A pro-science worldview, and what more world-changing solutions science can provide

Incomplete draft

written for the site truthcontest.com, open contest for "the ultimate truth on life and death"

Introduction: what is your question ?

Hello all. I love exploring the worlds of mathematics, physics, and a few more fields where to similarly exert my passion of search for truth through careful analyzing, building theories and synthetizing, on sufficiently challenging but meaningful and reasonable subjects that comes at hand.
And you, what do you like ? "Truth contest". Wonderful ! Do you like truths ? Here you are: 2+2=4. Do you like it ?

Of course, there are much more interesting truths than this. For example I could tell you about the universe of mathematics, which is quite wonderful indeed. We can find there endless infinities of infinities, that can as well be modelized as views on the same infinite through different structures. There, it has been proven that any universal truth is provable. Still an open range of questions with a seemingly absolute meaning are in fact undecidable (they cannot be proven nor refuted). The undecidability of some claims about infinities could be proven by buiding in a universe where the claim is true, and another one where it is false. But many of such undecidabilities are themselves unprovable, so that an unprovable claim can have a fakely finite proof in another universe. Do you like this ?

Still not ? So, what else do you wish to know ? Do you like to know about the Big-Bang ? how can the universe expand, slow down and accelerate without having any known center to go from ? How can a black hole capture light if it cannot emit anything and the light keeps going upwards from it at the same constant speed (c) ? How can a particle be at many positions altogether, and how can it be the same thing as a wave ? How the stars form, shine and explode ?

Still not happy ? What else do you want to know then ? "...the truth about life and death..." ?

Do you want to know about life on Earth ? How was it possible for the oceans to form, and for life to develop there for billions of years before finally conquering the continents ? Do you want to know how the human species appeared and conquered the world ? How did they form nations and made wars together until finally building peace, prosperity and economic growth, finally endangering their own planet ? Do you want to know how could they finally discover all these things about the universe ?Still not your question ?

OK, I understand you very well. You don't just have questions, your are facing troubles, the same troubles that so many other people on this planet faced. First, that you are a concious being, and that you can't describe the nature of this conciousness which you are, in the same ways as you can study anything else. Second, you wonder how the universe and/or the world in which we live can be globally described and understood, and is there any sort of reason why it is this way rather than anyway else, and what the f**k dropped you on this planet. Third, what will happen to you after death, and is there any way for you to prepare to it. Forth, is there any or several purpose(s) or missions of your life, either about how to be happy or for anything else, and/or any particularly important truth(s) that you need to know for succeeding it.
These concerns are legitimate. And the problem is, despite all its wonderful progresses in discovering the truth, science did not seem to have any available answers to these troubles. Why ? But we will see that this accusation is not right: important rational answers can be given already and will be given here. Only the circumstances and proper efforts were missing to produce and/or spread such answers previously.

As time went and commonly heard answers remained unsatisfactory, you could panick and, like millions before you, shout your need for a "Utimate Truth", as if such a phrasing of a request could make you deserve (and/or be of any help for) getting better answers.
Until now, it looked like the only voices offering answers were those of religions and spiritualities, more or less unchanged since millenia, quite older (at this time) than science itself (in the sense that it is now much more developed than in the time of Ancient Greeks; which leaves unclear the question whether the age of spiritualities is a sign of quality or of defect). But unlike science, these voices often contradict each other and their reliability is unclear, so that you are left with the trouble to tell the right from the wrong in their teachings.
So I was also in this situation. For years I was led to follow spiritual answers (Evangelical Christianity, to be precise), but my scientific mind was developing and working in the background, examining what was happening. This was fortunate, as when my life finally ran to a collapse of these spiritual "truths", it did not leave me completely lost: despite all the troubles, I could manage to rebuild a consistent and reliable understanding of all those matters.
This includes the understanding of what is wrong with these spiritual teachings, and why; why do so many people still believe in them, and what more essential truths did they fail to discover on the very issues they claim to answer. How their attractiveness and appearance of wonderful coherence and reliability, that preserved them through the ages, is hiding quite a miserable quality of truth as compared to the now common standards of scientific understanding (which I finally managed to reach on these issues), once examined more closely. What are precisely the differences between science and spirituality, not just the easy and superficial ones that spiritualities usually raise to put themselves forward, but also some quite more subtle ones that appear from a scientific viewpoint, that can reply to the former by showing how science can indeed go far beyond spirituality, and are usually ignored by "spiritual people".

