science

Noble Savages

By in animals, science, spiritual-not-religious

“For now, let’s keep the door open to the idea that animals can be spiritual beings and let’s consider the evidence for such a claim,” he added.
“Meager as it is, available evidence says, ‘Yes, animals can have spiritual experiences,’ and we need to conduct further research and engage in interdisciplinary discussions before we say that animals cannot and do not experience spirituality.”
Oh, gods, please, no. If animals become narcissistic, pompous bores who spend all their time looking for proof that the universe revolves around them, whose company will I be able to keep when I need to recover from the folly of my own kind? I’ll have no choice but to finally disappear into bags of elephant tranquilizers and syringes full of heroin.

I Refute Voltaire Thus

By in fresh hell, history, jests japes jokes jollies, non compos mentis, science, the madness of crowds

So, my parents have gotten into the whole “raw milk” thing, thanks to some quack doctor they went to see. Just to make sure I didn’t space out through science class all those years ago and hallucinate about the whole reason we started pasteurizing milk to begin with, I did some looking around on the Internets. This made me laugh…

Food scientists can hardly believe that so many consumers have turned their back on one of the most successful public health endeavors of the 20th century. In 1938, for example, milk caused 25 percent of all outbreaks of food- and water-related sickness.

…and it also reminded me of a recent righteous rant by Ed about an outbreak of pertussis in California, related to the trendy anti-vaccination movement.
See, there’s a part of me that appreciates this on some meta-level, the counterintuitive “victim of our own success” phenomenon. Science has done such a good job of freeing people from having to worry about dying from contaminated food and drink or formerly terrifying diseases that they’ve become complacent and ignorant, enough so to become contemptuous of their benefactor and deny that they ever needed its help in the first place. Of course, public policy deserves a lot of the credit as well, and it, too, has ironically helped breed a superbug of stupidity in the form of so many Joe Republicans, convinced that they never got nothin’ from no one and don’t see why they should have to pay taxes to help anybody else. Indeed, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have so many thankless, functionally retarded children.

And if you need further proof that history is not progressive but cyclical, not a steady advance of knowledge and compassion but alternating periods of high-minded cosmopolitan and knee-jerk provincial values, consider the fact that Upton Sinclair’s famous exposé The Jungle was written in 1906. What do you think the reception would be for a book like that today, 104 years later? An earnest portrayal of the hopeless plight of the working class, the corruption of unregulated business and the need for social programs, written by an unabashed !socialist!, of all things?
Progress? Age of Reason? I laugh in your face.

Who Are You Going to Believe, Me or Your Lying Eyes?

By in philosophy, science

Anthony Gottlieb:

