith-Ruiu, by contrast, shuns the language of transcendence and cure. “On Drugs” is a searching, philosophical meditation, not a brief for recreational or therapeutic drug use. Its aim is to destabilize certainties, not provide answers. “I think it would be detrimental to society if everyone was going around completely ripped all the time,” he told me over lunch during a visit to New York this spring. “I would never want to set myself up as an advocate.”

Nibbling pan-seared salmon in a dark T-shirt and jacket at a West Village restaurant, he looked every bit the strait-laced professor. Only his hair — shoulder-length, blond — conveyed a hint of nonconformism, or maybe just of California, where he grew up.

Image
A photograph of Justin Smith-Ruiu, wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses.

“What are we supposed to do with those human experiences that we all know exist but that defy language?” Smith-Ruiu asks.Credit...Elliott Verdier for The New York Times

A specialist in the history and philosophy of science whose next book is a scholarly study of Leibniz, he stressed that he wrote “On Drugs” stone sober and broke no laws to obtain the substances he ingested for his research.

In the case of psilocybin, this meant visits to a “smart shop” in the Netherlands, where, through a loophole of local law, the lumpy brown, subterranean mushroom “truffle” (but no other part) is available for purchase — and then only after a mandatory consultation with an employee. Smith-Ruiu’s salesman chastised him for referring to the mushrooms as drugs, rather than plants. (In fact, they belong to a separate kingdom: fungi.)

His ensuing trips on the truffles are recounted in “On Drugs” with the grave attention of a scientist in the lab. “They tasted much sourer than I had expected, and it was long, hard work to get them down,” he observes at the outset. From there, things get strange. On a dose “far more than is recommended,” he experienced an intense “interpersonal exchange” with Marilyn Monroe, who loomed from a poster on his hotel room wall, and, via YouTube clips, an even more powerful bond with Mama Cass, the late lead singer of the 1960s band the Mamas & the Papas: “Mama Cass suddenly appeared to me as ‘Mama’ in the fullest sense: the fount of my being and the origin of my world.”

On yet another trip, he understood that he was no longer any kind of being at all.

Ridiculous? Sure. But ridiculous, Smith-Ruiu insists, is the point. When philosophers think about consciousness, they tend to focus on “paradigm cases,” he said — a cat on a mat or a red dot on a screen. “These are important problems,” he went on. “How are we able to apprehend such basic facts about the world around us? But I think it might be methodologically preferable to go to the weirdest things our minds do and see what the problem of consciousness looks like then.”

Western philosophy was once more open to weirdness. In 1748, the Scottish philosopher David Hume showed how the contents of our minds are mere mental images, not direct perceptions of things in the world. As proof he offered the example of the shrinking table. A table appears to get smaller as we back away from it, though of course its size doesn’t actually change. The notion that mental images do not coincide with external reality gave rise, in the early 20th century, to an influential philosophical school: phenomenology.

Philosophers also sought insights through drugs. In the 1920s, Walter Benjamin took opium and hashish, keeping rigorous notes on his altered state. In 1935, Jean-Paul Sartre took mescaline — research for a scholarly book on the imagination. (He had a bad trip and for weeks afterward was convinced he was being followed by crabs.) In 1975, Michel Foucault dropped acid in Death Valley, an experience he called “one of the most important in my life,” claiming it caused him to completely rethink his final work, on the history of sexuality.

Image
A photograph of Justin Smith-Ruiu in an outdoor setting in Paris.

Smith-Ruiu teaches at the University of Paris.Credit...Elliott Verdier for The New York Times

Of all the thinkers who dabbled in mind-bending substances, perhaps the Harvard psychologist William James most closely anticipated Smith-Ruiu’s views. Evoking the wonder he felt tripping on nitrous oxide (laughing gas) as well as the “veriest nonsense” of his attempts to render the event in words, James was adamant that, as he wrote in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” in 1902, “our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

For most of philosophy’s history, such a claim would hardly have seemed radical. “The findings of psychedelics wouldn’t have surprised Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche and, most certainly, William James,” John Kaag, a philosopher at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an expert on James, told me. Only over the past 100 years has the discipline, through an “analytic turn,” been “trying to reduce all of human experience to the understandable, to the explicable,” he said. “And James says, no, reality always outstrips the descriptions of it — and that’s for the best.”


