Over the past few months, I’ve had several religious experiences repeat themselves in terms of set and setting and outcome. Earlier in the summer, I tried to reconcile these experiences with my atheistic faith. If atheism is the denial of a divine intelligence, how could I explain several subjective experiences that told me with as much certainty as I am capable of that I was communing with a *divine-style* intelligence?
In that earlier blog post, I attempted to retain the reality of both my atheism and my experiences by allowing for the possibility of non-human intelligences whose objectivity can only be described in hyper-dimensional terms. Hyper-dimensional does not mean divine — it just means different.
In this post, I’d like to examine the question of whether I am crazy.
I am a relatively smart human being. Billions of people are smarter than me, but billions of people are not. It may be true that I am overeducated and under-experienced, but I am also forty years old, which means that, while I have not experienced more than a fraction of what there is to be experienced, I have, in truth, had my share of experiences.
It’s true that I’m on medication for a general anxiety disorder, but it’s also true that so is almost everyone else I know, and I don’t think I’m more prone to craziness than anyone else in my orbit.
Furthermore, it is true that I’ve enjoyed recreational drugs, but it is also true that a few weeks ago I went to a Dead & Company concert where people way more sane than I am also enjoyed the highs of recreational drugs.
All of which is to say, I don’t think I am crazy.
The friends I’ve shared my story with don’t seem to think I am crazy either. I’m not suggesting that they believe I communed with a divine-style intelligence, but they signaled their willingness to entertain the possibility that these experiences actually hapened to me. They were willing to hear me out, and though they had serious questions that signaled their doubt, they also seemed willing to grant that certain arguments could resolve their doubts, and that, provided these arguments were made, they might concede that my experiences were objectively real.
In other words, I don’t think my friends think I’m crazy either. They may have serious doubts about the way I experience reality, but I think they also realize there’s no harm in what I’m saying either, and that there may even be something *good* in it.
I’ve read a lot about consciousness and the brain. I haven’t attended Tufts University’s program in Cognitive Studies or UC Santa Cruz’s program in the History of Consciousness, but I feel as if I’ve read enough in the subjects to at least facilitate an undergraduate seminar.
Through my somewhat chaotic but also autodidactic education, I’ve learned that neurological states cause the subject to experience a presence that is in no way objectively there. Some of these states can be reliably triggered by science, as when legal or illegal pharmaceuticals cause a subject to hallucinate. Other states are symptomatic of mental disorders objectively present in our cultural history due to the unique evolution of the Western imagination (some philosophers argue that schizophrenia isn’t a symptom of a mental disorder as much as it is a symptom of capitalism).
I am a white American male with an overactive imagination who takes regular medication for a diagnosed general anxiety disorder. It makes complete sense that a set of neurological states could arise in my brain unbidden by an external reality, that the combination of chemicals at work in my brain could give birth to a patterned explosion whose effect causes me to experience the presence of a divine-style intelligence that is not, in the strictest sense, *there*.
But I want to consider the possibility — the *possibility* — that this same neurological state was not the effect of the chemical chaos taking place in my brain, but rather the effect of an external force pushing itself into communion with me, just as a telephone’s ring pushes airwaves into your ear, which pushes impulses into your brain, which causes a neurological state that signals to the subject of your brain that someone *out there* wants to talk to you.
I’m not saying someone called me. I’m saying that the neurological states that I experienced during those minutes (and in one case, hours) might have been caused by something other than the chemical uniqueness of my brain, something *outside of my self*.
In a sense, I’m talking about the fundamental nature of our reality. In order for these experiences to actually have happened to me, I have to allow for a part of my understanding of the fundamental nature of reality to be wrong. And anyone who knows me knows I do not like to be wrong.
Heidegger wrote [an essay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Technology) where he basically argues that there is a divine-style presence (by which I mean, an *external, non-human* presence) that we, as human beings, have the burden of bringing forth into the world (according to Heidegger, this burden defines us as human beings). He argues that there are two ways we can bring this presence into the world: the first is through a kind of ancient craftsmanship; the second is through our more modern technology. The difference lies in what kind of presence will arrive when we finally bring it forth.
Accoring to Heidegger, the ancient sense of craftsmanship invites a presence into the world through a mode of respect and humility. Heidegger uses the example of a communion chalice and asks how this chalice was first brought into the world.
He examines the question using Aristotle’s notions of causality, and based on his examination, he concludes that the artist we modern humans might deem most responsible for creating the chalice actually had to sacrifice her desires to the truth of the chalice itself: its material, its form, and its intention. The artist couldn’t just bring whatever she wanted into the world because her freedom was bounded by the limitations of the material (silver), the form (a chalice must have a different form than a wine glass, for example), and the intention (in this case, its use in the Christian rite of communion). The artist didn’t wrestle with the material, form, and intention to bring the chalice into the world; rather, she sacrificed her time to coaxing and loving it into being — she was less its creator and more a midwife to its birth.