No group of believers has more reason to be sure of its own good sense than today’s professional scientists. There is, or should be, no mystery about why it is always more rational to believe in science than in anything else, because this is true merely by definition. What makes a method of enquiry count as scientific is not that it employs microscopes, rats, computers or people in stained white coats, but that it seeks to test itself at every turn. If a method is as rigorous and cautious as it can be, it counts as good science; if it isn’t, it doesn’t. Yet this fact sets a puzzle. If science is careful scepticism writ large, shouldn’t a scientific cast of mind require one to be sceptical of science itself?
There is no full-blown logical paradox here. If a claim is ambitious, people should indeed tread warily around it, even if it comes from scientists; it does not follow that they should be sceptical of the scientific method itself. But there is an awkward public-relations challenge for any champion of hard-nosed science. When scientists confront the deniers of evolution, or the devotees of homeopathic medicine, or people who believe that childhood vaccinations cause autism—all of whom are as demonstrably mistaken as anyone can be—they understandably fight shy of revealing just how riddled with error and misleading information the everyday business of science actually is. When you paint yourself as a defender of the truth, it helps to keep quiet about how often you are wrong.
…At the end of her book “Science: A Four Thousand Year History” (2009), Patricia Fara of Cambridge University wrote that “there can be no cast-iron guarantee that the cutting-edge science of today will not represent the discredited alchemy of tomorrow”. This is surely an understatement. If the past is any guide—and what else could be?—plenty of today’s science will be discredited in future. There is no reason to think that today’s practitioners are uniquely immune to the misconceptions, hasty generalisations, fads and hubris that marked most of their predecessors.
…Happily, there is another way out of the impasse between fallible science and even-more-fallible non-science. The contest is not a zero-sum game: the shortcomings of science do not make it rational to believe cranks instead. It’s a fair bet that many of today’s scientific beliefs are wrong, but only your grandchildren will know which ones, and in the meantime, science is the only game in town.
Well, yeah. Seems like an unnecessarily roundabout way of arriving at that conclusion, but okay. I’m not sure how many people there are who hold some belief in the infallibility of today’s science; I certainly don’t know any myself, and I suspect a lot of them have straw sticking out from their raggedy shirtsleeves and pantlegs in any event. Too often, though, when you hear someone placing emphasis on the imperfect nature of science, it’s being used as a way of trying to keep a foot in the door so that their preferred illogical, irrational belief can sneak back in.
You’re at some large gathering. Noisy, crowded, lots of things to pull at your attention. You hear what sounds like a familiar voice in the general din, turn and see someone through the haze and crowd, standing with her back to you, and recognize her as your friend. You decide to mischievously surprise her with a sly pinch on her ass. One close look and one stinging slap to the cheek later, you realize your mistake. If you’re René Descartes, the lesson you take away from this, and one that is for some reason treated with the utmost respect and gravity by important thinkers for centuries to come, is that your senses can be misleading and therefore can’t be trusted to give you absolute certainty. But how do we know that the senses can mislead us? By further application of the very same senses. You realized that wasn’t your friend after getting close enough to see her shocked face and hear her voice more clearly as she yelped in outrage, using the same eyes and ears that initially gave you the wrong impression. There’s no other method for obtaining that information.
In the same way, we discover our mistakes in science by continuing to apply the same standards of evidence and rationality. There is no divine revelation, no thunderclap of sudden awareness from out of nowhere that clues us in. It’s true that there is no absolute certainty (or at least no way for us to know of it, if you want to throw a bone to Kant here), but science has the reputation it does because it’s repeatedly proven itself to be the best way we know to get reliable, practical understanding of the reality we inhabit. Whatever shortcomings or failures it has to own up to do not mean the door is open to any incoherent fantasy or wishful thinking being just as epistemologically valid.

Show Your Work

By in atheism, augean stables, religion, science

Most of us have seen the movie Weekend at Bernie’s, right? Two guys going through all sorts of wacky hijinks in order to convince people that their dead boss is still alive, while going to hilariously desperate lengths to deflect any close scrutiny that might reveal the truth?