On Drugs
Save to your reading list https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... t.html#you

With “On Drugs,” Smith-Ruiu seeks to drive this idea home. One chapter imagines how Descartes’ famous proof of existence would read had the French philosopher first taken a hit of acid. His point: The rational consciousness favored by Descartes and his philosopher descendants — our “default neurochemical setting” — may be simply one mode among many for encountering the world.

“What are we supposed to do with those human experiences that we all know exist but that defy language?” Smith-Ruiu said at lunch. “It seems strange to consider no other neurochemical settings as giving any kind of access to the way the world is.”

Smith-Ruiu hasn’t tripped since completing his book, but it’s fair to say that his own default neurochemical setting has shifted. His crisis of meaning during the pandemic led to a number of drastic changes. He stopped drinking. He started a Substack, featuring essays and even fiction written in a new way, more creative, less academic. He also changed his name, adding, after 18 years of marriage, his wife’s last name — Ruiu (pronounced roo-you) — to his. He’s largely unconcerned about how “On Drugs” might be received by his colleagues. In short, he is hardly the same person he was before.

“Sometimes I imagine that I did not survive the pandemic and that my life halves somehow split,” he said, marveling at the thought. “I’m still navigating this transition from someone who had been a very straight and narrow and rigorous scholar to someone who is much freer.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/book ... sophy.html

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Quote of the day by Albert Einstein: “Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you…” - The Times of India

Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/arti ... aign=cppst

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This Is How Your Mind Works

Video: https://vp.nyt.com/video/2026/01/15/159 ... _1080p.mp4

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

Who are you? What’s going on deep inside yourself? How do you understand your own mind? The ancient sages had big debates about this, and now modern neuroscience is helping us sort it all out.

When my amateur fascination with neuroscience began, roughly two decades ago, the scientists seemed to spend a lot of time trying to figure out where in the brain different functions were happening. That led to a lot of simplistic shorthand in the popular conversation: Emotion is in the amygdala. Motivation is in the nucleus accumbens. Back in those days management consultants could make a good living by giving presentations with slides of brain scans while uttering sentences like: “You can see that the parietal lobe is all lit up. This proves that …”

But over the past several years the field of neuroscience seems to have moved away from this modular approach (each brain region has its own job). Researchers are more likely to believe that the brain is a network of interconnected regions. They are more likely to talk about vast and dynamic webs of neurons whose connections link disparate parts of the brain.

Luiz Pessoa, who runs the Maryland Neuroimaging Center, recently offered a metaphor that helps a layman like me understand what’s going on. In an essay for Aeon, he asks us to imagine a flock of starlings swooping and swirling in the sky. No single starling organizes this ballet, yet out of the local interactions between all the starlings a coordinated dance emerges.

As the brain is trying to navigate through the complex situations of the day, it is creating what Pessoa calls “neuronal ensembles distributed across multiple brain regions,” which, like a murmuration of starlings, “forms a single pattern from the collective behavior.”

This makes sense to me. Life is really complicated. To deal with a million unexpected circumstances, you wouldn’t want a brain filled with just a few regions doing just a few jobs. You’d want the brain to be able to improvise a vast number of networked ensembles that would dynamically affiliate and thus coordinate sensible responses.

Pessoa’s metaphor inspired me to try a little thought experiment. Imagine that you are a teacher and you look out at your classroom and see each of the students in your class as a flock of starlings. Their brains are not empty vats to be filled with information. Their brains are not computers that impersonally churn through calculations. Rather, each student is an ever-changing swirl of thoughts, fears, feelings, desires, impulses, memories and body sensations that interact to form a single mind that guides the student through the events of her day.

If you saw people this way, I think the first thing you’d notice is how much individual variation there is. If you see kids’ minds as a vat to be filled up, or if you conceive of the brain as a kind of computer, then every vat and every computer is kind of the same. But if kids are swirls, then every swirl has its own distinct set of motions — its own personality, its unique dance.

And yet our educational system is standardized. As Todd Rose writes in his excellent book “The End of Average,” when we grade or sort people, we measure them according to a few criteria, and then we rank them along a single continuum. Some people are A players, some are B and some are D. The message is: Be just like everybody else but better.

