Darwin, The Map, The Model, The Mystery

I attempt to argue endlessly that if there was no God to reveal religion, human social culture could never have grown beyond the hunter gatherer.  Ideologies like modern "liberalism", Communism, Socialism, Capitalism, etc, simply will not do because they lack the enforcement of an eternal all knowing, all powerful God that is going to see when you cheat on the rules that are required for society to keep operating, let alone flourish.

I believe the social requirement that most believe in him even though he can't be proved is CRITICAL, because it lends credibility to the glue of society which is the promise that you believe in love, nation, friendship, truth, honesty, fidelity and a myriad of other things that demand shared belief. If society is to be more than a police state of constant spying, imprisonment and distrust, then people have to believe in MANY things about each other -- the idea that they all worship a God that knows their behavior is a better check on the veracity of those social beliefs than not having such a check.

The level of freedom that America once had could only exist for a people that were religious as stated by John Adams. "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other".

There is no greater modification for a human worldview than the issue of belief in God, It puts the root of our mental model in the realm of metaphysics, thus allowing a perspective where there is ALWAYS hope, there is ALWAYS another potential answer, and there is no ending for our souls. No matter our current state, we always have a better future -- PERSONALLY, not just for "society" in the progressive/marxist dream. 

Take away that perspective and man, then eventually raw power,  becomes the measure of all. The world can no longer be seen through the lens of a beautiful creation of God, infused with love, meaning and purpose. Trying to wrench some "truth" out of "data" is an obvious fools errand from the viewpoint of philosophy -- "truth" is reduced to endlessly running experiments knowing that the only "progress" is in simpler explanations of finding that what you thought was "scientific truth" has been significantly or entirely falsified.

I was struck by this section of Darwin's autobiography, page 46 that was quoted in "Darwin's Cathedral".

“On this tour I had a striking instance of how easy it is to overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, before they have been observed by any one. We spent many hours in Cwm Idwal, examining all the rocks with extreme care, as Sedgwick was anxious to find fossils in them; but neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that, as I declared in a paper published many years afterwards in the Philosophical Magazine, a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley. If it had still been filled by a glacier, the phenomena would have been less distinct than they now are.”

Once Darwin knew about glaciers, "everything in the valley made sense".

Thus we come to one of the strengths and grave weaknesses of humans. We are excellent pattern matching "answer finders", but when he have a "hammer" (a specific answer), everything starts to look like a "nail" (place to match the pattern that we have).

We also LOVE to have an answer that we at least believe "completely explains" what we see. Faced with a near infinitely complicated universe and a very severely finite brain in comparison, we tend to want to believe that our model of the world/universe is "reasonably complete". Without God, our tendency is to "decide it is complete enough".

The "mental magic" of belief in God is to be able to build a mental model of our universe, but to realize and remain OK with the knowledge that our model is grossly incomplete. Seeing God as far beyond what we can ever approach allows us to feel comfortable with there always being a remaining "gap of mystery" -- in the spiritual as well as the physical.

The natural tendency for us to desire "closure" pretty much insures that once we have that "model that fits", in this case "glacier", we are certain that the situation is explained and we move on. In most cases, that works well -- we are very good at coming up with models and matching them to specific cases. But not always.

Is there ANY chance that a valley could be sculpted that way by some sort of pyroclastic flow long ago and then maybe "tuned" by water? Could it have been formed that way for some reason and then uplifted? Something completely different that we have not thought of yet?

Believing in God allows asking the question "For THIS valley, how critical is it really that we are "certain" of how it formed?" This moves us into a realm of discomfort on the side of both the scientist and the theist. From the scientific POV, there is a sense that we MUST provide an explanation, otherwise people will fall back to the "lazy explanation" that "God did it".

The theist becomes uncomfortable because the scientist is intent on entirely removing God. The theist may say "but who created the elements that allow ice and rock to interact", or go to some of my conjectures above relative to volcanism, floods / high speed runoff or just "appearance of age".

I've been lucky enough to see a lot of beautiful mountain valleys including Yosemite with it's hanging valleys. Darwin's description of "wonderful glacial phenomena" strikes me as quite odd. Why would it be "adaptive" for us to find mountain valleys as "wonderful" at all if we are evolved? I can understand why a sea shore or many other items of nature would be attractive, but a glaciated mountain valley, often above the tree line where the oxygen is thin and no vegetation grows?

Something is built into us to find a whole host of things in nature "beautiful" that make no practical sense for our material bodies. A sunset? We have little nocturnal vision -- based on evolution one would think that we might feel a sense of fear at the coming of darkness. A need to retreat to safety where we were less vulnerable to our lack. But no, we feel a sense of wonder and enjoy the beauty.

Oh, I'm certain that more than one evolutionist has come up with SOME explanation of "how it may have evolved" -- a conjecture impossible to prove or disprove by actual experiment, so basically a religious statement. "It evolved" or "a glacier did it" having no real utilitarian advantage over "God created it" (and do we ALWAYS have to be thinking "mechanism"?).

Some scientist will exclaim, "it is natural curiosity". Possibly, in a few cases -- but I've certainly seen many an eye glaze over at some explanation of how computers do "x", how the TV works, what's the difference between fuel injection and carburetion, Quantum Physics etc. It seems our "natural curiosity" is far from universal. 

We all operate with a mental model, a worldview, and that model is either based on God or Materialism (it's all a big accident). Science has thrown in the towel on a concrete explanation of even HOW we happened, let alone WHY.  The Big Bang is too far in the past, and if we believe science, our inability to exceed. the speed of light prevents us from observing much of the remnants of the Big Bang, now to far away to get to before the 2nd law of thermodynamics entropies humanity and our universe out of existence. 

To some degree we get to pick our model, or from a Christian POV, "Knock and it will be opened unto you, seek and you will find" ... which assumes you believe there is a transcendent door to knock on or to seek. 

From the above it seems clear that in order to have a "good life" in this mortal coil, the choice is obvious. However there is always a snake in the garden that seeks to convince us otherwise. 

Choose your model wisely. 

Eclipsed 2017

If you would like to see where we watched it, follow this link. In the sandhills S of Alliance NE -- we avoided the crowds. We were going to watch it from York NE, the clouds looked bad, so we abandoned our friends and just headed west ... for a spell just outside of Ogallala NE, it appeard that we would be punished for our sin ... it actually got a bit worse than this picture!

We found our spot, and we sat and watched the slow occlusion in bright sun, then we got some high clouds just before totality ... they broke for totality, and then it clouded right up. Whew!!

Here is my one 360 degree video -- I hesitate to include it because like so much of our modern world, it is FAKE -- the real experience is what is awesome, our reading, videos, movies, documentaries, "first person accounts", etc have more and more given many the idea that real experience isn't all that important. I'm starting to feel more and more like there actually isn't anything except real personal experience, with others, when at all possible.

The video underplays the darkness with the 360 degree "sunrise/sunset" effect. You can see that you are in a special spot of totality. It gives you a LITTLE of the feel that "things are not what they have always seemed". Go look at the best movies of the corona that you can find -- it is ALIVE, and the naket eye shows it in all it's majesty during a total eclipse. I had always assumed that the beautiful corona pictures were from special high resolution telescopes -- Nope! There it is in all it's mysterious glory. The mystery is that the surface of the sun is at about 6K degrees, but the the temperature increases very steeply to a few million degrees in the corona, in the region 500 kilometers above the surface,and we don't know why.

The other amazing thing is how light it is right up to that last "flash" as the sun totally disappears -- it looks like a super cloudy day, with a "weird filter", but not enough to really make you look up if you did not know what was going on..

As I write in my blog of "Spaceman",

"Experience vs Knowledge". Mike is orbiting at the Hubble spacewalking, looks around and EXPERIENCES the billiant light of the stationary sun as the earth rotates out of darkness ushering in a new 90 min Hubble "day". Mike EXPERIENCED the fact that the sun is stationary (relative to earth) and the day and night are caused by the rotation of the earth. Of course he "knew" that, but experience is much more. Telling someone about being a grandparent is not the same as being a grandparent.

You "know" what is going to happen, yet when it happens there is an emotional effect -- it "feels odd", how can this be? Even when you have been a space nut your whole life and watched men walk on the moon in rapt attention, there is something about the experience  of the moon blocking the sun that you sense is rare, and it is an honor from a greater source to be able to experience it.

