Art by Susanna Turino
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by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

Trusting the science is fine, unless it happens to be the kind of science that was sponsored by the cigarette companies in the 50s and 60s to prove that their product was safe. It turns out politics and science mix too readily.

Until very recently, talking about consciousness was a career-ending move for a scientist. Even today, depending on how you talk about it, such heresy can still get you burned at the scientific stake: ostracized, unpublishable, defunded, out of a job and a laboratory.

Orthodox science still insists that you can get consciousness from a stone. The dogma holds that mind, with all its wonderful qualities and sense of being, has derived from inert matter. The keepers of the nerdy flame preach that consciousness, your deepest sense of self, is all an accidental epiphenomenon, somehow generated by the electrical activity of your brain.

But, very recently, there are scientific dissenters, who acknowledge the obvious, namely, no matter how many billions of years you have, 13 or 1300, you can't get consciousness from rock dust. These radicals hold that mind just is; that it is a basic force, like gravity or electro-magnetism; that it does not derive from anything else, not from rock dust, not from the brain's electrical activity.

There are even some prominent, accomplished, wealthy scientists, who have gone on the attack against the scientific establishment. Pointing out that, when it comes to the matter of consciousness, the emperor has no clothes.

Beyond being canceled, they are fighting back against the unfair, unscientific bias that classical science displays towards consciousness, our most central experience. Ridiculing those who are ridiculous, they insist that consciousness is a holistic quantum phenomenon, beyond time and space, a phenomenon that does not fit into the plodding measurement of materialistic, classical physics.

They assert that, despite the perspective of our body, everything is consciousness; that we in the body are disassociated from our larger identity, which is holistic and all-inclusive.

Alive we are like a kid playing a video game, or a pilot flying an airplane by instruments. Dying we reassociate with our greater self, as if lifting up our eyes from the cockpit dashboard and looking out through the windshield, or better, flying off into the wild blue yonder... without the airplane.

That's all right, good, uplifting, life-affirming and meaningful, sounding a lot like heaven or a Near Death Experience to me. I'm grateful to these feisty scientists, Fredrico Faggin and Bernardo Kastrup, for giving a better, more authoritative form to my intuitions.

Faggin and Kastrup declare that the universe is conscious, that as the infinite holism of the quantum state collapses when we measure it, so the infinite holism of our spirit collapses into physical being. Faggin asserts that the universe wants to know itself. Kastrup freely uses the term God. But then, still allergic to things divine, he sneezes.

Kastrup tells us, without justifying his prejudice in any way, that God, the Universal Mind, doesn't think about itself or creation; that it is not concerned with us; that there is no personal God, only impersonal Nature as God.

His attitude reminds me of a recently reformed alcoholic who starts preaching to the rest of us non-alcoholics about how we should lead our lives. The alcoholic was, until the day before yesterday, an abusive drunk, torturing those who loved and needed him. But now he has seen the light and become an authority on the good life? This hubris may no longer be fueled by alcohol, but the arrogance is just as strong.

Similarly, those scientists, who up until the day before yesterday didn't even believe, are now dictating the terms of belief. Scientists, who for the last two centuries, have vigorously ridiculed the idea of God as wishful, childish thinking, now admit that there is a Universal Mind, but insist that He's not the kind of God that mystics all around the world have been talking about for thousands of years.

Scientists, who have just barely managed to lift their heads out of the materialistic slime, now admit that there is a God. But, still clinging to their sense of certainty, with all the zeal of recent converts, they claim to know best what kind of God He is and isn't.

Their folly is all too human.

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off. Please do contribute content, or your hard-earned pesos to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice; Atención robustly reborn for the digital age.

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