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The Theory of Accidentalism

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Powerful Mind Part 23

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, March 7, 2025.
Created August 11, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 22

For millennia, most human deep thinkers of whom we have kept records humbly kept an open mind about the nature of reality. They knew how little they knew and admitted it. Anything might be possible. They could not rule out any possibility.

With the rise of scientific thinking in the past few hundred years, scientists gained confidence in the scientific method. They especially appreciated the methodology of not considering something proven until numerous experimenters verified the results. This disciplined standing back from prematurely accepting one’s own experimental proofs gradually became more and more important to the scientific community.

Scientists accordingly became more judgmental of each other as regards the perfect embodiment of this principle. Now in the 21st Century, they can be stern with one another, calling each other out. Membership in the scientific community can be cast in doubt for those who appear to transgress against this principle by theorizing in ways that include unproven specifics.

William of Ockham in the 14th Century had added the idea of parsimony or elegance as a heuristic criterion for the construction of scientific theories. Essentially, this meant to start from the fewest assumptions possible to come up with the simplest explanations for things. Half a millennium later, Einstein was to modify this idea with his own notion: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Although this heuristic was never intended to be taken as a scientific principle, its close association with the scientific principle of replicated verification reinforced the idea of scientific simplicity as a clue to probable truth. This is ironic since everything we have learned about the universe so far proves the exact opposite: the universe is incredibly complex.

The formation of a scientistic culture around these ideas of demanding replicated proofs before asserting truth plus parsimony created what might be regarded as an aesthetic: a way of preferring the world to be, for unspoken and perhaps non-articulatable reasons. A world in which true scientists would cling to the proven and not add to that anything theoretical that was more than a stone’s throw away from the collection of proven facts. Scientists deviating from this aesthetic could lose their status, and their ability to receive funding for their work.

It was into this context that scientists began to treat the idea of a Godlike intelligence as being too far out to qualify under Occam’s Razor: God became classified as an unnecessary assumption.

This did not mean that science had proven the non-existence of such an intelligence, merely that it was at odds with a heuristic and a culture which had grown up around science. Some have compared today’s class of scientists to the ancient priest class: a group of people who feel superior, use codes that the non-members of the class cannot understand (advanced mathematics), and have an agenda that extends beyond the specific work of that class.

In order to avoid the invoking of “the unnecessary assumption,” science had to give credit to how much could be explained purely based on accident. We now, as a world culture, are willing to assume that life and then consciousness came about simply by the accidental crashing together of matter and energy. None of us has ever seen a beautiful and intricate sculpture being built out of a sandy beach by the action of the waves, and yet this is what we as a civilization largely “believe in.”

The theory of Materialistic Accidentalism has become our default explanation for reality at a non-conscious level. That theory has not been proven, and yet science is willing to assume it as a default, and to defrock scientists who write about ideas which can be quickly pigeonholed as “magical thinking” and “superstition.”

Einstein Rejected Accidentalism

Einstein did not accept Accidentalism. As he famously said, “God does not play dice with the universe.” He also wrote in 1954 in an article “On Scientific Truth”: “Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order… This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.”

“A superior mind.” This is what Einstein was sure had created the universe. He did not say that the universe and that superior mind were the same thing, nor that each of us shares consciousness with that superior mind; I cannot claim that any famous respected scientist has ever taken that position. For the moment, it’s just my theory.

“A superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience.” Did Einstein mean our own conscious experience, his own conscious experience, or the experience of taking measurements during scientific experiments, or did he mean all of those things? We don’t know. In the final chapters of my book, A Theory Of Everything Including Consciousness and “God”, I lay out certain experiments readers can undertake on their own which might convince them through their own experiences that there is something to my theory, as they realize they have hunches that turn out to be accurate, read people’s minds accurately, and receive inspirations that contain information beyond anything they have ever heard or thought before.

You ought not believe my theory, simply keep an open mind, do not assume that science has proven anything yet about my theory, positively nor negatively. Having an open mind you will have experiences and notice them that may constitute evidence convincing to you on way or another as to whether consciousness is a connected thing.

With an open mind you will begin to notice how often you experience synchronicity: you are thinking something, and then something occurs in the external world which is relevant to what you have just been thinking. A song on the channel you are listening to might come on just at that moment, or someone might say something to you, or you might notice something going on around you that seems like a comment on your recent thought.

As if someone is listening in to your mind besides you yourself, someone who is able to make things manifest to the world of your senses. When you notice how often this happens, and your gut tells you that so many coincidences happening accidentally are unlikely, and when you detect that you are learning important lessons through these synchronicities, you may also feel a degree of alignment with my theory.

