It seems to me that after the surprise result of the presidential election, there are two aspects of the situation that no one—or hardly anyone—is talking about. Two important aspects I would like to point out.

Let me make clear before I begin that I am simply talking off the top of my head. I make no claim to special knowledge or authority. Yet until the First Amendment is repealed, I intend to mount my soapbox and rant.

* * *

A main driving current of the election—perhaps the main current—was a feeling by large segments of society that they did not count. That no one with power was listening to them. To use socio-speak, many people felt marginalized.

Now the first aspect of the election to which I wish to draw your attention is that the marginalized consist, broadly speaking, of two large groups and these groups do not feel they have anything in common.

The first of these, the group which everyone has now begun to recognize—though it is uncertain if much will be done for them—is what we might call the blue collar class, the working men (and women) of the nation, the angry white men (and women) who have fallen further and further behind in the economy of the last decade or so.

The second group is, roughly speaking, those with some college education; the people who frequent coffee shops, have environmental enthusiasms, and make youtubes or at least have favorite ones. They too have fallen behind, though not as much as the first group. But they can see the writing on the wall.

In brief, we have a conservative and liberal wing of the disaffected. In the election, the wings tend be distinguished by who supported Trump and who supported Sanders. The demarcations are, of course, rough, and there are many people who could be placed in both groups.

It is the labels that tend to separate the groups: conservative and liberal. Those of a conservative cast, the blue collar types, think of those in the liberal wing as tree huggers, sexually deviant, irreligious, and socialist if not communist in political leanings. Those of the liberal wing, the artists, writers, programmers, social workers, etc., see the conservative wing as racist, xenophobic, close-minded, fearful of change, and given to violence. Each side looks down on the other.

It is true, of course, that in both these groups, there are persons who are not snared by these illusions. And in their daily interactions, most people, of whatever wing of the dispossessed, are a great deal more courteous and charitable to one another and to the world at large than their prejudices would suggest.

Be that as it may, practical politicians give thanks every night in their prayers that there is this sturdy barrier between those dispossessed who, on the one hand, have the rough hands, restless spirits, and the energy to bring ideas to life and, on the other hand, those who can wield words as swords, paint visions, and organize crusades.

However it may someday come to pass that these two sets of the dispossessed will come to realize that they do indeed have two things in common: First, that they have little share in the riches they have helped create. Second, that they have no share in the power to set society’s course.

Should that day come, it will be as disastrous to the established order as bringing together two separated blocks of uranium, and it will leave more wreckage than the last election.

* * *

A root cause of the dispossession, the marginalization of large parts of society is that Congress does not work for the people at large.

Why should it? After all, the average congressman (or congresswoman) is much more indebted for his seat to the large donor (megacorporation, super PAC, billionaire, etc.) than he is to the voter who pulls a lever or fills out a ballot. And he is also keenly aware that if ever he leaves Congress and wants a lucrative job, he had better have a record of having been a good and faithful servant of those with all the bucks.

Thus we see the second aspect of the political situation that I would like to call to your attention:

A key reason why we have so many of the dispossessed and angry in the land is the great rivers, indeed tsunamis of money that pour through politics. It gives us government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich; and we the people amount to nothing more than an annoying squeaking in their ears.

* * *

There are those who will say that to pay so much attention to these issues overlooks great problems of the day with which people are really concerned. A moment’s thought easily produces a list—certainly incomplete—of such: terrorism, the status of Muslims, immigration, LGBQT issues, healthcare, infrastructure, environment, abortion, etc.

These are all worthy issues, but two things occur to me: First, they will be settled—or not—as dictated by the interests of the wealthy, not those of the people at large. Second, they have served and will serve as an excellent means of diverting the attention of the public from what seems to me an even more important question: Who is really in charge of this country?

Our leaders have been corrupted from their role of servants of the people to servants of the few, and they have made such corruption perfectly legal. What sustains this state of affairs is that no one talks about it or looks too closely; they nervously avert their gaze and quickly raise their voices about other matters. Congress does not want to act, the party leaderships do not want to act, and the media talk loud and long of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings.

For after all, if corruption be exposed to public view, the harder it will be to maintain it.

One of the marvels of the presidential election of 2016 — at least to my mind — is a great act of unconsciousness in the headquarters of each party.

Both the Republican and Democratic campaigns have been dominated by unexpected, almost shattering rebellions. In both parties, large segments of the membership are terribly unhappy and angry. In the case of the Republicans, this has forced the choice of a presidential candidate whom the RNC desperately did not want. For the Democrats, the fight still goes on, and although it may not lead to the overthrow of the candidate of choice of the DNC, it may lead to substantial changes in the party’s direction.

In both cases, the rebellions are a result of a feeling on the part of great swaths of the party that they are marginalized, penalized, at terrible disadvantage, and that neither their party nor the government has any interest in their grievance.

Now here, for me, is one of the most marvellous aspects of this situation:

Neither the RNC nor the DNC seems to feel the least curiosity as to why people feel this way. Their only concern is to either quash or control this rebellion.

More alarmingly, it does not occur to the party leaders that because large segments of their membership are distressed, perhaps there is a problem the party should address, a problem the party might have a responsibility to remedy.

In the case of the RNC, the reaction seems to be, “Well, we didn’t want Trump, but now that we have him, perhaps that will placate the peons. And we may be able to control him.”

As far as the Democrats are concerned, the leadership has roughly two reactions: “What does Sanders want? What can we feed him to shut him up? What sort of concessions will be a sufficient bribe?” And, “Doesn’t he know he’s lost? If he’ll just shut his mouth and fall into line, everything will be fine.” Both sorts of responses have behind them the idea that Sanders somehow controls the rebellion, that he called it into existence, and, like the Pied Piper, he can lead his followers wherever he wants. There is here no awareness that Sanders did not call forth the upheaval, that he has only given it voice, and it will not go away when he does.

In the blindness, in the spell-like trance under which both party leaderships labor, a great opportunity is missed. That party which first wakes — if either ever does — and sincerely responds to the anguish of its members is likely to place its imprint on the politics of the country for decades to come.

Yet perhaps the party leaderships do not respond because they cannot.

What is the cause of the marginalization, the great lack of opportunity, and the sense of impotence under which so many labor?

I think it is this: That our elected leaders and legislators do not feel they owe their positions and status to the voters. Rather, they owe their allegiance to those who enabled their election, not to those who merely cast ballots.