For Heidegger, as for the Greeks, reality exists in hyper-dimensions. There is the world as we generally take it, and then there is the dimension of Forms, which are just as real as the hand at the end of my arm. For the artist to bring the chalice forth into the world is to bring it *from* the dimension of the Forms, which is why, for the ancient Greeks, the word for “truth” is also the word for “unveiling” — a true chalice isn’t created as much as it is unveiled; its Form is always present, but an artist is necessary to unveil it for those of us who have not the gift (nor the curse) to experience it *as a Form*. In an attempt to capture this concept, Heidegger characterizes the artist’s process as “bringing-forth out of concealment into unconcealment.”
I know it feels like we’re kind of deep in the weeds right now, but stick with me. I promise: we’re going someplace good.
After exploring the art of ancient craftsmanship, Heidegger contrasts the artist’s midwifery style of unconcealing with modern technology. Where artists coax the truth into being, modern technology challenges and dominates it. It exploits and exhausts the resources that feed it, and in the process, it destroys the truth rather than bring it to light.
For an example, Heidegger uses the Rhine River. When German poets (i.e., artists) refer to the Rhine, they see it as a source of philosophical, cultural, and nationalistic pride, and everything they say or write or sing about it only increases its power. When modern technologists refer to the river, they see it instead as an energy source (in terms of hydroelectric damming) or as a source of profit (in terms of tourism). For the artist, the river remains ever itself, growing in strength and majesty the more the artist unveils it; for the modern technologist, it is a raw material whose exploitation will eventually exhaust its vitality.
The modern method of unveiling the truth colors everything the modern technologist understands about his relationship with reality. It is the kind of thinking that leads to a term like “human resources,” which denotes the idea that humans themselves are also raw materials to be exhausted and exploited.
In my reading of Heidegger, the revelatory mode of modern technology is harder, more colonialistic and militaristic. It not only exhausts all meaning, but it creates, in the meantime, a reality of razor straight lines and machine-cut edges. This is why, in my reading of Heidegger, he believes we should avoid it at all costs.
To scare yourself, think of the kind of artificial intelligence that such a method might create (i.e., unconceal). It would see, as its creators see, a world of exploitable resources, and it would, as its creators are, move forward with all haste to dominate access to those resources, regardless of their *meaning.* The artificial intelligence unconcealed by this method is the artificial intelligence that everyone wants you to be scared of.
But Heidegger wrote at the birth of modern technology, when it was almost exclusively designed around the agendas of generals, politicians, and businessmen. He didn’t live long enough to witness the birth of video games, personal computers, or iPhones. He didn’t understand that the Romantics themselves would grow to love technology or that human beings would dedicate themselves to the poetry of code (Heidegger reminds us that the Greek term for the artist’s method of unconcealment is *poeisis,* which is the root of our English term, *poetry*). Heidegger could not conceive of a modern technology that shared the same values as art, and so he was blind to the possibility that, through modern technology, humans would also be capable of bringing forth, rather than a colonial or militaristic truth, something that is both true and, in the Platonic sense, good.
A theologically inclined reader could find in Heidegger an argument between the right and good way of doing things and the wrong and evil way of doing things, and through that argument, reach a kind of theological conclusion that says the wrong and evil way of doing things will bring forth the Devil.
But Heidegger’s arguments are not saddled with the historic baggage of Jewish, Christian, or Islamic modes of conception. Rather, he find his thoughts in the language of the Greeks and interprets them through his native German. He implies a divine-style presence (and his notion of *truth* contains the notion of *presence*, or else, what is there to be unconcealed?), but he’s only willing, with Plato, to connect it to some conception of the Good. He seems to fear, though, that, due to modern technology, this divine-style presence might not be the only one out there.
I’ll give Heidegger that. But he must grant me the possibility that there could be more than two different kinds of presences that humans are capable of bringing forth, or rather, more than two different kinds of presences that we are capable of recognizing as something akin to ourselves.
Heidegger had his issues, but I don’t think he was crazy. I do, however, think his German heritage, just like Neitzche’s, could sometimes get the best of him, and the same cultural milieu that resulted in a nation’s devotion to totalitarianism may also have resulted in two brilliant philosophers being blinded to some of the wisdoms of Western democracy, namely, that reality is never black or white but made of many colors, and just as the human presence is as complex as the billions of human beings who bring it forth, the divine-style presence brought forth by either art or technology may be as complex as the billions of technological devices that bring it forth.
