Category Archives: Psychological Musings

I’m sceptical of Sceptics

Around home, Psychological Musings

Sceptics (1 of 1)Any new theory of reality is indistinguishable from magic. paraphrased from Arthur C. Clarke

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Max Planck.

Funeral by funeral, science makes progress. Paul Samuelson

I don’t want to say that  I believe in magic, but I do believe in a world that is much more magical and alive, much more complicated, than that which is accepted by most establishment scientists. Today’s – and, as I think about it, probably any time’s – conventional wisdom is that we live in a world in which we know the basic outline of everything and that all is left is to fill in the details. Calling it conventional wisdom is really a misnomer, in much of today’s science, conventional wisdom is a euphemism for Faith.

Four hundred years ago, in the Western world, the conventional wisdom was that God had created the world in six days and left everything, except humans, to run on automatic, now the conventional wisdom is that the Universe is a Machine, somehow self-created about 14,000 billion years ago at the moment of the Big Bang, and now controlled – unintelligently, rotely, mechanically – by Universal Fields and Constants like  Gravity and The Speed of Light. As an aside, I love Rupert Sheldrake’s quip on this: It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.” The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it. End aside. The 500 year old conventional wisdom and today’s conventional wisdom are closer positions than one might, at first, think.

Both are dogmas that are not based on all the available evidence. Both believe that the world is without consciousness except, in one case, for God and we humans created in his image, and, in the other case, just we humans (or advanced life on a planet similar to Earth). The second position, we are told, is based on science and logic and is absent any superstition, any magic. But what we are told is wrong, science, today, is a belief system no different than any other religion. To quote Sheldrake again, For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

Dark Matter is a belief. Nobody – on earth, atleast – has seen or measured dark matter any more than anybody has seen a black hole. I’m not saying that black holes don’t exist, they might and I think that they probably do, but we don’t have any direct proof, just conjecture based on observations of light bending. We think that we have come to a logical answer but, people who believe in Jesus as their Personal Savior, think that they have got there by logic also. Are Black Holes, or Dark Matter, more logical that The Resurrection? Maybe, but they are no easier to observe (and the cynic in me says that the postulation of Dark Matter is only a device to make expansion-of-the-universe rates work mathematically) .

My concern is not if Black Holes or Dark Matter are real, it is that they have become part of an established belief system and are not to be questioned. About ten years ago, maybe twenty, I was driving home, listening to an interview with a Skeptic who was pitching his book. About half way through the interview, listeners were invited to call in and ask questions. That devolved into listeners recalling different para-normal experiences and having the Skeptic prove them wrong. I only remember two callers.

The first caller, I remember, told about driving down a winding mountain road with lots of blind corners. He had the top down and the sun was warm, just the kind of day and place to be driving a little too fast and have alot of fun. Out of nowhere, he had a premonition of a skull on fire. It rattled him and he slowed way down. A moment later, he turned a blind corner and there was a wrecked car, lying on its side. The caller thought he would have run into the car if he hadn’t slowed down.

The Sceptic pointed out that the driver might have seen a whiff of smoke, or, maybe, a dust cloud, or some other trigger that didn’t conscientiously register, but triggered the subconscious to signal danger. The answer seemed dodgy but this is the problem with anecdotal evidence, it can’t be tested. It can’t be proven or, really, disproven.

Later, another guy called in to get another debunking. He told about a experiment in which he was a part. A group of people saw two movies together. One part of the group saw movie A first and the other part saw Movie B first. Then they randomly split the two groups into two new groups. One group watched one of the movies and the second group, in a different room or different building away from the movie, meditated on what movie the first group was seeing. When asked which movie, the first group saw, the second group was correct something like 58% of the time.

The caller said that the experiment had been done several different times with a total of about eleven hundred subjects, so 58% is a statistically a significant number. The debunker offered a couple of comments on how the experiment was done wrong and the caller said No, that was covered by…. Finally, exasperated, he debunker said, Well I don’t know the details but something was done wrong because the results are clearly impossible, next question.  I don’t want to argue over whether the experiment proved anything or not because I don’t remember all the detail – and the caller may not have given them – but I do want to point out that skepticism is NOT debunking anything we don’t understand.

