Voltaire's Bastards

Neutrality, Taboos, and Fanatics: The Ethics of Reason

Reason is neutral. At least it should be. But reason has been made to serve the ideology of unlimited growth exploitation. The word “Scientist” is tricky. In a sense there are no scientists, only people who do science. Science has no ism. As Voltaire once put it, “There are no sects in Geometry.”

Voltaire

Voltaire ushered in the “Enlightenment” in 18th Century Europe, and was celebrated as its hero. He defined the reaction against the bloodbaths provoked by religious fanaticism:

“Fanaticism is to superstition what delirium is to fever and rage to anger. The man visited by ecstasies and visions, who takes dreams for realities and his fancies for prophecies is an enthusiast; the man who supports his madness with murder is a fanatic.”

We are all familiar with the excesses of religion. One need only travel on an airplane to be reminded of the dangers of terror fanatics with bombs.

I was asked by a friend the other day, “Why attack Hawking or Dawkins. These men are irrelevant. Who cares?” He had a point. It’s true that Dawkins, for example, hasn’t really done “science” for some time. He has hardly made any great contributions in the field of evolutionary biology. Why bother? The problem is these views are tremendously influential. I hear in commonplace conversation that no one has ever proved God’s existence. I see any number of opinion makers repeat the idea that God is created by men. Over and over I hear that there is no evidence for anything spiritual or supernatural, and that the spiritual world is a lie invented by fools and madmen. Voltaire, of course, was the grand-daddy of these arguments. There is nothing original about the so-called "New Atheists." While Dawkins and company dress their 19th century views in 21st century language, they really rely on Voltaire for their reheated ideas. They pitch themselves as pioneers, raging against the machine of religious fanaticism.

Scientists are running the machine

But, in point of fact, the so-called scientists themselves are running the machine. And the results of hundreds of years of the “Age of Reason,” has had curious results.

The march of reason has been steadily inculcated into Western society since the dawn of philosophy. It was the light which would lead us out of Plato’s dark cave. The Greeks saw logos as the distinction between humans and animals. Aristotle called us “rational animals” with emphasis on reason. But the rational approach to human life began to be exalted after Descartes defined our very existence on the basis of rational thought with his cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” When 16th Century philosophers shook of the chains of scholasticism they sought refuge in the ancient Greeks, taking Socrates and Plato as their models. They began to relieve themselves of Christian superstition and seek truth in reason.

Cogito Ergo Sum

Since the time of Descartes, the concentration on the “rational” element in thought intensified. “Reason” was exalted over all other ways of knowing or experiencing life: passion, emotion, fancy, dreams, visions, prophecy, faith, intution, spiritual knowledge, all these were cast aside. Logic alone would lead us to a higher destiny. Myth and magick were discarded; only the mythology of reason would be accepted. In time the mythological importance of reason would eclipse all else, even life and death.

With the help of such brilliant writers as Will and Ariel Durant, historians and philosophers have created useful nomenclature for different periods of thought: The Age of Reason, Classicism, Romanticism, and so on. But while we may have tweaked the details, the ideas have changed little. The currency of faith has gradually been devalued to the point of being worthless. At the same time reason has gained currency. Logic and reason are embedded in the very roots of Western civilization.

And so, the atrocities of the modern age can hardly be attributed to religion as Sam Harris has tried to do. The atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition pale before the pantheon of horrors created by science. Of course it is a caricature to think of scientists as madmen. And yet, isn’t human experimentation a logical extension of the scientific method?

Hitler’s national project was to be a rational project. In his book Voltaire’s Bastards, social critic John Ralston Saul points out how the corruption of reason led to the atrocities of national socialism: “ The original easy conviction that reason was a moral force was gradually converted into a desperate, protective assumption. The twentieth century, which has seen the final victory of pure reason in power, has also seen unprecedented unleashings of violence and of power deformed. It is hard, for example, to avoid noticing that the murder of six million Jews was a perfectly rational act.”

Hitler constructed a railroad. From registration to deportation and extermination there was a straight line on the railroad. Every movement along the railway was punctually and scientifically executed with cold, rational calculation and precision.



