Professor Trimbak Takes Edward O. Wilson to School: Notes for a Lermon on Scientolatry

In his own flight of self-deception Wilson impugned love for God, spiritual conviction and faith of the entire vast history of the Old Humanity. His irrational conclusion that all religious experience is adaptive self-delusion applied to everyone. It applied to the great geniuses who attributed their inspiration to God, to ordinary people who loved God in their everyday lives, the great saints transfixed by love for God, and the brokenhearted sinner with nowhere to turn but God. Billions of people. Wilson misunderstood them all.

For thousands of years people lived and reproduced with no need to understand how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.

Wilson concluded all love for God and religious experience were self-deceptions which once provided an adaptive advantage, but no longer did. Quite insane. According to that theory, in 1998 scientolatry should have been providing the "adaptive edge" now that people finally were seeing the "objective truth" of the machine. The extreme opposite effect obtained. In the world view of scientific materialism things are meaningful but nothing is immutably sacred. To a great extent it weakened the reproductive advantage of high intelligence because the "objective" truth Wilson referred to led to extremely unnatural methods of birth suppression that we find intolerable to put into words. Scientolatry was most influential among educated Westerners, post-Christians like Wilson, and it drastically reduced their rates of reproduction. If anything, scientolatry was like a protracted suicide. God was not an adaptive brain-burp for the Old Humanity, faith in God was not a self-deception, but even if it were, faith in God supports bringing children into the world by natural ways.

The Awakener had said the greatest spiritual energy in the world was in America. He used that energy to reorient things for the New Humanity. At the height of the Great Purification the political division in America was not based on wealth or class as it always had been, but on anti-God or pro-God consciousness. This extremely unusual scenario reflected that vast reorientation. Americans were uniformly oriented toward money and possessions, they had no respect for poverty whatsoever. But the political division was largely between anti-God and pro-God agendas. The anti-God agenda held that everything had meaning but nothing was sacred, and the adult individual was entitled to write his or her own script for living. The pro-God constituency accepted the eternal notions about the sacredness of life and of marriage. But God or no God, both groups loved money.

The brain's true meaning is hidden in its microscopic detail . . . If we mean by progress the advance toward a preset goal, such as that composed by intention in the human mind, then evolution by natural selection, which has no preset goals, is not progress. But if we mean the production through time of increasingly complex and controlling organisms and societies, in at least some lines of descent, with regression always a possibility, then evolutionary progress is an obvious reality . . . Across three million years, from the ancestral man-apes of Africa to the earliest anatomically modern Homo sapiens who lived about 200,000 years ago, the brain increased in volume four times over. Much of the growth occurred in the neocortex, the seat of the higher functions of mind, including, especially, language and its symbol based product culture.

Page 106. For Wilson the human brain was the end of the line. All meaning in creation was conferred by the brain, and all meaning resided there. The brain was the object of supreme importance as the terminus of evolution, and the ultimate goal of consilience was to reconstitute the brain artificially, thereby transferring total power over the seat of meaning. They ran out of time before that was accomplished. Wilson then referred to the fact that it was once blasphemous to speak of evolutionary progress. He became a kind of inquisitor searching through history for the sin of teleological thinking. Dreading being suspected of thinking evolution has a purpose, he timorously defended his use of the term progress. With respect to evolution and the theme of creation, regression is absolutely impossible: two human beings have never given birth to a monkey. But there is a larger problem with his definition of progress. By limiting the mind to biochemical processes, he sets the bar of progress very low: he recognizes only complexity and control as the measures of progress. Dismal.

Virtually all contemporary scientists and philosophers expert on the subject agree that the mind, which comprises consciousness and rational process, is the brain at work.

Page 107 Only blind faith could be so irrational, so out of touch with the world. The Manifestation saw an explosion of interest in consciousness among all manner of God-based philosophers, Christians, Buddhists, Islamicists, transreligious, and the few who knew of The Awakener. Of those who studied and wrote about consciousness in 1998, the vast majority accepted some kind of divine purpose or presence. Wilson's view represented a tiny minority of all philosophers of consciousness, scientists, and humanity at large.

They have rejected the mind-brain dualism of René Descartes, who in Meditationes (1642) concluded that 'by the divine power the mind can exist without the without the body, and the body without the mind.'

