Time and Chance

...happen to us all.

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Albert Einstein, 1955
quoted from a letter to Michael Besso's family after his death

Teaching Ignorance

Interesting piece in the NYT on trying to explain to students that science doesn't erase ignorance, it just creates new landscapes for it to exist:

The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask.

Of course not all ignorance is created equal. Not knowing the motions of the planets, or the root causes of our diseases, is fundamentally different than not knowing where life exists outside of our solar system, or the specific proteins involved in ALS.

Science is progressive in that future knowledge builds on erasing the ignorance of the past. The problems and breakthroughs we've made so far empower us to push ever onward in our pursuit of knowledge. We know we can do it again because we've done it before.

The progress science makes sometimes takes a circuitous route to improving our quality of life. The discovery of TDP-43 in ALS, for example, will not cure ALS overnight. As MLK once remarked, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Maybe the ignorance-erasing arc of science is long, but it bends constantly towards improving our lives.

Proclivity towards lore, legend, myth and BS

Both liberals and conservatives are capable of letting their feeling get in the way of their thinking. That's been known for some time now. But what is less well-known is that the conservative mindset is correlated with a propensity towards paranoia:

conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it). In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology. The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed. 

A good summary:

research shows that conservatives have more of a “negativity bias”, which means “they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments.” In other words, they are more fearful and respond more to fear-mongering than liberals. Fox News could have told you that, but it’s always nice to have some scientific evidence.

And that’s what these conservative urban legends are about: Conservatives keeping each other in a heightened state of fear by constantly warning each other about the endless threats to their safety, their identity, their masculinity, their religious holidays, whatever they’re hyped up about today. And using that fear to justify reactionary politics.

At the risk of over-generalizing, it may simply be brain differences that divide us into liberal and conservative camps. People who are psychologically "high strung" -- able to be terrified easily -- may move towards conservatism as a way to manage anxiety. Are right-wingers' stances on the strong military, law enforcement, lots of guns around, etc., all just preferences that arise from fear, not reason?

Metacogs

From The Atlantic:

We cling to myths like “the 10 percent brain”—which holds that the vast majority of our thinking power remains untapped—in part because we hope the minds of the future will be stronger than those of today. It’s as much a personal hope as a hope for civilization: If we’re already running at full capacity, we’re stuck, but what if we’re using only a small fraction of our potential? Well, then the sky’s the limit.

But this dream has a dark side: The possibility of a dystopia where an individual’s fate is determined wholly by his or her access to cognition-enhancing technology. Where some ultra-elites are allowed to push the limits of human intelligence, while the less fortunate lose any chance of upward mobility. Where some Big Brother–like figure could gain control of our minds and decide how well we function.

Or we could integrate into AI, becoming the closest thing to God that will ever exist.

New Pew Study

Everyone and their brother is writing something about the new Pew study which documents quite starkly the rise of secular people like myself and the fall of traditional religion.

I have held off because I don't think I have much of significance to say about it. Oh wait, I've already said a lot about it since 2007 or so.

Anyway, I just read an article on NPR interviewing the Rev. of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC for his response to the new study. I liked his response about how religious people can try to reverse this trend:

On those who say religion is unnecessary, given humanity's growing scientific knowledge

I think science and religion are at some point both about big questions of origin and wonder. And I think, for me, I've always felt that it's important for religious people to have the same kind of philosophical stance they use in their religious life as they do in the rest of their life. And a lot of times I think religion — religions — ask people to sort of turn off the scientific part of their lives and just go and kind of think about God kind of pre-scientifically.

I don't think we can do that. We've got to have a faith that is, in some sense, consonant with the way we think about the world scientifically. And again, I think one of the things the Pew study suggests to us is that if the church can get over its anxiety about talking about God in a grown-up way, we would actually reach out to and speak to more people than we do right now. [emphasis added]

That last part rings true to me. Honestly I think that fear and emotion cloud these discussions so much on the part of religious people that they can't really talk about God in a grown-up way. They are too afraid they'll go to hell for doubting. That's the pathetic part of religion: mind control.