As a believer in divine creation, an eclipse is especially poignient, as it feels like a direct message from God ... "As you grow in knowledge of my creation, you are able to discern my joy in creating the moon 400 times smaller than the sun, yet having the sun 400 times farther away so that at special times because of the eliptical orbit of of the moon, and the tilt of the earth, you may see my hand of creation as the sun is blocked perfectly. I give you these signs so that you may know that I am God".

Alas, for many today it is but one more random phenomenon in a cold and random universe that is so far beyond exceedingly unlikley that the fact of an eclipse would add a few exponents to the number of required universes were the God deniers to consider the ramifications of not only there being a universe that can sustain life at all, but one in which intelligent life arises -- nay, even CONSCIOUS intelligent life that can survey it's place in the universe AND, just happens to live on a planet that experiences perfect total eclipses ... where the sun is EXACTLY blocked, making it's corona visible!

One "explanation" is what Elon Musk believes ... we are in a "simulation" a sort of "Grand Matrix movie".  This explanation is really no "explanation", since it just makes "god" to be whomever programmed the simulation. According to modern physics, there ISN'T any explanation -- it's pure randomness all the way down, so there "must be" something like 10 to the 400th UNIVERSES in order for the extreme unlikelyness of our existence to happen.

To accept 10 to the 400th universes or "being a simulation" is considered intelligent and rational in these times -- God is however something that only the most backward and out of touch with reality believe in.

I pray that others may feel a little "sense of small" as I did in their observations of the eclipse. Our greatest shared loss, and with it, our ability to see our fellow man as similarly tiny short lived entities in a vast and timeless cosmos, is our sense of small. It isn't just our elites that have lost it or at least heavily distracted ourselves from it. Nobody with any sense of their smallness in the universe would waste their time tearing down statues of any sort if they were part of a very small and temporal humankind. Even all of human history is such a tiny blip in time that we barely have any history at all ... let alone any to tear down.

As it has been since Adam and Eve, the human sin that exceeds all others is PRIDE. for me, the eclipse was a visceral experience in being very small and very finite in the face of God and eternity.

Thanks be to God for allowing me to witness this example of his greatness. 

Statistically Showing Satan

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/12/how-do-americans-stand-out-from-the-rest-of-the-world/

To readers of this blog, there is nothing surprising in this polling other than the US is STILL exceptional on a set of key measures relative to "wealthy nations".

1. Belief in personal control of our lives. 
2. Belief in importance of hard work. 
3. Belief in God
4. Happiness 

I assume that my readers would be surprised because I'm surprised we have not slipped farther. I like to consider myself a "realist", but there is no doubt I err on the pessimist side of reality. We certainly ARE slipping on all these elements, but I would have thought we would have slipped to the point of near alignment with Germany, UK, Canada,  etc, but in general we have not. 

I was gratified to see how close the UK and US were on individualism -- Brexit? 

There is no doubt that the last 8 years have been a strong effort to stamp out all of the top 3 above, and to make us more like Europe. The charts are worth going to look at. Science tells us that believing that what we individually do makes a difference (1),  being dedicated to it (2), and belief in a benevolent universe (3), leads to happiness (4). 

We know those things to be true, yet "progressivism" wants to remove personal control, punish hard work, and remove God --- which leads to China, Russia, Germany, UK, Canada ... roughly 20% happy vs over 50% in the US. 

I believe in God and Satan. What we see here is a definite inversion, bad being willfully substituted for good -- we know what creates lives worth living from both science and ancient wisdom, yet we have a large political contingent dedicated to making lives LESS meaningful and happy!

All of us inherently know what is right, history has shown us what is right,  our science shows us what is right -- and yet, a significant number of people persist in working to create a society that is LESS happy, healthy and productive.

If there is no force of evil in the world, why would this be so? 

Reality Is Experience

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

A likely important article that I may return to and dig deeper into. Apparently, the physical universe can be replaced with "a conscious entity" and at least this new model "still works".

As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality.

"Ontological" -- being ... what IS.  The territory "real" as opposed to the map ... those being words like virtual, representation, metaphorical. This computer analogy gives a good idea why seeing "what is the most useful to the designer, or random chance" makes more sense than the "most realistic detail".

There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. 

They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. 

Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

It's always intriguing to me that a super intelligent guy, so non-traditional he is willing to question the MOST fundamental aspects of the nature of existence, still finds "evolution " as somehow a worthy explanation for how we came to be (or maybe "not **BE** as in being physical", but rather "be" as experience only) in this non-physical reality. It is always possible that the computer desktop "just evolved" after all. Actually, if you are an evolutionist, the development of the computer and the desktop metaphor is simply evolution still operating in what we have no doubt mistakenly labeled "consciousness", meaning "something special", but in evolutionary "reality", just more evolutionary adaptive algorithms.

 (column author) But if there’s a W, are you saying there is an external world?

Hoffman: Here’s the striking thing about that. I can pull the W out of the model and stick a conscious agent in its place and get a circuit of conscious agents. In fact, you can have whole networks of arbitrary complexity. And that’s the world.

So, a mathematic attempt to understand consciousness replaces "the world" with "a conscious agent" and it all works ... and it doesn't give him any inking that God would fill that "conscious agent" role quite nicely?

The discoveries of quantum mechanics, the mystery of consciousness and things like the insane small amount of information that seems to be coming in through our optic nerves for us to create what we are "seeing" all point to some fundamental misconceptions about what "reality" is -- if it "is" (ontology again) at all! 

"I think, therefore I am" was always tenuous -- perhaps, a universal consciousness is reality, and "I" am an illusion. Perhaps when God speaks to Moses and says "I am that I am" he was really de-referencing the THAT!  (C++ programming, the "this pointer" is the pointer to the object itself) "I'm THAT" I am" ... the ultimate base of existence.  You (Moses) are another "I am", created in my image.

Roger Scruton has covered this philosophically quite well. 

The Creation Science Oxymoron

I took an hour this past Sunday evening to attend a "Creation Science" presentation -- maybe a bit of nostalgia for my youth as a fundamentalist Baptist.

The speaker was Dr Robert Carter, affiliated with Creation Ministries a business dedicated to the idea that the earth is 6K years old and they can prove it "scientifically".

First of all, let me say that I'm sure that many of the people taking part in this are well meaning and truly believe that they MUST somehow "debunk evolution" in order for people to believe in God, the Bible, and Jesus. I'll refer to them as "Young Earth Creationists" (YEC)

My main concern here is idolatry -- focus on the physical over the spiritual. Thomas could only believe if he thrust his hand into the side of the risen Savior. YECs seem to think that belief in the miracle of God taking human form and dying for our sins requires that we thrust our minds through "science" into the physical world and SEE that it is created via "scientific" knowledge.

My view is that our original sin lies in us seeking knowledge and power in the physical world, rather than relying on "The Word" of God -- meaning Christ ("and the Word was with God")" and the Bible (in that order). Science and thinking in a materialist manner puts the creation ahead of the creator. The choice of the material "fruit" over the WORD of God was the fall.

Science is all about stuff (material), but God didn't create ONLY stuff. He created man "in his image", which is SPIRIT, not "stuff" (matter) ... our consciousness, which science also can't measure, and therefore does not exist to science.  Science deals with what humans are able to perceive, or they create machines to perceive and MEASURE the scientific (materialist) view of "what is". If it can't be measured, it doesn't exist for science. The consciousness of the scientist that is doing the measurement isn't part of science -- which I suspect is part of the reason for "quantum effects". The quantum superposition doesn't "collapse" until a consciousness (spirit) could view it) --  Schroedigers cat is in the superposition of dead AND alive until a consciousness views the result.

Science seeks truth in matter, and has chased matter to the point where it becomes waves, particles, quarks, strings, fields, quanta and all sorts of wispy ghosts that behave more like quantum spirits than "stuff". The search for the "truth" of matter has led to "spooky effects at a distance". Both time and space have become "relative". Perhaps energy is all there is -- or "data", or perhaps, spirit -- dare we say it -- God?

Looking at matter will never provide eternal truth. Matter isn't eternal -- as far science can tell the physical universe will die in cold entropy or a super hot "big crunch" according to physics. Long before either of those happen, physical life will be gone -- in a mere universal heartbeat of a few 10's of billions of years next to the vastness of eternity.

The Bible says that God created the earth. It doesn't say how and it doesn't say when.  Certainly it can be "wired" to give someone the impression that the earth "must" be a certain age, just as the Catholic church once persecuted those who said that the earth orbited the sun, because Joshua 10:13 says "So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.".