But if you see people as flocks of starlings, you’d see just how dehumanizing such sorting systems are. If you wanted to coach, teach or treat a flock of starlings, you wouldn’t be content with factory-style, one-size-fits-all approaches. You wouldn’t want to rank people along a single scale. You’d want personalized education, personalized medicine, personalized management techniques.

The second thing you’d notice, I think, is that change is the human constant. In our culture we have a tendency to essentialize people, to pick a few labels or traits that supposedly capture who they are. But flocks are always in motion. A person who is extroverted at home might be introverted at synagogue. A stock trader who is overly aggressive in a bull market may be overly cautious in a bear market.

Behavior is more about if-then signatures. If I’m confronted with this context I tend to respond with this mental swirl and that action, but if I’m in a different context I’ll respond with a very different swirl. If we saw people as starlings, I think we’d pay more attention to how good each person is at changing and adapting and less on supposedly permanent traits.

Third, I’d think you’d notice that the categories we use to understand people get in the way of actually understanding them. We divide mental activity into categories like perception, reason, emotion, desire, action. This fits well with the modular view of the brain. Vision takes place in the back of the head; reason takes place in the front.

But if you see people as a set of swirls, you are confronted with the fact that all these different mental activities are intensely interconnected as part of a single holistic process. The emotions you feel influence what you see just as much as what you see influences what you feel. The divisions between these mental categories begin to dissolve away. As Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist, wrote in her book “How Emotions Are Made,” “emotions are not, in principle, distinct from cognitions and perceptions.”

Finally, if we embrace the flock of starlings metaphor, then we can dump one of the more unfortunate metaphors we in the West have relied on to understand the mind. This metaphor, going back to ancient Greece, holds that reason is a wise charioteer and the passions — emotions and desires — are the stallions who pull the chariot. In this fable, reason is the calm, sophisticated smart guy, while the emotions and desires are dumb, primitive beasts. People lead good rational lives when they use reason to suppress and control the passions.

This chariot metaphor rests on an overly positive estimation of the power of pure reason and an overly negative view of the passions. The fact is that your emotions are not primitive and dumb. Positive emotions encourage risk-taking. Awe encourages you to broaden your focus beyond your narrow self. Sadness encourages you to change your way of thinking.

Your desires are not dumb, either. They tell you what is worth valuing and where you should go. Your body also contains its own form of wisdom. Cortisol increases vigilance. Adrenaline prepares the body for quick and decisive action.

As Annie Murphy Paul writes in her book “The Extended Mind,” “Recent research suggests a rather astonishing possibility: The body can be more rational than the brain.”

If we wanted to step back and look at the whole mind, we’d say — to the extent that we can even separate these faculties — that reason, emotions and desires are just different resources people draw upon to help make judgments about what to do next. Each faculty has its own strengths and weaknesses, and life goes best when a person coordinates all the faculties in one graceful swirl.

Your job as a conscious person is not to be a dominating, rationalist charioteer. It’s to read the judgments that your emotions, desires and body are sending you, act on them when their judgments are appropriate and redirect them when they are getting carried away.

Some people are so misled by the charioteer fable that they don’t cultivate or use all their faculties. They are so smitten with their own high intelligence that they don’t pay attention to their own emotions and desires, or to the signals their guts are sending them. This is why phenomenally smart people often do astoundingly stupid things.

The conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species and assigns itself the leading role. But the view of humans as swirls of starlings shines proper attention on all those deeper processes we should rely on every second, even though they may emerge from underneath the waterline of conscious awareness.

One of the nice things about modern neuroscience is that it reminds us of all those deeply subjective processes that make us fully human — the way we assign value to things, the way we yearn to be better than ourselves, and our potential, when everything is going well, to move gracefully on the pilgrimage of life.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opin ... e9677ea768

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Pope Leo XIV, who taught mathematics and physics, sends a message on the occasion of the International Day of Mathematics, reiterating that having a great deal of knowledge is not enough if we do not know who we are or what the meaning of life is.

By Deborah Castellano Lubov

Pay attention to the moral dimension of emerging technologies, Pope Leo XIV urged in a message sent on Friday to mark the International Day of Mathematics.

In the message, sent to Professor Betül Tanbay, Chair of the International Day of Mathematics, and signed by Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, the Pope offered cordial greetings to all those taking part in the webinar on the theme “Mathematics and Hope.”

In the context of the manifold challenges facing the human family, "not least rapid technological development with all its potential for good or evil," the Pope encouraged participants to consider how mathematicians can be hopeful signs to the wider world.