These are so many issues. I will try to explain the main ones, with a special focus on 2 goals. First, to dismiss a number of frequent wrong beliefs. Second, to explain important and still not well-known issues about where we are heading to, how to keep our planet safe, give life better chances to be worth living, and ensure that global progress will keep going. 

Do Near Death Experiences have anything to teach us ?

We are living in wonderful times. Thanks to the recent progress of technology, we have new opportunities to access the truth on a large diversity of subjects, that spiritual teachers of the past did not have. Do you want to know what happens to man after death ? It's easy. You just need a computer with internet access, and the initiative to type there "Near Death Experience" as a search phrase.

This way you can explore thousands and thousands of testimonies of people who visited death for a few moments before coming back to their earthly life, as well as the results of many studies that were made out of their collections. You can see that some of these people had the time or chance to visit wonderful realms in their experience, that you might like to call a "meeting with God". Or, as they would usually not use this word themselves, at least you can consider such an expression as one of the best possible approximations of a name for these experiences, as compared to anything else we are used to in this earthly life.

When I took this initiative of reading such testimonies (at the time of my deconversion from Christianity), even though it was other people's experiences and not mine, it overwhelmed me with one of the most tremendous feelings in life that I can imagine to have here before reaching there. It appears so naturally coherent with some intuitions that many people naturally have or can hope for about the mind/body duality, the meaning of life, our responsibility in this life, what is there after death, and that there exists a higher perspective on this life that we will have the opportunity to discover once finished. And, eventually, the existence of reincarnation. That these experience quite positively changed the lives of the people who had them, and gave them some deeper and more authentic values system than they had before.

At first sight, these testimonies may seem to confirm the teachings of religions and spiritualities that were there since millenia. Such insights on life and death were carried by spiritualities, not by science. So, does it mean that these spiritualities really carried any deep truths on essential questions, that science missed ?

Beware drawing fast and easy conclusions. The observed similarities can as well be explained in other ways that make this conclusion unnecessary. These natural intuitions on soul and death, which I mentioned to be in harmony with the testimonies, might as well (together with further social or logical mechanisms) stand as a large part of explanation for the creation, development and popularity of the traditional spiritual teachings, with no need of any more mysterious source of truth at their origin. There is neither any problem to bet that some near death experiences also occurred in the past and could directly or indirectly influence these teachings.

Therefore we still need to examine things in more details.
What lessons are precisely given by NDE testimonies, or can be reliably deduced from them (to be distinguished from any influence of unreliable beliefs and subjective reinterpretations by either experiencers or other authors that selected, presented and commented these testimonies) ?
How do these lessons differ from spiritual teachings, and what can be deduced from these differences ?
Are there any contradictions between both ?
Do spiritual teachings carry any important added information in comparison with those natural intuitions and experiences, and can we check how true and reliable is this added information ?

Considering these questions, the answers I could observe, looked rather strange and surprisingly disappointing at first sights. The most interesting NDErs, who seem to have met God and touched universal knowledge, usually forgot nearly everything of this universal knowledge while coming back, and do not have any Universal Truth left to teach us. They do have some quite nice and interesting things to tell us, but no very specific revelations of truths that we would need to know, beyond some relatively natural remarks (that we shall meet the effects of our acts to others, so we should care for each other, and similar things).

Another possibly surprising observation, is that no correlation could be found between the contents of these experiences, and prior religious affiliations of these people. One experiencer as I could read, even explicitly reported from his life review, that God does not care about our religious beliefs.
And while a few testimonies can be found of people who converted to a specific religion after their NDE, these are small numbers compared to those who left it, became more liberal about it or came to consider it irrelevant. And even though someone converted to Christianity just after his NDE, I do not remember of any testimony of someone with regrets during his life review, for not having converted to some religion earlier.
This observation directly dismisses any claim for a currently established religion or spiritual teachings, to be necessary or even useful for people to access heaven after death, as this chance turns out to not affected by it (remaining open to complete materialists as well).

Another remark can be found to support this conclusion. Many of these people with a fantastic encounter with God in their NDEs, complained that they could not find the words to express their experience. So, while it is somehow visible that their experience (and the Universal Knowledge some of them could touch), truly went far beyond anything describable with words, they still did not get from there any significant Truth of a type that that can be taught to us but that we could not easily guess ourselves based on some basic natural intuition, nor (with possible rare exception ?) any specific new mission for them to fulfill. Maybe, there would be some hidden reason for this, that we would not know. Is it a will of God to leave us manage on this planet without any instruction from Him, as some testimonies may indeed suggest, or any other kind of impossiblity for such a revelation to be done ? This remains unclear at first sight. Still, some testimonies do suggest a sort of answer to this question: that we came to this Earth in order to make a life and manage things on this Earth, rather than for remaining obsessed about the heavenly things that we left behind and that we will recover later, once this life will be over, as these heavenly things would be of a so different type, that they would be here completely irrelevant.