Parting Words

Oliver Sacks:

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

 I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

Beautiful way to say goodbye. About the time you start to focus on leaving behind some impression upon others, you realize that your most important one will come through your progeny.

Hellish heaven

Thoughts I've had before:

A serious but startling statistical analysis by researcher Greg S. Paul suggests that if we include the unborn, more than 98 percent of Heaven’s inhabitants, some 350 billion, would be those who died before maturing to the point that they could voluntarily “accept the gift of salvation.” The vast majority of the heavenly host would be moral automatons or robots, meaning they never had moral autonomy and never chose to be there. Christian believers, ironically, would be a 1 to 2 percent minority even if all 30,000+ denominations of believers actually made it in.

The theological implications are huge. Christian theologians typically explain evil by arguing that this was the best of all possible worlds, the only way to create free will and to develop moral virtues (like courage, compassion, forgiveness and so forth), to make us more Christ-like and prepare us for Heaven. But if we run the numbers, it appears that God didn’t need the whole free will—sin—redemption thing to fill his paradise with perfect beings because no suffering, evil, or moral freedom is actually required as a prelude to glory.

So...what's the point of this life, again? If we have these immortal souls that live eternally, why clothe them in physical form in this world at all? It seems that the vast populace of Hell is anyone who lives past the age of accountability (if there is such a thing), while the vast populace of Heaven is anyone who didn't make it that far.

Christians seem to believe that God is perfect and will not tolerate imperfection, and this is why Hell is a necessity. But on the other hand, do all wrongs involve God, or are there some "victimless wrongs"?

Enchantment

A little nugget from David Brooks today:

Basically, they have to take the enchantment leap. This is when something dry and utilitarian erupts into something passionate, inescapable and devotional. Sometimes a student becomes enraptured by the beauty of math, and becomes a mathematician. Soldiers doing the drudgery of boot camp are gradually bonded into a passionate unit, for which they will risk their lives. Anybody who has started a mere job and found in it a vocation has taken the enchantment leap.

In love, of course, the shift starts with vulnerability, not calculation. The people involved move from selfishness to service, from prudent thinking to poetic thinking, from a state of selection to a state of need, from relying on conscious thinking to relying on their own brilliant emotions.

When you look at all the people looking for love and vocation today, you realize we live in a culture and an online world that encourages a very different mind-set; in a technical culture in which humanism, religion and the humanities, which are the great instructors of enchantment, are not automatically central to life.

I have to guess some cultures are more fertile for enchantment — that some activities, like novel-reading or music-making, cultivate a skill for it, and that building a capacity for enchantment is, these days, a countercultural act and a practical and fervent need.

Something to reflect on -- do the arts cultivate the capacity for enchantment? Does science?

A note on THC and young children

A lot of people are getting concerned about kids finding the cannabis-infused edibles being sold legally in CO and WA retail stores. They want better packaging so that little Jane or Johnny aren't able to open Mom's "special" brownies and partake, since they wouldn't know or care that they have THC in them. Although the article portends a serious problem, the statistics undercut the point they're trying to make:

Compared with the 14 children who were treated after consuming marijuana, the hospital treated 48 children who had swallowed acetaminophen — the active ingredient in Tylenol — and 32 who had accidentally taken antihistamines during the same time period.

So just to put this in perspective: the kids who ate large amounts of weed brownies suffered zero side effects. The kids who eat too much Tylenol will suffer liver damage (it is the leading cause of liver damage in the US). The same thing is true for kids who eat too many (adult) vitamins. Iron poisoning from vitamins and supplements is the leading cause of poisoning in children under five.

In both cases, no sane person thinks we should outlaw Tylenol or iron pills. Instead, the packaging needs to be childproofed, and those who buy these substances need clear warnings on the labels. Then, every responsible adult will put their Tylenol, pre-natal vitamins, and their pot brownies together, either locked away, or high above the reach of a child.