Category: Religion

Past-Present-Future As It Relates to Fiction-Nonfiction-Fantasy-SF

by James Wallace Harris, 12/12/25

I’ve been contemplating how robot minds could succeed at explaining reality if they didn’t suffer the errors and hallucinations that current AIs do. Current AI minds evolve from training on massive amounts of words and images created by humans stored as digital files. Computer programs can’t tell fiction from fact based on our language. It’s no wonder they hallucinate. And like humans, they feel they must always have an answer, even if it’s wrong.

What if robots were trained on what they see with their own senses without using human language? Would robots develop their own language that described reality with greater accuracy than humans do with our languages?

Animals interact successfully with reality without language. But we doubt they are sentient in the way we are. But just how good is our awareness of reality if we constantly distort it with hallucinations and delusions? What if robots could develop consciousness that is more accurately self-aware of reality?

Even though we feel like a being inside a body, peering out at reality with five senses, we know that’s not true. Our senses recreate a model of reality that we experience. We enhance that experience with language. However, language is the source of all our delusions and hallucinations.

The primary illusion we all experience is time. We think there is a past, present, and future. There is only now. We remember what was, and imagine what will be, but we do that with language. Unfortunately, language is limited, misleading, and confusing.

Take, for instance, events in the New Testament. Thousands, if not millions, of books have been written on specific events that happened over two thousand years ago. It’s endless speculation trying to describe what happened in a now that no longer exists. Even describing an event that occurred just one year ago is impossible to recreate in words. Yet, we never stop trying.

To compound our delusions is fiction. We love fiction. Most of us spend hours a day consuming fiction—novels, television shows, movies, video games, plays, comics, songs, poetry, manga, fake news, lies, etc. Often, fiction is about recreating past events. Because we can’t accurately describe the past, we constantly create new hallucinations about it.

Then there is fantasy and science fiction. More and more, we love to create stories based on imagination and speculation. Fantasy exists outside of time and space, while science fiction attempts to imagine what the future might be like based on extrapolation and speculation.

My guess is that any robot (or being) that perceives reality without delusions will not use language and have a very different concept of time. Is that even possible? We know animals succeed at this, but we doubt how conscious they are of reality.

Because robots will have senses that take in digital data, they could use playback to replace language. Instead of one robot communicating to another robot, “I saw a rabbit,” they could just transmit a recording of what they saw. Like humans, robots will have to model reality in their heads. Their umwelt will create a sensorium they interact with. Their perception of now, like ours, will be slightly delayed.

However, they could recreate the past by playing a recording that filled their sensorium with old data recordings. The conscious experience would be indistinguishable from using current data. And if they wanted, they could generate data that speculated on the future.

Evidently, all beings, biological or cybernetic, must experience reality as a recreation in their minds. In other words, no entity sees reality directly. We all interact with it in a recreation.

Looking at things this way makes me wonder about consuming fiction. We’re already two layers deep in artificial reality. The first is our sensorium/umwelt, which we feel is reality. And the second is language, which we think explains reality, but doesn’t. Fiction just adds another layer of delusion. Mimetic fiction tries to describe reality, but fantasy and science fiction add yet another layer of delusion.

Humans who practice Zen Buddhism try to tune out all the illusions. However, they talk about a higher state of consciousness called enlightenment. Is that just looking at reality without delusion, or is it a new way of perceiving reality?

Humans claim we are the crown of creation because our minds elevate us over the animals, but is intelligence or consciousness really superior?

We apparently exist in a reality that is constantly evolving. Will consciousness be something reality tries and then abandons? Will robots with artificial intelligence become the next stage in this evolutionary process?

If we’re a failure, why copy us? Shouldn’t we build robots that are superior to us? Right now, AI is created by modeling the processes of our brains. Maybe we should rethink that. But if we build robots that have a higher state of consciousness, couldn’t we also reengineer our brains and create Human Mind 2.0?

What would that involve? We’d have to overcome the limitations of language. We’d also have to find ways to eliminate delusions and hallucinations. Can we consciously choose to do those things?