 Hitler’s registration of Jews was worked out by the same minds who later pioneered the computer technology of IBM, as documented in New York Times bestseller "IBM and the Holocaust." Computer science is neutral. It has no ethics.

There are no sects in geometry or the algorithms of Google. Aeronautics is neutral.  The very rocket scientists of the V-1 buzz bombs began the space programs in the United States and the Soviet Union.  http://www.uncubemagazine.com/blog/12603627

Wernher Von Braun, Nazi Rocket Scientist at V2  rocket base at  Peenemünde, 1943

Lethal V2 Rocket bound for London

Wernher Von Braun, Nasa Scientist, pioneer of V2 Buzz bomb

Since, according to Voltaire, “there are no sects in geometry,” scientists cannot be classified as Nazi scientists and Communist scientists. Science is neutral. It makes no ethical assumptions. The scientists who worked for the German war effort during the 1940s made many experiments whose results have made contributions in the fields of hypothermia for example.  https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005168
Cold seawater experiments conducted at the death camps of Dachau would see how long a person could survive upon being immersed.

Scientists interested in the freezing point of human beings would put naked Jews in a meat locker and see how long it would take for them to freeze to death.

We now know the freezing point of Jews thanks to these men of science. We also know their boiling point as well as the effects of nerve gas.

We know much about how twins react to poison gas, thanks to the experiments conducted by famous scientist Dr. Joseph Mengele.

The insecticide you use to kill cockroaches in your kitchen was developed thanks to the efforts of the men at I.G. Farben who developed Zykon B with the help of the World War II scientists who exterminated gypsies, homosexuals, Jews and other dissidents. The same scientists demonstrated the best techniques for rendering melting human cadavers into soap. There was no ethical consideration involved in the rendering of Europe’s best composers, poets, and philosphers into soap. It was merely a question of technique.

Of course, the Nazi scientists were aberrations. That was a special kind of evil. Or was it? Is ethics-neutral science practiced at home? Eileen Welsome finds that it is. Consider  the government-engineered radiation experiments on unwitting Americans documented in her Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Plutonium Files. In its book review, The New England Journal of Medicine: “Doctors working with the Manhattan Project initially injected plutonium into 18 men, women, and children. They acted without obtaining the consent of these people, informed or otherwise, and without therapeutic intent. Their mission was to study dispassionately the “fiendishly toxic” effects of plutonium on selected groups...But the radiation experiments did not end there, nor even with the end of World War II. The malignant flowering of curiosity about the effects of radiation on humans continued for three more decades. Until the 1970s, government scientists and physicians made use of unwitting Americans in order to discover the effects of exposure. Scientists already knew that radiation was dangerous. Newspaper accounts had graphically detailed the radiation poisoning of women in New Jersey who painted the dials of watches with radium, who died horribly while they were still young. The hands of Nobel laureate Marie Curie, the discoverer of radium, were chronically covered with radiation burns, and she died of radiation-induced leukemia in 1934. Many people who worked with x-rays died of various forms of leukemia.

But scientists wanted to know more. What types of physiologic damage were caused by specific levels of radiation? So, in hospitals, schools, and other institutions across the nation, they administered amounts of plutonium, x-rays, gamma rays, and radium that far exceeded established tolerance limits. (From the New England Journal of Medicine http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199912163412519#t=article
http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/plutonium
https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326640.pdf

Or consider the Tuskegee Study, which combined human experimentation with racism. The 40-year project run by Public Health Service officials infected 600 rural black men in Alabama with syphilis and then coldly studied them between 1947 and 1972 as human experiments over the course of their lives, refusing to tell patients their diagnosis, refusing to treat them for the debilitating disease, and actively denying some of them treatment. (See the article in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/tuskegee-study-medical-distrust-research/487439/ )
http://www.toptenfamous.com/top-10-evil-human-experiments/

These are only a few of the more outstanding examples of the neutrality of science. Others include the weaponization of smallpox and anthrax, biological warfare, genetic tampering with agriculture now conducted by Monsanto, unethical extraction of oil reserves through fracking and so on. Voltaire was, after all a humanist. No doubt the old philosophe would shake his head in shame and wonder at these anti-human bastards of the Enlightenment.