Use of algorithms in AI

In this regard, Pope Leo suggested that an especially fruitful area of research is the use of algorithms, particularly in artificial intelligence.

“Such a task,” he said, “requires not just intellectual effort and ingenuity but an integral growth of the whole person, in order to encompass the moral dimension of these emerging technologies.”

Humanizing the digital sphere

Recalling his own time as a teacher of mathematics and physics, Pope Leo XIV reiterated that having a great deal of knowledge is not enough if we do not know who we are or what the meaning of life is.

The Holy Father prayed that all those involved in the event would remain attentive to the profound spiritual needs of the human heart, seeking ways to humanize the digital sphere and shape it as an opportunity for fraternity and creativity.

He also encouraged them to be prophets of hope, truth, and goodness in the world.

Pope Leo concluded by invoking abundant divine blessings of wisdom, joy, and peace upon all those participating in this year’s International Day of Mathematics.

Thank you for reading our article. You can keep up-to-date by subscribing to our daily newsletter. Just click here

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news ... ssage.html

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Another Giant Leap Reminds Us How Small We Are

A mission that took four astronauts farther than any human has ever traveled in the history of mankind has made people feel a little trippy.


The view of home from the other side of the moon.Credit...NASA, via Getty Images

In the beginning, Artemis II was about science. The mission, which ended on Friday with a clean splash into the Pacific Ocean, carried four astronauts who gathered data, took photographs and tested life support systems as they orbited the moon.

But for the astronauts themselves, and millions of people who checked in on them from hundreds of thousands of miles away, the mission also elicited meditations on more profound matters.

“You just look up and feel wonder, grandeur and smallness at the same time,” said Jim Davis, a pastor in Orlando, Fla. He was having dinner at a restaurant with a small group from his church when the mission launched on April 1. The group stepped out into the parking lot to admire the rocket blasting upward into the early evening sky.

For 10 days, people admired the vastness of the universe. The frailty and interdependence of the human species. The sheer awesomeness of the moon.

“I just had an overwhelming sense of being moved by looking at the moon,” Christina Koch, a mission specialist on Artemis II, reported to mission control this week. “It lasted just a second or two, and I actually couldn’t even make it happen again, but something just threw me in suddenly to the lunar landscape and it became real.”

For many people back home on Earth, the mission was a brief reminder of the sheer scale of outer space, and a prompt to contemplate both our power and our powerlessness. It turned all of us into children at camp, lying supine and looking up at the stars, thinking very big thoughts.

ImageA family, seen from behind, look upward as Artemis II launches into the sky.

The Artemis II mission was a chance to pause and participate in the ancient human pastime of contemplating the skies.Credit...Cassandra Klos for The New York Times

It’s a paradox that scientists, philosophers and poets have tried to capture for centuries.

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” a writer of the Book of Psalms asked of God.

“When I search for the numerous turning spirals of the stars, I no longer have my feet on the Earth, but am beside Zeus himself,” reads a text attributed to the second-century astronomer Ptolemy.

Andrew Davison, a theologian at the University of Oxford who has written about the implications of extraterrestrial life, said in an interview that one of the “great provocations” of the cosmos is that, in it, “human beings seem unbelievably small, but also it bears witness to our greatness.”

He added, “We are a kind of being that can have that whole universe inside us, in our thoughts.”

For many astronauts, what begins as a scientific endeavor becomes something spiritual. Frank White, a space philosopher, coined the term “the overview effect” in 1987 to describe the shift in perspective that some astronauts said came from viewing Earth as merely one small sphere in an endless expanse.

Image
Christina Koch, an Artemis II mission specialist, looking through a window at Earth.

Christina Koch, one of the mission specialists on Artemis II, with a view of Earth. Ron Garan, a former astronaut, said this week that everyone he has talked to who has been to space “has been transformed in some way.”Credit...NASA, via Reuters

Ron Garan watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 as a small boy with his family, and was struck by the sense that “we had just become a different species.” For millenniums of human history, all life on Earth was constrained there. Then suddenly the rules changed, the boundaries expanded.

Mr. Garan grew up to become an astronaut who spent six months on the International Space Station in 2011. In space, he was overwhelmed by the realization that everyone on Earth is also in space already, together.