Page 108 Wilson continued his astonishing misrepresentation of the philosophy of his day. The Awakener had just provided humanity with a fresh dispensation of this Truth, and though millions did not follow Meher Baba, millions and millions thought and read and wrote and knew and prayed to divine independence in human consciousness.

According to the great philosopher, the noncorporeal mind and hence the immortal soul repose somewhere in the corporeal and mortal body.

In attempting to reveal Descartes' "mistake" Wilson unintentionally summarized Old Humanity's most accurate formulation of the soul. The Awakener had just provided specificity in that knowledge. In their seminal work (2010) on bio-sanskarics, Never Mind, It's Not Matter the Tylers revolutionized our understanding of how the jeevatma (individual soul) 'reposes' in the brain and interacts with the body during an incarnation. The bio-sanskaric interactions are daunting, and like all phenomena approaching infinite complexity, can be best conceptualized in Wolfram units.

The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbor a nonphysical mind.

Wilson displayed a shocking lack of imagination: if it does not occupy space or cannot be experienced through the five senses, it does not exist. His view denied the possibility of divine love, it denied love independent of bodily functions. It was also, of course, quite true—there is no particular site in the brain that 'holds' the mind. However, Wilson's conclusion that a nonphysical mind exists was rather like concluding the brain itself did not exist because the quantum wave-particles that composed it were invisible.

After a necessarily brief summary of those events—brief because they knew so little—Wilson got to the tantalizing core of his God-envy: how close are we to building a model, living brain? He felt a calling to minister to the doubting, although the human brain was very, very complicated nobody should lose faith that one could be made up in a lab. That was the ultimate goal of consilience. Baldly stated, it was their lack of love for humanity and all those naturally occurring brains that inflicted that goal on them.

What more can be said of brain structure? If a Divine Engineer designed it unconstrained by humanity's biological history he might have chosen mortal but angelic beings cast in His own image. They would presumably be as such ready made stewards of the beautiful planet bequeathed them.

Wilson soared about the brain. I was struck by the word bequeathed, as if the world was left to humans when God died. A Divine Engineer did dream it. His will has made us increasingly rational, far-seeing, wise, benevolent, unrebellious, selfless, and guilt-free, as our souls return to their source.

Wilson briefly mentioned the problem of goodness. Goodness, compassion, selflessness all presented thorny problems to scientific materialism. If the sole purpose of reproduction is reproduction, why do so many humans behave against their own chances to reproduce? Why do humans so consistently sacrifice physical safety and comfort so often on behalf of others? Wilson prized rationality above compassion, but he and other scientific materialists could not fail to notice compassion. This was theoretically troubling. How to explain a universal tendency that expresses itself in actions inimical to self-survival and self-interest?

Although it is the nature of philosophers to imagine impasses and expiate upon them at book length with school masterish dedication, the hard problem is conceptually easy to solve.

Like all zealots, Wilson mocked those who did not accept his philosophy. He was dismissive of the philosophers Jackson and Chalmers who worked on the so-called 'hard problem' which had to do with color perception. They tried to prove that there are qualities of consciousness, specifically color perception, that cannot be deduced solely from the physical brain. Of course, their fundamental view has survived intact.

Scientific materialism was a tautology in service of a preconception: evolution causes evolution, reproduction causes more reproduction, and experience leads to experience. In such a creation everyone lives for themselves, connected externally by the mechanical operations of their brains. Scientific materialism answers every challenge with tautology. In this case, pertaining to the subjective experience of color, Wilson droned rather idiotically, defining art as an essentially social process, as the means by which people of similar cognition reach out to others to transmit feelings, brain to brain. This was as absurd then as it is today.

Nevertheless, fundamental new information will come from science by studying the dynamic patterns of the sensory and brain systems during episodes when commonly shared feelings are evoked and experienced through art.