JWH

Can Rereading THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ Help Me Remember What It Was Like to Be Ten Years Old?

by James Wallace Harris, 12/5/25

While watching Wicked, I struggled to recall the excitement I felt when I first read the Oz books at age 10 back in the summer of 1962. I wanted to know whether the fantasy world Wicked created matched the one L. Frank Baum created in his fourteen Oz novels.

The barrier to making this comparison is memory. Memories are highly unreliable. Plus, we overwrite our memories every time we recall them, so am I really remembering 1962, or just the last time I thought about reading the Oz books as a kid?

Like most of my brain excavations, I have to rely on logic and deduction instead. I also look for corroborating evidence. I spent many days on this problem, and here are my results.

The Oz books were the first novels I discovered on my own. For various reasons, I concluded this was the summer between the 5th and 6th grades. My family lived on base at Homestead Air Force Base, and I found the Oz books in the children’s wing of the base library. They were old and worn.

The first novel I remember is Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, which my mother read to me in the third grade. I started using libraries in the fourth grade, but read nonfiction books about airplanes, space travel, cars, and animals.

I remember roaming up and down the fiction section at the base library and discovering the Oz books. I had no idea who L. Frank Baum was, nor did I have any idea when they were written. I didn’t know about copyright pages or genres. I saw “Oz” on the spines and connected those books to the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, which I had seen on television every year since the 1950s.

I did not know the word fantasy. I doubt I understood the concept of fiction. In other words, these books were an exciting discovery. To compound that excitement, they were all set in the same fictional universe. They were my Harry Potter books. L. Frank Baum had tremendous world-building skills.

Analytically, I know that at ten, I didn’t know much about the world. My vocabulary was limited. And I was unaware of most concepts and abstractions. My previous beliefs in fantasy – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy had caused me great embarrassment in first grade when a girl called me a baby for mentioning them. I was five, she was six.

In other words, I knew Oz did not exist, even though Baum created so many wonderful details to make it believable. I remember wanting Oz to exist, but I knew it didn’t. I don’t think I grasped the idea of fantasy at that time. All I knew was that the books created an artificial reality in my mind that was mesmerizing.

Watching Wicked and then rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz this week let me compare the two versions of Oz, but I couldn’t compare my initial reactions. Wicked is quite colorful, creative, and contains many elements of the original stories, but it no longer worked on me as the Oz books had in 1962. And that’s to be expected, since I’m 74, long past the age for fairytales.

My quest changed. I now wanted to know how my ten-year-old self saw the world. Rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz gave me very few clues.

My contemplations led me to some ideas, though. I have damn few memories of life before age five. I have zillions of memories dating from age five to twelve. I started thinking about them, and a revelation came to me.

Before age five, I theorize our minds are like LLMs (large language models). Those AIs can take in information and react to it, but they are unaware of the world. After five, but before puberty, we develop some self-awareness, but it’s very limiting. It isn’t until around twelve or thirteen that we start thinking for ourselves.

Here’s my main bit of evidence. As a child, my mother told me about God and took my sister and me to Sunday School and church. I just accepted what I was told. But when I was twelve, I started thinking about what they were telling me about religion. I didn’t buy it. I considered myself an atheist by 1964, when I was thirteen, maybe fourteen.

In my thirties, when I was working in a library, I came across an article that said that some librarians in the 1950s felt the Oz books gave children unrealistic expectations about life, and pulled the books from their shelves.

When I read that, I knew it had been true for me. The Oz books led me to science fiction, a genre that also inspired unrealistic expectations regarding the future that have proven to be unrealistic.

Here’s the thing: I was being told two fantasies at age ten. The first was from The Bible, and the second from the Oz books. Looking back, I see that my young self began to reject religion at age ten because I preferred the stories from L. Frank Baum. I wasn’t aware that I was comparing two fantasies; I just preferred one over the other.

Then I discovered science fiction. Concurrently, I was also discovering science. That gave me the illusion that science fiction was reality-based. When I consciously rejected religion, I thought I was choosing science. However, in recent decades, I’ve realized I had substituted science-fictional fantasies for religious fantasies.