Now back on solid ground and working as a consultant and writer, he attributes the emotional impact of space travel in part to the phenomenon of weightlessness. If a person is sitting on a beach looking at the sunset, or is perched on the rim of the Grand Canyon, gravity attaches them to the scene they are admiring, Mr. Garan said.

“But when I was in space, for the first time in my life, I was outside the frame of the masterpiece looking in,” he said. “That changes everything.”

Mr. Garan compared space travel to a psychedelic experience (though he declined to say whether he knew this first hand). Astronauts over the years have described crying, worshiping God and experiencing utterly new feelings of almost disembodied awe while in space.

When the Apollo 14 pilot Edgar Mitchell was on his way back from the moon in 1971, he was overwhelmed by the thought that “the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars,” he later told an interviewer. “It was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy.”

Image
A yellowish moon hanging in the sky.

Stories about the origins of the cosmos and its relationship to humanity are foundational to many religions.Credit...Cassandra Klos for The New York Times

Back on Earth, he researched various spiritual traditions to try to understand the experience and eventually found a term in Sanskrit that captured it: savikalpa samadhi, a state of deep meditation.

The Artemis II astronauts seemed at times to be undergoing similarly mind-expanding realignments of reality.

“You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth,” pilot Victor Glover mused in an interview with CBS News on Easter Sunday. “But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos.”

Skeptics question whether the overview effect is anything more than a passing emotion.

Space travel remains a highly unusual human experience. Private space travel companies, like Blue Origin until recently, have taken dozens of tourists on brief flights above the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space about 62 miles above Earth. Traveling farther, to Earth orbit and beyond, is still out of reach for all but government-sponsored astronauts and the wealthiest space tourists.

The growing list of people who have technically gone to space includes billionaires like Jeff Bezos, pop stars like Katy Perry and space-coded celebrities like William Shatner, who concluded that the “vicious coldness” of space contrasted with Earth’s warmth and filled him with “overwhelming sadness.”

But celestial epiphanies have always been accessible to those who can’t physically travel outside Earth’s atmosphere.

“Since the dawn of our species, every human society has looked up at the stars,” said Jo Marchant, the author of “The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars.”

Image
The Milky Way.

The Milky Way, seen from the Artemis II crew. “In all of this emptiness, this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe, you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together,” the astronaut Victor Glover said during the Artemis II mission.Credit...NASA, via Associated Press

Stargazing has influenced religion, philosophy, art, science and politics. Isaac Newton’s discovery that laws of motion and gravity affect everything equally influenced democratic beliefs that kings to commoners should be subject to the same rules, Ms. Marchant said.

With the encroachments of light pollution and screen-based distractions, human beings in the 21st century arguably spend less of their time contemplating the night sky than ever before.

Troy D. Allan was an Army chaplain in Afghanistan when he began intentionally spending time outside at night. He knew little about astronomy or constellations, but found that simply staring up into the sky helped him find peace in a period of his life otherwise marked by turmoil.

Mr. Allan now heads a program at Utah State University that facilitates camping trips for teenagers and others to contemplate the night sky, and their place underneath it. His campers set up their tents, then lie back and watch the stars come out. At first, time moves slowly for young people accustomed to clicking through life at the pace of TikTok. But gradually, they warm to the experience.

“What happens to humans when we encounter vastness, silence, beauty and mystery?” Mr. Allan said. “It’s the recalibrating of our lives.”

After the stars come out, Mr. Allan’s group goes on a hike, with the Milky Way stretched like a banner above them. Then they stop again for a long time and look up.

Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/us/a ... e9677ea768

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Quote of the Day by Albert Einstein: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a.....” What powerful life lessons does Albert Einstein’s intuition vs rational mind insight reveal today?

Synopsis
Quote of the Day by Albert Einstein: Modern neuroscience shows that over 90% of brain processing happens subconsciously, shaping decisions before logic intervenes. Einstein’s insight aligns with this: intuition is not guesswork but compressed experience and pattern recognition. Rational thinking organizes; intuition initiates. The real lesson is balance. When intuition guides direction and logic validates execution, thinking becomes complete. Ig ..

Quote of the Day by Albert Einstein: There is a quiet contradiction at the heart of modern life. We live in the most data-rich, logically optimized era in human history—yet anxiety, confusion, and dissatisfaction continue to rise. We measure everything. Productivity. Intelligence. Output. Even happiness is reduced to metrics. And still, something feels off.