The creation of art is a profoundly nonsocial activity. It is the impulse to express Truth in the world of forms. The creative impulse and the social aspect of art are two different things. I was thinking about Ross Keating's book on Francis Brabazon. It was Brabazon's love of beauty as expressed in Art which brought him to Meher Baba. Brabazon's poetry had been challenged for lacking energy for the "supersonic" age of 1955. Brabazon: "The reaction of a person's nervousness has nothing to do with Art. Art is inspite of all nervous reactions and their cure. I am not interesed in your supersonic nervousness. and if you answer that this is escapism I will reply that your supersonic nervousness is escapism. I am interested in trying to find the eternal values which is Art within myself. These values are nothing to do with changes of temper or different ways of living. If you doubt this then you doubt (or perhaps you do not know of) a continuous living communication through the ages. The only thing that does change somewhat is the medium employed- e.g. change of language." Brabazon, the Awakener's poet, goes on way to state the experience of divine inspiration of all geniuses thusly "Art is the method of practising devotion to the True Teacher, who is the Supreme Artist; the whole universe being His creation and man His most finished work. To this Artist, every true artist has ever bowed, knowing that without His help he is helpless, without His inspiration he is void of any creativeness." Wilson told us science explains how we experience color, art transmits how we feel, and both are necessary to understand the subjective experience of color. Art is not about truth, it is about feelings.

Love is the reflection of God's unity in the world of duality. It constitutes the entire significance of creation. If love were excluded from life, all the souls in the world would assume complete externality to each other; and the only possible relations and contacts in such a loveless world would be superficial and mechanical. It is because of love that the contacts and relations between individual souls become significant. It is love that gives meaning and value to the world of duality. But while love gives meaning to the world of duality, it is at the same time a standing challenge to duality. As love gathers strength, it generates creative restlessness and becomes the main driving power of that spiritual dynamic which ultimately succeeds in restoring to consciousness the original unity of Being.

Discourses, page 116

Scientific materialism viewed the human being as a machine and human relations as mechanical. Love, was worse than a challenge, it was a positive enemy to be defeated. Wilson tackled the enemy love and bracingly encouraged that it can be reduced to a biochemical reaction. He denied love any parcel of brain anatomy. He reported there are only emotions and recent science divides emotions into primary and secondary types. Primary emotions are instinctual and secondary emotions are personal. The Awakener had just expanded our understanding of these phenomena and we would now say the primary emotions are predominantly the sanskaric endowment from animal forms and personal emotions are the sanskaras arising during the soul's journey across countless human lives.

What we call meaning is the linkage among the neural networks created by spreading excitation that enlarges imagery and engages emotion.

Page 126 In the absence of love, meaning is the anthology of humanness. O Neural Networks Thy Will Be Done! We love and hate and feel and think in unique ways according to the sanskaras associated with the incarnation. Wilson's views were influenced by Christianity and scientolatry. Both traditions denied reincarnation. Wilson followed his definition of meaning with brief definitions of major complex mental operations. Decision making was "competitive selection among networks.", Mood was "persistent emotion," and insanity "was the persistent production of scenarios lacking reality and survival advantage."

For Wilson, creativity did not involve inspiration and there was no form of understanding above the intellectual. Creativity was a brain-based ability to generate novel scenarios. In truth, creativity is a form of transcendence and positive egolessness. It has always been associated with an experience of Presence beyond the self—myth and superstition, claimed Professor Wilson. Gratitude to God for creativity is misdirected. It is all in the head. As a reductionist who studied insects, Wilson did not credit the experience of transcendence reported by creative people, and ordinary people at highly creative moments. They were all irrational and had only their neural networks to thank. Wilson was unaware of the five successive levels of consciousness above the intellect.

Instinct
Intellect
Inspiration
Intuition
Insight
Illumination
Realization

Even Christ we have been instructed, and Mary soon afterward, ascended to heaven in bodies—supernal in quality—but bodies nonetheless. If the naturalistic view of mind is correct, as all the empirical evidence suggests, and if there is also such a thing as a soul, theology has a new Mystery to solve. The soul is immaterial, this Mystery goes, it exists apart from the mind, yet it cannot be separated from the body.

This paragraph sets one's teeth on edge. Wilson's scientolatry was a reaction to Christianity. He had little or no awareness of the other avataric religions. Christianity was the only theistic religion in which the Avatar was publically executed, or so they thought. which perhaps explained their preoccupation with the physical body. Meher Baba cleared up Christian misconceptions about the relationship between universal mind, individual mind, and the body.