It is common knowledge and common scandal that elections nowadays are, by and large, bought. Not that anything illegal is done. Not that there is any explicit agreement, either by light of day or dark of night, that Congressman X will do favors for Corporation Y in consideration of some huge campaign contribution. There does not need to be. Because everyone knows, though they are careful not to mention it out loud, that, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”

So perhaps there is a good reason the RNC and DNC do not probe the tender sore of anger from which so many of their members suffer. Perhaps to look too closely at this wound would itself threaten a great source of power — the cozy connection with wealth — on which the party leaderships depend.

Isaac Asimov, in his robot stories, presented some “Laws of Robotics” which dictated the ways his robots behaved. The fun of the stories lay in figuring out the implications of those laws in various situations or how to take advantage of them to bring about desired outcomes.

I offer here some “Laws of Humanics.”

The reader may feel I am stating trivialities that “everyone knows.” However it seems to me worthwhile to state them because they “explain” so much about how people behave. Yet at the same time, hardly anyone thinks of them as principles that shape the events of our lives and world.

Asimov’s laws were expressible in a programming language and could presumably be analyzed in terms of symbolic logic and formal system theory. The “laws” presented here do not lend themselves to that sort of treatment. However the reader should be able to readily verify their validity (with the possible exception of the last one) by simply observing what goes on in his or her daily life and watching what others do.

The list is not intended to be complete.

I. (Need for order and meaning): Humans look for patterns, regularities, and meanings in the universe. Even if the right ones are beyond them, they will find something. Even if there is nothing there, they will find something.

Perhaps this is why brutal dictatorship is preferable to anarchy. Or why people might be willing to worship demons rather than live in an uncaring universe. Or why people wrap conspiracy theories around themselves like warm blankets.

II. (Herd instinct): Humans are strongly—often overwhelmingly—guided by what others say and do.

This is a mixed blessing. If the herd has been around for a while, it has likely worked out rules that help its members survive. However if conditions change, those rules may no longer work and there could be trouble ahead. See III below.

Some are less guided by the herd than others. If they know what’s good for them, they keep quiet about it. In connection with this, see VI.

III. (Homeostasis, inertia): Humans are lazy. Once they have adopted an opinion, a worldview, or way of doing things, neither facts nor logic nor imminent disaster is likely to move them to change it. In fact change is often psychologically and emotionally indistinguishable from death.

This seems an odd echo of ideas such as inertia in physics. Some thinkers (Rupert Sheldrake comes to mind) have wondered if in some sense the universe might just like to keep repeating whatever it has done before, that we do not so much have laws of nature as habits of nature.

Whether or not there is any substance to this cosmic speculation, it is not hard to see that it works in the human arena. Humans are natural conservatives.

IV. (Unconsciousness): Humans have a strong ability to filter out, ignore, or remain blithely unaware of anything which does not fit their expectations or worldview.

This is clearly connected with III. It is not so much a corollary of it as a description of a human ability or tendency which aids the functioning of III.

It is probably this ability that permits us to be dimly aware of the fact that we have overdrawn our bank account or that we are destroying the planet without it dawning on us that we should do anything about it.

Temple Grandin, an autistic scholar of animal behavior who believes her own condition is some sort of window into how the minds of animals work, speculates that the extremely developed ability to filter out details of the environment and ignore them is what separates us from the animals. If you have ever seen a dog or cat startled by some trivial thing such as a shopping bag, something that you know instantly is not a threat, then you have seen this principle at work.

One of the greatest applications of this law is the ability to remain unaware of internal contradictions in our beliefs or of upsetting implications of those beliefs. This blindness sometimes permits us to show mercy where our beliefs and rules dictate harshness, even death; so it is not all bad.

V. (Empathy): We carry within us a strong natural impulse to help others. This is not a universal impulse, though it is very widespread, and it can be trained into a habit or starved to death.

Empathy is most naturally awakened by our family or by people in our “group.” Extending empathy to larger groups of people—to people who don’t look like us or have a different religion or politics—is usually one of those difficult and exhausting acts of free will referred to in VI. It often takes years and lifetimes.

In its most evolved form, it extends beyond humans to animals and even to the planet.

VI. (Change is possible but excruciating): Humans do have free will and can change their basic worldviews or values. However this takes energy and is exhausting. Usually only limited amounts of change are possible at any given time.

Some of my readers may object to the idea that there is such a thing as free will. I take my stand with the fellow who said, “I have to believe in free will. I have no choice in the matter.”

The usual way for a change in the worldview to take place is for one generation to die off and another take over. In the modern history of the West, people have been privileged to see this happen over and over again.

Another way for this to happen is for catastrophe to destroy the established mental landscape. (Think of the South after the Civil War or Germany after the Nazi debacle.)

One way to bring about change is use an established authority against a different part of the accepted worldview. Thus Moses could lead the people out of Egypt because he spoke for God, or the prestige of science could be used to get people to accept vaccination.

Other ways to bring about such changes are stories and humor. The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an important factor in turning people against slavery. And authoritarian regimes have a special hatred and fear of jokes aimed at them; this undermines the unthinking respect on which their power is founded. Both stories and humor are ways for us to stand outside ourselves, outside our usual beliefs and values, in a way that does not feel threatening. When we do stand outside ourselves, sometimes we can change the way we think.

I append here one more “law” that many of my readers may suspect should not appear in the list. They may feel it does not really refer to any fundamental or distinctive feature of human nature. That we are only talking about the jumbled and inevitable workings of natural desires. Or about the pathological skips and glitches that occur now and then by chance in the normal operation of the human mind.

VII. (Divine discontent): There runs through the human race—but only breaking out sporadically—a yearning for something that transcends the world.

When we talk about the “the world” here, we mean something like “the way we expect things to be,” “the usual order of things.” We are not talking about a quest for mere novelty. Implicit in this yearning is a desire for something with more meaning, more significance than what we find in our normal lives.

This “discontent” may manifest itself in any number of ways: It might show up as a desire to write poems instead of advertising copy, to be a fighter pilot instead of a housewife, or to peek beneath the foundations of reality by taking LSD.

For many people, perhaps most, this “discontent” never displays itself or never leads anywhere. They may be caught up in life’s demands and worries or lack the spark that kindles “discontent.” Or they might hear the siren call—the call to start a new life, take up an unpopular cause, start a grand adventure—and never dare respond to it. Perhaps in after life, they will tell themselves, “Sometimes you get crazy ideas … but they pass.”

If they do respond, then we have a prime example of VI, the application of free will.

When we consider the impulse described in VII, one suspects it has led to most of what we think of as the “forward motion” or progress of history. To stone tools, monotheism, science, and the rights of man. Is it possible, one wonders, that there is something in human nature like a teleological drive? Like an evolutionary imperative?