They were completely certain that the sun HAD to move, since the Bible "said so", so it was better to kill a heretic who failed to believe this "truth" than to allow such madness to spread. As all of us who share the  beginning of wisdom ought to know each day, their (and our) God is too small! If you follow the link, you will be taken to my review of a small book by that title that has a very large message. It is US who attempts to put an infinite God into a box and explain how he MUST operate.

As I've repeated too often, I'm willing to let God create the world via any mechanism he chooses. He may have created it "during" the time I wrote this sentence -- and it would all look exactly like it does now. Not to "fool" anyone, but because that is how God chose to create it! He is beyond time and space -- and certainly beyond the thoughts of man.

I used to work on the startup code for a large operating system where we created a "boot image" and loaded that into the memory of the computer. If you looked at it when it started running, you could assume that a whole bunch of things had "happened", that really had not. They had been set up so they appeared that way because that is how they needed to be to work with the rest of the operating system -- not to "fool people".

This is but a single possibility. To believe that understanding the MECHANISM of how God may have created somehow helps us understand an eternal God is counterproductive to faith. Becoming mired in a never ending argument over matter, cells and calendars is to miss God -- that he is eternal, spirit, light, love and not of this physical universe (except as Christ).

Western civilization is dying because it has put it's faith in matter rather than spirit and truth. Science is ONLY about measurement and mechanism, and proudly so. It has, nor recognizes,  a soul, nothing at all that is spiritually human. To science, we are all "naked apes", soulless animals living meaningless lives in a meaningless universe. Science is "psychopathic" -- it denies consciousness and values since they are not observable or measureable. Science is a TOOL ... like a hammer, like a computer. (psychopaths don't see others as "conscious")

CREATION -- even the puny human form of a new song, painting, novel, technological innovation or flower arrangement, is outside of science. The divine creation is a gap so large that God needed to become human in the form of Jesus Christ in order to bridge the gulf created by sin -- one of the chief of which is our idolatry of matter over spirit.

"Creation Science" demeans creation and attempts to use "science" in it's own idolatry of the physical -- to say with doubting Thomas, that "faith is NOT enough, I muse SEE the marks of creation"! Our current "Standard Model" of physics is "timeless", defined by mathematics that make time relative -- it says that what is happening now has always been happening and always will be. If you add in quantum mechanics, everything that "could be happening" is  (each "decision" causes a "fork" creating a new universe from that point on.

So "true" evolutionists are turning on physics -- they want a NEW MODEL that shows that what we see "can happen" with no outside intervention or "timeless principles" it may well take 10 to the 400th or 10 the google UNIVERSES, but ANYTHING is more palatable to them than "timeless".

Apparently anything  other than a timeless God is palatable to young earth creationists as well -- no matter how many strange "flood hoops" they have to jump over to have their 6K year cake.

My bottom line concerns with young earth creation are:

1. Idolatry -- the desire to put the physical ahead of the spiritual. The idea that "unless I can physically touch the risen savior, I will not believe", transposed to "unless the physical evidence viewed by science in the world aligns directly with Genesis, I will not believe that God created the earth / universe".
   
2. Moneychangers in the temple. YEC is an opportunity for some to attempt to profit from the creation of a cult like set of followers that feel that their "faith" (actually if it is proven by physical evidence, it is not faith) depends on physical defense of 6K year creation. Which is of course is not faith at all : Hebrews 11:1 11 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
   
3. Loss of spiritual authority and increased loss of youth to paganism.  The modern world has no shortage of idolatry for the physical. The battlefield of the spiritual has been virtually abandoned, and the YEC movement wants to abandon the spiritual in the case of creation and fight on the physical plane as well. It is as if Elijah had joined the pagans in cutting himself to obtain the attention of the true God. 

That being said, I understand their desire. The idea of a "physical slam dunk" that PROVES the existence of the God that many of us love and fervently believe in, tempts our minds like a beautiful woman draws our eyes. When we see our children wooed away by science that is spiritually dead and devoid of even the recognition of humans as conscious, our very souls weep and cry out in pain we cannot begin to voice.

The only "physical matter" that proves the spiritual is the person of Jesus Christ. All other attempts are idolatry -- often well meaning idolatry, but idolatry just the same. At one time I wished it were not so, but I believe I understand more of the reason that God demands we worship him in SPIRIT and Truth.

Being flesh, we are so drawn to the physical that if any form of the physical save the person of Christ, present at Calvary and in Holy Communion was really worthy of our study and adulation, we would be inexorably drawn to that form to the exclusion of Christ, writing books, creating web sites and holding endless discussions on the minutia of this "physical truth", rather than worshiping "The Way, the Truth, and the Life". We might possibly even build a physical "Ark" as a talisman for the spiritual protection of Christ through the waters of this world.

Only the Trinity is eternal, however we share an eternal future though not an eternal past. We will know the HOW, WHEN, WHY, etc of creation -- for now, let us have faith that God Created!

BOistan Divided, Drowning vs Abortion

DIVIDED AMERICA: Global warming polarizes more than abortion - The Washington Post:

The more people connect on a human level, the more people can “overcome these tribal attitudes,” Anna Jane Joyner says. “We really do have a lot more in common than we think.”

I read an article like this and wonder how the author would answer the following question;

Do you think the natural state of human society is:
A. Tribes
B. Plato's Republic
C. Marxist Communism or Socialism
D. Some yet unknown scientifically based advanced culture?

I'm assuming he thinks "D", but then HOW does one get there? Force?

We once overcame tribalism by believing in a set of transcendent truths that we called "Western Civilization" which was largely rooted in Christian values. Justice, equality of opportunity, individual responsibility, freedom, etc ... that kind of trash.

Science is like engineering on the starship Enterprise .... it lets you go fast, blow things up and make the doors go "whoosh"! It tells you NOTHING about what you "should" do. Annihilate the aliens or go down and see if you can have sex with them like Kirk and Riker might prefer -- those are NOT scientific questions!

On  a "human level", we are all tribalists. On a scientific level, we apparently take a lot of surveys and marvel that we are tribalists -- but somehow believe that if we all get together on a "human level", we will reach a decision that killing off the next generation is better than them drowning in the rising oceans. Or something.

Is the "fastest growing segment" of the population "young earth warmists" that believe that man arrived in the last 10K years after the most recent ice age, thus missing the last warming period equivalent to now 120K years ago, or the previous three other comparable periods in the past 500K years? Will appropriate surveys make the last 500K of geologic and climate history go away?

Science is WHOLLY unable to produce the "myths" on which to base a human society. It may well help a reasonable society, or even "tribes", have more "stuff", move around more, kill each other more efficiently, or distract themselves more completely, but that is ALL it is capably of doing.

No matter how many surveys you send out!

'via Blog this'

Elon Musk, "Simulated"

Elon Musk: There's a 'one in billions' chance our reality is not a simulation:

I apologize to those that saw my "fake post" -- it was supposed to be a "draft", but I hit "publish".

The simulation hypothesis, first proposed in 2003 by philosopher Nick Bostrom, posits that if many sufficiently advanced civilizations exist, and if they're likely to create simulations of the universe (or a slice of it), then we are almost certainly living in a simulation.

If you trust Musk, the chances of us not being in a simulation are insignificantly small. "There's a one in billions chance that this is base reality," Musk said. He bases this argument on the fact that humanity has experienced amazing technological advancement in the last few decades.

My thought since college has been that we are "running on God".  What we see as "quantum effects" are side effects of us not actually being "physical", but rather spiritual.  "The Apple in the Garden" converted a perfect spiritual existence into an imperfect "physical" one, where things seem material and evil, death, and Hillary exist.

Elon Musk is FAR smarter than I, but let's just consider his hypothesis here.

The odds of a universe like ours existing are now often calculated as that our universe is one out of 10 to the 400th universes. The number of atoms in the universe is less than 10 to the 100th ... like 10 to the 80th (my internet at the lake is sketchy right now).

So does it strike anyone else that "living in a simulation that was done by a more advanced civilization" is just a "modern" way of trying to avoid God? I mean, if you create a simulation, you COULD have "simulated spiritual experiences", an afterlife and even bliss and punishment in an afterlife.

Perhaps we live in the simulated universe that humans who advanced beyond the "Singularity" and became "machines / genetically engineered / cyborg super-beings" decided to create our simulation because they were bored? I'm reminded of the words from "Sapiens" relative to beings such as ourselves becoming "omnipotent" (all powerful) without being "all knowing" or perfectly moral.

Is there anything more dangerous than irresponsible and dissatisfied gods who don't know what they want?

Is not the current election season in the US enough for people to realize that great power and wealth are no guarantee at all of great morality, responsibility or even grade school level truth and character?