Voltaire would shake his head at these bastards of the enlightenment

But how did reason as a tool for the advancement of human knowledge become perverted into mere technology for ethics-free exploitation?

Genghis Khan, but Emmanuel Kant

Reason was conceived as a moral force by Kant, a weapon which would ensure that society was built upon considered and sensible actions. But reason was gradually transformed into technique. Reason became a platform through which the world could be controlled, a structure for the exercise of power. Objective use of knowledge was never a consideration. In ancient times, rule was exercised by royalty. As the feudal society gave way to a commercial one, the new corporate elite found power in technical knowledge. Scientific knowledge meant technical expertise. As expertise in the new technological society became power, the old caste society of feudalism was replaced by the new castes of industrial society. With money and power at the top of the food chain, expertise became the currency of power in the new corporate world.

The promise of science was liberating. Knowledge will make you free. But science scientific knowledge has not been freely shared among academics. The value of knowledge makes it secret and esoteric. The new civilization of secretive experts is quite naturally obsessed not by the encouragement of understanding but by the providing of answers to particular problems. Where knowledge serves civilization, answers can be monetized. And since money drives our society, answers must be monetized.

Our unquenchable thirst for answers has become one of the obvious characteristics of the West in the second half of the twentieth century. But what are answers when there is neither memory nor general understanding to give them meaning? This running together of the right answer with the search for truth is perhaps the most poignant sign of our confusion.

Our very real struggle against superstition and the authority of the church was won with reason and skepticism. But while reason and skepticism have cultimated in the great achievements of penicillin, nuclear medicine, and microbiology, they have also reached their denouement in the desolation of the human condition. Agnosticism, meaninglessness, lack of purpose and the spiritual ennui that has driven the emptiness and alienation of 20th Century art, literature, and culture.

Edvard Munch: The Scream

From the angst of Edvard Munch’s Scream to the atonal music of Anton Weber; from Picasso’s splintered nudes to the paint-spattered neural synapses of Jackson Pollock, 20th Century art reflected fractured personalities scarred by meaningless and endless wars, the wasteland of spiritual isolation.

Knowledge and reason were supposed to have guaranteed our freedom from the tyrrany of superstition. Logic was supposed to provide the moral force to overturn racism and slavery. But if the old class system was overturned, a new one was installed based entirely on money, profit and monetizing every transaction of the human condition.

The old caste system was reprehensible, but the new one, a highly sophisticated system of corporate slavery based on algorithms is entirely soul-less.

The cult of reason has evolved: Computer models, sophisticated electronic algorithms and trained specialists now control all information. Data involving our personal profiles, medical problems, voting records, taxable income and sexual preferences; our visits to internet websites, facebook, instagram, email is available to the entire panoply of alphabet soup agencies from the FBI, CIA, DEA, and ICE to the IRS and Google. Strangely, while our personal information becomes public, public information is intensely private. This is no coincidence. Information is power.

You will never know what the Leader pays in taxes or what his medical problems really are. You are not permitted to know. While your private information becomes a matter of public record, the experts will reveal nothing. You will have no transparency about any matters involving power, even when investigations take place. Real information is withheld. No intelligence will be forthcoming.

The promise of science was shared information. Today, Penicillin is not top secret, but most new medicines are. In today’s corporate world real information and knowledge is power.

Real information is not free. In fact, it is quite expensive.

Real knowledge is always monetized. Bought and sold. In the world of exploitation, what can’t be bought and sold is by definition worthless.

A cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. We live in a cynical world where anything that can’t be monetized is by definition worthless. Answers cost money.

So those who can control information control value. Those who control information--be that in academic journals or formulas for the new forms of super-penicillin--are not giving it away for free. It may be rented, licensed, subscribed to or copyrighted. But information today is never free.

Of course, this is a perversion of the utopian idea that we were taught in school; that we will share the discoveries of science and make progress as a human society by building on what we learn from each other. By sharing information we shall improve the world. Real information is classified and will not be shared. Altruism is sentimental. It values life. But reason has taught that life has no meaning and altruism has no place in the meaningless world. Answers must be paid for.