The most important thing is not my theory, it’s the openness of your mind. Letting in all experiences without filtration based on hidden assumptions of materialism and accidentalism, and forming your own independent theory of what is going on, based on weighing all the evidence of your own experience. Updating your own theory continuously. Deconditioning the imposed cultural assumptions and applying the unbiased scientific method to your own life.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Watch this 1-minute video of Bill talking with his daughter about Materialistic Accidentalism.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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How Did We Each Become Such a Rolebot?

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Powerful Mind Part 15

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, February 7, 2025
Created June 16, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 14,

From our earliest experiences, people were telling us how we should be. For the first five years of our life, possibly the first 25, and unfortunately probably until the last breaths we take, we are very malleable creatures. The plasticity of our brains is widely known: we are constantly building new neural connections, which can then take on a life of their own, able to cause some of what we say to ourselves internally. We are particularly impressionable when we first come into the world for on our own, we know nothing, except the obvious physical needs as they arise, and so our instinct is to look for incoming advice.

Given these basic conditions, it’s understandable that even besides hard-wired primate mimicry programming in our genes, we would be largely shaped by each other. Other mechanisms more recently discovered such as mirror neurons enable our empathy with each other, serving a pro-species-survival behavior pattern of cooperation which has enabled us to erect the many artifacts of what we call civilization.

Freud, in what I feel is his most important book, Civilization and Its Discontents, comments based on his pioneering experiences of psychoanalysis with patients, how he perceives a common thread across neurotic people (today I believe he would classify us all that way), a pattern created by the thwarting of inner motivations by the constraints placed upon us by our particular form of societal civilization. From his sample, he concluded that the main problem was the limitation which most societies on Earth (his sample was mostly European upper class) place upon free sex. Free in the sense of being able to have sex with all the people that seem sexy to you. Had his sample been representative of the population of the planet, his focus on sex may or may not have remained the same. The total number of ways in which our behavior has been shaped by our laws and social conventions is far more all-encompassing than as relates to sex.

As each of us grows up we generally accede to the demands placed upon us to achieve acceptance and a sense of belonging.

This is one of the fifteen primal motivations discovered by my research. The scrip we pay for belonging is conforming. Sometimes that conforming is comfortable and sometimes it rankles us inside, but we go along with the game for safety and support within the herd. Freud’s wider point was that excessive conforming leads to neurosis, an early stage of insanity (disconnection from reality). Just as there are pre-cancerous states, there are also pre-insanity states.

Neuroscience and psychoanalysis both have many explanations to the phenomenon of our tendency to be influenced from the outside. My own method, concentration introspection, goes back much earlier than either of these two potent modern mind sciences, spanning millennia from the Rig Veda through the work of Freud, Jung, William James, Abraham Maslow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and John H. Flavell, who gave it a new name, metacognition, in the 1970s. All of these methods sheds more light on how it is that each of us is capable of being influenced in extraordinarily powerful ways from the outside – typically, without our realizing the full significance of the process, and its spread of effects.

From my recent media work, in collaboration across many industries and academia, where there is much to be learned from the scientific work of others, we now know that McLuhan was more right than he himself knew. He said the medium itself was more powerful than the messages which came through the media. He was referring to television and never claimed to have seen the digital future we now live in. And yet, the latest evidence about digital media shows that McLuhan’s concept is proven right in media he never anticipated.

The latest evidence is that the forced conventions of scrolling, mouse control, skippable and unskippable ads, and relentlessness of ads begging for attention, have caused the constraining of attention windows: digital media users fall into a pattern of giving only a second or two of attention to ads they do not ignore entirely. This is quite different from television, where under ideal circumstances of ad-context resonance, 15 seconds of immersive attention can occur when the viewer’s subconscious motivations resonate with the ad’s subconscious motivators.

So our present external world has taken a very strong hand in your life and mine so far.

It will take a lot of metacognition, introspection with concentration, for you to bring on the Observer state in your own castle. The state in which you can intuitively catch yourself thinking something for which you actually have no compelling evidence, but thinking that way has become habitual to you. And what you have been taking to be your very own self when you take your own counsels internally, is actually the residue of all of the imprints that have been made on you by the horde of stimuli you have experienced.

Clearing out excessive other-directedness from your self is a form of purifying the mind.

This purification is central to all of Eastern philosophy. Most of what is generally taken as mysticism is actually codified metacognition, using metaphors recognizable and meaningful in those cultures. Even astrology started as a way of evoking metacognition.

This is another example of how our society shapes us. I just wrote “even astrology” because it is a subject that has been denigrated in our present society. And even I follow society’s rules. I just understand what I am doing and why I am doing it, rather than playing a programmed set of roles, and not even realizing that I actually have a true self underneath all the roles. Realizing your true self from the inside is a freeing experience, and leads to a life living at least sometimes in the Flow state, the state of continuous impregnable happiness and effectiveness, bringing forth your unique gifts to the world.