Skepticism implies not knowing and the willingness to be open to not knowing, it is what is presumed to be at the foundation of science. However, too often, Skeptics – and I’m talking about professional arbitrators of Reality who say they are Skeptics – have bought into, completely, mainstream thinking. They are only skeptical of ideas out of that mainstream tradition. These are Skeptics are supposed to be my peeps and it bothers me when my peeps act from unsubstantiated Faith, just repeating the old dogmas.

We are all the same

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

We are the same (1 of 1)

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

We are tribal and have been for a long time. According to suppositions made from our DNA, about 50,000 years ago, humankind was down to around 1,500 individuals composed of ten to twenty isolated tribes. Several tribes, about 600 individuals in total, left Africa and, over the last 50,000 years, they have populated the rest of the world. If they were like today’s hunter gatherer tribes and, the evidence suggests they were, the tribes were constantly fighting over territory (which was probably a primary driver to human dispersal). None of that is very controversial.

I have been reading A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade and in it he postulates that humans, H. sapiens, have continued to evolve, locally, to their environment, both in and out of Africa, since that diaspora. That we have continued to evolve is controversial, however. Wade further postulates that this evolution has resulted in five major races – with lots of slightly different regional gene pools – and that these five races are, each, slightly different with different abilities because they are evolving in different environments. This goes against almost everything that I believe.

Among many other things, Wade presents an excellent case that people living in Europe and Eastern Asia – China, Korea, and Japan – have evolved to be less violent because the greater population densities of those areas have pushed the evolving humans in that direction. The inference from what Wade is saying – and inference may be too soft a word – is that Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court ruling upholding a sentence of 1,000 lashes for jailed liberal blogger Raif Badawi, that we Westerners find so despicable, is not just a result of Saudi culture but also because the Saudis are genetically more violent.  This goes against our liberal mantra, We are all the same.

Everybody I have talked to about this has disagreed; vehemently (I haven’t talked to any white supremacists but I suspect that they would agree). Nobody has put their hands over their ears, saying I hear no evil, but damn near.  I know that feeling, for as long as I can remember, We are all the same has been at the center of my belief system. It is the main reason why I am against capital punishment (that and the practical matter that, because of all the appeals, it costs more and it delays closure).  We are all the same is why I get so bothered when people demonize whomever we are currently bombing as if they were not as human as us.

But, what if Wade is right, what if the Saudis are more violent than the English? What if young blackmen in the hood in Baltimore are more violent than young whitemen in Appalachia? Not just more violent because of culture or circumstances but more violent, as a group, because of their DNA? What if we aren’t all the same? What if different groups aren’t the same? Just writing this makes me feel uncomfortable and I have to keep reminding myself that we are talking about groups not individuals that can vary wildly within each group (only a fool would think Jalāl Rūmī was more violent than Joseph Goebbels).

Thinking about Wade’s thesis, I wonder if, in a way, saying We are all the same is sort of a cop out.  If everybody is the same, it is much easier for us to accept them, to not prejudge them, it makes it much easier to love them because they are just like us (and, we are certainly lovable). But if we are not all really the same,  will we still be able to accept The Other, will we be open to Love someone who is different? Will we still be able to judge someone for who they are rather than for what group they are a member? If they really are The Other, will that make a difference?

I don’t know, I like to think not but I don’t know, and I understand why this is such an explosive book.

Free Will vs. Compelled

Americana, Current Affairs, Family, Politics, Psychological Musings

Church-2678We had Easter at Michele’s familial home the weekend after the Indiana pizzeria said they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding. Sitting around, what I like to think of as the typical American family table, we had a couple of interesting conversations about politics that spilled over to religion (or religion that spilled over to politics). We were, very roughly, evenly split between Liberals and Conservatives and the Conservatives were spit between those who had gone to church that morning and those who hadn’t.

One thing we did agree on, surprisingly, is that people should have the right to be assholes, within limits, but that governments shouldn’t. To be clear, I wouldn’t say that we completely agreed, but we did come close to agreeing that there were differences between public acts in public spaces and private acts in private spaces. We all agreed that if a store is open for business, they have to serve everybody that walks in, but we differed on how restrictive they could be in the hypothetical catering of a wedding.