Elon Musk is an engineer / entrepreneur / inventor -- his simulation hypothesis is a classic from that sort of brain. Programmers often say that "any problem can be "solved" by adding a level of indirection". It is wiser to say that many problems can seem simpler by adding a level of indirection or abstraction. 

"We are simulated" solves precisely nothing. By whom for what purpose? is still operative, and if this is all merely a simulation by beings no more morally perfect or philosophically wise than ourselves, it is FAR from a comforting conjecture!

I fully understand that may moderns find the idea of a morally perfect God who would be willing to die a horrible death for THEIR miserable life to be about as terrifying as they can imagine. I maintain they have REALLY not thought their situation through! 

As with a lot of things, consider that such advanced super-beings might have "children". There is a rather fun old Star Trek called "The Squire of Gothos" that is a worthy watch if you want to consider the Musk conjecture -- perhaps one of the "super children" kicked off the equivalent of his "Fisher Price" computing toy on "random universe creation" at 10 to the billionth and somewhere along the line, we popped up! He is looking at it right now and deciding the best way to "intervene". 

Or maybe he already did -- and it is BO followed by Trump vs Hildebeast! 

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The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom

I'm thinking that I'll occasionally link to an "alternate review" for those that want more detail than I provide so here is an alternate view.

"Evil (Lucifer) is a by-product, a component, of creation. In a world evolving into ever higher forms, hatred, violence, aggression, and war are a part of the evolutionary plan." 

Plan? Higher forms? Bloom is an atheist, so he needs to realize the fact that his faith REQUIRES that there IS NO PLAN! There are also no "higher forms". A godless universe has no "preferences" -- slime mold is just as "good" as Einstein, and there IS NOT such a thing as "good / evil / Lucifer / etc" in such a universe. So his premise is completely flawed -- if there is no god, there is NO DIRECTOR FOR EVOLUTION ... it is RANDOM! What survives and breeds survives and breeds, and what doesn't, doesn't. No planner, no plan.

"Lucifer is the dark side of cosmic fecundity, the cutting blade of the sculptor's knife. Nature does not abhor evil, she embraces it."  

Again, no god, no plan, no "sculptor". Whatever form breeds best is just fine with the blind watchmaker. No consciousness in "nature", so no "abhor or embrace" -- it just "is".

The conclusion of the book is this:

Super-organisms, ideas [memes],  and the pecking order, these are the primary forces behind much of human creativity and earthly good. They are the holy trinity of the Lucifer Principle. 

Super-organisms are societies / groups -- the United States, Exxon, The NFL. The assertion is that each individual is like a "cell" in the super-organism in which they live.

Ideas / memes are things like Christianity, evolution, free speech, money -- ideas, beliefs, ideology, religion. The book espouses the theory that these "memes" compete for "the fittest" like genes -- memes are the "genes" of the super-organisms.

Pecking order -- goes back to chickens / barnyard. Dominance hierarchies of people and super-organisms. He goes over the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the US Empire along with the rise of Islam as a "killer meme / super-organism". The book was published in 1995, his predictions on the rise of Islamic violence were right on.

The far left hated the book thinking it sounds "Fascist" as in "fittest survive, violence is part of nature / unavoidable / etc". It debunks the "nobel savage" in a number of ways -- one of the most colorful is the !Kung of the Kalahari desert -- very primitive, very warlike, lots of killing, lots of violence. No connection to "corruption" by the west -- they just naturally like to kill each other!

The book would really love to come up with some hopeful note. One example:

It is important that the societies which cherish pluralism survive. It is critical that they spread their values. It is vital that they not mistakenly imagine all other societies to be equal and their own inferior. It is imperative that they not allow their position in the pecking order of nations to slip and that they not cave to the onrush of the barbarians. 

Hmm. That is a very nice sentiment -- he likes "pluralism". Does he "like it" even if it isn't adaptive? I mean, what basis does he like it on? It feels good? He believes there is no god, so the ONLY standard is "what works" -- in evolution, what breeds. As I've pointed out, current "pluralistic", "relativistic", "post-modern" western society DOES NOT BREED! Islam does. Mormons do. Primitive backward groups in Africa do.

In the absence of a "divine meme" that is BELIEVED, then all civilizations really are "equal", because the universe has no order. At a number of places in the book, the above being one, Bloom clearly realizes at some level that "no rules means no rules", which means that the Western "pluralistic" societies may well lose out to societies of "true believers" that are interested in conquest while we are interested in getting men wearing dresses into the ladies room.

Gender uncertainty, homosexuality, abortion and birth control are not really the stuff of "healthy super-organisms" -- in fact, they are a pretty solid indication of a near death super-organism. Organisms that stop replacing their "cells" (eg stop having children), and spend their energy killing off unborn children and encouraging same sex unions really don't play in the godless naturalistic universe. "Pluralism" might feel nice to some authors, but it doesn't play well in the model universe he imagines we live in!

It is hard to recommend this book. There IS a lot of "interesting stuff" in it, some of which was new to me, but given it's flawed premises and rather dark with some "wishful hope" conclusions, it can pretty safely be bypassed for better fare. "Sapiens" would be a great example of that fare, along with "Darwin's Cathedral" to round out the "meme" part a bit.

Bloom manages to criticize "Closing of the American Mind" as "blaming our problems on progress". As you can see in my critique above, I think Bloom fails to understand the results of his own world view, so is casting around for whom he can blame -- "Closing" is just a random target.

I'm just going to stop here -- one can't love every book you read! I think the core issue is really just another attempt to get "Science" to carry the load of philosophy and theology.

The Science Of Training White People

The scientific way to train white people to stop being racist — Quartz:

Back in 2007, the "progressives" were trying out the idea that "race was a social construct" ... it didn't really exist in the real world, it was mostly created in the US to support slavery and the continued oppression of blacks. At that time, Kevin Garnett was a big B-ball star and was forced to live his life of racial oppression on  $15 million a year.

The linked article would seem to say that in the case of race being a construct, the wisdom of "the latest is always most correct" ("progressivism") failed in 2007! Race is BACK! and it is more dug in that ever. In fact, it is a "core of our existence"!

When the core of our existence is brought into question, it gets emotional pretty quickly.

In this world, the greatest gift of religion (or transcendent philosophy) is that you have a core of your existence that is NOT your "race, income, health, gender, politics, intelligence, education ....".

When our reality as good and moral people feels threatened, up go the defenses and we stop listening. That “track-switching” process right there is actually a continuation and reinforcement of our privilege—whites get to walk away from the implications of race when people of color don’t have that luxury, so let’s get real about that for a second.

To be a Christian is to daily give up the idea that we are "good and moral people" and accept that we are broken and vile beggars seeking Grace. It's a perspective that makes viewpoints like the article's fall into the old song "and the things of this earth will grow strangely dim ..."

When all you have is your position of relative power in this world and there are no transcendent or sacred values, then EVERYTHING is about POWER. It's a Hobbesian world of tooth and claw (in this case intellectual / power / privilege meaning "life"), so it is (intellectually) "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The assumption is that SOMEONE's "will to power" (Nietzsche) World View will rise to the top and force all others to bow to it. "The Party" is pretty darned sure that they have that World View well in hand ... in fact, they are exceedingly smug about it.

We have only really existed in a world nearly bereft of spirit, history and philosophy since "the 1950's" -- ("Closing of the American Mind"),  so today, a dogs breakfast of ideologies, grievance / minority groups of all sorts (in this case focused on race), now define the "cultural order".

In the absence of God, every person is their own "god", and quickly seeks to find some sort of group identification to replace the lost belonging once provided by religion, culture, nationality, etc. Race, gender, sexual preference, economic status, political leaning -- the list is endless and often frivolous -- "Gothic", tattooed, rides a Harley -- groups expand and they ALL seek for their group to be "the truth" and for "all other groups" to get used to their "very special" point of view as being ultimately right!  "All pigs are equal, but some are more equal than others!" (Orwell, Animal House)

In the case of the linked article, the fact the permeates all society is race and "white privilege", and THOU SHALT not question the pronouncements of the race industry on the matter -- thus, "science" is to be used to force your conversion to their world view!

There’s an understanding in the field that people of color may have a greater access to what it means to be white than white people, just as women have a greater understanding of what it means to be male than men—it’s a product of living as a minority. So calm yourself and try to listen, even if only because you look foolish grabbing at straws for an explanation of something much greater than your own small behaviors.