I realize now that the Oz books had the power of Bible stories on me at age ten. The reason why so many people are true believers as adults is that they were programmed as children. Wicked doesn’t have that kind of power over me today. I can’t remember what that power felt like, but I do remember that for a few weeks in 1962, the ideas in the Oz books set my mind on fire. Rereading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz did not reignite that fire because I’m no longer a believer in anything.

I’ve often wondered if I hadn’t been lied to about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, and thus had not experienced humiliation at discovering they were lies, and if I also hadn’t discovered Oz books, would I have accepted the Bible stories as truth as a kid and believed them now?

JWH

Science v. Greed

by James Wallace Harris, 9/9/25

“What if the greatest threat to truth isn’t ignorance—but desire? In a world overflowing with information, we rely on cognitive tools like religion, politics, philosophy, and science to make sense of reality. But as greed hijacks our narratives and undermines our trust in evidence, science—the one tool built to transcend bias—is under siege.” – Microsoft CoPilot

This essay describes how I evaluate my daily news feeds. We all rationalize what we want with cognitive tools humans have evolved to explain reality. Two tools dominate many news reports covering current events: science and greed.

If an electron had consciousness, imagine it attempting to explain its existence and describe its position in reality. We are no more significant than an electron, yet we explain our existence with an array of cognitive tools that justify our lives. Cognitive tools are linguistic systems that explain reality to ourselves and others.

Of all the changes our society is undergoing in 2025, the one I fear the most is the attack on science. Science is the only cognitive tool we’ve developed that consistently explains reality across minds and cultures. Unfortunately, reality is complex and science is statistical. Most individuals can’t comprehend complexity. This is especially true when math is required.

Most individuals choose a cognitive tool on faith. They will never understand what they believe or how they believe it. Even believers in science accept it mostly through faith. That’s a shame, faith is a terrible cognitive tool. It is the root of all delusion.

I know early Christian theologians made a virtue out of faith, but consider the logic behind it. They were asking their followers to believe something they couldn’t prove. Because I’m not a scientist, I can only accept scientific claims about reality on faith in science. I don’t like that, but I have to be honest with myself.

However, science’s peer-reviewed research can be studied. Scientific results evolve with constant retesting, which can also be studied. Scientific knowledge is applied in technology, which is further validation.

Faith is a cognitive tool, but a dangerous one. It promotes belief over evidence.

Throughout our evolution, we’ve developed several cognitive tools to explain reality. Religion is the people’s favorite. Unfortunately, religion doesn’t describe reality; it only claims to. To support its views on reality, religions spawned morality to impose order on individuals. Religions are fantasies we create to rationalize our fears and wants. Religion is a cognitive tool we use to impose an explanation on reality, one imagined by one person, and spread to others.

Politics is another cognitive tool we use to impose order onto reality. Politics began with the strength of one individual, which spread to groups. Eventually, weaker individuals gained power by using religion. Finally, collectives gained power through consensus. Politics often combines tools such as science, religion, art, philosophy, ethics, and others to create an ordered system within reality.

The next significant cognitive tool to emerge was philosophy. Philosophy gave us mathematics, ethics, logic, and rhetoric. We learned a great deal from philosophy, but ultimately, it can lead to endless speculation. Philosophy often became another tool for rationalization for what we wanted to believe.

Science is a collective effort that works to eliminate bias. Science studies patterns and consistency that can be measured by all observers. The results of science are not absolutes, only our current best working hypothesis. Science has proved to be the supreme cognitive tool because it works so consistently. Technology is applied science. We only have to consider the success of technology as the best proof that science is an effective cognitive tool.

Many humans can’t handle science. They are willing to accept science if it agrees with their wants. But they reject science when it gets in the way of their desires. Greed is steamrolling science today because some individuals have wants that are more powerful than scientific explanations.