For some reason, I was reminded of that movie while reading this screed from Anthony McCarthy about religion and science.
Why is anyone paying attention to what Stephen Hawkings or most other scientists say about religion except on the basis of their presumed authority? And it’s the flimsiest kind of authority on the topic, based in a reputation gained in an entirely different field of study. As far as I have been able to see, Stephen Hawking has never published a scholarly paper on the subject in a reviewed journal so it’s not even passed that level of testing. Perhaps if he had tried his ideas in that academic realm he might have avoided limiting himself to one, very crude assumption about religious thinking, believing that all of it is as unaware of the vicissitudes of the study of religious questions as he obviously is.
Anyone who has read even a little of the rigorous, formal literature around various religions, would know that the contemporary critics of religion almost never have the slightest knowledge of what serious people have said on the topic.
Nameless contemporary critics “almost never” know what nameless “serious people” have said about it, eh? Well, that was most certainly, uh, precisely vague! As has been said many times before, it’s amusing to see how they don’t even bother trying to disguise this ridiculous double standard. The most unsophisticated, uneducated professions of faith are always accepted as valid and genuine; the most simpleminded believer is accepted to have had some meaningful experience of the truth of God’s existence. No one would think of scoffing at the faithful for daring to speak of their beliefs without having spent years in seminary first. Yet skeptics are constantly told that they must display intimate familiarity with the most irrelevant nuances of theological reasoning, from Augustine to Niebuhr, in front of a panel of judges who can hardly be said to be impartial, before their objections will be treated as “serious”. And you should be ashamed of yourself for suspecting that this is all just an elaborate exercise in keeping the goalposts in constant motion!
But lest you think I’m unsympathetic here, let me hasten to assure you that I know all too well what it is to suffer from this sort of doctrinaire purism. My sophomore-year geometry teacher, mathematical fascist that she was, repeatedly refused to consider the ornate brilliance of my thirty-step proofs, dogmatically insisting that I had failed to establish my given! So I fully appreciate how tiring it must be to have to listen to these philistines nattering on about how you need to provide some evidence that we should even take the idea of an invisible deity seriously to begin with before we can move to discussing all his/her/its glorious attributes.
Okay, seriously though, fine. It’s simple, really — put up or shut up. Devise whatever standardized religious literacy test you want. Name whoever you want as a “serious” source for us to familiarize ourselves with. I guarantee you there won’t be any problem finding an atheist who can ace it. Hell, we can start with an agnostic like Bart Ehrman right off the bat. Anything else you want to complain about?
Not a single law of science is anything other than the product of human thought. Not a single one of them has been developed except within a realm which excludes everything but what we can discover of the physical universe. I believe that exclusion is based in our experience and the extension of our logic, which, itself, is a means to address our experience of the physical universe.
…A passage in the Book of Isaiah that often comes to mind when thinking about this topic, is when God is said to have said, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,”. Whatever else people have held about God, no matter how much of our limited minds and thoughts and even our crimes and injustices we have attributed to God, even the most anthropomorphic religion holds that God is not a human being. To think that God would be required to follow our laws of science or, indeed, any possible actual mechanisms of a universe created by God, is rather touchingly naive in a way that even the “ignorant goat herders” who are believed by the incredulous to have written the Bible were able to surpass.
Ah, yes, that’s the good stuff. Science and our conceptual ability are limited to being able to understand the “physical” universe, which we experience through our senses. God is beyond all that. God is like Emily Dickinson times infinity, hiding in a closed room he/she/it never leaves, slipping cryptic notes out every so often, written in a private language that can only be understood via mystical communion by those already inclined to believe in him/her/it. So how, then, asks the skeptic, are you, a fellow human with a similarly limited brain, capable of perceiving this mysterious “beyond”? What is this God you speak of, if he/she/it is too enormous to be caught in the puny little conceptual nets we humans are limited to using? And even if you claim we can’t look directly upon God in all his/her/its mind-shattering majesty, what discernible effects does this God have in the universe we live in, and what do they have to do with our cultural standards of morality? If even that’s too much to ask to see, well, could you at least tell me how an incomprehensible, imperceptible God is distinguishable at all from a nonexistent one? Can’t you point to some sort of common, shared experience we can use as a foundation for further discussion?
“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe…”
Moving along.

It seems to be an emotional need of the new atheists to believe they have disposed of the question of purpose but most people seem to be unimpressed with that artificial substitute for reason. And that’s only one of the questions that we, mere mortals, have about the universe which we find ourselves in. I am more convinced as I see us destroying ourselves, to a large degree with the products of science and technology, that unless we include questions of purpose, justice, rights, morality and other entirely non-scientific features of human thought and culture, that science is inadequate in itself to ensure our continued existence.

I’m not sure who these nameless people are that think science alone is going to solve all of our problems independent of ethical or practical considerations, but assuming there are some out there somewhere, I’ll agree, he sure put them in their place. But once again — whatever solutions we come up with are going to have to come by way of communication over a shared experience. I’m not interested in what your particular favorite holy book says. I’m not going to take your word on the validity of the supposedly mystical insights you’ve had if you can’t even begin to express them in some form others can understand and relate to. And I don’t care how many religious authority figures in history have advocated the Golden Rule as a general ethical principle if I can reason my way there by myself.

Our Father Who Ain’t in Heaven

By in atheism, calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, philosophy, religion, science

Calvin: Why do you suppose we’re here?

Hobbes: Because we walked here.
Calvin: No, no. I mean here on Earth.
Hobbes: Because Earth can support life.
Calvin: No, I mean why are we anywhere? Why do we exist?
Hobbes: Because we were born.
Calvin: Forget it.
Hobbes: I will, thank you.
Rev. Robert Barron says that Stephen Hawking should shut up about philosophy and theology since all he knows is physics…and then proceeds to talk as if he understands physics based on the excerpt from Hawking’s new book that everyone is talking about, where he says that science makes God irrelevant when it comes to the “how” of the universe’s existence.

The classical philosophical tradition gives us an adage that is still hard to improve upon: ex nihilo nihil fit (from nothing comes nothing). Any teacher worth his salt would take a student to task if, in trying to explain why and how a given phenomenon occurred, the student were to say, “well, it just spontaneously happened.” Yet we are expected to be satisfied with precisely that explanation when it comes to the most pressing and fascinating question of all: why is there something rather than nothing?