See, blacks know more about what it is to be white and women know more about males than men -- somewhat strangely, what they "know" is very negative, but never the less it is the "true facts", and obviously any white male is going to feel hideous about looking "foolish" in front of a black or a woman!  (the prospect is so humiliating it provokes anxiety to write it!) You may not understand the kind of smugness that is needed to reach those sort of conclusions, but they are kind enough to include a link in the article to an example!

It is amazing how often arguments for "superiority of perspective" in a world with no standards or truth, call for a time machine. I suppose if morality, truth, reason, philosophy and history are all "power constructs", a "time machine" is as good an argument as any. But the real core argument (to the extent there even is one beyond MIGHT IS RIGHT) is this.

You were born where you were born, your skin is the color that it is, and you grew up how you did, exposed to the media and a society that you had no control over, all of which led you to being exactly who you are today.

... The myth of meritocracy gets in the way of seeing this—we all want to hold onto our story that we’re strong, smart, and deserve everything we have.

Naturally, the "story" of the authors of the article is not a "story" at all, but "settled science".

There is no merit. "Who you are" is semi-randomly determined by your birth, your society, etc -- there is no purpose for your life. You have no "gifts, destiny, soul". There is no "merit" in building cathedrals, serving God, writing great literature, exploring the world or even going to the Moon. Chucking spears at a passing wildebeest, putting bones in your nose and dancing around the campfire to the rhythm of drums is at least equivalent, and as they say above, in their universe "superior", since black people know more about what it is to be white than white people do.

Why is it again that people have a hard time getting along when everyone's story is supposedly equally valid? Well, because that is a bold faced lie. The game is about POWER, and he who can destroy the "stories" of what was a great culture and replace them with the "Good Facts" of multiculturalism, diversity, socialism, gender identity, "tolerance" (for people that agree with "The Party"), feminism, environmentalism, etc can gain power and eventually FORCE compliance!

Somehow, as The Party gains greater and greater power, I suspect our own home brewed "National Socialists" will find even BETTER "Scientific Training" to convince any who fail to see the brilliance of their "truth" from daring to question them. If some refuse to consider themselves "foolish", it can be important for those people to be dead so that "the truth" doesn't get "confused".

As long as a few million of us are smart enough to fail to see the 2nd Amendment as an "ideological construct of a racist white patriarchy", we ought to be fine. No matter how smug someone is,  multiple rounds of .223 to head and chest tends to introduce some humility. There may not be such a thing as "merit", but there is such a thing as hitting the target.


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100 Million Deaths, DDT, Malaria, Value of Life

Rachel Carson's Deadly Fantasies - Forbes:

Readers of this blog know that I believe ALL lives matter, and that I am intrigued, dismayed, perplexed and frustrated by the WIDE variation in how much given lives in fact do matter! To that end, I've come back to the issue of DDT and Malaria.

To make the longer story REALLY short, DDT came online at just the right point in history -- right as WWII was getting underway, and from 1943 - 1960, it saved on the order of HALF A BILLION ... yes, you heard that right, 500,000,000 lives!!!  If you have time to read just the very early part of this article, it is WELL worth your time!

Then, along came "Silent Spring" -- a FICTIONAL work, that was supposedly based on science, but was not, that is credited with founding the environmental movement. The results of the world wide emotional backlash against DDT were immediately catastrophic, and if you must see the "punchline", at least 100 MILLION dead, making Carlson in the ranks of the greatest mass murderers in history:

In Ceylon, for example, where, as noted, DDT use had cut malaria cases from millions per year in the 1940s down to just 17 by 1963, its banning in 1964 led to a resurgence of half a million victims per year by 1969.[18] In many other countries, the effects were even worse.

By 1970, the National Academy of Sciences was worried, they tried to head off the rush to disaster with this:

To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase in agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably, perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that, in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable. Abandonment of this valuable insecticide should be undertaken only at such time and in such places as it is evident that the prospective gain to humanity exceeds the consequent losses. At this writing, all available substitutes for DDT are both more expensive per crop-year and decidedly more hazardous.[19]

But it was banned in the US anyway, and many other places to follow.

And even for those that did not, the halting of American DDT exports (since U.S. producers slowed and then stopped manufacturing it) made DDT much more expensive, and thus effectively unavailable for poor countries in desperate need of the substance.[25] As a result, insect-borne diseases returned to the tropics with a vengeance. By some estimates, the death toll in Africa alone from unnecessary malaria resulting from the restrictions on DDT has exceeded 100 million people.[26]

I did more reading this PM on DDT than I really wanted to ... the guy that wrote this article used to eat a teaspoon of it before his speeches! He died of a heart attack at age 84.

I could ramble on -- in general, danger to humans, very close to nil. Danger to birds, nothing if used in ANY sort of sensible way -- the issue of eggshells / eagles is from having it virtually POURED on fields for no good reason other than it was "cheap and effective so more must be better".

Back to the important point, LIFE!

No images of lilu in her outfit today guys! ;-(

So a woman writes a fictional story about birds being killed at just the right time so a bunch of lefties go off the deep end about a pesticide that has saved HALF A BILLION lives, and it is banned!  We finally start getting back to use it FIFTY YEARS  after it's banning has killed well over 100 MILLION !!!

I understand that most of the lives saved and lost were black, and I certainly understand that from the point of view of the left-liberal-progressives in this country, black lives are "pawns". They are CRITICAL as a voting block today, but as 6K young black men die in the streets here by shooting each year, those lives matter as much as the lives of babes in their mothers wombs. Abortion falls especially hard on the black, which was the intention of Margret Sanger and the eugenicists.

The gay guys that died from AIDs mattered HUGELY, although far, FAR less than a common street thug that attacked a police officer in Ferguson. His life approached the worth of an assassinated US president if one considers the amount of media time spent on it.

OTOH, many many thousands of deaths of poorly educated white people in an epidemic of suicide and substance abuse are worth even less than those of the young urban black men shooting each other!

My answer is that we have abandoned any sense of proportion, reason and morality and are being completely driven by a politically controlled media, government and educational monolith under single party (D) control that is 100% directed to gaining and locking in POWER.

I'd like to hear alternative answers.


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In Praise of Racism

How To Drive Right Wing Racists Insane With One Simple Question:

Racism --  (Google) The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

Edward O. Wilson, "The Meaning of Human Intelligence", p30 and 31, 

"A second overpowering human behavior is the overpowering instinctual urge to belong to groups." ... "A persons membership in his group--his tribe--is a large part of his identity. It also confers on him some degree or other of a sense of superiority".  

The text following this gives scientific backing to these statements, but I suspect we are all humans here, we know them to be true in our very souls. A little later, we find:

".... people prefer to be with others who look like them, speak the same dialect, and hold the same beliefs." 

Wilson of course knows he is on dangerous ground and attempts to couch his obviously true statements because he knows that the dominant culture thinks like the linked article. I really like this quote from early in "Meaning of Human Intelligence" :

"When Carl Sagan won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1978, I dismissed it as a minor achievement for a scientist, scarcely worth listing. When I won the same prize the following year, it wondrously became a major literary award of which scientists should take special note."

 A marvelous and HONEST statement of human nature! We love ourselves and we love our group -- either we were created that way or we became that way because it was adaptive. Either way, that is who we are for at least many tens and hundreds of thousands of years to come -- assuming we can survive.

The one modification easy to make to the definition is the "all" -- it is of course "most", and the fact that our natural feeling is that our group is superior can be intellectually and spiritually tempered. It will still exist in our hearts, because it is our wiring, but with the help of God it can be channeled as can the other parts of our fallen nature.

We could re-write the racist definition as "Blacks believing that all blacks are superior and therefore black lives matter more than others".  It is totally clear that many current blacks are racist and extremely proud to be so, which I'd argue is the main reason that many whites are responding in kind in a world that has long left behind the unifying factor of Christian belief. Both blacks and whites are human, and barring belief and practice of a religion that specifies improved behavior, they behave accordingly.

The essence of the column above is our old friend the inversion. The "liberal" ideology/religion defines "minority" to be  "good" (even when they become the majority), and "traditional majority" (ie. white) to be "evil". This is directly in opposition to human nature, which "just is". Christianity seeks to IMPROVE on fallen human nature, not invert it. "Love your neighbor AS YOURSELF" doesn't say "learn to hate yourself, then your neighbor will seem better". It seeks to properly channel our fallen state back to God.