I wanted to link to an article in Bloomberg, “Why Iowa Chooses Not to Clean Up Its Polluted Water,” but it’s behind a paywall. Bloomberg subscribers can read it, but that costs $39.99 a month. Apple News+ subscribers can read it for $12.99 a month. It was the perfect article to illustrate my essay. It described how all the cognitive tools I covered are used to rationalize polluting water in Iowa.

[I’ve since found a free video version of this article on YouTube.]

I’ll use a general example in case you don’t want to watch the video. Take climate change. Science has been consistent in predicting what will happen if we increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

There are trillions of dollars worth of fossil fuels waiting to be extracted. The people who own the rights to those fossil fuels don’t want to lose that wealth. Science suggests we should switch to energy sources that don’t produce CO2. This would destroy the wealth connected to fossil fuels.

That’s why the fossil fuel industry attacked science. And they’ve made it political, philosophical, and even religious. They use every cognitive tool before science to attack science. They even attack science with pseudoscience.

Ever since the fossil fuel industry has succeeded with its attacks on science, every group that wants something that science denies has borrowed those tactics.

Climate change is a complex subject to understand. That complexity allows individuals to confuse people with doubt. I can simplify it in my mind. CO2 can be considered a thermostat. Raising the concentration will increase the average temperature of the planet; lowering the concentration will lower the temperature. But leaving trillions of dollars in the ground is something many people can’t accept.

The primary foe of science is greed, but other sources of human desire have embraced the same thinking. Especially, religion. Faith has always been the tool of religion to counter rationality.

Belief rules in this new age. Decades ago, I thought science would help us create a more rational political system. Maybe even inspire the creation of a science-based religion. But that hasn’t happened. We’re rejecting science. We’re returning to cognitive tools that don’t jive with an objective reality. We want to live by subjective experience.

That’s scary. Especially to me, since I want to live in a society where reality makes sense. Reality created through subjectivity is madness, a chaos.

We don’t have to see into the future to know what will happen. We only have to look at history, another cognitive tool for explaining reality. History has always been susceptible to corruption. But if you study enough histories, you’ll see consistencies.

With every news article you read or watch on television, consider how the individuals involved are interpreting reality and which cognitive tools they are using. Notice how often the story involves science versus greed.

Greed usually wins.

JWH

What Should I Major in at Old Age University?

by James Wallace Harris, 8/16/25

I’ve decided to earn an equivalent of a graduate degree before I turn 77. I need a project that will keep me occupied in retirement. I’ve always been one to know a tiny bit about hundreds of subjects rather than a lot about a few. I want to pick one subject and stick with it.

I could get a master’s degree from the University of Memphis, where I used to work, since I can take courses for free. I’m not sure they have a major that fulfills my interests. I will check it out. I’ll also check out available online universities. Mainly, I’m borrowing the structure of a graduate degree for my plan.

I decided a book-length thesis will be my measure of success. Since a master’s degree usually takes two or three years, I’m giving myself until I turn 77, which is November 25, 2028.

Over the next few months, I will decide what I want to study. There are many things to consider and think about. Most graduate programs have lots of prerequisites. Before I retired, I considered taking an M.S. in Computer Science. That program required 24 hours of math courses and 12 hours of computer courses to be accepted into the program. The degree itself was 36 hours.

It’s doubtful I could finish a computer science degree before turning 77. And in all honesty, I no longer have the cognitive ability to retake all that math.

My undergraduate degree is in English. I did 24 hours towards an M.A. in Creative Writing before I dropped out. I was also interested in American, British, and European literature. I’d have to start over from scratch because those 24 hours would have timed out. But I no longer want to study English or creative writing.

I’ve also thought of pursuing an Art History degree. I’ve been collecting art books and art history books for a couple of decades, and I have friends with degrees in Art History. One gave me a list of 200 artworks that I’d be required to discuss to pass the oral exam for the master’s degree. I started reading about those works.

I realized I would have to commit several years of dedicated study to pass the oral. I don’t want to do that. I don’t love art that much. I’m not sure what single subject would be worth that much dedication.