If so, it is not clear what it aims at. Indeed, the present intellectual climate is quite hostile to the idea that human existence or evolution could have any aim or purpose at all. From that point of view, VII is simply a random process rapidly going nowhere in the middle of the night.

You may remember that Hari Seldon was the fictional psychohistorian in Isaac Asimov’s famous science fiction work, the Foundation series. Hari’s life was situated about twelve thousand years in our future, near the end of the Galactic Empire. By virtue of his mathematical theory of society and history, Hari was able to predict the coming end of the Empire and even make arrangements for a new society to rise in its wake.

I have been put in mind of Hari by two works that have passed under my view in the last few months.

One of these goes by the forbidding title of

Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY):

Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the

Collapse or Sustainability of Societies

and can be found here.

The paper is a very straightforward effort to model how societies interact with their resources and how this might lead to collapse or to a sustainable situation. The technique is to use predator-prey differential equations where a society’s resources (food, minerals, water, etc.) are treated as the prey and the members of society, the consumers of those resources, are treated as the predators.

An important wrinkle in the model is that society is divided into Elites and Commoners with the Elites consuming a larger proportion of resources than the Commoners. As one might expect, the amount that Elites consume has tremendous influence over whether or not the model collapses or evolves to a stable state.

The second paper (actually, a book in the making) has the slightly less forbidding title

A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History.

It’s by a fellow named Peter Turchin at the University of Connecticut who is involved in the study of cliodynamics, the multidisciplinary study of history with an emphasis on mathematical modelling of historical dynamics. You can learn more about cliodynamics at this site.

Cliodynamics apparently leads to the perception of cycles in history, sometimes cycles that last a century or two, sometimes shorter ones of about fifty years. The sorts of quantifiable facts that can be discerned in historical records and statistics are such things as wealth, inequality of wealth, proportions of different classes of society, trade, turbulence versus stability, and so forth.

Not surprisingly, Turchin in his structural-demographic models of historical dynamics finds that Elites again play a very important role; in this case, the overproduction of Elites is a strong indicator of political instability in the offing.

After a little reflection, this is not such an odd thought.

From the scraps I recall of imperial Chinese history, the empire was governed by a mandarin class, and the way one got to be a mandarin was by passing an official examination. These examinations were brutal; they required the investment of a great deal of money and years and years of one’s life. Imperial dynasties, as I recall, got into trouble when there were too many people taking the exams and either not passing or not getting jobs when they did. The result was that you had a large group of bright, highly educated, unemployed, and unhappy people; and then it was usually time for an imperial collapse and a totally new start.

Come to think of it, there’s something similar today. In the last few years, there have been articles about M.B.A.’s having trouble finding jobs. And it’s not limited to M.B.A.’s. I’ve heard lawyers lamenting that law school graduates are having a hard time finding a starting position, at least one that permits them to pay off their education loans. That reminds me that Turchin’s work indicates a strong possibility of American peak political instability somewhere around 2020. As the old Chinese saying has it, we may be about to live in interesting times.

Let us note a few things about the work of the HANDY team and Turchin:

There is an established tradition of trying to find models or patterns of history; think of Oswald Spengler or Arnold J. Toynbee. Such models are built, excite interest, become the topic of the day, and then pass from fashion. One of the things that makes the HANDY and Turchin models particularly interesting is that they are mathematical models. They have knobs and switches on them so that one can play with the parameters and see if some variations yield “better” results than others. And the answers that come out of them are numbers and statistics so that it is easier to judge if they “worked” or not.

Notice that the HANDY and Turchin models are not specifically predictive in the sense of telling us that Caesar will be assassinated on the Ides of March. Rather they tell us about the tendencies of societies, of the things that are more likely to happen under given circumstances. It’s knowledge akin to the realization that if you drive ninety miles-per-hour on a winding dirt road, then the wheels are more likely to come off.

We don’t really know how good the HANDY and Turchin models are. This is a characteristic of much exploratory scientific work; it is a leap in the dark. Or we may, as time goes on, find evidence to support them. (2020, here we come! ) And, of course, there are other people building such mathematical models, trying to get something that matches historical records and then gives decent predictions. For example, if I recall correctly, the HANDY model was preceded by a simpler one that was applied to Easter Island in an attempt to understand the collapse of that island’s culture. The field of cliodynamics is a young one. We are still waiting for a real Hari Seldon to come along.

Now this brings up a particularly crazy thought, and what fun is madness if you don’t share it?

The two cliodynamical models discussed here are mathematically quite straightforward and reasonably simple. The real difficulties associated with them are collecting and interpreting the historical data. The actual mathematics is probably no worse than that associated with building a good computer game. Certainly there are precedents. Games about building civilizations or worlds or conducting military campaigns. This means that such models could be built by people who are not academics. College undergraduates—even bright high school students—might put one together or run experiments with it. Think SimHistory. Indeed they might even be able to collaborate with the academics and feed results and ideas back and forth.

What’s that? We already have all these world- and city-building games?

Maybe we do. But it seems to me that these games are given to the unfettered exercise of imagination. This is a lot of fun, but I wonder if there might not be something a little different and worthwhile to be uncovered here.

I remember decades ago when one of the first popular games that simulated actual warfare came out. It was, if I recall correctly, Tactics II, and it was not a computer game. (At that time, personal computers didn’t even exist in science fiction.) It was played on an actual board with little cardboard pieces, and it took about eight hours for a game. The reason it comes to mind now is that I learned something interesting in the process of mastering the game. There were varied and complicated rules about how different pieces moved and fought, but tucked unobtrusively toward the end there was also a rule that if fighting pieces could not trace a supply line back to a friendly city, their strength went down drastically. I was the first player in the game to notice that rule—and to realize its implications. This made me unpopular with the other players, but I didn’t care—I was happy with the results.

The thing I learned that day was something about the importance of logistics in warfare. Not that I became an expert, but ever since that time, when I have read military history or news articles about fighting, I’ve had a bit more understanding of the role of logistics in any sort of real world conflict. And my understanding is more vivid because I did not simply read about it; I worked my way through it.

So I wonder if models of historical dynamics might not carry with them similar lessons about which forces, trends, and policies are likely to bring about what changes in society. Would such models help us to understand why given policies and attitudes produced good or bad results?

What would it mean if we had a number of bright Young Minds running models of historical dynamics in their bedrooms or apartments—and using them to come to conclusions about public policy issues such as income inequality, resource scarcity, and public debt? What would it mean if those conclusions did not agree with the Sacred Truths of public debate?