Now, compare this with how it goes with spiritual teachers. I do not know a large number of spiritual teaching, but despite their repeated claims to be speaking about more essential realms beyond words, I did not notice there any complain of a difficulty for them to express what they are meaning, and overall the spiritual experience they are putting forward, seemed quite less extraordinary than those of the deepest near death experiencers who had no message for us.
This inspires me a big distrust towards any claim by spiritual teachers to have got from their voluntary spiritual path "beyond words" any essential truth for us that we would need to know.

This does not mean that there is no Truth worth caring about, but obliges us to relativize and reformulate the question. So we shall continue the study through other types of considerations.

Can a Ultimate Truth exist, and do people need to know it ?

At this point, the information that seems to be deduced from from the above consideration, may look quite strange: that there seems to be, finally, no message from God (or other Universal Truth from a supernatural orgin) for us on this planet. This looks quite strange, because it contradicts a conviction that some of us may feel, along the same type of metaphysical intuition that met confirmation in the study of NDEs, that God should not have let us orphans here, but should have had something to tell us, because right and wrong do exist and our moral sense needs to know what it is that we should be doing here.

And the above argument to claim that there would be indeed no message for us from beyond, does not seem very reliable yet. Therefore we need to test this strange claim against more arguments and observations of other types, to get more reliable knowledge about it.

First, we can notice that not a majority of people really care for the truth. Many people just care about what they do in their life, without any higher consideration, even if they happen to be in a religion just because it is the religion of their country that they follow without many questions. You might call this regrettable, expecting things to be better if they cared more about the truth. However, sorry to disappoint you but, after all my experience of vain tries to talk with religious and other people, I don't deplore this indifference of many, once put in context. On the contrary, I do approve the right of many people to not care about the truth, may it be Universal or specific, if they are not naturally interested with it, provided that they don't oppose it either (either the information of what the truth is, or the actions it shows to be needed).

My problem was that, many of the important truths about life that I could discover and try to share with people around, turned out to be of a too complex type for these people to grasp and accept. It would just have been a too big work for them.
Remember: I explore many subjects just like I do mathematics. If I tried to share my thoughts about high mathematics with people around, they just would not be able to follow. This is not a trouble as long as they do not care about mathematics, because in this way they are letting me in peace and free to develop my mathematical ideas in myself and share them easily with any of the rare other people that would be interested. The troubles come when the involved issues are of a kind that people do care of. Indeed in such a case, many people are strongly believing something, that is in fact false. There is no solution to make them accept the truth on the subject, which is too complex for them to grasp properly. Thus, there is no solution either to stop them from strongly believing false views and trying to propagate them. And their attachment to a false view naturally leads them to scorn anyone who disagrees, even if the other person is in fact right.
Thus we arrive to the following paradox:

The more a majority of people care for the truth in intention, the more this makes them oppose it in practice.

Looks strange for you ? For a scientist, this remark is usual. This phenomenon is a significant part of the explanation how science could succeed in its search for truth, while spiritualities failed.
Scientists managed their search for truth through the opportunity they had to exchange ideas in priority with the small minority of other skilled specialists in their research field, without disturbance from anyone who does not have the necessary knowledge for bringing a useful contribution to the issue being worked on.

On the other side, spiritualities were all focused on the same question of the "ultimate truth on life and death", and based their "success" on their popularity, i.e. the acceptance of their teachings by the large public. And the problem is that the design of a teaching aimed for looking credible in the eyes of a large public, is not usually compatible with a strive for conformity to the truth.

These remarks, that will be developed later, will not be here for claiming that this world is going well (indeed, science aims for progress, which is based on the assumption that the world needs to change), nor that it would not be in need of new important truths, but that we should be careful of what sort of truth is needed, which should not be required to enter some predefined format and criteria that some may expect.

Concretely, while I do wish there existed more clever people like me, able to discover and understand deep truths, I do not believe in the sustainability of a world made of copies of myself, as I know my life depends on the works of many people that I would not be ready to replace.