Allocating just twenty minutes a day to studying yourself objectively (the socially acceptable term is “meditation”) is guaranteed to improve your life, even if it’s already perfect.

You don’t have to sit in a specific position. The main point is to observe your self, observe the workings of your mind. Stay on it, don’t get distracted from it. Watch what is going on in your mind as you unwind. What do you start thinking about first. Why that?

As soon as you realize you’ve been distracted, go back to the task. Have a way of taking ultra-brief notes – key phrases that will bring you back to where you just were. That way you can go on having revelations without worrying about remembering the ones you had a moment before.

Don’t filter things out that you feel like writing down because they might seem obvious to others. You are the only one who will ever see these notes. Unless you decide to publish some of them. Don’t do editing during metacognition, editing is for later. Metacognition is reconnaissance, the Observer state, assimilation of implications can come later, hence the notes.

Love to all,
Bill

 

Do It Your Way

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Powerful Mind Part 14

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, January 31, 2025
Created June 9, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 13

Every human being is unique. A combination of genes and experiences that has never existed before and will never exist again. You are one of these unique creatures.

Then, why would your conversation, for example, sound like everyone else’s?
It’s partially because much of our learning is by imitation. That’s OK as a starting point, but then a fully realized individual will assimilate all of the different body movements and ideas that have been taken in imitatively. Not continue for an entire lifetime frozen into those imitated attitudes and behaviors.

Everyone has had the experience of having a friend or acquaintance who always says exactly the same things in any given type of situation. That person is playing tapes from his or her mind.

Everyone has had the version of this experience involving some unfortunate people who have lost some part of their short-term memory, and continue telling you the same stories, over and over again.

Imagine for a second that you, yourself, are a little bit that way. Not because of memory loss but simply habit.

How many times a day do you say the same word?

A few of us have been lucky enough to see monkeys, like in a zoo, or maybe even in the wild. Monkeys learn by imitation and you can see their learning take place, you can watch as they copy another monkey or a person – maybe even you are that person they are copying. Monkeys are closely related to humans, sharing a common ancestor, and seeing the way monkeys imitate can tell us a lot about ourselves, and get us to question all of our beliefs and ideas and attitudes, because maybe they became “ours” during a similar process.

It’s fun not to be a predictable person. That often requires giving fresh thought to a question rather than simply popping out the thing you always say about that question. That freshness is fun too. It isn’t a mistake to be playful in life, as long as your conduct suits the occasion. All of life is the playfulness of consciousness expressing itself.

It’s easiest to see how imitative behavior is formed when observing children, they are in the thick of it. Often, they don’t know the complete meaning of what they are saying, they are just repeating something they’ve heard. The problem is that this can continue way into adulthood.

You can imitate
Everyone you know
I told you so
—The Beatles, “I Dig a Pony”

We all value our freedom. We have a sense of free will: we observe ourselves making a decision, and we feel it inside when we have reached that decision. We know that we could have gone the other way. Therefore, we must have free will.

Some thinkers have pointed out that these feelings could be illusory, and that one could have predicted that decision from the outside, having observed your past behavior. It follows logically from this, that if you want to have free will and freedom of action, you need to study which actions you have been taking and try to discern why you have been taking those actions. Especially, was there someone else who influenced you to begin that pattern of action. Only after careful self-analysis can you know for sure that you are establishing your own self as an independent thinker and action-taker, not someone who has been other-directed for a lifetime.

Self-analysis starts with self-observation. You need to be aware of what you are doing from moment to moment, and why and how you are doing it. That is studying yourself as if from the outside. Each impulse that arises in you to do something is a phenomenon to be studied objectively. You don’t need to use words in your mind to ask yourself “Why would I do that” before following the impulse and allowing your body to take the action, or ignoring the impulse.

The level of detail is important when you are observing yourself. You will want to focus on the details, not jump to one general conclusion right away. How do your eyes move and what happens to your breathing when you are thinking about a given subject. Your expression and body as you walk into a room – what are you projecting to others – and why, at that moment?

Study not only things that seem to be important but also things which seem to be trivial. When you get out of bed in the morning, how do you swing your feet to the floor, and how long have you been doing it that way? Does the position you sleep in remind you of anyone else – e.g., your father or mother? It’s important to actually experience the feeling of discovering these things about yourself. How much of you has been simply copied from your models, and how much has been independently considered by the real unique you?

You don’t have to be like your friend in order to be his or her friend. Be your self. But first you must discover who that self is.

In some cases, you might come back to the same conclusions and ways of being as before. In other cases you may realize the way you do certain things – for example, the way you laugh sometimes is false and you’ve never liked that about yourself, you were mimicking someone else, and you’ve been doing it for a long time, and you’re going to learn how to break that habit by patiently catching yourself. At first, whatever program you are trying to delete from your repertoire will win over your will power, but as you persevere, you will gradually become dominant and the habit will eventually be totally broken, only to return in moments of extreme stress, until you lick it there too. Breaking conditioning is not easy but it can be done by this simple patient method.