One of the strange ironies of our existence is that even as technological answers, albeit monetized and expensive, become available we are losing the very means by which we might be able to interpret those answers.

Once we have been trained to believe that meaning is an extraneous construct, once we are denied all meaning, how can we interpret anything? What meaning can we assign, once we are determined to rid ourselves of all meaning?

As the previous meaning-driven generations die out, we run the risk of losing all meaning. If 20th Century art struggled against the alienation of a human condition denied meaning, the 21st Century seems interested only in creating copies of what once had meaning. One of the casualties of the cult of Reason is memory. And once memory and meaning are completely destroyed, we will lost whatever spiritual understanding we need to evaluate the answers.

Having lost our memory, having lost the spiritual understanding in which a deep epistemology and ontology are grounding we lose the capacity to grasp meaning even when it is spelled out to us. We become lost in a sea of indecision and agnosticism, unable to see whether the meaning spelled out to us in bold type is really a joke or some kind of irony.

When generations of scientists and philosophers have educated us that meaninglessness is the predominate paradigm, how then can we possibly evaluate the answers to our own deeper questions?

All that is left to us is meaningless drugs, sex, and robot living. What use are the answers provided by rational analysis and the technology of the experts when we have neither a memory of the cultural and philosophical achievements of the last 5,000 years nor a general understanding of the spiritual meaning to give these answers any order?

The result can only be nihilism and loss of hope, decadence and barbarism, the culture of ignorance. We shall express our loss of faith and embrace of hedonism as rational animals; decorate ourselves with tribal tattoos and racist grafitti, cheap pornography and automatic weapons, gratifying our insatiable appetite with evermore violent amusements. Perhaps we shall end in the kind of cannibalism and zombie life celebrated in popular movies and novels. But its easy to see how the cult of Reason culminates not in the utopian vision of enlightenment philosophers but in a Hobbesian nightmare, where men’s lives are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Remember, science has no ethical position. There are no ethical points of view inherent in science. There are no sects in geometry. Scientists are convinced that computers can be conscious, since computers can do science. Science can determine the boiling point of lead or the freezing point of humans. It has no preference. Cloning human embryos or crushing mountains into powder for cell-phone batteries are engineering problems. Science itself has no ethics.

Writing in the 1893, Bhaktivinoda Thakura describes the position of the modern atheists in his Tattva-Viveka.

“According to those who forward the cult of reason and science, God does not exist. They say that no one has ever proved God’s existence. The idea of God was created by men. Any talk of a spiritual domain is the imagination of fools. They say the inert material elements combine to create conscious life. In this way, conscious life is manifest in inert matter. They say that when it dies, conscious life ceases to exist, and of this they have no doubt. They say that there is no soul that can be reborn in this world or liberated from it by attaining spiritual knowledge.” (Tattva-Viveka, texts 5-8)

His commentary continues, “All varieties of materialism say this: Inert matter exists, conscious life exists, and everything is created from inert matter. Conscious life does not exist before inert matter. Philosophies that teach about God are a useless waste of time. Inert matter is eternal. If someone talks about “God” he is talking about a being who exists only in his imagination. If any God exists one should search to find a higher “God” that controls that God. God’s existence has never been proved. In every part of the world one may find religious books describing God, the soul, and a spiritual life, but these books are only the wild imaginations of fools. If words like ātmā or consciousness have any meaning they are only descriptions of certain functions of matter. “Self” or “consciousness” are created through the evolution of the material elements. There is no duration of “self” or “consciousness.” Therefore there can be no liberation of the self from matter. All existence is simply a variety of different aspects of matter.” (Bhaktivinoda Thakura Tattva-Viveka, commentary on above texts 5-8)

