The God Behind Our Knowing 

The God Behind Our Knowing

Beginning With God

I like to think of God as my friend who I can ask hard questions to. A good question is "God are you real? The answer I got is "Here is am."

Then I ask another question, "What does that mean?"  God answers "We have a conversation, and I come up with things that you would not come up with on your own."

So this is for me being really real, talking person to person. 

This is the difference between talking to a AI machine and God.  God does not speak to me in vague words, the words for me are really on the spot.

With AI there is vagueness plus noticeable patterns.  A typical pattern is statement than has three truths about something followed by a "but" or other qualification.

For example: "God is not merely an idea we analyze, not merely a pattern in the mind, and not merely a formula waiting to be solved."

Another example: "God is the source of being, the maker of the universe, the giver of life, and the one who knows fully what we only glimpse in part."

The second sentence is awkward.  I do not "glimpse in part" whatever that means.

Since God is separate from ourselves, the ideas from God speak about something that is really worth talking about, without generalities, and patterns.

When I was a kid, my Mother, sent me to Catechism class where the nuns did not tolerate questions.  Believe, believe, believe.  That was it.

I really loved science and I still do.  But science seemed incomplete.  It always was asking questions and there was nothing to hang on to if the questions were outside nature.

When Religion Becomes Noise

When I was young, I did not know how science and the Catholic Church fought each other and how science relegated anything that smelled of religion off limits.

For all its short comings, the feeling of grace, was something I wanted because it was so natural, and soothing. 

On the other hand, the Catholic doctrine contained some good ideas, like love and God, I could not question anything. 

I of course had not power to change anything, except make the nuns hostile.

What bothered me the most was the guilt I had.

 Anything connected with sex was treated as sinful, and anything sinful created guilt.

The Limits of Science and Psychology

Science has gone very far in studying the outer world. It can measure stars, decode genes, build computers, send signals around the planet, and look deep into matter.

That is magnificent.

But when it comes to the inner life, science still has a problem. It often treats the inner world as too subjective, too private, or too close to religion.

Psychology tries to study the inner life, but it often approaches the person as a patient with a disorder.

You are diagnosed, classified, treated, medicated, or counseled. Some of this is helpful.

Modern methods such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can be very useful because they help people see the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

But psychology can also become another system of labels.

One of the worst mistakes in psychology was behaviorism, because it tried to explain human beings almost entirely from the outside.

The inner life was treated as if it did not count because it could not be measured directly. That may look scientific, but it leaves out the most important part of being alive.

If a person gives up on religion but has no deeper understanding of the inner world, he can end up in a void.

He may no longer believe the old doctrines, but he still has the same fear, desire, guilt, longing, confusion, and need for meaning.

Something has to replace blind belief, but that something cannot be emptiness.

The answer seems obvious to me. We need a disciplined study of the inner world.

Science studied the outer world and changed civilization. Now we need to study the inner world with the same seriousness, but without reducing the soul to chemistry or turning God into a church rule.

We live in a world where many leaders have no real understanding of the inner life.

They are often driven by ego, image, power, fear, and ambition, and they do not even see the machinery that is running them.

Culture has advanced outwardly, but inwardly it often remains primitive. There has to be a higher way.

The Higher Way

Higher Math Applied to the Inner Life.

Higher math begins when we stop treating numbers as little objects to be counted and begin seeing them as signs of a deeper order.

Arithmetic teaches us how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but higher math asks what kind of structure is hidden behind those operations.

It wants to know how things relate, how they move, how they change, and what remains steady underneath the movement.

That is why higher math connects so naturally with Deepermind. The inner life also has hidden structure.

A thought may appear suddenly, but it rarely comes from nowhere.

It may be tied to an emotion, an old memory, a bodily tension, a fear of loss, or the ego’s need to defend its image.

What seems like a simple thought may actually be the surface of an entire system moving beneath awareness.

Using Matrices to Understand Thought

A matrix is usually described as a group of numbers arranged in rows and columns. It may have three rows and five columns, or it may have thousands of rows and thousands of columns.

That is the ordinary mathematical description, but the idea becomes far more interesting when we stop thinking of a matrix as merely a box of numbers and begin seeing it as a way to organize relationships.

A matrix can hold values, and those values do not have to represent only inches, pounds, dollars, or temperatures.

They can represent qualities, directions, probabilities, meanings, choices, colors, emotions, or relationships.

Once we see this, a matrix becomes more than a school exercise. It becomes a way to picture how the mind may compare many things at once.

A vector is a value that has both direction and length. If I walk three meters east, the direction is east and the length is three meters.

That is easy to picture because we can imagine space on a map. But now let us move beyond ordinary space and use the same idea for meaning.

Instead of using north and east, let us use red and blue. Imagine red as one direction and blue as another direction, with the two directions 90 degrees apart.

Red points along one line, and blue points along another line at a right angle to it.

This gives us a simple space where color can be described by direction and length.

Now consider purple. Purple is not pure red, and it is not pure blue. It is a mixture of both.

In this color space, purple would point somewhere between red and blue.

If the vector leans closer to red, the purple has more red in it. If it leans closer to blue, the purple has more blue in it.

If it sits halfway between them, the red and blue values are balanced.

The angle of the vector tells us the mixture. The length of the vector tells us the strength or intensity of the color.

A short purple vector may represent a pale, light purple because the color has less strength.

A long purple vector may represent a deeper, darker, more intense purple because the color has more force behind it.

So the direction tells us what kind of purple we have, and the length tells us how strong that purple is.

This is a powerful idea because we no longer need buckets of paint to think about color.

We can picture color as a relationship in a field. Red and blue are not merely names.

They are directions. Purple is not merely a label. It is a position between them, with both angle and strength.