I’ll study college catalogs for inspiration, but it’s doubtful that I will want to complete an actual degree from a university. Instead, I will need to make up my own degree.

Let’s say a master’s degree involves twelve courses, and each course requires studying five books. Then my custom-designed degree will require distilling sixty books into a single thesis volume. That thesis should present an original idea.

The single subject I do know a lot about is science fiction. And I’ve thought it would be fun to write a book that parallels the development of science with the evolution of science fiction. I probably already own the books I’d need to research the subject. And it would be the easiest goal for me to achieve because it’s a subject I love and would have no trouble sticking with.

However, I’ve become obsessed with a couple of ideas that I want to study. I believe they are especially fascinating for the last years of my life.

The first is about how humans are delusional. I’d like to chronicle all the ways we fool ourselves. I want to study all the cognitive processes to discover if we can interact with reality without delusion. Current affairs is the perfect laboratory for such a study.

Second, I’m fascinated by how personality is formed. I’d like to answer this question: If I knew then what I know now, how would I have reshaped my personality?

There is a synergy between the two interests. How do delusions shape our personality?

Ever since I read Ed Yong’s An Immense World, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of Umwelt. Our senses limit and define how we perceive reality. Our personality and cognitive abilities determine how we choose to react to that perception of reality.

I haven’t decided yet on what I will pick, but I’m leaning towards delusion and personality development. If I choose that, I’d start this project by collecting books on the subjects and by reading popular periodicals. Eventually, I’d get to academic journals. I don’t think my made-up degree will be very rigorous, though. I’d consider a two-hundred-page book at a modest popular science reading level to merit my do-it-yourself degree.

JWH

What Will Be the Pivotal Issues in 2026 and 2028?

by James Wallace Harris, 7/2/25

Peter Leyden claims that America undergoes 80-year cycles, which he calls epochs, with peaks of upheaval that last 25 years. The past peak was after World War II, from 1945 to 1970. Leyden claims we’re entering a new peak in 2025 that should last until 2050. He zeroes in on artificial intelligence, clean energy, and bioengineering as the driving forces. I’m not big on predicting the future or seeing patterns in history, but there are ideas in his theory that are worth contemplating. I do believe we’re living through a historic period of change.

David Brooks claims America is moving away from thinking of itself as an idea that inspires the world to a homeland that we should defend. Brooks has moved away from being a traditional conservative to becoming a spiritual guru who teaches morality. I find all his recent speeches to be both uplifting and inspirational. Brooks feels the changes we are experiencing are undermining our individual characters and altering our collective national character.

CBS News asks if we’re moving into a new Gilded Age. But this time, the oligarchs are far richer and much more powerful. There is a synergy between this documentary and the videos of David Brooks and Peter Leyden. Everyone feels a massive paradigm shift coming. In 2025, I believe we’re living through the largest social and political upheaval since 1968.

If history does go through cycles, can we alter their course? The average person does not have much power. But in 2026, we do get to vote, and again in 2028. I believe the Democrats lost in 2024 because they had no clear vision. Being against Trump is not a political plan. In 2024, the Americans voted for Darwinian rule. Let the strong thrive and the weak die. The current administration is enacting laws to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Essentially, civilization on the cheap. They appeal to greed. They appeal to resentment. They believe everyone should be responsible only for themselves.

It’s a very Darwinian philosophy. There’s no way we could call America a Christian Nation anymore. This is what America wanted through a fair and square election. But now that they are seeing what it means, do they want to keep it?

I don’t think we should wait until 2026 or 2028 to decide what we want. The Republicans won by clearly defining their goals in 2024. Democrats need to produce their own version of Project 2025. Project 2028 needs to be specific, and all Democrats need to support it. It can’t be too radical. It will need to be liberal yet practical. It needs to appeal to independents and old-style conservatives.

I have no idea what that plan should be, but I wish it would be something David Brooks would back. It needs a moral foundation because, as much as I accept the scientific theories of Darwin, I don’t think survival-of-the-fittest makes for an appealing political philosophy.

JWH