Finally, how can spiritualists ever pretend to want or expect the truth about life and death to be universally understandable and acceptable ? Very many times, debates have been ongoing between spiritualists and atheists, about the existences of God, the mind/matter duality and the afterlife. While it might be arguable that the ones had good arguments that the others failed to undertand or to answer, I cannot pretend to resolve and close the debate in the present text. And nobody else can do it in this precise format either (of a reference text of the currently established or at least easlly defendable refence text of a "universal truth").

Thus, I'm going to imitate heaven's indifference with respect to metaphysical faith and its reluctance to leave us any important information about itself, by dedicating most of the following sections to truths about life, that will remain equally acceptable and arguable independently of whether mind/matter duality and afterlife do exist or not. For, ifever there was indeed a good reason why on this Earth we don't naturally know much about afterlife, and why God did not leave us any revelation about it, then we should respect it. And indeed, as we will see, many important truths about this life are here in need to be taken care of by rational means.

The sense and nonsense of life and its waste.

Imagine 3 characters: a presenter (P), a theologian (T), and an scientist (S).

P: Hello Mr T. What are your views about life and the universe ?

T: I believe that life has a purpose. We are not living here just by chance. Every life is valuable.

P: And you Mr S ? Do you agree with him ?

S: Hard to see how this could be. Do you realize that the emergence of man on this planet is a fruit of a very long and painful process of natural selection and evolution ?

T: I agree that the ancient vision of a world made in 6 days with man directly created by God, was not factually true. However I still consider that even the whole universe, including its precise process of evolution and natural selection, had been envisioned in advance and made happen by God, for a purpose.

S: And what do you think this purpose could be ?

T: Just see: we are here to talk about it ! Isn't this wonderful ?

S: Very well. Now I have a surprise for you. I created a new time machine.

P: Wonderful ! Shall we be able to travel in the past or future with this ?

S: Well, not exactly. But we will be able to communicate through time. Now I'm tuning this machine for communicating with the Earth as it was in year 123,456,789 BC.

P: Wow! What can we find there ?

S: This was during the reign of Dinosaurs. Look here: this animal is one of the early Mammals. A member of the mammal specie which formed that time's common ancesters of most of the mammals we are familiar with. Of course it cannot speak, but this machine can directly communicate with its mind and translate its contents to and from English langage. Here it is ! Hello, Mammal !

M: Hey, what's this ? Who are you ?

S: We are humans.

M: What are humans ? This looks so strange !

S: Uh... we are in fact, some of your grand-grand...grandchildren.

M: I can't believe it ! You are too different from me or from my babies.

S: Don't worry. We are just here to exchange some thoughts with you.

M: Okay, so what are you thinking about ?

P: We are discussing the sense of life. And T. has some interesting ideas about it.

M: Hello T. What did he say ? the sense of life ?

T: Yes, I think every life has a sense, a purpose.

M: Oh ? This world I live in is so hard, strange and terrifying to me. Do you think this all makes sense ?

T: Yes, it does.

M: but, what it is this sense, then ?

T: Well, you are a very important creature in the eyes of God, that sent you there for a wonderful mission. Can you imagine ? You are a member of a very long chain of creatures that will lead to the emergence of humans (like us) 123,456,789 years after you !

M: But... how much is 123,456,789 years ? Sorry, I cannot count. And I hardly understand anything else you are saying, either.

T: Never mind. You need not understand how much is this precise amount of time, as for God, 1 day is like 1,000 years, and 1,000 years are like 1 day.

M: So, what can I understand of it ? Is there a divine purpose why I am struggling here ?

T: Yes.

M: Then, what should I do, to fulfill this purpose ? Please tell me something I can understand !

T: That's simple, To fulfill your divine mission, you don't need to understand much. You just have to eat, grow and reproduce if you are healthy and clever enough to make it, or perish otherwise.

M: Wow! Thank you T for having enlightened me about God's plans for my life. From now on I will know the way to follow God's will.

Here is a conclusion I will already suggest : the sense of life cannot be altogether existing, unique, and universal. Just as there are a diversity of worlds in the universe, a diversity of species and individuals on this planet, a diversity of questions to be answered, there are also a diversity of possible ultimate senses of life, which may be positive (eventually much better than it seems), but eventually negative too. It can be very different from what is directly felt by the person, who does not necessarily need to know it for it to be fulfilled.