It might make life uncomfortable for a number of politicians and Important People who would say, You don’t understand! You’re all wrong!

And the Young Minds would answer back, But we can run all these models, and we can change the parameters, and we still get the same answers! And looking at the models, we can follow the logic of the situation!

But I have to pause and recognize that my readers—who are doubtless far more sane than I am—are, at this point, most likely reeling in horror from the vision conjured here.

Please, calm yourselves. I’m sure there’s no need to worry.

In the course of time, the politicians would raise up Recognized Authorities who agreed with them, and conspiracy theorists would appear who questioned what those Young Minds are-really-up-to. The politicians, Recognized Authorities, and conspiracy theorists would corral these unruly Young Minds. They would discredit and bury the use of mathematical models under a blizzard of denunciations, scholarly refutations that employed far more impressive terms and notation, and white-hot exposés of plots to undermine American values and liberties. And the hubbub would die down.

Alas, I feel the slow trickle of sanity back into my mind. After all, in the final analysis, ordinary people cannot be trusted to understand these things for themselves. Can they?

I recently read an online article about rats and death which offers an interesting commentary on the spectacles through which we view the world.

Professors at the University of Michigan found that dying rats, after their hearts ceased to beat, experienced an unusual surge in electrical activity in their brains. A remarkable feature of this surge was that it was more intense than normal rat-brain activity. But what made this article particularly interesting was the suggestion by one of the researchers that this surge might offer an explanation for near-death experiences (NDE’s).

NDE’s are intriguing and puzzling experiences. They are almost irresistibly suggestive of the idea that we somehow survive the death of our bodies. However this is an idea which, for many people, it would be far too weak to characterize as “controversial.”

We are firmly convinced that every effect has a cause, and if we are “educated” persons, we know that all causes must ultimately reduce to scientific ones. (If we probe a little more deeply, scientific means physics, chemistry, biology, and someone writing equations on a whiteboard.)

To such an educated person, this survival idea is surely a false conclusion since consciousness (the basic fact of our existence) must have a physical cause, and medical and biological science have presumably shown that consciousness depends on the correct functioning of the brain. It then seems annoying that many who have had NDE’s are somehow unable to accept the iron-clad logic of this position. For example, a neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander, who underwent a particularly spectacular NDE wrote a book about his experience titled Proof of Heaven.

The Michigan researchers suggest that humans, at the point of death, experience similar surges and that NDE’s are somehow produced by these electrical surges. They were careful not to claim that this is an explanation of NDE’s. They merely raised the possibility.

Now there are other philosophies than the scientific/physicalist floating around out there. Indeed, so far as I know, such other philosophies have been dominant through most of human existence. To be sure, they have often involved disreputable concepts such as magic, spirits, and gods, but some of them – various forms of idealism, the philosophies behind Catholicism, Buddhism, etc. – have been thought about very carefully. Let us call such philosophies paraphysical.

The paraphysical philosophies tend to believe that mind is something that stands apart from the physical world, that it has an independent existence. They can be quite comfortable with the idea that NDE’s might reflect a reality external to our ordinary experience.

Given that fact, a question I find interesting is this: How would someone who subscribes to a paraphysical view interpret the findings of the Michigan researchers? Let me be a little more particular: How would someone who tried to think about things scientifically and critically – yet subscribed to a paraphysicial point of view – receive this news about the rats?

(Some of my readers will complain, “You can’t have anybody like that! Those are contradictory characteristics!” But yes you can. There certainly are and have been many reputable scientists who are also religious or at least “spiritual.” An outstanding example: Einstein, who believed in God, though not a personal one.)

Perhaps if someone looked at things from the paraphysical side, she would be disposed to say, “Ah ha! These electrical surges must be caused by something. We know that mind has an existence that is not purely dependent on the body and that it may well survive the death of the body. It is very possible that it is the near-death experience, the beginning of the entry of mind into a post-physical mode of existence, that causes them!” In other words, she might consider that the electrical surges supported the reality of life-after-death.

Now I expect most of my readers would consider this argument perverse. There would be a feeling that any argument that explained a phenomenon on physical grounds or placed it in a physical context must be favored over any argument that did not.

I am not quite sure why this is so, but we touch here on a subject that may deserve a lengthy and careful discussion. A topic, I expect, for some other time.

The Michigan researchers saw in their results the possibility that the electrical surges caused NDE’s. This is because – from their point of view – there could not be an external reality to which those experiences refer; the experiences must have a physical cause.

I do not argue with their conclusion, but it is a conditional conclusion.

However if one takes the paraphysical perspective, post-death existence is usually assumed; at least it is a strong possibility. It occupies a theoretical position something like the one that was occupied by the neutrino or Higgs boson till proof was found for their existence. So – if survival of death is a real phenomenon, should we not hope it will produce effects that we can “see”? Then does it not seem perfectly reasonable to think of these electrical surges as a possible “footprint” of after-death existence?

Now this is also a conditional conclusion. It seems to me just as respectable as the suggestion of the Michigan researchers. What will, I suspect, make it distasteful for many people is that it starts from the “wrong” condititons.

So it would appear that the significance of things we see lies at least partly in the spectacles we wear.

That leaves us with the question of why the scientific/physicalist spectacles are the “right” ones. A topic, as I said, for another time.

The average person today is struggling with a complex world and looking for tried and tested ways to make difficult decisions. Over the course of years I have had many opportunities to watch people grapple with hard problems. From that experience I have distilled a short list of rules that I have seen employed over and over again. I hope such a list will be helpful to others.

The reader should be encouraged by the fact that these rules are indeed ones we all use to solve our problems—from the highest officials in the land to the felon who lives down the block. This is easily verified by watching the news or listening to your neighbors.

To be sure, this is only a partial list. However it may easily be expanded by observing how we really think when we are not paying attention to what we think.

Foresight and Vision

1. Good intentions are sovereign protection from the consequences of lack of foresight.

2. It’s too early to let anyone else know there’s a problem.

3. If you can avoid noticing the problem, it will not be there.

4. If you can just avoid looking like an idiot, the problem will solve itself.

5. Everyone will know exactly what the problem is without you having to tell them a thing.

6. If someone you don’t like says it’s an emergency, you may safely assume it isn’t.

7. Since the future cannot be predicted with one hundred percent accuracy, it can be completely ignored.

8. If you can just keep people from making a fuss about it, by the time the problem becomes unmanageable, it will be someone else’s problem.