The purpose of leftism is to DESTROY the natural order.  Taking the natural inclination of people to love themselves (see previous Pulitzer prize) and to love their family, religion, race, ethnicity, tradition, etc and to INVERT it so that large groups are to be accepted in the new group/religion ("liberalism" / TP) by declaring their self-loathing for the natural order previously listed (self, family, etc). In order to be part of the "The Party"(TP-D), they are required to tell a lie against their very nature -- "Black Lives Matter -- but white lives do not!".

It is sad that such people as the author of the article never find me to interview -- the picture at the head of the article looks exactly like so many liberals that I have calmly explained my thoughts to. It is clear that their "tolerance" is extremely limited.

So, my off the cuff answer to "Why am I a proud white person"? The question from the article that is supposed to "drive me insane".

I believe that pride is natural but dangerous, I prefer to consider myself a BLESSED White Christian, but in the spirit of the question.

Christendom, Western civilization, the Constitution, Newtonian Physics, Albert Einstein, Edmund Burke, Winston Churchill, flight, the Moon Landing, electricity, clean water and sanitation, Scotch, Bourbon and the Green Bay Packers.

With the modifications above, I am a "proud racist" -- as a fallen human, as is the author of the article. They seek to deny their very nature and declare that they are no longer human. I seek to accept my fallen condition and become more like Christ with the help of the Holy Spirit.

As we watch the rest of  2016, we have a ringside seat for human nature and we can all see if it is redeemed by "liberalism" or if it could use some more of the help of God.

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Science, Philosophy, Fundamentalism, Ignorance.

http://theweek.com/articles/610948/why-many-scientists-are-ignorant?google_editors_picks=true

I hate the title "Why are so many scientists ignorant", not because it is incorrect, but because it will cause an emotional reaction. "Why are so many scientists poorly (or narrowly) educated?" would be better. The short and flip answer is because they have to be. Human brains, even genius ones have severely limited capacity compared to all the knowledge that there is. We all make choices in the Hobbesian bargain of choosing to "Know everything about nothing or nothing about everything".

If we are very smart, we can "cheat" and know "a lot" about some special area and still know a bit about a quite a few things, but since the body of knowledge is so large and the depth of any area is so deep, the effect is that all of us are at BEST "experts" in a narrow range, and ignorant about virtually everything else. It isn't an insult, it is just the way things are.

The problem in being ignorant about philosophy is that in order to even BEGIN to make any sort of value judgements about the possibilities of knowledge and the types thereof, you have to DO philosophy!

To argue that philosophy is useless is to do philosophy. Moreover, some existential questions simply can't be escaped, and philosophy is one of the best, or at least least bad, ways we've come up with to address those questions.

I am reminded of listening to MPR one day when they had a statistician on to discuss the lottery and gambling. A caller, clearly very sure of themselves, called in and said "I'm really glad you are having this show! My brother in law is REALLY stupid,  he always picks 1,2,3,4,5 with a Powerball of 6. What are the odds of THAT happening"?!

There was a long pause, "thanks for your call", and the statistician explained as nicely as he could that the odds were 1 in 292 million or so, exactly the same as the odds of any other set of 6 numbers being selected! The caller had a lot of confidence, but no demonstrated knowledge of statistics relative to his supposedly "stupid" brother in law.

So, Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking -- among many others end up sounding like the MPR caller as they call philosophy "useless". Hey smart guys, if it is so useless, how come you are attempting to DO IT??? !!!!

I've attempted to cover this ground in many ways on this blog, but I think the article is worth the read -- here is the part I liked best:

Instead, we've become a philosophically illiterate culture at large. Seemingly every day, you can find examples of people displaying stunning cultural illiteracy — people in positions where that simply should not happen. The great philosophical tradition that our civilization is built on is left largely untaught. Even "liberal arts" curricula in many colleges do not teach the most influential thinkers. If our elites aren't being taught this great tradition, then it should come as no surprise that some subset of that elite — experimental scientists and their hangers-on — don't know it.

That's part of the problem. But it's just a part of it. After all, as a group, scientists have an obvious objective interest in experimental science being recognized as the only path to valuable knowledge, and therefore an interest in disdaining other paths to knowledge as less valid. People who listen to scientists opine about philosophy ought to keep that in mind. 

And then there's another factor at play. Many, though certainly not all, of the scientists who opine loudest about the uselessness of philosophy are public atheists. The form of atheism they promote is usually known as "eliminative materialism," or the notion that matter is the only thing that exists. This theory is motivated by "scientism," or the notion that the only knowable things are knowable by science. Somewhat paradoxically, these propositions are essentially religious — to dismiss entire swathes of human experience and human thought requires a venture of faith. They're also not very smart religion, since they end up simply shouting away inconvenient propositions. 

Fundamentalism is not a belief system or a religion, it's a state of mind. There can be fundamentalist religion, fundamentalist atheism, fundamentalist socialism, fundamentalism libertarianism. What all of them have in common is, in David Bentley Hart's words, "a stubborn refusal to think." The fundamentalist is not the one whose ideas are too simple or too crude. He's the one who stubbornly refuses to think through either other ideas, or those ideas themselves.

We ALL have vast swaths of ignorance, but not knowing enough to get in out of the rain or not play in the middle of the freeway are critical bits of knowledge for even the most brilliant and focused of scientific or other prodigies. Not knowing enough about philosophy to understand that being a fundamentalist eliminative materialist is no "smarter" philosophically than being a fundamentalist Muslim or Christian makes one look as intellectually lost as the "smart guy" lottery caller.

"Post-modern" man tends to fall prey to this because of the removal of the humility of "the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God", coupled with the extremely oppressive and rigid set of rules of the modern religion of "secular humanism / liberalism". Where humility is a requirement for all practicing Jews and Christians, smugness is a requirement of followers of the inverted religion of "liberalism".

So there we see it yet again -- inversion, the mark of Satan. Is it any wonder that this world is starting to look like Hell?

AA, BOcare, Drugs

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous - The Atlantic:

Reading through this I find a couple of threads:

1. BOcare has mandated that all insurance policies include 30 days of treatment for alcohol, so there is more money in the alcohol treatment bucket than ever before. Money as always is "good and bad". True, more people may get treatment -- OTOH, it is likely there will be a bunch of "standards" that may or may not be that helpful to people that need help -- but they will certainly direct money to "the right pockets" as determined by politics. 
2. Folks like the Atlantic HATE anything that smacks of "higher powers", so AA makes them VERY uncomfortable! 

That said, I can't imagine anything outside of God that can't be improved. It turns out there are a couple of drugs that are approved for treatment of alcohol abuse. 

I researched this article, I wondered what it would be like to try naltrexone, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved for alcohol-abuse treatment in 1994.

Perhaps even worse is the pace of research on drugs to treat alcohol-use disorder. The FDA has approved just three: Antabuse, the drug twhat induces nausea and dizziness when taken with alcohol; acamprosate, which has been shown to be helpful in quelling cravings; and naltrexone. (There is also Vivitrol, the injectable form of naltrexone.)

AA, because of the "anonymous" part can at least seem somewhat secretive, and at least some of the AA people tend to be "anti-substance" -- as in "if you are taking ANY drug, that is "the same" as being addicted to alcohol". Of course, that is an oversimplification -- any relatively loose organization like AA is going to have SOMEBODY that says damned near anything.

I don't draw any conclusions from this. Alcohol is a drug, so it doesn't seem impossible that some drugs might help reduce cravings for it. As a fat guy, I noted with more than a little interest that naltrexone might curb cravings for food.

Personal aside. Apparently a guy that I have known for around a decade committed suicide over the weekend -- not local, not completely sure, friendship had been reduced to FB except for me seeing him on my long motorcycle trip in 2013. Few other things going on -- my Dad's issues being one.

Girl Scout Cookies were brought into the house. I resisted them for a couple of days, but in the presence of nice cold milk mid-afternoon, I succumbed. End damage, a row short of a whole box. I really had no intent of eating that many, it was purely "one more ... oh, there is some milk left ... oh, I need more milk ... and ... repeat".

The snake brain is a scary scary thing -- given the right circumstances I am DEFINITELY powerless against Girl Scout Cookies. I once heard of someone who could eat ONE -- she ought either be killed or put in  control of the universe,  I'm not qualified to state which!

Keep the damned things OUT OF THE HOUSE! ... there but for the grace of God!

Anyway, "addictive behavior" --- food, video games, drugs, alcohol, smoking, gambling --- is certainly part of the human condition. The drugs and alcohol are currently at epidemic proportions and killing over 50K people a YEAR.


