by AnonYMous
The Restaurant
Why do you have to go?
They are coming for me.
Who? The police?
Among others.
Can they actually catch you?
Not the police specifically, but let me share with you a multiversal truth: no matter how high you are on the totem pole, there is always something higher. But don't panic. We are not in any serious danger.
--I went to the door and could hear voices below.
They are talking to my landlady. She will tell them she saw you with me.
You are right, well this has been very pleasant, and thanks for the juice.
Wait. One more thing. Actually, I really don't think we will have time, they will be here in a moment.
It's fine, I know you have a pressing question, and since you want an answer, I will make some time. The old woman will confuse your apartment number with the nice Chinese man's across the hall. The police will spend some time trying to get inside. Then they will search his apartment. Then they will search the other apartments next to his. Then they will go back and question the old woman again. We have time to get into it.
--He sat down again, though not before getting my umbrella, which was nearby, and setting it next to him. I noticed his flashlight dim to the strength of just a few candles. I could just barely see his features in the soft light. I hurried to ask my question.
What about God?
What about God?
Well, does he exist?
I am assuming by God you are referring to the Vishnu type God, the creator of all the universes, what George Cantor called the Absolute Infinite. The Infinity that encompasses all other infinities, the God that encompasses all gods.
Yes, does he exist?
Well, have you met him, or her, or them?
If I did, I probably wouldn't ask you the question.
Sure you would. Many of the greatest saints and holy men who claimed to have experienced God have had their doubts occasionally, and were curious what others' experiences were also.
Well, I am not a saint, I am not even religious.
Did you ever get an inkling, a feeling, an experience?
Not really, nothing dramatic.
Well, if you haven't experienced it, it is impossible for me to just explain it to you.
Why not?
You see, as I mentioned earlier, you cannot describe something infinite with logic, deduction or analysis. Logic and deduction take basic, simple finite ideas and lead you to more complex finite ideas. But you are not trying to understand a finite idea; you are asking me about God. If I give you some more finite blocks of knowledge, all your blocks of knowledge will never add up to what you are hoping for, some infinite block of knowledge. No matter how big your block gets, it will be infinitesimally small compared to the infinite knowledge you are seeking. Hence, just like I cannot prove or disprove an infinite universe to you, I cannot prove or disprove God.
What about a partial knowledge, more knowledge than I currently have?
Using the type of knowledge you are seeking, still infinitesimally small, you could call it mathematically insignificant.
So that's it? You leave me with that?
No I suppose I won't. It pains me to see humans in such a confused state about the most basic things. This happens a lot in your paradigm. Realize that knowing something logically, scientifically, intellectually, is not the only form of knowledge.
What else is there?
How do humans come to gather knowledge? Your philosophers have argued about this for millennia.
Yes, and most of it is just that, philosophical speculation in my opinion.
I want you to think of humans as gathering information about something in three major ways. They can come to understand a thing or a concept logically, by knowing its parts. This is knowledge through analysis and deduction that is so prevalent in your current scientific paradigm. More commonly, throughout history, humans have learned about something from information provided by other humans through their stories, testimonies and teachings. This would be passed on knowledge. Finally, they can gather direct knowledge through their senses; see it, hear it, touch it.
All right.
--He put down the last bottle of juice without opening it. He thought for a moment, and then said,
I think we have just enough time for one last thought experiment. Imagine that at the Empire State Building there is an extremely fancy restaurant, and I have invited you there for dinner. Imagine that you have lived in a monastery all your life and haven't eaten anything except rice gruel, so you have almost no concept of what any other food could possibly taste like. When you get to the restaurant and look at the menu, there are many famous dishes on it, but you do not recognize any of them since all you have ever eaten is gruel. Luckily, this restaurant has a very detailed menu that lists all of the ingredients of each dish. The first item you read about is their signature dish, the Lobster Newburg. By the way, I don't condone sentient beings eating other sentient beings when either has evolved to the point that they don't have to. But we will use lobster as an example because I know humans don't get too excited about the taste of broccoli. When you read the ingredients of the lobster on the menu, do you know how it will taste or whether you should try that instead of the other dishes?
Logically, I should be able to get some idea from the menu. But I don't know what the ingredients taste like, since all I have eaten is gruel.
That's okay because the menu has much more detailed information you can read about. This amazing menu also lists the number of calories, the amount of fat, salt, vitamins and minerals in the lobster dish. In case you are still short on information, the menu gets even more detailed. It now tells you the exact molecular structure, the approximate amount of atoms, electrons, quarks, gluons, leptons, and neutrinos in the lobster. Finally just in case you are still indecisive, it gives you a Schrödinger wave function for the lobster dish. In fact, in this menu you have at your disposal all possible information about the lobster known to science and mathematics. Once you have read this most detailed account, would you know what lobster tastes like?