9. It is far more important to avoid embarrassment and inconvenience today than death and disaster tomorrow.

Crisis Management

1. The first and most important step in solving any problem is to assign blame.

2. On an important project, always remember to assign responsibility for success to yourself and responsibility for failure to someone else.

3. All you have to do to show that yours is the right opinion is to show that everyone else’s is wrong.

4. Inconvenient facts don’t really matter.

5. The secret of good expert advice is to find an expert who agrees with you.

6. Focus on only one aspect of the problem. All others can be safely ignored.

7. Never consider all the consequences of your actions.

8. Problems can always be solved at the last minute.

9. Expect others to solve your problem. And keep in mind that their problems are none of your responsibility.

10. Always pay more attention to your fears than your hopes.

11. Depend on your feelings. People who depend on reason and logic are cold and not to be trusted.

Stand Your Ground

1. The only possible reason for someone to disagree with your ideas is malice, naiveté, or pigheadedness.

2. Since only troublemakers will criticize your ideas, any facts, logic, or contrary arguments that they cite can be safely ignored.

3. If you just stick to your principles, you are not only justified in rejecting any criticism, you are also perfectly safe in not listening to find out what it is.

4. If the goals you have in mind are incompatible, that’s no reason to change your plans.

5. Do not listen to people with a different viewpoint from yours. They might infect you.

6. Listening to someone with different values than your own, shows that you lack principles.

7. There is one thing of which you can be absolutely certain: Closed-mindedness is only a fault of others.

8. When you find you are at the bottom of a hole, remind yourself, “I’m not a quitter! ” and dig harder.

Team Player

1. Never question an authority-figure—it might make him mad.

2. Whoever yells the loudest is always right.

3. Better to be accepted by others than to be right.

4. Depend blindly on others.

5. Anyone who is like you can be trusted.

6. Anyone who has been nice to you for the last half hour can be trusted.

7. Be particularly trusting of anyone who is angry with you so they will see how nice you are.

8. If you have no reason to trust another person, then a solemn promise from him or her will give you absolute protection. I swear it.

9. Always keep in mind that when the head lemming yells, “Jump! ” you have about one second to prove, once and forever, that you are completely and irrevocably trustworthy.

Not long ago, I missed a meeting of friends discussing computers in mathematics. The e-mail that called us together led off with the quote, “We are on the threshold of a revolution in mathematics—how we think about it, how we practice it, and how we learn it.” (Paul Lutus, 1985.)

Everyone is aware of the impact of computers’ on our economy and daily life. And they have indeed caused and are causing a revolution in mathematics, or at least in the practice of mathematics. They have allowed mathematicians (and scientists and engineers) to investigate mathematical problems and physical systems of great variety and hitherto unimaginable complexity. They have also generated strong currents of thought to the effect that reality is at base a digital creation (see, for example, Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science) and that we should be able to solve all our important mathematical problems by some form of simulation. That is, by brute-force number-crunching. (Of course there are still mathematical and physical problems that are too tough for our computers to crack—such as weather prediction beyond a few days—but the answer to this is obvious: More power! )

However if we cast our mental gaze back over the history of mathematics from, say, the Nineteenth Century till now, I think that there was another mathematical revolution that occurred earlier, that was even more fundamental. Something on the order of the invention of relativity or quantum theory. With one interesting difference—that by and large, aside from the mathematicians themselves, no one realizes this profound revolution took place.

Now the reader may feel this claim a bit odd: How can anyone overlook a revolution as fundamental as relativity or quantum theory? And just what is this revolution?

As for how it could be overlooked, why do people know about relativity and quantum theory? After all, the vast majority of people (and this includes academics aside from scientists in those fields) really have little understanding of them. They do, however, have a strong awareness of relativity and quantum theory and of their importance. This is due to the great stream of publications and presentations that have been made over the years on these topics and the fact that one cannot ignore such striking “fruits” as nuclear weapons and laser discs.

Mathematics on the other hand, lacks such a stream of publicity. And although it has an abundance of “fruits”—things like functional analysis and topology—they tend to be edible only by scientists and engineers (and a few other specialist types such as economists and statisticians). So the general public remains pretty much oblivious of the triumphs of mathematics (with perhaps the exception of fractals).

As for what sort of revolution we are talking about, a good article on this is A Revolution in Mathematics? What Really Happened a Century Ago and Why It Matters Today by Frank Quinn. But let me try to present this idea from a personal perspective.

My own mathematical initiation occurred at the University of Florida and Florida State University in the 1960’s during what was still perhaps the Golden Age of pure, abstract mathematics. What I learned in high school—algebra and trigonometry—had little bearing on the experience I am trying to get at and did not do much to prepare me for it. Nor would it have helped if I had learned calculus in high school. My only foreshadowing occurred in tenth grade geometry; but this was at a time when high school geometry was still a demanding theorem-proof sort of course.

Even at the beginning in university, through calculus and differential equations, I really had no inkling of the “revolution” we are discussing. After all, calculus and differential equations are courses taught to a lot of people besides mathematicians—engineers, statisticians, physicists, etc. They tend to be dominated by a desire to compute things, not by an interest in deep understanding.

Things began to change when I took my first real math course, which, as I recall, was abstract algebra. And as I went on to other math courses, things got weirder. I had little awareness at first that I was the beneficiary of an intellectually cataclysmic event that had occurred in the second half of the Nineteenth and beginning of the Twentieth Centuries. But one thing did impress me mightily, and that was that I was having to learn to think in a really strange and different way.

Now when I say this, I am not talking about learning exotic new concepts such as transfinite cardinals or Banach spaces or topologies. I mean that I had to learn to control my thoughts in a different and much more careful—excruciatingly so! —way than I was used to.

For one thing, words had to be used exactly the way they were defined during whatever the current discussion was. If, for example, a duck was defined to be something that had feathers, two legs, and quacked, then the fact that it might have been constructed in a factory using a marine landing craft for a body and weighed three tons was totally irrelevant. So long as feathers had been attached, it had two legs (hydraulic or not), and quacked, then by heavens, it was a duck!

To put this another way, words ceased to be things such that, “Everyone knows what that means! ” Words were now precisely what we said they were, nothing more and nothing less. And any would-be-mathematician who forgot that would find him- or herself sliced into epsilon-small bits.

For another thing, every assumption had to be laid out clearly and explicitly. Or else, everyone worked from a body of assumptions that was felt to be crystal clear to the participants. One might, for example, start with the assumptions of Euclidean plane geometry. Or with the properties of the real numbers which, it was felt, all the participants knew so well that no real disagreement could arise as to what they were.