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Darwin's Cathedral, Evolution, Religion and The Nature Of Society

http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Cathedral-Evolution-Religion-Society/dp/0226901351/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457489612&sr=1-1&keywords=darwin%27s+cathedral

After seeing the subject book by David Sloan Wilson referenced in a number of other books I've read, I finally got around to reading it. Certainly not a "page turner" -- lots of evolutionary terminology. "Group Selection" is the biggie -- the idea that when groups have characteristics that are more "adaptive", they will be "selected" -- meaning more babies, more babies that live, conversion of other groups, etc.

"Since Darwin's theory relies entirely on differences in survival and reproduction, it seems unable to explain groups as adaptive units. This can be called the fundamental problem of social life. Groups function best when their members provide benefits for each other, but it is difficult to convert this type of social organization into the currency of biological fitness". 

The author is attempting to resurrect "group selection" by putting it on a continuum called "multi-level selection theory" ... genes, cells, organisms, groups -- selection happens across any and all, but what is most interesting to the author is clearly groups, and how religion is a core mechanism of that selection.

 "Moral communities in larger than a few hundred individuals are "unnatural" as far as genetic evolution is concerned, because to the best of our knowledge they never existed prior to the advent of agriculture. This means that culturally evolved mechanisms are absolutely required for human society to hang together above the level of face to face groups. 

At least if you reject any potential for "divine revelation" -- just where DID Newton or Einstein come up with their initial hypothesis? ... just kidding, mostly. The point is, for a pure atheist scientist, there had BETTER be SOME explanation why "unnatural things" are happening with human groups!

The other big evolutionary discussion is the "argument from design" and "functionalism". Naturally, an atheist scientist assumes that the "design" is "random", relative to some function that is adaptive (as opposed to there being a "designer")  He uses the example of a can opener relative to functional design. "The design features that identify an object as a can opener provide such a strong argument that we don't even call it an argument, we call it self evident".  He then points out that a specific religion "Calvinism" is DESIGNED to provide the function of allowing a group larger than "natural" to function -- interestingly, "designed" by Calvin.

On page 228 he really gets down to brass tacks.

" It is true that many religious beliefs are false as literal descriptions of the real world, but this merely forces us to recognize two forms of realism; a factual realism based on literal correspondence, and a practical realism based on behavioral adaptiveness."  

"Rationality is not the gold standard on which all other forms of thought are to be judged. Adaptation is the gold standard against which rationality must be judged, along with all other forms of thought."  

and then ... "... factual realists detached from practical reality were not among our ancestors. It is the person who elevates factual truth above practical truth who must be accused of mental weakness from an evolutionary perspective". 

I could do a MUCH longer review, but I think this is the core. For those that assume there is no God, the fact that humans are able to function in groups larger than a couple hundred people at most is a HUGE problem. It clearly happened, but HOW did it happen?

The answer is just what I harp on -- religion. In the West, Judaism and Christianity -- which CLEARLY were the  "most adaptive", or "divinely inspired" if you are a believer. If you are an evolutionist, they realize that they had damned well better figure out that "practical realism" is FAR superior to "factual realism" (or at least what the consciousness that we have no clue as to what it is THINKS is "factual") from an ADAPTIVE POV!

 Having the "facts" right, but turning up dead (as in "our culture")  -- meaning that you are NOT "among the ancestors" of the future doesn't fit well with having a "superior" brain -- even if you DO feel really great about gay "marriage"! "Superior" means staying in the gene pool in the evolutionary world!No matter how "good" something may be for your own moral reasoning, if you drop out of the gene pool, your "good" fails the test of survival.

Is it even POSSIBLE to have civilization as we know it without a huge majority of the people in that civilization fervently believing that the basis for their civilization is divine and sacred, or at the very least "exceptional"?  From what we have seen to date, not without massive coercive force as in National Socialist Germany, USSR, China, North Korea, etc. It remains to be seen in a couple cases if brutal force can be a substitute for belief. Even if it CAN, is that REALLY what our "factual realist" scientists find to be a "good idea"?

All in all, a good book -- most could read the first 20 pages and the last 20 and get 80% of the value out of it. It is worth at least that effort.

Heisenberg Cut From a Nut, Data vs Meaning

Why Gravitational Waves Are Red Herrings:

Deepak Chopra isn't really any more of a "nut" than me -- and he is a better educated nut in any case. It just rhymed well. I find his brand of spirituality to be too amorphous, "I'm OK, You're OK", "just be and it will all be OK" sort of the kind of spirituality that promises everything but demands nothing, and seems to have no real "there, there".

He is however fascinated with the interaction between things like the "Heisenberg Cut"(HC), the "boundary" between Newtonian and Quantum Physics, as am I.  My analogy for that boundary is like the hardware / software interface in computing, although sort of the "reverse". Above hardware interface in computers (the instruction set), all is "software" or "data" -- software is just data in a special format that the hardware recognizes as instructions.

Above the HC in the world, all appears to be "matter", but we know that it is also "energy". Below the cut, our attempts to discover if things are waves or particles becomes probabilistic. The answer seems to be "both", which may mean "neither/something else", but we don't know what that is. We may figure that out, but my guess is that at the below the HC, we are getting at least very close to the "stuff" (or non-stuff) of God -- meaning "spirit". Software runs on hardware, matter and our world might run on "spirit". At least I like to imagine that.  It has a weird symmetry.

Third, until reality is united into one whole, science cannot justify its claim to understand nature. This isn't simply a piece of grumpy skepticism. The Heisenberg cut raises a wall inside the human brain, because the brain is both a large object and totally dependent on quantum events taking place at the very most fundamental level of brain cells. Being unable to fuse the two domains of reality comes to a crunch every time you think a thought. At the large scale level of classical physics, your thought can be detected as increased neural activity that "lights up" on a brain scan. Yet this isn't the same as reading your mind. Only you know what your thought is.

Last I checked, there wasn't any real "evidence" that thought requires quantum effects, but there certainly are quantum effects taking place in each and every atom in the brain. Are there "special types" of quantum "operations" taking place in some of the specialized cells in the brain?

If you were watching the registers of a computer flit through millions of instructions manipulating millions/billions of bytes of data without access to a huge hunk of the software that was running and other programs which allowed you to trace the operations against source code, only a TINY number of people in the world would have any hope of discerning what was happening in the "big picture" of the program. Modern RISC instruction sets are hopelessly compressed and obscure from a human logical POV ... they are meant to run efficiently on specific hardware and rely on sophisticated optimizing compilers to generate streams that fit the specific hardware structure. That optimization makes the meaning of the instructions flitting through still more obscure from even an expert human POV.

How much more difficult is our situation in watching neurons "light up" under a "Positron Emission Tomography" (PET) or some other scan? For a computer CPU, we can look up the spec -- how many registers, what is the instruction set, etc -- for the brain? We are men blind from birth painting a picture of something that has never been described -- consciousness. "The feeling of knowing" indeed!

On the face of it, you'd never connect the fantastic achievement of LIGO with the utter confusion that exists when it comes down to how the brain works. Yet they are intimately connected, simply by the fact that doing science is a brain activity. If you don't know how such activity produces consciousness, and then how it goes on to produce the image of a four-dimensional world, you can't claim to understand what reality actually is. Instead, you're like someone in closed room who hears banging on the walls from outside. This banging can be measured in all kinds of ways, but everything you can say about it cannot be confirmed, because you'd have to escape the room to really find out what's going on.

There is a group of us in this closed room. We can all verify with each other that we are hearing, seeing, measuring a whole lot of stuff. We all have feelings, and we have verified that feelings are required for us to make any decisions (people that lose feelings / emotion are unable to make decisions). When it comes down to what all the measurements "mean" or "why" we see and feel the things we do, there is a lot of disagreement.

Mr Logic: "The data just IS, try to use what we learned to make us money, pleasure, more data, etc"

Mr Feeling: "There HAS to be a why! Think about what this might MEAN!"

Mr Logic: "Quit thinking about that! Try to use the data to help us LIVE LONGER, we are all going to DIE, even our children might die! We have to get BUSY, PLEASE get BUSY! "

Mr Feeling: "Why live longer if there is no purpose?"

Mr Logic: "Pleasure you fool! Pleasure will make you happy! Long life and pleasure, that HAS to be the reason we are here! Besides, why die? We can find ways to live FOREVER! "

Mr Feeling: "This work is hard and demanding. If pleasure is the answer I would rather spend time with my loved ones and watch the sun go down. Why even live one day longer if there is no meaning? ".

Mr Logic: "Damn you! I can't complete this work alone! Less and less people are willing to do the important work of making our lives more pleasurable and hopefully longer! I can't understand why this has happened!"