‘Tis a mystery. One that isn’t solved or explained by postulating a God about whom nothing tangible can be said or understood. Why do you act as if you’re owed an explanation for metaphysical puzzles anyway?
You and I are contingent in the measure that we had parents, that we eat and drink, and that we breathe. In a word, we don’t explain ourselves. Now if we want to understand why we exist, we cannot go on endlessly appealing to other contingent things. We must come finally to some reality which exists through the power of its own essence, some power whose very nature it is to be.
But that whose very nature it is to be cannot, in any sense, be limited or imperfect in being, and this is precisely why Catholic philosophy has identified this non-contingent ground of contingency, this ultimate explanation of the being of the universe, as “God.”
Three things:
1) Many Buddhists would be happy to explain to you how we can “go on endlessly appealing to other contingent things” to understand our existence. You’ll notice I didn’t say they will explain why we exist, which leads us to the next point.
2) The very question “Why do we exist?” is inherently invalid, resting as it does upon the unquestioned assumption that our existence itself is teleological by nature, something that is unclear and unproven, to put it mildly. “Purpose” is a human concept, a tool we use, not a built-in feature of life itself.
3) Anselm? Really?

Wherever You Go, There You Are

By in augean stables, non compos mentis, science, the madness of crowds

Today, not only in peasant homes but also in the city sky-scrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century the tenth or thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcism … What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery!

– Leon Trotsky
There’s this old lady I know. I heard her scoffing last week at the story about scientists calling climate change undeniable. This is coming from someone who consults the Farmer’s Almanac to see what the weather is going to be like for the next few months.
She also believes that WD-40 has analgesic properties, and uses it the way most people might use Bengay. I suspect this might have a bit to do with why her skin looks like old luggage that’s been left outside in the rain for months.
A lifelong smoker who frequently has coughing jags that sound like she’s choking up bits of her lungs, she nonetheless claims that her doctor says she has the health of someone in her twenties.
Oh, and despite being a typical Christian who thinks God is personally intervening in her life on a regular basis, she firmly believes the thing about the Mayan prophecies of the world’s end in 2012.
Stephen Hawking (who’s becoming a real downer lately, it must be said) says we need to make steps toward colonizing space if the human species is going to have any chance of long-term survival. I just wonder how he would ensure that we don’t carry our inherent deadly stupidity out there with us.