After this, every step in an argument had to follow by sheer logic and nothing else.

Therefore one could not reason by analogy. (“We know that all objects have locations. The number 3 is an object, therefore 3 must be located somewhere.”)

Nor by pictures. (“Look, if we draw the line from A to B, we can see that it has to intersect the line that runs from C to D.”)

Nor by intuitively obvious “facts” brought in from outside the system. (“We know that any event A must have a cause B. That in turn must have a cause C. And C is caused by D and so forth. Now if we follow this chain of causation backward, we must eventually come to some event E which has no cause. Let us call this event God.”)

From my point of view, the heart of the revolution I am talking about was (and is) this way I had to learn to think about things. Let us call this the non-Euclidean revolution. This is because the birth of non-Euclidean geometries was one of its most visible products.

Let me point out two of the most striking “fruits” of this revolution.

The first and one of the most useful is this: Mathematics as we understand it today, is not about any thing.

To understand what I mean by that, consider, for example, the theory of what mathematicians call groups.

A group is a collection G of “objects” and a “binary operation” * on G that satisfies certain axioms. When we say that we have a binary operation * on G, what we mean is this: Given any pair of elements a and b from the set G, there is a way to “combine” them to form a new element a*b of G. The axioms for this binary operation (the properties it is assumed to have) are these:

1. For all elements a,b,c of G, we have

a*(b*c) = (a*b)*c.

2. There exists an element e of G having the property that for all a in G,

a*e = e*a = a.

This e is called an identity element of the group.

3. For all elements a of G, there exists an element b such that

a*b = b*a = e.

One instance of a group is Z, the integers, the set of whole numbers, positive, negative, and zero,

…, –3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, …

with the binary operation being addition. The element e in this case is 0, the additive identity.

Another instance of a group is found by taking a polygon P in three dimensions and letting G be the set of rotations and reflections that take P onto itself. Suppose that a is the rotation by 90 degrees about the x-axis and b is the rotation by 90 degrees about the z-axis. Then a*b can be taken to be one rotation of P followed by the other (say the a rotation first). In general, the * operation in this setting is meant to be the composition of the transformations of P, that is, one transformation followed by the other one. It is not hard to convince oneself all the axioms of a group are satisfied. The transformation e is the one in which P is neither reflected nor rotated, the identity transformation (that is, you do nothing at all to P).

We might think from our first example, with the integers, that a*b=b*a for groups in general since we know that a+b=b+a when we add numbers. However in the second example (transformations of a polygon), one can show instances in which a*b does not equalb*a. That is, the property of commutativity does not follow from the axioms of a group. This is an instance when we see that we have to be careful not to let unspoken assumptions (what “everyone knows is true”) creep into our thoughts.

We have given two examples of groups but there are tons more. For example, if we look at maps of countries or the world, we know there are many ways to set up coordinate systems on a map and specify the locations of cities, geological sites, and so forth. The transformations between different coordinate systems can be treated as a group with the operation a*b amounting to the application of the transformation a followed by the transformation b.

The examples we have given of groups are instances of the idea of a group. (I think another nice way to describe them is as incarnations of the group idea.) But the thing to notice here is that there is a vast and complex literature on the theory of groups. That literature is not meant to be about any particular example or incarnation of group theory. Any result which is proved about groups can automatically be applied to all of them. In this sense, group theory is not about any particular group but about the idea that stands behind all of them.

This generality applies to many areas of mathematics. If, for instance, we study the theory of Hilbert spaces, we find that possible solutions of differential equations can be treated as a Hilbert space, and so can probability amplitudes in quantum mechanics. Thus anything we can establish about Hilbert spaces in general tells us something about differential equations, quantum mechanics, and other areas as well.

So precisely because mathematics is not about any thing, it tells something useful about many different things. Sometimes we do not know what an area of mathematics is telling us about things till after the mathematics is invented. This was the case for the theory of tensor analysis (invented to do calculus and geometry on curved spaces of any dimension) when it was discovered to be just the tool to develop general relativity.

The second “fruit” of the non-Euclidean revolution that I want to point out is that its very explicit statement of its assumptions leads one to question those assumptions. The outstanding example of this is non-Euclidean geometries.

In Euclidean geometry, if L is a line and p is a point not on L, then there can be one and only one line L’ through p that is parallel to L, and L’ will never meet L.

This is the parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry. It is an explicit assumption about that geometry. But logically there are other possibilities. One of these is that L and L’ do meet; this leads to a new and non-Euclidean geometry. Another possibility is that there may be many lines passing through p that are parallel to L and never meet it; this leads to a different non-Euclidean geometry.

This invention of non-Euclidean geometries has turned out to be very fruitful area of mathematics and has also been quite useful in physics.

So a most marvelous quality of this fundamental, non-Euclidean revolution in mathematics is not simply that it enables one to think outside the box but that it forces one to actually see the box and measure its dimensions. This is tremendously liberating for the creative mind. For the greatest confining power of a box occurs when we do not know it is there.

When I put up my previous post about physicalism (4/9/2013), I described it as: “… the idea, roughly speaking, that everything can be explained by physics and that the scriptures thereof can written down in mathematics.”

This was quite brief. A bit like describing an important character in a novel as “six feet tall and wearing chain mail” and then saying nothing more of him for the rest of the story. We usually want to know more about the lead character. We would like to know things like whether he has blue eyes or brown. Is he a surly individual or light-hearted? Does he decapitate the waitress when she puts skim milk in his coffee instead of half-and-half? And so forth.

So let us sit down and have tea (figuratively speaking) with physicalism and make his—or its—acquaintance.

Of course, since this is an imaginary tea, the traits I ascribe to our distinguished guest may be nothing more than my individual fantasy. And I may miss traits that my readers feel to be vital. Nevertheless, physicalism is so thoroughly at home in our collective conscious (and subconscious) that I am hopeful most of my readers will say, “Yes, that’s him, that’s the culprit! ”

* * *

1. A basic assumption of physicalism is that there is a reality (perhaps hidden) that we can probe by the use of our senses, reason, and mathematics. That is, there is a basic structure to the universe, a story we can tell about it, that can be brought to light by use of these instruments (senses, reason, and mathematics).

2. It also tends to be assumed that this structure runs upward from basic, fundamental things to the more interesting ones. This is, if you will, reductionism.

That is, quarks and fields get together to make electrons and protons and atoms, and these join to make molecules, and eventually we work our way to stars and brains and galaxies. There is a chain of explanation and causation (perhaps in a probabilistic, nondeterministic way) that runs from simple to complex, and the description of this chain is provided by mathematics. Things such as cats, roses, and the way our heart flutters at a baby’s smile are simply the working out of that chain. But it is the atoms and laws of physics that are the basic reality.