Vocabulary note on the word "Spirituality"

When preparing to write the next sections, I guessed there would be a big risk of misunderstanding unless I develop in advance the following explanation on the use I will make of the words "spiritual" and "spirituality".
Indeed there is a sort of paradox, but I see the source of the difficulty as coming from the cultural context of this world.
In a sane cultural context, there would be no such problem: it would be possible to use the words "spiritual" and "spirituality" to name the sorts of things and qualities that these words naturally suggest.
These could range, for example, from aspects and supernatural realities observed in near death experiences, to a diversity of higher-than-usual activities of the human spirit, like science, philosophy, arts, litterature and mutual understanding.

Unfortunately in the present world, the use of these words happened to be captured by a wide range of traditions (from mainstream religions to a large number of independent individuals) which used them specifically to qualify their own practices (or aspects of it).

The effect of this circumstance is that (as will be progressively explained in the next sections), in the present world, trying to learn what is Spirituality and how to become more spiritual by hearing the teachings and testimonies, and observing the behavior of, people who often use and highly value these words, is something like it could have been to study and observe what is a democratic Republic by visiting and living in countries of the Soviet Union. You see the misunderstanding trouble: in these countries, criticizing the regime in force was interpreted as meaning to be an ennemy of communism, of revolution, of democracy, and of the people. How could it be possible to claim to be a Democrat while opposing the People's Republics ?

Thus for spirituality, there is the following dilemma: should we use "spirituality" to name its ideal meaning, or its traditional use ? It turned out to me that, given the circumstances, the only practical option was to stick to its traditional use, and claim loud that I oppose Spirituality, despite the risk of misunderstanding of such a claim at first sight. This will have quite odd consequences, such as that "false spirituality" will be a pleonasm, "authentic spirituality" a contradiction, and that "spiritual" roughly means "ignorant and proud of it".
So in the next sections, I will list a number of negative features of spirituality. This does not mean to claim that all kind of spirituality will necessarily have these features, but that I invite the reader, for whatever specific example of a spirituality he would consider, to examine in details, for each negative feature I mention, whether it applies or not to his case, together with my explanations of why this feature is indeed negative.

Spirituality and the ego problem: introduction

I find it astonishing how it could be possible for many spritualities to teach and hold as a sort of unquestionable evidence, that [reason = ego], whereas [spirituality = selflessness, dissolution of the ego]. Indeed, all the evidence I could observe seemed to show that the real correspondance is rather the other way round.
However, such an absurd belief can still be explained: that spiritual teachings first developed that kind of view when science did not exist yet, with in its place some elaborate strategies of war or unfair quests for wealth and power that catches so much the attention of the people; then, it kept propagating with no problem in the modern world across the vast majority of people who remain unfamiliar with science (their mind not direcly concerned with it), and for whom the scientific mind remains a sort of UFO.
Ignoring the depths of science, they would easily mistake science's use of the mind with other, wrong uses of the mind.
Easy reaction: from the observation that there exist people doing wrong things of a given sort (here: with one's mind), some deduce that it is wrong to do anything of this sort. 
As if anyone could do anything significant in the world without using one's mind.
Such a reaction is explained here (/social-paralysis)

Or to be a little more elaborate, some draw this view from the external connections currently linking science with untrustworthy actions or institutions (administrative connections, matters of technological innovation, and the ways in which technology has been used, which was not always wise and fair).
Or they can just relate the mind to the self-interest motivating anyone bothering to use one's mind for productive work. We will come back to these issue later.

We must mention the reply that spiritualities would do for their defense, that is, while it is true that the universe is big and very complex, our souls are still very important beings there because of their special value and the special depth of their essence; and that their study and training would be of special importance because of the benefits produced by the spiritual knowledge and practice.

I can admit that, so that I do accept spiritual research as having its own rightful place among the diversity of activities and searches in the big puzzles of life and truth. I would just like to say on this subject, that:
1) a careful rational work needs to be done to check any spiritual claim whenever possible;
2) no matter whether such claims can be checked or not, many more crucial truths for mankind can be scientifically established, as will be developed in the next section, unaffected by this issue;
3) anyway, the object and stakes of this spiritual search remains restricted to the limits of this earthly life, which is (as seems to be expressed from NDEs and as many spiritual people themselves claim), but a small part of the universal path of one's spirit in the supernatural realm; this larger path turned out to remain generally unaffected by this kind of work (as we previously mentioned, and which would need serious observational results to be dismissed).