But you have to be guiltless about your robot winning sometimes, especially in the beginning. Don’t let it depress you and don’t lose confidence. Accept that you will need to retrain your autonomic systems by not losing your cool, steadfastly and with resolve repeating the cancellation of those impulses as soon as you can in each situation. In some cases, you will have blurted something but you can explain and change your response to what you yourself truly feel in the moment. In other cases, you can stop it before a word leaves your mouth, but after you somehow telegraphed that you were about to say something. In the same way, you can truthfully explain the deconditioning you are going through, in order to become the person you are meant to be. There is no shame in metacognition, it’s a valuable skill that has never been given the attention in schools that it deserves. It will make you more effective and happier after your inner world housecleaning is done.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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All The World’s a Classroom

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, January 10, 2025
Created February 2, 2024

Not to contradict the Bard’s “All the World’s a Stage” – both lenses make sense. The value of using lenses experimentally is that you see things in new ways. This both stretches and searches your imagination.

Einstein said that imagination was even more important to him than intellect, and he demonstrated the power of imagination in his thought experiments methodology, without which we might to this day not know about relativity.

Hopefully, you have in my earlier writings picked up my notion that there is probably a scientific explanation for the actual existence of God. My own lens (which I now have come to strongly suspect is the truth) is that all that exists is a single consciousness of which we are individualized manifestations.

In A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and God, I support this hypothesis within the current physics standard model, positing that John Wheeler’s quantum foam might be identical with consciousness.

If the truth is anywhere in that neighborhood, what is consciousness doing here on Earth, why is our history the way it is, why are we facing the perils we today are facing?

If one looks for the Good, and asks how can the turmoil and terror we are now undergoing be a good thing, the answer is that it might be the only way for us to learn lessons we desperately need to learn.

It is common to observe that a person who is spiraling downward often cannot reverse course until he or she hits bottom. This has oft been observed for example in the case of alcoholics.

Perhaps we have become so addicted culturally to ego and its demands that the only cure is to let it take its painful course. Money and power have over the millennia been concentrated in a small fraction of us. Today, some of those people have decided to use their money and power for Good, while the vast majority still are hypnotized by greed and narcissism.

The vast majority worry about the future and have become cynical. Merriam-Webster defines “cynicism” as “the sneering disbelief in sincerity or integrity”. This means literally that the average person believes that no one has sincerity or integrity and if they do, they’re a fool.

What if the meaning and purpose of life on Earth is that we are here to learn about life, about reality, our place in it, and what to do about it, how to fit in cosmically, and perhaps how to be trustworthy enough to be reborn in an even more powerful body and mind, possibly at a higher level of evolution?

This cannot be tossed aside as a ridiculous idea. It could be what is actually going on.

What can we do more of than anything else? Learn, perhaps? Each day, each second, there is something to learn from the situation we are in. Possibly a lens might tend to be more useful the more that lens can help us notice learning opportunities and think deeply, and feel deeply around inside, about these learning opportunities.

All of the turbulence in our minds is in its own buckshot way a groping, distracted, grasping at straws attempt to figure out stuff. How do we apologize, how do we keep this job, how do we cure this ill, how do we repair this damage, what should we do first. We may not be successful at it, but it does appear to be some sort of effort to learn something.

All species appear to share curiosity and play, both of which are key parts of a learning process.

Where we went wrong as a race is we learned how to take more than our share and then unintentionally idealized that as the summum bonum. The highest good.

Hence a world fixated on competition rather than cooperation. A world that increasingly disbelieves in the Good.

Is Earth where souls from everywhere who got left back got sent for remedial education?

Or does it just seem that way from the news and social media babble?

As we navigate amongst each other each day we encounter friendly folks making jokes and standing up to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 99% of what we experience in an average day is Good. Unless we are spending too much time imbibing doom and gloom from pitiless media choices.

A lens of seeing the Good, looking for it whenever it seems to be absent, asking what could a possible single consciousness be doing here for us to doubt the justification for suffering in today’s world, such a lens enables us to divine what the Divine might be thinking.

We ourselves have conscious choices to make as to what learning we welcome the most, what lessons we wish to draw upon ourselves. We can choose not to suffer. It actually works when one uses the powers of concentration which lie perhaps dormant from long disuse within us. We can choose to release the tensions in our bodies, to see and feel the Good in our lives in the present moment, to take in and savor the beauty around us, to focus on taking the Good to others, sharing Good as widely as possible, learning step by patient step how to become better at it.

We need to learn that negativity cannot serve the Good.

Love to all,
Bill