3. A third assumption is that whatever we can know about the universe can be found only by the aforementioned instruments—our senses, reason, and mathematics. There is no other way to knowledge. It seems to me that this should be called the Imperial Assumption.

4. An assumption which is closely tied up with the faith in mathematics is that the only things we can really know are measurements. This is the only way in which we have direct contact with nature.

To be sure, our first response may be that this is nonsense, that there are many things in our direct experience that have nothing to do with measurement. We may, for example, think we really know the look of red in a blooming rose. The sensation of red is clear and immediate in our minds; it has nothing to do with rulers or timers.

However a closer examination of the process leads us to see that the cells of our eyes are responding to photons of a certain frequency. But this only happens if a sufficient number of the proper photons turn up. Assuming they do, this results in a signal that is sent to our brains. This in turn is processed and lights up other brain cells in a way that causes us to say, “Red! ”

“You see! ” I imagine physicalism crowing triumphantly. “Everything is measurements! ”

Incidentally, this particular faith tends to be accompanied by a feeling that a measurement made by some sort of instrument—a gadget—is more real than an impression that registers in a human mind. (“I don’t care if you do think the milk smells funny. We’ve run the lab tests and it meets all the FDA standards. Drink it! ”)

5. Another basic assumption of physicalism (or perhaps it should be regarded as a deduction from the previous assumptions) is that the underlying structure of reality does not depend on us. Planck’s constant is the same for Daleks as for humans. More broadly, the assumption is that the laws of the universe do not depend on intention, desire, or consciousness. They are independent of anything that looks like mind or spirit. They just are.

A classic anecdote illustrates this idea: One of the most famous works of the French mathematician Laplace was Mécanique céleste, a volume meant to illuminate the workings of the solar system. When Napoleon took the mathematician to task for failing to mention God, Laplace replied, “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.”

Another noteworthy expression of this sentiment is the short story The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. The point it makes is very clear: The universe does not care.

6. It seems a natural consequence of all the above that there is no room for God in the universe nor for gods or half-gods or spirits. Atheism is a comfortable fit with physicalism.

7. But the next thing physicalism may lead us to discard is consciousness.

If we look at the electrons and protons and oscillating probability amplitudes that presumably make up reality, it is hard to spot anything that looks like consciousness. To be sure, we can claim that consciousness is just something like a standing wave or algorithm generated by these more elementary entities hooked up to form a brain. And if we believe in physicalism, then at some point we may even be able to write down equations describing consciousness!

But if we compare the sensation we have of our individual consciousness with a list of equations, we may well have a bewildered feeling that we see no connection between the two. To say that the equations describe the bright point of awareness which is our consciousness begins to look uncomfortably like an act of faith. Indeed there are philosophers and scientists who use the words “consciousness” and “illusion” in the same sentence a great deal of the time.

The unpleasant possibility arises that not only does physicalism have no room for God, it has none for Man either.

8. In line with the points above, it is easy to feel there something “contradictory” about physicalism. Now I do not mean “contradictory” in the sense of a logical contradiction. I have in mind something more like an emotional or psychological contradiction. Perhaps it is more aptly called a “dissonance.”

This is sharply brought out in Bertrand Russell’s essay A Free Man’s Worship . On the one hand, Russell gives full weight to the idea that the universe does indeed not care: “Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.” Yet the heart of the essay is a resounding cry to defiance of this conclusion, a call to rise above the fact that we exist in a universe that will not only destroy us but that is, at base, meaningless. There is, in this cry, something of the spirit of the gods of Norse legend facing Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, the end of the world.

Yet though there is something magnificent in Russell’s stand, how can it—on his own assumption of the nature of reality—amount to anything more than a puppet twitching through the motions of an act in which it pretends to have no strings? How can we believe in a universe lacking in significance yet claim significance for our own lives? Or even for the belief just expressed?

To put our “dissonance” in different words—can it be that to dwell on the Mount of Truth, we must live in air so thin that we cannot breathe it?

9. We come now to the end of our interview. Let us, in parting, look at why it might be that physicalism is an idea adopted by so many with scarcely a question.

We are taught from early on that science is an important source of profound truths. Now when we think of the great triumphs of science, we usually have in mind the accomplishments of very particular sciences. For example, relativity theory and quantum mechanics in physics. Or genetics and Darwinian evolution in biology.

All these disciplines are “sciences,” so we easily assume there is something called science (or, better yet, Science, with a capital S) of which physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. are all examples. Now physicalism is not the same as physics; one is a philosophy, an outlook on the nature of reality, while the other is a particular and limited discipline. Nor is physicalism the same as chemistry or astronomy or biology or any other science But I suspect that for most people the word science is almost synonymous with the idea physicalism.

Now if this is so, then it is easily seen that the impressive array of scientific discoveries of the last few centuries stands as a “proof” of the correctness of physicalism. We deduce this via the popular and widely used logical principle, “I have such a marvelous hammer that surely every problem must be a nail! ”

* * *

So now the tea cups have been emptied and turned over and the interview ended. I hope you found it of interest.

There may be traits of physicalism that I overlooked. Or that I distorted. Or some that I discussed that you feel should really not be on the list. If so, feel free to conduct your own interview and correct the shortcomings of this one.

I have recently finished reading a book Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig which addresses the question, “Why doesn’t Congress work?” The book is written in accessible style with a number of examples, but what makes it particularly compelling is that Lessig makes clear the dynamics of the present unhappy situation.

Here, in brief, are some of the important factors the book brings out. Most readers may be acquainted with them. However they seem to make more of an impression when assembled and trotted out as a kind of parade of the guilty.

The first thing to keep in mind is the importance of Congress. Congressmen (and congresswomen) pass our laws. They have tremendous influence on the state of the country and the economy. The obvious consequence is that a lot of people who have strong interests in the economy — large corporations, unions, billionaires, etc. — would very much like to be “friends” with Congress.

A second factor is that congressmen can earn a lot more out of office than in it. Rank-and-file members of the House and Senate are paid $174,000 per year, and for most of us, this seems magnificent. But there are lots of people working for big corporations, foundations, and what-have-you that earn quite a bit more. And a congressman would like to be able to send his children to Harvard or Yale, and he does not want his time in Congress to end up as a vacation he took from the serious business of advancing his career. (See, for example, this article from Slate.)