The Copernician revolution

An important step at the start the scientific era, was the discovery (or rediscovery) that the Earth is not in the center of the Universe. This idea shocked the religious establishment, whose doctrine was saying that man was created by God in his own image. Indeed this doctrine could fit well with the view of the Earth at the center of the universe, but was harder to defend otherwise.

Then, progressively, science discovered that the Universe is extremely big, that the Sun is not the center of it either (and generally, the Universe has no center). Also, humans are not essentially different from animals; that time is large, so that human history is but a small part of the global history of life on Earth. Life evolved very slowly based on a large accumulation of random events in a wild environment ruled by the survival of the fittest. Humans emerged through a series of events that seem accidental.

If there had been a higher purpose for the way this evolution happened, we could wish it had been done better. For example faster, with a smaller waste of species that disappeard (including some nearly human species). Or also, we can regret that the ability of the first terrestrian vertebrates to see in 4 fundamental colors (red, gree, blue and ultraviolet), inherited for example by birds, were not kept for humans (as the green and ultraviolet were lost in the evolution to mammals, then the red one split into red and green for humans later).

Then, the exploration of the universe by science happened as an exploration of a universe of knowledge, which clearly did not have the question of the sense of human life in its center. From a scientific viewpoint, the universe of the truth and knowledge is an immense universe with no center.
In particular, our own lives and our conditions of happiness, individually or collectively, are no more at the center of the truth, than is man or the Earth at the center of the Universe.
Scientifically, there is not one Truth, but an illimited landscape of specific truths: there are a potential infinity of questions that can be raised, and there may only be a unique truth to be discovered on every specific question, provided it is a well-defined question.

This does not mean there would not exist more important questions than others (indeed, science is full of examples of specific unifying truths that are quite more important than others). This does not mean either that the current disperson of science is always good. Indeed I find it sometimes regrettably more dispersed than it should be, and that some more general and important questions or research domains were pitifully neglected.
But this means that, if we want to find or understand important and useful truths for our lives and duty on Earth, then it requires quite a deal of intelligence, work and luck, and the right way to this goal may be not a direct one.
In particular, scientists'ability to form a global understanding of life and the universe was based on the large diversity of independent research works that each brought a different piece of the puzzle.
This can be seen as a virtual Copernician revolution that defines an essential character of the opposition between science and spirituality.

The spiritual anthropocentrist conception of the truth

Spirituality always focused its interest on who we deeply are and what is our own deep interest, either by forms of introspection or from any other source: our deep feelings, motivations, values and duties, and what is after death. They usually view themselves and/or human life in general, as the navel of the truth, forming a more or less an anthropocentric conception of the truth that may be characterized by the following:
(1) That it should be easily accessible to anyone sincerely searching for it
(2) That knowing the truth personnally should be the key to one's personnal happiness
(3) That claiming the truth should make one sound respectable

The problem is the temptation (sometimes unconcious) for many people to be influenced by such expectations as if they could be useful hints to distinguish the truth. But in fact, the truth has no duty to serve us in particular in such ways. Its only duty is to be true. Indeed for example there has undeniably been many people who sincerely searched for the truth and could not get it. But you can note, for example, that there is no tremendous necessity to consider (1) as desirable, as finding the truth is not a requirement to enter heaven.

And why should all these conditions be required to hurryingly apply to all humans now, while they clearly could not apply to our ancestors, and even hardly recently ? Who do we think we are ?

Indeed, if you consider that the dignity of life is in its diversity, and the digniy of the spirit is to create new ideas, they you can't wish to reduce the sense of life of a large majority of people, to the role of selectors and propagators of a unique Truth fixed in advance.

First, the main duty of the truth in general is to be true, rather than to satisfy the above or any other requirements. Second, the specific truths of importance to our life should be selected for being (and would desirably be) true and useful in the service for the people; while these people, insofar as they did not know this truth in advance (as they would still need to receive it), ought not to have be designed to be the best selectors and propagators in the service of this truth. Indeed: spreading and selecting every specific truth of importance needs to be done only once in the long story of mankind, rather than being a perpetual task to be easily repeated !

If only the requirement (1) and eventually (3), could work for a significant enough number of humans so that it would make it possible for them to limit the world's troubles into a relatively safe situation in the short term (that, at least the Earth would not be destroyed), until, hopefully, it would become more universally accepted in a later time, then we should already consider this as a big progress.

How can it be ?
For propagation, machines (formerly the printing industry; currently the Internet) can be much more efficient. For selection, some sorts of social structures where a few people operate the selection for propagation to the many, can be useful, though ill-designed social structures that were dominant until now, did not always do a good job in this area (we will come back to this issue later).