No, of course not.
No problem, because there is a second part of the menu that perhaps will be more convincing. In the next section, you find the testimonials, reviews and ratings for the lobster. You read that the president loves the lobster, as do many famous celebrities. You read the extremely detailed descriptions of how rich the sauce is, how succulent the flesh is. You read the famous story of how a lone fisherman, on a life long quest for the finest lobster, found this particular type after diving for months in the deepest of oceans. He returned only when he had found the perfect lobster to share with the world. Could you now make a choice? Could you now leave the restaurant fully satisfied and recommend the lobster to others?
Well, I think that if the reviews are the best, I could confidently choose it. However I would not be satisfied, as I still need to taste it.
Armed with all of this knowledge, knowing all the physical parts, and knowing all the written opinions, you could describe to me in great detail what the lobster should taste like. If you wanted to, you could even make others who have never tasted lobster desire it also. But, in the end, you don't know how the lobster tastes until you have actually tasted it. You can stack and stack your logical knowledge about the lobster, process more and more details, and yet all of this finite knowledge does not add up to anything significant when compared with the knowledge you receive when you have actually tasted it. You see, there are things in this world that you cannot break apart, or fully describe.
Well you may not be able to describe them exactly, but you can get some idea, can't you?
Of the three types of knowledge, the first two, the logical, and the testimonial, do exactly that. They are social constructs that convey an idea about something. A tiger for instance, who does not socialize much, is a pure experiencer of its world. It does not care about other tigers' opinions
about a subject. It garners direct sensory information; it sees things for what they are. Humans on the other hand are social creatures, depending on each other for survival, so it is beneficial for them all to be on the same page, to have similar ideas. You couldn't go planning a hunt and having even one person in your group act erratically. You would all starve. Humans developed ways to communicate; to describe objects, ideas, emotions, just about everything, in ways that others in their social group could understand. The reason for this is pretty obvious: humans cannot read the minds of other humans, they are all separate consciousnesses. Humans cannot directly observe the conscious thoughts of another as a whole. For them to have any idea what another is thinking, they must communicate their ideas through a medium they can observe, such as words or gestures, or art. They observe this more basic information, and using it, their mind will create an approximate picture, a mental simulation, of what someone else is thinking. Using social knowledge the society defines for the members who their friends are, who their enemies are, and who their God is. What happens in very large and highly organized societies is that the members tend to understand the world primarily through these social constructs. They listen to the stories of others and take up the ideas of others. In many societies, this imagined knowledge is considered as good, or even better, than personally experienced knowledge.
Yes, you mentioned the power of our mental world earlier, but isn't it true that our senses often deceive us?
That is definitely a strong opinion in your current paradigm; your senses deceive you, are limited and can even be harmful.
Yes, and that is the teaching of many religions, not just science.
True, many religions use stories, testimonies, allegories and lessons, to teach you what you should think, but so does your society in general. Your personal experience is secondary to the accepted teachings of your paradigm, stated by your wise men and your books. When you experience something that does not conform to you society's beliefs, those experiences are discounted.
Well I don't particularly subscribe to other peoples opinions or to their holy books being forced on me. I prefer scientific fact.
Actually, science is in many ways the most advanced form of social knowledge. It uses both the first way of knowledge and the second. It elevates abstract knowledge through facts and figures, mathematics, logic and analysis to a much higher level than experienced knowledge.
Perhaps it should then. Doesn't it tell you what a thing truly is, a pure form of knowledge, unblemished by opinion or personal perception or misconception?
Well I wasn't finished. Scientists then take these abstract numbers and results and proceed to create a theory or hypothesis interpreting them. Which is?
A story.
Or a testimony or a decree about how the world works and what all of these numbers and formulas mean. So I guess I will add to my previous statement this: that in your paradigm, your personal experience is secondary to the accepted teachings of your wise men, books and scientists. But remember that neither the scientific method nor the religious method of describing a thing is the actual thing they are describing. They are representations, approximations, substitutes for direct experience. They are building blocks that are combined to manifest a mental image in your mind.
--Again I must have looked confused.
Let me make another attempt to get this through, lets try Music. Say we are dealing with sound now instead of taste. How different is the experience of listening to Beethoven's 9th in a concert hall, compared to reading a review in the New York Times. How different is it from an objective scientific description such as: A vibration in the air generated by a wooden instrument onto which four gut strings are attached, at the resonating frequency of 494 HZ simultaneously sounding with one at 440HZ for a duration of .5 seconds followed by a pitch at 523 HZ, resonating for .2 seconds played on a three foot long metallic instrument with a bell shape on the end.
I understand that science can't accurately describe music.