Now a congressman is (generally) not an idiot. He (or she) cannot help but think of the fact that it may not be in his best interests to continue for more than a few years in Congress. And he cannot help but realize that landing a good job after Congress may depend on the good will of the people is dealing with as a congressman. He may, for example, be tempted to become a lobbyist; this is a natural sequel to a legislative career. And a rewarding one. One attempted investigation of how congressmen-turned-lobbyists are treated (and this is a hard thing to investigate) arrived at the astounding conclusion that in their new jobs, they received an average increase in salary of 1,452 per cent. (See this article from Republic Report.)

As a third factor, a similar thing can be said about congressional staff. Staff are absolutely essential not only for things like typing and correspondence but because the congressman often does not have time to keep on top of the details of the complex issues that he has to deal with. Staff does this for him. The experience and connections that staff members pick up can be just as valuable in outside jobs — such as lobbying — as the experience and connections that congressmen acquire. The highest ranking staff members earn salaries in the low six figures, but most of them earn somewhere around forty to fifty thousand a year. Much as congressmen, staff know that being particularly nice to corporations and people with money who want to influence legislature could turn out to be beneficial to their long-run career.

Fourth factor: The costs of campaigning for election have become astronomical. Think of opinion polls, phone campaigns, and television. Another factor that drives costs is that a candidate for a congressional office must be able to match the funds and resources of his opponents; if he cannot do this, he is dead.

Congressmen are well aware of this. One hears estimates that congressmen spend fifty per cent or more of their time on the job raising campaign funds. That is time they do not have for the problems and complaints of the people who elected them.

A fifth factor is that extensive gerrymandering across the country and the terrible expense of election campaigns makes it very difficult for any kind of citizens’ movement to challenge the established politicians’ lock on Congress.

Of course Lessig in his book goes into much more detail than here. The important thing is that he makes it clear why both wealthy elements of the country and the Congress have a big stake in the present dysfunctional system. This, as Lessig points out, will make the problem very difficult to deal with.

But on a final note, he is very clear that we should not think of congressmen as corrupt. By and large, they are not guilty of taking money to vote for Bill X, and they do not go into Congress looking for how much money they can get away with. They sincerely want to serve their country. Rather, we should think of them as addicts. They are placed in an environment which is strongly corrosive of their principles, and if they cannot do right, then they may well hypnotize themselves into believing that evil is good.

Now although Professor Lessig points out how difficult — perhaps impossible! — it will be to heal our congressional disease, what he shares with us is still worth hearing. After all, the first step in breaking the wizard’s spell is to start paying attention to the man behind the curtain.

Years of exposure to the toxic effects of mathematics have rendered me unfit for human society and civil discourse. I used to happily acquiesce in whatever I was told was true, whether it was that fiber is good for you or that the Moon is made of roquefort. Now however, grown cynical and suspicious, I find myself doubting the most innocent statements and wondering, “How do they justify that?” Consider the following:

By physicalism, I mean the idea, roughly speaking, that everything can be explained by physics and that the scriptures thereof can written down in mathematics. This sort of conception used to be labelled materialism; it was, at that time, envisioned that reality amounted to point masses or particles flying around and colliding like billiard balls or influencing one another by gravity or magnetism or electric charge. As present-day physics is filled with more ghostly entities—probability amplitudes, warped space-time, vibrating branes, and so forth—the term materialism has given way to the broader physicalism.

Now so far as I can tell, what we would call a well-educated person in the Western tradition has a very strong tendency to assume automatically, without question, almost without awareness, the validity of physicalism. The “truth” of their position is evident to them. The idea that it might be an assumption is as invisible to them as water is to fish.

Notice that I refer to the “well-educated” person. I have in mind the sort of person who is considered knowledgeable, who follows world affairs, who has a college degree, who is perhaps an academic or intellectual, who tends to be a leader in the community and who, even if only unconsciously, helps shape the views of those in his or her orbit.

It is quite possible—perhaps likely—that the majority of people do not subscribe to such a doctrine. There are, after all, still many religious believers and many who avidly follow their horoscopes.

And of those who do subscribe to physicalism, we may find some who at the same instant unconsciously believe or even loudly proclaim their belief in some basically contradictory idea or -ism. (Think, for example, of the inwardly skeptical politician who is sharply aware that a strong affirmation of religious faith is crucial to his survival.)

Yet despite all this, I have the impression that physicalism is the foundation of the way our educated class views the world.

This is understandable in the case of scientists and engineers. After all, they spend their working lives looking at the world from from the standpoint of physicalism. And of course they may contaminate administrators, financial planners, and others who have to come to them for advice. But I think this influence of physicalism is felt even in the humanities, a place where one might hope to seek refuge from it. Though it is proclaimed there that the heart and spirit of the enterprise is Man—his thoughts, songs, arts, accomplishments—yet in the literature of, say, the last century and a half, the feeling comes through that Man is simply an accident, thrown up by the blind and random forces of nature, who is now faced with the impossible task of justifying his own significance. This seems the sort of mindset that would be a very natural consequence of underlying physicalism.

A thing that seems to me quite strange is that although it is the well-educated who are likely to believe in physicalism, they are unlikely to feel any need or to have any ability to justify their belief.  (There are, of course exceptions; quite possibly the present reader is one.)  Indeed, the fact that they subscribe to such a belief is a principal reason to describe them as “well-educated.” To do otherwise is to invite the adjectives “superstitious,” “naive,” or “ignorant.”

Of course given this situation, one of the first questions that occurs to me is this: How does one justify physicalism? And hard on the heels of that, a second question suggests itself: “What are the alternatives?” Surely if we are going to believe in physicalism, it must be because it is the best of the choices before us. But what choices?

Two possibilities are idealism or religion of some flavor or other.

I have little feel for idealism or how one might contrast it to physicalism. I suspect the same is true for the average well-educated person.

As for religion, it looks to me as though matters have reached such a state that we cannot compare them; it is automatically assumed that people cannot discuss religious matters and physics at the same time; they are said to operate in different domains. (This is not at all the same sort of discussion the atheist may have in mind when he says he certainly can discuss them at the same time; physics rules, and religion is a delusion produced by neuropathology or less honorable means.)

Are there other alternatives?

Very likely. And yet—again—strange to say, no one seems conscious of them. Or at least conscious of them as alternatives. That is, not as systems of thought that can be brought into the same arena with physicalism and compared by noting contrasting assumptions, consequences, or how well they comport with physical or psychological reality.

So let me leave you with these questions:

What—if any—are the alternatives to physicalism? And why is it preferable to all of them?