Quote of the Day Today by Albert Einstein:
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ne ... s?from=mdr

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photographed by photographer Martin Vos, ca. 1930

The meeting of A. Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore was a remarkable encounter between two of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. They discussed various topics related to physics, philosophy, religion, art, and human nature. Their conversation revealed the ities between their worldviews, as well as their mutual respect and admiration.

Einstein and Tagore met through a common friend, Dr. Mendel, who was a Jewish physician and a fan of Tagore's poetry. Tagore visited Einstein at his residence at Caputh in the suburbs of Berlin on July 14, 1930, and Einstein returned the call and visited Tagore at the Mendel home. Both conversations were recorded.

One of the main themes of their dialogue was the nature of reality and truth. Einstein believed that there was a reality independent of human perception, and that truth was objective and universal. He cited the example of the Pythagorean theorem, which he claimed was true regardless of the existence of man. Tagore, on the other hand, argued that truth was essentially human, and that it was realized through our emotions and activities. He said that the world was a human world, and that science and religion were both expressions of human truth. Another topic they discussed was the concept of beauty. Einstein asked Tagore if beauty was independent of man, and if the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful if there were no human beings. Tagore replied that beauty was not independent of man, but rather a harmony between man and the universe. He said that when our universe was in harmony with man, we knew it as truth and felt it as beauty.

They also talked about their personal tastes in music. Einstein confessed that he did not appreciate Indian music, because he could not follow its rhythm and melody. He said that he preferred music that had clear structure and logic, such as Mozart's. Tagore explained that Indian music was based on improvisation and emotion, rather than on fixed rules and forms. He said that Indian music expressed the infinite personality of man, which comprehended the universe.

https://x.com/PhysInHistory/status/2063203518568444164

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The Labyrinth of Subjectivity: Constructions of the Self from Mullā Ṣadrā to Muḥammad Iqbāl (Winner, 2019 Best Dissertation of the Year on a Topic in Iranian Studies, Foundation for Iranian Studies)
By Muhammad U Faruque

Abstract
The Labyrinth of Subjectivity:
Constructions of the Self from Mullā Ṣadrā to Muḥammad Iqbāl
by
Muhammad Umar Faruque
Doctor of Philosophy in Near Eastern Studies
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Asad Q. Ahmed, Chair
Referred to by some philosophers as “the knot of the universe,” investigations concerning human selfhood and subjectivity can help unravel questions of central contemporary relevance, such as what it is to be human in a globalized, secular world. As one scholar has pointed out, understanding our “selves”—our natures, capabilities, and possibilities—is the most captivating of all questions because, in the final analysis, it cannot be attained through empirical research alone. That is, there are no facts which can help us decisively determine whether our selves constitute parts of our bodies, or are incorporeal substances which somehow inhere in our bodies, or are epiphenomena of our minds.

Against the general backdrop of these kinds of concerns, my dissertation investigates the creative ways in which concepts of selves and selfhood have been constructed in early modern and late modern Islamic philosophy (spanning from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries). I draw on the work of the three major thinkers during these time periods who made unique and lasting contributions in this regard: Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1640), Shāh Walī Allāh (d. 1762), and Muḥammad Iqbāl (d. 1938). Alongside detailed analyses of each of these thinkers’ views on the self and selfhood, my study also situates their insights within the wider constellation of related discussions in late modern and contemporary philosophy, engaging the seminal theoretical
insights on the self by thinkers such as William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Richard Sorabji, and Daniel Dennett. This allows me to theoretically frame my textual inquiry within what can be called a tri-partite model of selfhood, taking in bio-physiological, socio-
cultural, and ethico-metaphysical modes of discourse and meaning-construction.

One key insight which emerges from my comparative inquiry is that the Muslim philosophers whom I study reveal themselves to be fundamentally concerned in their own unique ways with the problem of the human condition in general. Their manner of addressing this central issue from their differing perspectives devolves on the cultivation of what can be called an anthropocentric notion of the self that emphasizes self-knowledge, self-perfection and self- transformation.