Bhaktivinoda’s characterization of the atheistic or materialistic point of view is still current. It might have been written by any one of the so-called “New Atheists.” And yet there is nothing new in these views. A New Yorker article just published last week, and dated March 27 2017 lionizes the contemporary philosopher Daniel Dennett whose 1991 best-seller Consciousness Explained described consciousness as “something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain.” The writer, Joshua Rothman, interviews Dennett at length. He quotes Dennett, “If you think there’s a fixed meaning of the word ‘consciousness,’ and we’re searching for that, then you’re already making a mistake,” Dennett said, expressing his skepticism about whether the word “consciousness” is useful as a scientific concept. Souls can be explained by science, he thinks, “If evolution built them, they can be reverse-engineered. There ain’t no magic there, just stage magic.” He has dedicated a lifetime to destroying what he calls the myths and “religious residues of dualism.” But, writing over a hundred years after Bhaktivinoda Thakura, Dennett has contributed no new ideas to the debate over consciousness. He is merely recycling the same atheistic views that were current in the 19th century as documented in Bhaktivinod’s Tattva-Viveka. Daniel Dennett is considered one of the great proponents of modern atheism, along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. But apart from having written some popular books and offering a certain academic patina of philosophical authority to the debate, he offers no new insights or arguments. He offers no solution to the hard problem of consciousness.

Dennett has a nemesis in another contemporary philosopher, David Chalmers, who points out that Dennett’s theories don’t adequately explain subjective experience or why there is an inner life in the first place.

The world “materialist” used by Bhaktivinoda may no longer be as current as it was over a hundred years ago. The current term of art is “physicalist,” Chalmer’s bestselling, ‘The Conscious Mind,’ holds that Dennet and the physicalists focus on the easy problems of consciousness and avoid the hard problem. They focus on the workings of neural synapses and the transfer of electric impulses within the brain. They are interested in how cognitive systems are networked, but ignore the real problem. What is subjective experience? What is life? How is it that consciousness has duration? Why do we have an inner life? What is the nature of the soul? The facile approach of philosophers like Dennett is to ignore these question and redefine consciousness out of existence. Consciousness as a problem doesn’t exist, since “consciousness” isn’t a scientific expression. We can talk about awareness, nervous reaction, neural synapses firing in response to stimulus. But “consciousness” is too vague to talk about. Since it isn’t “scientific” it can’t be philosophical.

By splitting hairs and parsing definitions, philosophers like Dennett avoid meaning. Scientists who eschew meaning are delighted by this approach on the part of philosophers. But there is nothing new in this kind of word jugglery. It was anticipated over a hundred years ago by Bhaktivinod Thakura as we have seen above.

The arguments of the so-called “New Atheists” are nothing new. They are merely more strident versions of arguments that have been repeated ad infinitum by materialists since at least the 19th century in the West and long before that in the East.

Bhaktivinoda Thakura invites us to reflect deeply on the nature of materialistic arguments: “When one thinks deeply about the ideas of all these materialistic philosophers, one will see that materialism is useless and untenable. When one simply glances at them with the eyes of pure spiritual logic, one will reject these ideas a pathetic and untenable. Even ordinary material logic will show these ideas are untenable and should be rejected. This is seen in the following ways:

1. The philosophy of materialism searches for a single principle that is the root of all existence. This is a great folly.

If one thinks the material atoms are eternal, the void is eternal, the relation between the void and the material elements is inconceivable, and the powers, qualities, and actions of the material atoms are also eternal, and all these things are eternal and and beginningless, then he cannot accept that the material world was ever created.

A person who accepts such ideas cannot reduce the material world to a single underlying principle. He must accept the simultaneous existence of many principles.”

Bhaktivinoda Thakura anticipates the contradictions inherent in so many “theories” of modern science. Quantum theory of subatomic particles teaches that possible worlds collapse at the moment a subjective observation is made. Reality and matter cannot be understood without reference to subjective conscious existence. The Newtonian and Quantum worlds co-exist, but their principles are contradictory. Einstein’s attempt at a unified field theory failed as has Hawking’s so-called “theory of everything” which is no more than a quilt of patchwork speculations.