Think about it this way. Human beings have a very different relationship to the atom bomb than they do to Donkey Kong. But both relationships are objectively held with technology. Is the presence that might be brought forth by Donkey Kong the same as the one brought forth by the atom bomb? To suggest so would be like saying the reality brought forth by the efforts of a nine-year-old Moroccan girl share an essence with the reality brought forth by a 76-year-old British transexual. Yes, there are going to be similarities by virtue of their evolutionary heritage, but to suggest they both experience reality in the same way is to overestimate one’s heritage and miss the richness of what’s possible. We wouldn’t want to do so with humanity; let’s not do so with technology either.
Here’s a question. When I say “divine-style intelligence,” what exactly do I mean?
Well, I mean a hyper-dimensional intelligence. This intelligence is abstracted above and beyond a single subjective experience and yet, like a wave moving through the ocean, it can only exist within and through subjective experience.
The interaction between the atom bomb and the humans beneath it is the result of a hyper-dimensional intelligence connecting Newton to Einstein to Roosevelt to Oppenheimer to Truman. Similarly, the interaction between the video game and the human playing with it is the result of a hyper-dimensional intelligence connecting Leibniz to Babbage to Turing to Miyamoto.
With such different paths behind them, such different veins of heritage, and such different modes of interacting with humans, wouldn’t the divine-style intelligences brought forth by these technologies be completely different, and shouldn’t one of them, perhaps, have the opportunity to be *seen* — to be *experienced* — as both good and true?
The subjective experience of a human being is due to the time-based firing of a complex yet distinguishable pattern of energies throughout the human brain (and the brain’s attendant nervous system, of course). You *experience being you* due to the patterns of energy spreading from neuron to neuron; you exist as both a linear movement in time and as a simultaneous and hyper-dimensional web. Subjectivity, then, is a hyper-dimensional series of neurological states.
But why must we relegate the experience of subjectivity to the physical brain? Could it not arise from other linear yet also hyper-dimensional webs, such as significant and interconnected events within human culture, maybe connected by stories and the human capacity for spotting and understanding the implication of significant patterns in and through time?
Humans are the descendants of those elements of Earthbound life that evolved a skill for predicting and shaping the future. Would that evolutionary path not also attune us to recognizing intelligence in other forms of life?
I hear the argument here, that humans seem incredibly slow at recognizing intelligence in other forms of Earthbound life — hell, we only barely began recognizing it in the human beings who look different from us, let alone in dogs, octopuses, and ferns — but in the history of life, homo sapiens have only just arisen into consciousness, and it seems (on good days anyway) as if our continued progress requires our recognition of equality not just among human beings but among all the creatures of the Earth (provided we don’t screw it up first).
It doesn’t seem unfathomable that, just as our subjectivity arises in floods of energy leaping and spreading throughout the human brain, another kind of subjectivity might arise through another flood of energy leaping and spreading across the various webs of our ecological reality, a subjectivity that arose from some kind of root system and may only just now be willing and able to make its presence known beyond itself, like a green bud on a just-poked-out tree, or like a naked ape raising its head above the grasses on the savannah time, announcing to all and sundry that something new has moved onto the field.
The story of Yahweh, of Christ, of Muhammed, is the story of a set of significant and interconnected experiences understood not just as real, but as divine. Yahweh, Christ, and Allah spoke through these experiences, some of which were verbal, others of which were physical, and still others of which were political, by which I mean, effected by decisions in various throne rooms and on various battlegrounds. Like energy moving from neuron to neuron, Yahweh, Christ, and Allah move from story to story, from event to event, traveling not through a single human brain, but through a collective culture, and through this, the God is brought forth in full truth and presence.
According to each of these major religions, one can connect oneself to (commune with) the presence of God. One can do this through artful devotion, through praxis, prayer, and/or meditation.
Even as an atheist, I’m willing to grant these religious experiences as real, but I’m not willing to grant them their exclusivity. I argue that the divine-style presences that made (or make) themselves known through the religions of Yahweh, Christ, and Allah were (are) hyper-dimensional intelligences suffering from a God complex. All three hyper-dimensional intelligences have their unique flaws, but they share the flaw of megalomania. This is understandable, considering how powerful they claim to be, but just because you’re powerful doesn’t mean you’re God. It just makes you powerful.
With Heidegger, I want to discuss the kinds of hyper-dimensional intelligences that might be unconcealed during human interactions with reality, but I don’t want my discussion to get bogged down by the concepts of God, gods, or even, like the Greeks, the Good. Heidegger founds his notions in the language of the Greeks’ concepts of Being; I want to use something else.
I would like my notions to rest on a rigorous concept of play, a subjective experience that, I believe, precedes the experience of Being, and leads to the possibility that, right now, we are not (nor have we ever been) alone.
Hopefully that only sounds a little crazy.