By putting the first-person perspective at the center of their conception of the self, these philosophers invite us to take a fresh look at our understanding of the self. This is because if the self is reduced to a set of cognitive functions or identified exclusively with various brain-states,
as in neuroscience, one would downplay how the self appears from the first-person vantage point, thereby attenuating the concrete connection between human ethical agency and moral responsibility

For my teachers
who opened the gateway to learning and self-discovery

ارد ندان میل جهان بی جمال جان جانارد ندرد حقا که آن ندار کس که این ه
چ کس نشانی با هی ندیدمن دلستان زاارد ندشان او نرم یا خبر ندا یا من
شین استه صد بحر آت در این ر هر شبنمیارد ندعما شرح و بیان دردا که این م
)حافظ(

Contents
Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... iv
Chapter One: The Problem of the Self ....................................................................................... 1
Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1
Background and Disciplinary Challenges ................................................................................... 1
Setting the Parameters .............................................................................................................. 6
Degrees and Dimensions of Selfhood ......................................................................................... 9
The Ambiguity of the Self ...................................................................................................... 10
The Self as a ‘Spectrum and Aspirational’ Concept .............................................................. 15
The Self: A Multi-dimensional Approach .............................................................................. 17
Being a Self: Definition and Conditions ................................................................................ 18
A Critical Review of Previous Scholarship on the Self............................................................. 21
The Self in a Global Context .................................................................................................. 21
The Self in the Islamic Tradition............................................................................................ 27
Summary.................................................................................................................................... 34
Chapter Two: Mullā Ṣadrā: The Deliverance of the Self ........................................................ 35
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 35
Intellectual Context.................................................................................................................... 35
The Problematic of the Self ....................................................................................................... 39
The View from the ‘I:’ Consciousness and Self-Knowledge Prior to Ṣadrā ............................. 44
Self-Knowledge and Consciousness of the ‘I’ in Ṣadrā ............................................................ 49
Self-Identity as Presence ........................................................................................................ 52
Self-knowledge and levels of consciousness ......................................................................... 54
Immateriality of the Self ............................................................................................................ 59
Sculpting the Self: The Self’s Ascension through Virtues and Self-Cultivation ...................... 78
The Nature and Significance of Self-Knowledge .................................................................. 78
Sculpting the Self ................................................................................................................... 84
Nature of the ‘True I’................................................................................................................. 97
Summary.................................................................................................................................. 112
Chapter Three: Shāh Walī Allāh: The Subjectivity of the Subtle Body .............................. 114
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 114
Between Persia and India: From Mullā Ṣadrā to Walī Allāh .................................................. 114
iii
Intellectual Context.................................................................................................................. 124
A Note on the Texts Used .................................................................................................... 127
Overcoming the Terminological Confusion ............................................................................ 127
The Presence of the Self from the First Person ....................................................................... 134
Self-Knowledge and First-Person Subjectivity .................................................................... 134
The Epistemological Hurdle................................................................................................. 138
The Body as Text: Deciphering the Self through Subtle Bodies ............................................. 145
Graeco-Islamic-Indian Background ..................................................................................... 145
Deciphering the Self through Subtle Bodies ........................................................................ 153
Wajd or a Theory of Spiritual Emotion ................................................................................ 165
Trading Divine and Human Subjectivity ................................................................................. 171
Traveling within the Laṭāʾif ................................................................................................. 171
The End of Selfhood ............................................................................................................ 175
Summary.................................................................................................................................. 188
Chapter Four: Iqbāl: Individuality and the Affirmation of the Ordinary Self .................. 190
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 190
Socio-Religious Context .......................................................................................................... 190
Muslim Identity in Colonial India ........................................................................................ 193
Practices of the Self .............................................................................................................. 196
The Perfect Human as the Fullness of the Self .................................................................... 203
Situating Iqbāl and Iqbāl Studies ............................................................................................. 209
The Crisis of Modern Subjectivity ....................................................................................... 213
The State of Iqbāl Scholarship on the Self ........................................................................... 222
Iqbāl as Intellectual Historian .............................................................................................. 226
Intuition of the Self through First-Person Experience ............................................................. 232
Unity of Self and Consciousness ............................................................................................. 240
Individualism and Multi-Dimensionality of the Self ............................................................... 247
Self, Freedom and Immortality ................................................................................................ 255
Summary.................................................................................................................................. 267
Chapter Five: Conclusion (I and I: Why the ‘I’ Matters) ..................................................... 269
Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 279

Complete thesis at: https://www.academia.edu/41000208/The_L ... card=title