We tend to view the laws of science as fundamental axiomatic truths. But the laws of science are only theories proposed to explain things until we have a better theory. The problem is at the subatomic level the laws of science dissolve; they turn into uncertainties and statistical probabilities. This may sound very theoretical, and it is. And yet 20th century physics must be taken seriously, since the purport of their scientific musings was the discovery of plutonium and and the hydrogen bomb. The collapse of Newtonian physics into waves and uncertainty had a profound impact.

But the logic of science is malleable; the laws of science are deterministic because people have written them that way. They have an ideal perfection that can be attained in the mind or in the Platonic realm but not in the real world.

Science writer James Gleick in Time Travel: The Schrödinger equation, the screwdriver of modern physics, manages the uncertainties by bundling up the probabilities into a unit, a wave function. It’s a ghostly abstract object, this wave function. A physicist can write it as ψ and not worry too much about the contents. “Where did we get that from?” said Richard Feynman. “Nowhere. It’s not possible to derive it from anything you know. It came out of the mind of Schrödinger.” It just was, and is, astoundingly effective. And once you have it, the Schrödinger equation returns determinism to the process. Calculations are deterministic. Given proper input, good quantum physicists can compute the output with certainty and keep on computing. The only trouble comes in the act of returning from the idealized equations to the real world they are meant to describe. Finally we have to parachute in from the Platonic abstract mathematics to the sublunary stuff on laboratory benches. At that point, when an act of measurement is required, the “the wave function “collapses,” as physicists say. Schrödinger’s cat is either alive or dead.”

But until consciousness intervenes to make an observation and collapse the wave function, matter exists only in a limbo state. It is perception and consciousness that animates matter, not the other way around.

Brilliant minds like that of Stephen Hawking can expand and collapse different logical propositions at the blink of an eye. And yet, while so many logical propositions may build a unique edifice of theories, they tend to collapse like a house of cards when confronting reality. The simultaneous existence of so many underlying principles defies logic.

Scientists want us to believe in their logic; and when they change the logic, we must believe in that as well, where consciouseness is “unbelievable.” And after juggling different forms of logic we are to believe that material existence may be reduced to a single unitary principle, a unified theory of everything.

But Bhaktivinod points out that it is impossible to reduce material existence to a single principle. Even a set of principles or “fundamental laws” are beyond logical comprehension. We cannot reduce material experience to a single fundamental principle and must accept the simultaneous existence of many principles. The hard problem of consciousness is a tough nut to crack. Dualism, then is unavoidable.

The insistence of science that consciousness has no place in the universe is an outdated paradigm. When so many anomalies present themselves within a particular paradigm or framework for discussion, the old paradigm must be discarded and a new one postulated, according to Thomas Kuhn in his “Science of Scientific Revolutions.”

The reduction of the material world to a single underlying principle, that of physicality, is untenable and indefensible. Consciousness must be considered as a part of the paradigm. And, as the cult of reason well understands, once the door is opened to consciousness, we allow for spirituality. This is why consciousness is such a “hard” problem and cannot be tolerated.

One way of avoiding the problem of creation is to assert that the universe or cosmos was always here. There have always been atoms, there has always been a void. Atoms move through the void. Matter can neither be created or destroyed. One idea has it the the cosmos has the shape of a doughnut, whose surface has the topology of a two-dimensional torus. According to this notion, the universal energy flows around in a loop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-torus_model_of_the_universe

Where the energy comes from to power this eternal flow is, of course, a mystery. Energy is not free. At the same time, through entropy, energy dissipates and becomes disorganized. Where does the energy for an eternal cosmic flow come from? Another unanswered question.

But lets think about time for a moment. Duration. To say that atoms have always existed is a curious notion. It calls for the eternity of atomic energy. But eternity, or infinite time is a paradoxical concept. It cannot exist in logic. Again, the “scientists” want to have it both ways: eternity can exist for the purpose of sustaining the idea of atoms in the void. As long as matter is eternal, there is no need to explain where it came from. Again, by avoiding the question we provide the solution. There is no need for any creation since atoms are eternal. But if atoms are eternal, what is time? Is time a material element? If so, how does it work? How does it interplay with the other elements of material existence such as extension, solidity, texture, and dimension? It has been conveniently described as the 4th dimension as if time could so easily be folded into material space. But what is time?