I would not say “not accurately” because these objective descriptions are perfectly accurate. I would instead say not meaningfully. These descriptions will put a mental image in your mind about an object, but it is not a meaningful image. Your mind will create a mental simulation of the 9th from this abstract knowledge, but it will be very different from the direct observation of the object itself. In essence, when you observe a description of something; that is what you are observing, not the thing itself, but the description.
--The point he was making seems very clear to me now, but at the time, I can only guess that I was not showing complete comprehension, because he continued with another approach.
I can see it is hard for you, in your scientific paradigm to understand the importance of the difference. Let me try to restate my argument in a scientific light, describe it in the words of your paradigm, perhaps that will clear it up for you. Think of it this way: We know every object has a Schrödinger wave function that describes its many possible coordinates in space. And we know that the wave function will collapse to one result when it is observed by a single consciousness. What this means in many worlds, is that an object has within it all the potential possibilities of motion, and a mathematical equation can describe those possibilities.
Yes.
So, within the Schrödinger wave equation there is information about every possible position. When observed, the other possibilities fall away and there is indeed one definite position in each world.
Yes.
Now think of an object or an event, like the lobster, or the act of eating the lobster. Imagine that it can have many potential qualities; a feeling, taste, smell, emotion. To each consciousness that interacts with it, the lobster has a different quality. Just as we could not pinpoint a wave's exact location, so we cannot pinpoint a lobster's definite quality. The lobster's value is spread out over all the consciousnesses that can observe it. Therefore, you can imagine that each object, event, or concept, has a mathematical representation. Not one that defines its position in the multiverse, but one that defines its quality in the multiverse. Defining the actual sense and feeling it is capable of producing to a consciousness that interacts with it. You could call it its Quality Function. Each object has within it a myriad of possible qualities, and depending on who is observing it, will provide a unique quality for each observer.
I am not sure I follow.
Imagine again the Beethoven's 9th. The piece as a whole has within it many possible qualities, and will manifest a different quality in each person that observes it. People of the same social group, say western music lovers, will have relatively similar yet unique reactions. Some will think Beethoven is great but prefer Mozart, some will think it is great but too long, some will think it is the greatest thing ever created by a human. People from other paradigms will probably just be confused by it. An African musician may find the harmonies strange, and the rhythms simple and uninteresting; so plain compared to the complicated drum rhythms he is used to. Eastern music lovers may find it is too active, since its heroic nature does not allow for the meditative and peaceful experience music is supposed to create. A dog, who's brain doesn't process music in the same fashion as a human will be far more interested in chewing on the seats of the concert hall. No one will experience the 9th in the same way; no one will feel exactly the same thing about it since everyone has different pasts, opinions, and moods. The 9th has within it all of these potential qualities, and will manifest differently for each observer.
I understand that all things have their unique interpretation and their unique meaning to each person. But I guess I still don't see why you think abstract or learned knowledge is not important, especially since within our paradigm, we agree on what these things mean.
Because all of this information and deduction about a thing serves to create in your mind a mental approximation of something, you could call it a dream. Neither the information, nor the image created in your mind has the same quality as the thin
g itself. Think of how you imagine the future and the past. These are indeed mental approximation of actual worlds, but they are not the same as being present in, and observing an actual variation of the multiverse. Similarly, the image that manifests from social knowledge is not the same as a directly experienced observation of the thing. Hence, a description of Beethoven's 9th in the New York Times will have its own quality function, but one that is different from the quality function of any actual performance of the 9th. Just reading more reviews of the performance will not get you any closer to the experience of hearing an actual performance. Now think of all of these quality functions as wave functions. As I had explained before, just adding waves doesn't necessarily make a bigger wave. Thus piling on a lot of facts or testimonies doesn't necessarily create more meaningful knowledge. Just as gathering more and more facts does not necessarily lead to a better decision, it often leads to information overload. Contrary to popular belief, more is not always better. Sometimes you even have to unlearn what you have learned. Sometimes you need to remove some waves so you get less interference and less confusion.
But what about the most basic concepts, the building blocks. Can we at least agree on those?
All mental concepts, from abstract scientific concepts, to the most basic sensory information like color, touch or sound have their own unique quality function for each observer. This is one of the reasons humans are always fighting. Though you may all hear the same words, the thoughts and images those words create in your mind are very different for each person. The physical sound of the word is the same, but its mental manifestation is different.
What about these mental images that we create; you said they are similar to our mental images of possible futures. Is the mental image we create in our mind, the one we observe, actually real or just imagination?
There is information in your mental image, therefore it is real. The mental images created by your mind have a physical representation in the firing patterns of neurons and chemical reactions in your brain. All the bits of information you are using to create the ideas in your mind each have their own quality function, as does the final mental image you observe. They all exist.