In any case, no evidence comes to us that the lovers of Christ rushed off to solve the nonexistent mystery of where the soul abides. Wilson questioned the location of the soul in order to deride spirituality, not to explore it. The mechanical-biological view Wilson slaved over rejected the possibility of the existence of supernal bodies. Wilson did not pose a sincere question about the Crucifixion, he taunted. In God Speaks and elsewhere The Awakener gave us at least sketchy information about archangels (sixth plane entities) and angels (third plane entities). Wilson's mind was open to the mechanics of evolution and closed to the inspiration for it.

Love pervades the universe
Life and love are inseparable from each other. Where there is life there is love. Even the most rudimentary consciousness is always trying to burst out of its limitations and experience some kind of unity with other forms. Though each form is separate from other forms, in reality they are all forms of the same unity of life. The latent sense for this hidden inner reality indirectly makes itself felt even in the world of illusion through the attraction that one form has for another form.

Love in inanimate nature
The law of gravitation, which all the planets and the stars are subject to, is in its own way a dim reflection of the love that pervades every part of the universe. Even the forces of repulsion are in truth expressions of love since things are repelled from each other because they are more powerfully attracted to some other things. Repulsion is a negative consequence of positive attraction. The forces of cohesion and affinity, which prevail in the very constitution of matter, are positive expressions of love. A striking example of love at this level is found in the attraction the magnet exercises for iron. All these forms of love are of the lowest type since they are necessarily conditioned by the rudimentary consciousness in which they appear.
In the animal world love becomes more explicit in the form of conscious impulses directed toward different objects in the surroundings. This love is instinctive, and it takes the form of gratifying different desires through the appropriation of suitable objects. When a tiger seeks to devour a deer, it is in a very real sense in love with the deer. Sexual attraction is another form of love at this level. All the expressions of love at this stage have one thing in common, namely they all seek to satisfy some bodily impulse or desire through the object of love.

Human love has to adjust to reason.
Human love is much higher than all these lower forms of love because human beings have fully developed consciousness. Though human love is continuous with the lower subhuman forms of love, in one way it is different from them. For henceforth its operations have to be carried on side by side with a new factor which is reason. Sometimes human love manifests itself as a force that is divorced from reason and runs parallel to it. Sometimes it manifests itself as a force that gets mixed up with reason and comes into conflict with it. Finally, it expresses itself as a constituent of the harmonized whole where love and reason have been balanced and fused into an integral unity.

For Wilson scientific materialism was an all-inclusive religion with an answer for every important human problem and puzzle. He tackled the enigma of free will with the same simplistic catechumen he brought to every aspect of humanness. Still, his brief discussion of free will is one of my favorite parts of Consilience because Wilson clearly wanted free will to exist. The best he could muster was that free will is a fortunate inability of brain chemicals to understand themselves. But you can sense his gratitude for even that rather dreary conclusion.

Scientific materialism went through several phases of development as a religion substitute during the last century of the Old Humanity. The misuse of science provided hubris to react against God and God-based compassion. During Wilson's lifespan it was repeatedly used in the service of totalitarian fascism and communism. In the name of materialism and pseudoscience, humanity had been reduced to extremes of cruelty. Though he was not at all aware of the human racism which his scientolatry necessarily exacerbated, he was aware of totalitarianism, racism, and religious hatred. He knew this history when he articulated his views on the problem of free will. And even then he was hesitant to claim for science ultimate control over human free will.

Another set of circumstances made Wilson approach the problem of free will cautiously. In looking at America of the Great Purification, we cannot avoid the prevalence of crime. The enlightened view—and this was a positive contribution of humanism—was that poverty, deprivation, lives surrounded by criminality, and addictions from the cradle all predisposed people to crime and undermined their free will. The conservative view was less forgiving. It tended to hold each individual responsible and punish according to deeds with no consideration of childhood factors. Obviously poor people and people exposed to criminality when children were more likely to be locked into prisons. Because criminality was so pervasive in Old America, the debate about childhood factors vs harsh free will determinism was an important one, and another reason why Wilson's God envy was slightly dampened on the question of free will.

We make decisions for reasons we often sense only vaguely, and seldom if ever fully understand. Ignorance of this kind is conceived by the conscious mind as uncertainty to be resolved; hence freedom of choice is ensured.