That conversation drew us into a – unexpected, for me – minefield. Maybe it shouldn’t have been unexpected, because I was the primary wanderer, owing to my fascination with religion’s special privileges. It is illegal for me to take peyote because I enjoy it, but, under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, I can take it if I am taking it as part of my religion. My question was Why should religion get special privileges? The only answer I got to this question was something along the lines of We are a Christian Nation, as if that would answer it. As the conversation staggered on, however, my question did get answered in a fashion.

To back up, when we are in Napa on a Sunday morning, or around a religious holiday like Christmas, Michele usually goes to church with her step-father, Jim (who was one of the church goers in the group, duh!). During the conversation, Michele’s stepfather said something, I don’t remember what, that led to Michele countering that she wasn’t raised as a Christian and wasn’t a Christian now. Jim was surprised, If you aren’t a Christian, why do you go to church with me? Michele said that she went because she enjoyed it. That was even more surprising to Jim.

Isn’t that why you go? asked Michele. No, I don’t go because I enjoy it, I go because, as a Christian, I have to go, Jim  said, laughing in a dismissive way as if that should be self-evident. In a way it was the answer that I had been looking for.

Still, not being a believer, Jim’s answer shocked me. Actually, I am a little reluctant to say Not being a believer, because I think of myself as a believer in A Divine that transcends what we know of the ordinary world. I don’t believe that science knows all the big answers and we are now only working on filling in the details, I don’t believe the world is all material and we are only a result of our DNA. I do believe that there is A Mystery, I’m just not a believer in any particular religious dogma (and I especially don’t believe that there is a personal God that cares how we act, that holds a grudge if we don’t go to church, that is interested in how we have sex or what we ate for lunch).

My life is not governed by a god telling me to live it a certain way. Not being a believer in that dogma means that I don’t get my morality from somebody’s interpretation of what God wants us to do. The church goers were pretty adamant that, without God telling us the rules or providing the moral guidelines, to say it in a little less dogmatic way, we would have no morality. Michele said that she is a Scientist and her morality is based on the scientific principle that acts have consequences. I sided with Michele and added that I liked the Buddhist Eightfold Path that includes don’t harm others and the Church goers looked at us like we must not have any moral principles at all, like maybe we were OK with serial killing.

Looking across the table, I could almost understand that somebody could believe that they weren’t homophobic, but their God is and they have no choice but to follow along. That gulf between our beliefs, between our belief structures,  seems much bigger than I had imagined.

Hacked by ISIS

Psychological Musings, Uncategorized

 

hacked

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. Eric Hoffe

Sometime last Saturday, my blog was hacked by ISIS. I found out when I got an email from Malcolm Pearson saying Did you know you’ve been hacked by Islamic State? I am happy to say that Michele was able to unhack it in less than an hour. That is more than pretty good; according to Eldora Speedway, whose website was also hacked by ISIS, it took the Darke County Sheriff, FBI & GoDaddy working together atleast an hour to unlock their website.

Which brings up the question, Why me? Michele says it is probably an automatic hack because I mentioned ISIS in a headline, but why would they hack Eldora Speedway in Darke County, Ohio. And why the Isle of the Wight County,  Virginia, website? or the Sequoia Park Zoo Website? It seems so random and strange and creepy. I feel both, sort of honored in the I don’t care what they say about me just spell my name right way, and creeped out in the Holy shit, these wackos actually kill people way. It drives home that ISIS is basically incomprehensible to me.

Anything I say about ISIS or any group, for that matter, is just my projection. I can’t, really, put myself in the shoes of someone that so believes their answer is god’s command. I can only guess as to why my website was hacked, and all those guesses are only what I would do. Or what I think I would do, or fantasize I would do, but never have.  Anger? I can relate to that. All I have to do is read about the murder of Ahmed Al-Jumaili last Thursday to make me angry. Not angry enough, long enough, to hack a website and chopping somebody’s head off is a huge stretch – obviously, I hope – but I can understand it.

Hate, sure. I’ve felt the corrosive burning of hate. Boredom, absolutely. I volunteered to go to Vietnam in 1965 because I was bored. I would have gone, too, if the Battalion Recruitment Officer hadn’t talked me out of it, telling me that the only job in Vietnam I was qualified for, would be as a door gunner on a Huey, often a short lived assignment. But he did talk me out of it. If he had pushed me, instead, with tales of my saving civilization as we know it, I might have ended up there, killing people (or trying to).