Let's go further: do you think there should exist a sort of universal truth in the sense that it should be understandable by anyone, and that its understanding and acceptance by everyone should be useful ? I don't. Consider this: if you really want that sort of universality, while the diversity between humans is just a restricted version of the same nature as the differences between humans and animals, then you should extend this universal character of the same truth to animals too.
Obviously, you can't.
Thus, you can't a priori require the expected deep truth, to be understandable and acceptable by the majority of people either. Just like the deep truth and importance of quantum physics, is not based on its understandability and acceptability by the public. This does not preclude the possibility for a truth to be universally useful, as we will explain now.

Openness of rationality and its fruits

When a scientists makes a discovery, once this is established, constitutes an irreversible progress for mankind, as the knew knowledge becomes available to all mankind forever, and will not need to be repeated, and can be useful as a basis for further progress. When some engineers do applied science to innovate and produce a new technology, this technology becomes widely avalable to a large number of people. Most of these are non-scientists, that can enjoy the fruits of the new technology with no need for them to study the scientific theories that made these technologies possible and decide if they agree or disagree (for example, the theory of electromagnetism that wireless communication is based on).
In other words, the benefits of a scientific or technological innovation, operated by a person or a given limited set of people, are automatic, universal (worldwide) and irreversible.
The technologies based on deep scientific truths, benefit all, with no kind of faith-based discrimination (just like NDEs showed that heaven makes no faith-based discrimination) such as would be induced by a requirement to understand and accept these truths.

For rational people, ego problems and similar things (bad feelings, insults) are usually not the navel of the problems at stake. They may occur sometimes, and may sometimes be a problem, but are not usually the main problem. Not because scientists managed to conquer the light of selflessness, but because, most often, ego problems were not here in the first place. And even if people may get angry and call each other names, this may be just a normal and useful process for the progress of the debate.

What the search for truth is about, and that many rational people do care for and are most sensitive to in a rational debate, is whether the debate is progressing on the rational level (and how efficiently does the other's attitude contribute to this goal), rather than what feelings the participants can be having meanwhile.
Because the main feature of rationality, is less about being serein (though this may help) than about how one can manage to lead one's understanding and jugements to the conformity of correct rational processes, without being biased by whatever feelings one could have. Moreover, the rational process is something progressive in time while feelings may fluctuate. Thus, when a jugement is expressed with anger, it should not be forgotten that the anger is not always a good explanation for the jugement, because the judgement might also be the expression of the conclusion which emerged from a rational process that previously developed carefully for a long time, in a way unbiased by such feelings.

Large scientific projects can be the place of "utopian" cooperation processes, with no significant hierarchical/domination troubles, while contributors are focused on their use of reason. A physicist developing a theory beyond the Standard Model, competing with other candidate theories to be tested in particle accelerators, would not normally take it personnally if his theory was refuted by experimental results.

The spiritual ego, in practice

Spiritual practice, on the other hand, usually consists in sorts of works for the practioner's own soul.
Spiritual practitioners are often focused on changing their own self, for accumulating there fruits of peace, joy, "spirituality", and... "selflessness" (while managing to forget that they are in this way entirely caring of their own deepest and most personal self). Not only do many focus on the navel of their own self to try to accumulate selflessness in it, but they assume this activity to be the navel of what any human should do, and more generally, to be the navel of the Universe's problems.
Especially, they would assume any conflict or disagreement to be a fruit of ego problems; and their conviction of having made themselves the best work of making their own self selfless and therefore enlightened, and therefore omniscient, provides them the conviction that the problem must be coming from the other person's ego. Especially if the other person claims to be knowing the subject better - an idea that many spiritual people cannot even consider to be possibly true (it's not their "fault", so they don't deserve to be the mistaken one !).

For example, many "spiritual people" (or many people in general) would easily come to teach other people what to think for feeling well out of their own experience of how they could feel, as if the way all people feel should be the same. Thus, a spiritual one feeling well should be taken as a universal example of how to do and what to think in order for anyone else in the world to feel good as well. Therefore, anyone else claiming to feel things differently from this person should automatically be wrong. This is made especially worse when the required change is not just about trying something, like you can try a medicine or a sport, but also about believing something. Spiritual people would consider it spiritual to accept to believe or think something for that reason (that it makes one feel well), while they would call it "hard-heartedness" to refuse it. But the truth is that choosing to hold something as true for an advantage whatsoever, rather than after a proof of its truth, is the very definition of corruption.

