Interpreting the world: a possible cause of the emergence of divinity?

Interpreting the world: a possible cause of the emergence of divinity?

Interpreting the world

Divinity, the word can have multiple definitions and many meanings to us, depending on our identify, beliefs, childhood influence and a lot more. To a believer, divinity is associated with something greater than mankind, something that is above the laws of nature, and yet that can itself affect the very structure and functioning of the universe and physical as we see it. To a Hindu (or Aryan, as I prefer the term, simply), divinity almost always relates to the concept of Brahman, or his many manifestations as the vast multitude of deities, ranging from Indra and Surya to Visnu and Shiva. A Muslim finds his peace of mind in adoring and worshipping Allah, and for a Jew it means worshipping Yahweh. Whatever the religion is, wherever we are, we can almost always find believers.

Now, with belief, there is also the absence of belief. Atheists and agnostics dominate the higher tiers of the society today, people who are either too faded up with the increasing religious atrocities all around, or just unwilling to accept things without reasonable proofs of their existence or being true, or both. I usually belong to the second category, but recent advances in neuroscience and psychology have forced me to reconsider my decisions.

What do we see? 

Sensing the world around

Whenever we look at the world surrounding us, we see a vast, brimming world with life thriving all around us. It is rather hard to describe it in terms of increasing levels of complexities, and deriving a picture of so complex a world from a simple model of sub-atomic particles interacting with each other. However, the purpose of my article is to relate the concept of 'faith' and 'experience of divinity' to science, and hence I am turning to model-dependent realism, without further ado.

So, as per neuroscience, our brain is basically a collection of many, many neurons interacting with each other. As I already mentioned in my previous post on the possibility of digital or computational immortality, there is a striking resemblance between the model of ants interacting to form an ant colony, and the model of neurons interacting within our brain. In this regard, let us turn to something mathematical, John Conway's 'Game of Life'.

If you're not familiar with game of life (not the one concerned with money and life itself), you an have a look at this Wikipedia article depicting what it actually is, HERE. One of the many results of the game is that, we see how a complicated system of chemistry and biology can emerge from a system of very simple physical laws. Thus, chemistry is the effective theory of physics, whereas biology acts as the effective theory of chemistry. A discussion regarding how this happens is beyond the scope of my post here, although I'd like to do that soon enough, maybe in another post.

Neurons constitute the human brain

So, armed with our understanding, and sublime realization that increasingly difficult-to-explain complexities can emerge from simple laws and systems, we turn to understand what perception of reality is. As we see the world around us, we basically use our sense organs to gather input from our surroundings. This way, our sense organs are quite similar to 'sensors' of electronic devices such as Smartphones. However, a major difference between the two sorts is that, the former is biological and organic, while the latter is powered by electronic logic. It is not, though, difficult to imagine and view our brain as an organic computer. This organic computer, as our brain is, is basically fed by the stream of data that we constantly receive from outside. And the task of our neurons is to effectively organize these data into information, by processing them. And finally, the brain creates a model resembling the physical reality outside. What we see, smell, hear, feel or taste is basically linked with the physical reality by this model. And in this way, this model serves as a bridge between perception and actual reality.

The projection of thought

The brain is quite similar to
a biological computer

With the emergence of increasingly sophisticated organisms as a result of evolution, psychology governing them became increasingly complicated as well. And this is the reason why we are gifted with what is commonly known as 'self-consciousness'. We have a working theory of mind, and this makes us different from other organisms. And our brains are wired to process the input while simultaneously relating it to the data obtained from the memory, the storage or repository of past input and output obtained. Thus, when we see our friendly neighbour approaching (who, say, usually regard us politely), we start reacting immediately, considering to greet him or her similarly. The number of factors governing our behaviour can actually be very large.

In the process of organizing and processing input, brains use effective neural algorithms to obtain a picture of 'effective reality', which helps us focus on the situation at hand. For example, while you are reading this line, your brain makes you 'see' this line only, simultaneously giving you the impression that you're seeing it all. That's why it is not possible for us to recall all the elements of a picture in detail after glancing at it for one of two seconds. At the same time, we can actually tell a lot about the subject, theme and mean impression that the picture produces.

Hand in hand with it, there comes the process of outward projection of thought. Think of an analogy, lets say we are inside a room at nighttime, with open windows. And we have a candle that's glowing inside. Now, when we gaze outside through the window, we see that the light of the candle travels outside as well, to an extent. This is the outward projection of light, and does not necessarily mean that there must be a source of light outside. Simply the area is illuminated by the light source inside.

Projecting personality outside 

In the documentary, 'Through the wormhole', an experiment is shown to be conducted on a group of children, who are asked to hit the bull's eye inside a closed room, one by one (such that each remains alone during the task). None of them are informed that the room is fitted with webcams monitoring everything that happens. At first, several children are given the task, and almost all of them are seen to cheat. Now, a second group of children is taken. They are told that an invisible and imperceiveable being, a fairy princess, is sitting on a chair inside the room. They refuse to believe at first, and some even try to perceive her, without no success. However, in this case we see that the level of cheating is much less. Why?

False positives are among the many reasons
behind the survival of humanity

A possible and plausible explanation is that, conscious beings, the children, are subconsciously projecting' consciousness outside their effective models. This means, they simply feel someone is out there, watching them, even though that's not true. This perception, or better to say, sensation, is thus entirely related to our beliefs, and not to actual reality.

In his book 'Paranormality: why we see what isn't there', Prof. Richard Wiseman mentions a brilliant experiment conducted in England, which involved spreading a false tale of a ghost of a clergyman haunting a harbour. And within two years, there had been multiple 'sightings' of this ghost, with the daughter of a landlord claiming to have fainted seeing a menacingly cruel phasm staring at her.

How can we plausibly explain all these? The most common and reasonable deduction is that, nothing is actually happening, or needs to happen, outside. What happens is entirely inside our brain.

Interpreting 'divine will' and supernatural signs

It is now fairly easy to see why the early ancestors of the human race attributed unknown and unexplained (at that time) natural phenomena such as lightning, rainfall etc. to superbeings such as gods and demons. Being conscious, as Richard Dawkings mentions in his book 'The God Delusion', it has become our nature (because of evolution) to sense consciousness even in unconscious things and phenomena. This is evolutionarily significant, because it helped us survive by receiving more false-positives than false-negatives.

Whenever we worship, a virtual 'agent' is projected outside our brain by our brain itself, which serves as the object of our worship. And this agent becomes the element of divinity that we worship.

It might be very difficult to even consider all these true, for many people, but once we give in to reason, all these become self-evident themselves with time and practice.