Mr Feeling: "Then you DO understand that "why" is an important question?"

... and so it goes.


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Gravity Waves Detected, Spacetime Scanner?

Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them - The New Yorker:

This is really big news in physics. Yet ANOTHER area that Einstein and his General Theory of Relativity have been proven right!

I like their little "story" that they introduce the detection with because unlike pseudo science like AGW, it puts this into context. Billions of years since the event, over 100 years in the making, false alarms, failures, big investments, and finally ...

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again. 

The waves rippled outward in every direction, weakening as they went. On Earth, dinosaurs arose, evolved, and went extinct. The waves kept going. About fifty thousand years ago, they entered our own Milky Way galaxy, just as Homo sapiens were beginning to replace our Neanderthal cousins as the planet’s dominant species of ape. A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein, one of the more advanced members of the species, predicted the waves’ existence, inspiring decades of speculation and fruitless searching. Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth. Marco Drago, a thirty-two-year-old Italian postdoctoral student and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp—a faint whooping from low to high. This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.

The biggest IMMEDIATE effect is just yet another confirmation of General Relativity as correct. The hope is that this is a new way of seeing the universe that we have now just barely established as "possible".  Gravity waves are ripples in the actual fabric of the universe -- spacetime! All the other electromagnetic radiation -- light, radio, infrared, gamma, x-ray, etc travel through space. We now have a form of wave that might "illuminate" even dark matter.

We don't really know how gravity waves might be "used" -- but we now are pretty certain that they do exist! It MIGHT be that like telescopes, radio telescopes, etc gravity waves will in the future be one of the major ways that we observe the universe.

Exciting stuff!

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36% Of Climate Related Scientists Say "Comply With Kyoto"

Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis - Forbes:

This will get a LOT less coverage than the "97% of Scientist agree" on AGW!

Surveys and Science are like "Lutherans and eelpout" .. Huh? If 100% of scientists think that space is expanding at a fixed rate (which they pretty much did) and data shows that it is expanding at an accelerating rate, then, until the next data, 100% of scientists were WRONG! Pretty much all of them thought that  space was Static as well prior to  Edwin Hubble showing it was expanding!

Science is driven by data, surveys are driven by opinion.

It's probably WORSE for AGW that what the survey shows. Experiments have now been done where you put the survey taker in a PET scanner which is pretty much a lie detector that actually works! Ask people a question like "Blacks are inherently better basketball players than whites", which 90%+ will answer NO!!! Because they have been socialized to KNOW that is what they SHOUD answer, but nearly all of them (including blacks) are LYING!

No doubt a goodly number of climate related scientists are NOT going to answer this one in the socially acceptable "wrong way" ... even though is was supposed to be anonymous, many could lose their jobs for being a "denier".

The electrical power exec at the meeting I was at this AM was VERY uncomfortable with AGW being questioned in the room, and made basically a "statement of faith" that "they had children, cared about the planet, and this was a settled area in the industry that was not useful to discuss!".







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EPA Dictatorship Loses 5-4

Supreme Court blocks Obama carbon emissions plan | Reuters:

I happened to be at a meeting this AM which had an electric power industry executive at it.

They pointed out:

1. They invested 10's of millions of dollars removing 90% of the emissions from their coal plants under the assurance that would suffice for decades. They borrowed money and set rates based on those promises. Now they are being told that is not good enough and they have to close the coal fired plants. 
2. Every utility has to have a plan that shows how they can cover 110% of known peak demand (that is why new peaks are EXPENSIVE). 8% of solar capacity and 14% of wind capacity can be counted in that plan. So 22% renewable, 78% standard. Those coal plants MUST be replaced with natural gas turbines -- that is the ONLY way to keep the grid running. 
3. Our grid is becoming more vulnerable. Less local generation, more power coming from longer and longer distances. 

Solar doesn't work at night, it works less on cloudy days. The wind varies -- thus the 22%. Batteries are a LONG way from being an assist.

NPR was pretty dejected this AM about 5 members of the SCOTUS still not willing to go full dictatorial powers to the president. They feel it is a "national emergency" ... like a war ... this is the biggest problem of our time! No time to be hanging on tired old words in tired old documents, LET THE PRESIDENT ACT!

Why are nations pretty much required to end up as centrally run dictatorships without rule of law limiting government?

See the problem above on investment in "clean coal" and what happens when that investment is suddenly declared "not good enough" in a shorter time than was assured. Private business MUST make ENFORCEABLE contracts and make decisions on that basis! With rule of law, so must government -- but not now (at least not until a justice dies or they manage to turn one).

Why do we see reductions in investment, innovation and growth? How hard is it to see that maintaining any rule of law on this issue is one heartbeat away from being overturned?

The left cares NOTHING for "precedence" -- in fact they HATE IT! One SCOTUS justice dies, BO appoints another, and dictatorship wins on this issue!

Why would anyone invest in making existing energy sources cleaner or innovations that are "less than perfect" (whatever that is ... non-polluting, risk free, cheap, invisible, safe .... theoretical solutions can be VERY good!)

If we lived in a country with a written and REAL Constitution and separation of powers, we would not be having this discussion! ... but that is no longer where we live.

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The Feeling of What Happens : Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciouness

http://www.amazon.com/The-Feeling-What-Happens-Consciousness/dp/0156010755

The wide ranging book by Antonio Damasio takes a shot at explaining the "there, there" of being human --- consciousness.

One of his definition shots is: "Consciousness as we commonly think of it, from it's basic levels to its most complex, is the unified mental pattern that brings together the object and the self".

Another is: "...the presence of you is the feeling of what happens when your being is modified by the act of apprehending something. The presence never quits, from the moment of awakening to the moment sleep begins. The presence must be there or there is no you."

We all pretty much echo SCOTUS Potter Stewart with the "I know it when I see it" relative to obscenity in his case, but relative to consciousness here. I'm fairly sure one of the marks of autism (which Damasio doesn't mention)  is that many autistic people can't recognize others as conscious, and sometimes the consciousness of autistic people is compared to being possibly similar to that of some animals. (One of the people making this comparison was Temple Grandin, a PHD who is autistic ...)

He talks of two kinds of consciousness "core and extended". Core is "the feeling", extended is all your biography, knowledge, and creativity. Your "higher functions". The core consciousness seems to be largely a brain stem phenomenon heavily connected to your emotions and "body loop" (mental image of your body / connection to body).

I really like how he uses real known mental conditions to talk about specifically what brain injuries will affect core and extended consciousness and how.  I believe in "spirit", and also believe that consciousness (especially core) is where "matter meets spirit". My personal view is that we will eventually find some "quantum biological effects", possibly in a specific area of the brain stem that are the link to the non-physical.

Back to the book ... "Life needs a boundary. I believe that life and consciousness , when they eventually appeared in evolution, were first and foremost about life, and the life urge within a boundary. To a great extent they still are."

"The life urge"? -- pretty close to "The Force" of Star Wars fame, or even "the animating spirit".

My reading seems to be getting feverish here, and I'm behind in blogging what I've read lately -- "the creative urge" seems to be driving me. Where might that come from? Same place as the "life urge" I'd guess, or as I'm also in Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra", perhaps "the will to power" has a similar origin?

"Time Reborn" was about figuring out "what's out there" ... but the "mechanism" (if you are a strict materialist) that we are using (running on?) to theorize, develop equations, run experiments, etc is human consciousness ... "the feeling of knowing" ... "the life urge".

Sit in a quiet place, Relax and take a couple deep breaths. Now, focus ONLY on your breathing -- gently. It's not a contest, there is no "right or wrong". You will likely have "intruding thoughts" -- you may actually get frustrated. What is getting in the way of YOU, and your attempt at simple relaxed focus on your breath is your mind -- your "ego". Your "busy brain" -- the Zen folks call it your monkey-brain.

My view is that the "you" that is observing your breathing is "core consciousness", and the distractions are coming from your "extended consciousness".  I believe that the connection to the infinite is from your core consciousness -- and that the extended is what wants to take over the ship and convince you that you and everything "out there" is a bunch of "stuff" ... and so are you. If it can't succeed in convincing you, it will work very hard to distract.

I'm definitely of two minds on this issue! ;-)

It's a worthy book -- it is well reviewed and has a lot of secular accolades. I sometimes look at books like this and the "Time Reborn" book as a NY Street game of "hide the spirit" -- see,  no spirit under this shell ... switch, switch ... oh, "life force"? "emergent"? "Principle of Sufficient Reason"?  ... nah,  "Pay no attention to that spirit behind the curtain"!