The situation becomes especially absurd with a claim such as: "Do you think you are the only one suffering ? There are many people more unfortunate than you !". Let's analyze this argument and its motivations.


Spiritual people believe that giving other people advice on how they should think, is the best they can do for them.
Spiritual insulting advice
Spiritual sense of morality: to feel those they are helping - that every other's problem is an imaginary problem.
Resentement is dismissed

to be interesting "you won a million"


Thus, many spiritual people are sticked into the desperate and endless strive for selflessness, a mirage that always withdraws as they approach it, until they might manage to delude themselves enough for believing they reached it. Then they might become Masters of Spirituality surrounded by tens or hundreds of worshippers.


More sections will be added later. For example:

The truth is mental, but not conversely

The limits of reason ?
If reason did not work, science would not exist

Seeing the mind in colors
MBTI

Truth and happiness


Math & physics are absolutely amazing. Plato's cave is no exaggeration as an image for has already been already accomplished by science.

legitimate bitterness against spirituality

Reason/feeling  =  work/leisure
(monks don't work)
Serious for the heart

When the spiritual people "explain" disagreements with their views by negative feelings (pseudo-skeptics do the same), but call for a feeling-based judgement

The scientific & academic institutions

Scientific education far from true science; many pseudo-physicists...Scientific teaching problem
ISTJ

The academic system as a whole is not a decided well-thought conception of scientists, and its role has never been to properly share and show what science really is. Its main role was to be a democratically and administratively stable way of managing a population, the overwhelming majority of which has no chance to really understand science anyway; to provide them with diplomas, hopefully (but not always reasonably) likely to let them chances to find a job. Only little hints of real science were reflected there. Scientists have been the servants of this system, mainly because they hardly had any other option to keep their jobs.

gifted children / decrease of level and popularity of scientific studies

The ivory tower of science: assets and drawbacks - lack of political consciousness among scientists
Dead lectures
Scientific jobs, financing problem
Hyperspecialization

What is science

Falsifiability
Do Science and Spirituality have any common subject to discuss, agree or disagree on ?
The infalsifiability can emerge at the global level
Ultimacy vs Relevance
Proton mass computation
The hiearchy of physics theories
(non-essentialism)
Naming a list of principles of scientificity is irrelevant; natural ability and practice is what makes the difference. Most scientists did not follow any course on the scientific method, but only mathematics (proofs...)

How debates go rationally or irrationally:
How to root rationality standards - exclude irrational people from the debate - the scientific standard is the only proven truth standard
Insanity: keep trying the same thing and expecting it to suddenly produce different result

False or low quality sciences

Marxism
Psychanalysis
Philosophy
Economics
(Medicine)
Psychiatry

Religions: origins and specificities

Meme theory confirmed in practice
The mind as a computer

Is it necessary to read all before replying
"don't force to believe"
Archeology of Egypt
MBTI and religion
Miracles, changed lives, have no relevance to truth

Why Science is needed for metaphysics too

Why falsifiability is necessary for metaphysics too:  big paradoxes makes questions insolvable by pure logic :
- cubic jugement dilemma or karma problem made worse by spiritualities themselves
- stupid design
- miracles are made to support wrong doctrines
- no email for connection or dating

Metaphysics

Metamathematics and time
Immortality

Operational definition of the mind-matter duality : AI cannot pass the Turing test.
Definition of the physical universe
QM interpretation
Parapsychology and miracles
Anthropic principle and fine-tuning of physical constants

Karma and fate

Why is the karma law irrelevant
Human dignity ? opposed attitude of science  & spirituality wrt fate
(artificial rain)

Work, nature & technology


The nature of work is freedom and innovation

Reprogramming the outside world

Global job market and its consequences


Autopsy of Marxism


Problms with open source community
(reverse capital risking)

IT solutions for a better world

Waligore connections + his criticism of a "Present"
Putting religions in front of their contradictions
sharing transport & housing
newciv
Voting methods

Carbon tax and other environmental issues

Public debt problem


The dating problem

The banana tree
"Ego" and fate
Solutions for dating :
Online dating
Ribbon
Group meetings
(TV)
Keeping contact
Relational education

Further future

Overpopulation
How can mankind keep evolving

Fate of the Earth
Accelerated expansion
Conclusion: the quest for truth is endless
Back to the Antispirituality entry page

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