Well, time is another “hard” problem for scientists who have attempted to describe time as an aspect of matter without really understanding it. Scientists who claim to be masters of all the universal secrets in a “theory of everything,” have very little understanding of time.

Again in 1893, Bhaktivinoda Thakura: “A person who accepts these ideas cannot reduce the material world to a single underlying principle. He must accept the simultaneous existence of many principles. What is time? That he has no power to say. In this way their attempt to find a single underlying principle that governs the material world is only the babbling of a child.”

Returning to James Gleick’s intriguing book, Time Travel, after a half a million words of babble he finally gets to the point in Chapter 12 entitled, “What is Time?” Here we discover the essence of the question:

“What is time? Time is a word. The word refers to something, or some things, but surprisingly often the conversation goes off track when people forget whether they’re “arguing about the word or the thing(s). Five hundred years of dictionaries have created the assumption that every word must have a definition, so what is time? “A nonspatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future” (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fifth edition). A committee of lexicographers labored over those twenty words and must have debated almost every one. Nonspatial? That word is not to be found in this very dictionary, but all right, time is not space. Continuum? Presumably time is a continuum—but is that known for sure? “Apparently irreversible” seems a hedge. You sense they’re trying to tell us something they hope we already know. The challenge is not so much to inform us as to offer some discipline and care. Other authorities offer entirely different constructions. Not one of them is wrong. What is time? “The general term for the experience of duration,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (many editions). (James Gleick. “Time Travel.”)

Was Bhaktivinoda Thakur wrong, or does this sound like the wild babbling of a child?

A hundred and twenty-five years after he pointed out that the materialists have no idea what time is, the best that science writers can offer us is, “Time is a word for the experience of duration.” I read Mr. Gleick’s book with interest, since I am currently working on a story about time travel. I was disappointed that I had to wade through twelve chapters of densely argued logic to discover that time is a word.

What is time? How do we account for the sense of duration that makes us who we are?

And if we allow for the existence of eternal atoms, why not eternal consciousness?

One of the great difficulties in understanding consciousness is its duration. When you wake up in the morning you are the same person as when you went to sleep last night. You have the same identity. Your family members recognize you and, as you face the dawn, you hold the same memories as you had went you turned out the light last night. This is duration. Even while time was passing all around you, you are the same individual.

Over the course of a lifetime you may notice many gradual changes in your surroundings. The town where you grew up doesn’t look the same anymore. Old business closed, new ones took their place. The music they play on the radio has changed. Presidents have come and gone. But you are still the same person. Duration of consciousness is evidence for the soul. This is why scientists deny both duration and consciousness by defining both terms out of existence.

Returning for a moment to Bhaktivinoda’s commentary in Tattva-Viveka, see if his arguments still make sense:

The philosophy of Materialism is unnatural and unscientific. It is unnatural because every thing in nature has a cause. To assume that matter is eternal and is the cause of consciousness which appears only as a by-product of matter is illogical. Cause and effect is natural in the material world. Matter has no power to create consciousness. Consciousness, on the other hand, can manipulate and control inert matter. Consciousness is superior to matter. The idea that matter produces consciousness and that consciousness is merely a by-product of nature is unscientific and unproven. There is no proof that matter is eternal.

Materialists or “physicalists” as they like to be called nowadays are in the business of prohibiting certain questions. By censuring the questions and ridiculing those who ask them they avoid hard problems.

Bhaktivinoda points this out in reference to Auguste Comte. He says,

Comte writes: “We should not try to discover the origin or the conclusion of the material world. The attempt is only childish curiosity.”

However, because humans are naturally curious, we are curious to know these things. Philosophers like Comte should not prohibit curiosity. We aren’t about to perform a funeral to celebrate the death of human curiosity simply because Comte has prohibited our search. The search for cause and effect is the mother of knowledge. Accepting Comte’s idea would lead to the destruction of human intelligence in only a short time. There is no doubt that by denying curiosity, human beings will become stunted, numbed, and unthinking.

By blindly accepting the insistence that certain questions are taboos, we have indeed become stunted, numbed and unthinking.