But a voice from heaven? that’s hard for me to relate to. I guess it would be nice to be noticed by god, but I would rather be given a winning Lotto number. Hell, there is also the very real possibility that the the hack might not even be from ISIS (although it did say ISIS is everywhere in a, sort of, homage to Anonymous.

What ever the reason, however it happened, Michele was able to get me unhacked and update my website in the process, so I would like to say No harm, no foul, but it did screw up Michele’s day. She unhacked me in an hour but the rest of the day was consumed with making upgrades and changes.

Thank you very much, Michele!ISIS-0957

 

 

ISIS and the crazy bad guys.

Psychological Musings

SF Bookmarker-

Every Thursday, I have about a one and a half hour phone conversation with a good friend, Ed Cooney. Ed and I used to have lunch on Thursdays, but he had the temerity to move to Buffalo, New York so now all we have is Thursday mornings. We – I think we, I, for sure – try to limit the conversation to politics and religion. I consider Ed a good Christian (although I’m not sure that he does, not the Christian part, the Good Christian, part). Ed sends out a weekly newsletter and, lately, he has been talking about the part morality plays in our foreign policy.

As much as I am interested in the part morality plays in our foreign policy, it was an old article that Ed sent me, that got me thinking about how we think about the enemy. In the article, Ed tells about a minster, Archie Mitchell, whose family were the only casualties of World War II on the mainland of the United States. After loosing his family, the poor guy became a missionary in Vietnam. On his third tour, while working at the Ban Me Thuot Leprosarium, Archie…along with a generous supply of medicines and equipment…were removed from the clinic by a 12 member unit of the Vietcong….In 1969, negotiations for their release were near completion when they were suddenly broken off.  None of the three have been seen since….Were any tender moments left for Archie Mitchell and his co-prisoners?  Did they ever smile or laugh again? What, beside the threat of death, fueled Archie’s energy to keep on keeping on?  What sustained his faith?

While Ed wrote this in 2010, I think that his thinking of the Vietcong is based on what we were told about the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. I have a different impression. I have never been to Vietnam and I have never met any Vietcong, but my base impression is much more benign. My default level is based on what I read and see about Vietnam now. And it is reinforced by talking to Ophelia and Peter who have lived there and still have strong Vietnamese friendships. I think that the Vietnamese are, essentially, the same people today as they were in 1962.

This has got me thinking about ISIS and how our propaganda – both overt and covert – has influenced my thinking on ISIS. I heard David Brooks quote someone – in a way that seemed like he agreed – that, today, ISIS is the biggest treat to global security. That is astonishing: ISIS is a bigger treat than global climate change, it is a bigger threat than 15,000 nuclear weapons, a good portion of which are armed and ready to go; as far as that goes, ISIS must be a bigger threat than  a nuclear Pakistan falling apart.

Let me try a mind game for a minute. We think ISIS is much worse than the Mexican drug cartels but the cartels killed more than twice as many people as ISIS, the cartels routinely decapitate people – about 700 in 2012 alone – they are on our border, right on our border!, and directly dealing drugs as far north as Bismark, North Dakota. Think about that for a moment. Now think about ISIS, doesn’t ISIS still seems scarier. It does to me, too.

It is amazing, the day in, day out, propaganda  we are subjected to. I’m not trying to say that ISIS are the same as the Vietcong. The Vietnamese were fighting a war for independence and did not behead people. I am not saying that ISIS are anything but thugs with an ideology overlay. In that regard, they are more like Nazis than Vietcong, but most Nazis were people just trying to get along rather than sociopaths and I suspect that most of ISIS is also.

As an aside, in May, 1945, when the allies occupied Europe, they vowed to rid Germany of the Nazis. Very quickly, they realized that wouldn’t work and by 1952, the Nazis were back in power. According to Tony Judt in Postwar, In Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percent of finance ministry employees, and 60 percent of civil servants in the Regional Aquaculture ministry were Nazis. In May 2003 Bush made the same pledge and he kept it. The Coalition Provisional Authority got rid of anybody associated with the Ba’athist Party down to the school principal level. That is is a good part of why Iraq fell apart after the war, it had nobody to run the place who had any idea of what they were doing. End aside.