Translation: free will is an adaptive delusion. In a strictly mechanical view of evolution, free will is equivalent to brain will. Wilson determined that human choice was an illusion caused by the hidden machinations of mental (biochemical) activity. One can only believe that Wilson did not often think about this rather restricted and dismal view of free will, else he might have given up science altogether.

Suppose with the aid of science we knew all the hidden processes in detail. Would it then be correct to claim that the mind of a particular individual is predictable and therefore truly, fundamentally determined and lacking in free will? . . . But to pursue this line of reasoning into the ordinary realm of conscious thought is futile in pragmatic terms, for this reason: If the operations of a brain are to be seized and mastered, they must be altered. In addition, the principles of mathematical chaos hold. The body and brain comprise noisy legions of cells, shifting microscopically in discordant patterns that unaided consciousness cannot even begin to imagine. . . . Because the individual mind cannot be fully known and predicted, the self can go on passionately believing in its own free will. And that is a fortunate circumstance. Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive.

Translation: free will is an adaptive delusion. Wilson's deepest faith was that science would have total, perfect knowledge of the brain. This was his heaven, yet he demurred at the prospect of this total knowledge providing external control over human will. Wilson stepped back from the precipice of scientific totalitarianism by concluding that while knowledge, and the control it implies, might be theoretically possible it is impractical.

Of all the voodoo science that the materialists constantly spouted, the most unsubstantiated were pronouncements about which spiritual states offer "biological adaptiveness." Wilson constantly made claims that a given trait was biologically adaptive, without a scientific foundation for those claims. Throughout the book he announced that faith in God was "biologically adaptive." Now he finds that it is confidence in free will that confers the same advantage. This is the "Virgin birth" theory of scientific materialism, a sweeping belief with no basis in fact.

Even if "confidence in free will" existed in some form among primates, it would be impossible to establish through reductionist methods. Do people "with confidence in free will" have higher rates of reproduction? After spending my entire life studying the religious experience of the Old Humanity, I would conclude that confidence in God and religious piety increased reproduction and "confidence in free will" tended to depress birthrates. Certainly, in 1998, when scientific birth suppression was widely used, birth rates among theistic religious people were higher than among atheistic. How does that relate to confidence in free will? Does confidence in free will provide for a longer or healthier lifespan on the organismic level? There is no evidence for that generalization. For example in America in 1998 some of the longest lived, healthiest people belonged to an early 19th-century Christian sect called Mormonism. For the first 100 years this sect was polygynistic and therefore had enormously high reproductive rates. In 1998 Mormonism emphasized healthful dietary habits, moral self-control, large families and corporate capitalism. Its doctrine certainly did not emphasize individual free will. These historical facts directly contradict Wilson's declarations.

Finally, given that conscious experience is a physical and not a supernatural phenomenon . . .

Page 132 Wilson believed it was impossible to achieve complete knowledge of brain biochemistry of a living individual because 1) the methods of achieving that knowledge were too invasive and 2) body-brain biochemistry was too complex. However, he by no means closed the door on scientific totalitarianism. He believed it theoretically possible for science to create an artificial human mind. While it was not practical to grab Mr. Smith off the Main Street of Cleveland, Old Humanityio and defeat his free will by means of total scientific knowledge, the idea of being able to patch together Mr. Smith's brain and or brain effects in a laboratory was the trumpet blast that transfixed scientific materialism.

You remember their Constitution, the list of legal protections which had purified religion and made the practical effect of making misused science more dangerous to the Old Americans than misused religion. Those protections against "unlawful seizure" protected Mr. Smith's brain. Yet artificial production of part or whole human organisms was a goal of scientific materialism. In 1998 this goal was being pursued along several lines, from donated or commercially sold cells, as well as by using cells and body parts from human beings deemed expendable, specifically the youngest.

Wilson worked at Harvard University, which was considered to be the most prestigious University in America if not the world. Solicitations to purchase elite ova from Harvard students ran in the Harvard University student newspaper on an ongoing basis. There was a robust demand for elite ova. Scientific materialism made it easier for affluent educated people to feel comfortable spending a great deal of money to purchase agriculturally derived human babies, even while millions of the naturally acquired human babies of that time did not have enough to eat. I think I will leave off here.

Neural Networks, Thy Will Be Done!

The Mind