Know You Don’t

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, religion, science

Eagleman is quick to make it clear he’s not saying there’s a force X; he doesn’t want to be lumped in with the folks peddling New Age flakiness. He just wants to keep an open mind, which is what he thinks science is all about—extend the pier but don’t forget about the vastness of the ocean, expand what we know but remember that what we know is dwarfed by what we don’t know.
[…] Does that mean Eagleman-the-writer wants to believe that he has both a brain and a soul? How does he respond to the question, “Does David Eagleman have a soul?” He pauses again.
“So, I can answer that in two ways. I can tell you from my internal experience, and from my scientific training. Internally, I have felt as I’ve gotten older that I am not the same as my body, despite all of the neuroscience. How do I put this? What’s clear is that I depend entirely on the integrity of my body. As things in my brain change—if I were to develop a tumor, for example—that could completely change who I am, how I think. So I’m somehow yoked to my brain in a very strong way, and the question for all of us is, are we yoked to it 100 percent or is there some other little bit going on? From the inside, I have an intuition that I’m not just equivalent to my body. That said, intuitions always prove to be a very poor judge of reality. So, if you ask me, ‘do I have a soul?’ I would say ‘you know, I kind of feel like there’s something about me that’s a little separate from the biology.’ But I have no evidence for that.”
– KTB
Fair enough. I don’t have a problem with what-if scenarios per se; I found Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence to be a useful thought experiment, myself. At least he admits he has nothing to go on but a feeling to support his hope for a soul. And I think it’s clear he does indeed hope there is one. I say that because most people don’t spend much time passionately pondering possibilities that they feel are ludicrous on the face of it.
My mom is big on UFOs, ferzample. I don’t recall who it was that suggested that the whole postwar UFO phenomenon was basically the attempt of a modern, scientific age to believe in the idea of a new type of higher intelligence taking an interest in us and watching over us to replace the old Bronze Age deities, but I think it definitely applies in her case. While I’ve always conceded that the possibility of extraterrestrial life is interesting, certainly, I’ve never been all that worked up about it. It seems obvious that most of the true believers are slightly mad or seeking attention, so my feeling has always been, well, when they land on top of the White House or in the middle of the halftime show of the Super Bowl, rather than abducting trailer park denizens to experiment on with strangely retrograde medical tools, then I’ll pay attention. In the meantime, there’s enough interesting stuff right here that we don’t know much about, and my life doesn’t change if I accept, deny or shrug at the possibility or likelihood of intelligent alien life.
The struggle between the brain of a scientist and the soul of a writer continues in Eagleman. Maybe the brain allows itself to imagine a soul in order to take the sting out of mortality of the brain. Maybe the soul allows the brain to pretend to be in control, secure in the knowledge that the soul is immortal.
Hard to say, but in the space between the materialist and mystic, anything’s possible.
Anything’s possible. Today, I could meet the love of my life. Or maybe win the lottery. Perhaps it won’t be pleasant, though; maybe I’ll die in a freak auto-erotic asphyxiation accident. Or maybe the dumb bastard who veered off the road a month ago and smashed through my mailbox and the neighbor’s fence before hitting the side of the other neighbor’s house will do it again, only this time while I happen to be standing by the side of the road. Hell, we could play this game all day if we want to get creative; these are just mundane examples.
What’s likely, though, is that, having already finished work uneventfully, I’ll eat, sleep, read, work out and spend time online, like I do many days as a matter of routine. Of course I’m always aware that something unexpected could come up. But it’s rare that something completely out of nowhere just barges into your life and throws all into chaos. There’s a core pattern that persists and it takes a herculean effort sometimes to dislodge it.
And maybe we’ll get lucky and we’ll both live again
Well, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, don’t think so
Well, you tell me what you saw and I’ll tell you what you missed
You missed where time and life shook hands and said goodbye
You wasted life; why wouldn’t you waste death?
You wasted life; why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife?
The afterlife is another topic that’s certainly interesting in and of itself, especially to see how concepts of it have changed so much over the millennia. But once again, when you see clearly how unlikely it is that primitive conceptions of the self (thoughts and feelings that magically exist independent of brains or sensory organs, possibly contained within a diaphanous spirit resembling the physical body) are still worth entertaining given what we do know about the body and the mind, it kind of takes the zest out of wondering if it’s still a possibility somehow.
This sort of agnosticism – regardless of whether you brand it with a new name like “possibilian” – always strikes me as disingenuous. Of course we don’t know everything, but we have no choice but to make do with what we’ve seen to work so far (and once again, sorry, there’s nothing but wishful thinking to stand as evidence for these old cherished beliefs). No one can actually live and function in a realm of endless possibility; at some point, you just have to act, even though you’ll never have all the relevant information pertaining to your situation. The pertinent questions are: what would you be doing differently whether you believed or disbelieved? And what about your individual existence is so vital that you think it should continue forever, and why would you even want it to?

No, Nothing

By in alan watts, atheism, augean stables, ohferfucksake, religion, science

Figure-and-ground, then, constitute a relationship — an inseparable relationship of unity-in-diversity. But when human beings become preoccupied with concentrated attentiveness, with a type of thought which is analytic, divisive and selective, the cease to notice the mutuality of contrasting “things” and the “identity” of differences. Similarly, when we ask what we really mean by a fact or a thing, we realize that because facts are divisions or selections of experience, there can never be less than two! One solitary fact or thing cannot exist by itself, since it would be infinite — without delineating limits, without anything other. Now this essential duality and multiplicity of facts should be the clearest evidence of their interdependence and inseparability.

The naive idea that there is first of all empty space and then things filling it underlies the classic problem of how the world came out of something. Now the problem has to be rephrased, “How did something-and-nothing come out of…what?”

— Alan Watts

 

I thought Ron Rosenbaum was somewhat of an idiot last year. It is with a heavy heart that I say unto you that eight months later, he’s still an idiot. PZ already said most of what needs to be said, but I thought this part could been seen as the fatuous essence of Rosenbaum’s tirade:

In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I can’t wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.

I can’t speak for anyone else, believer or not, but leaving aside the fact that I have no problem admitting that I don’t know the answer, I don’t particularly care. Life as we know it exists, and that’s good enough for me. Postulating a single cause of it all only makes us ask how that itself could have been uncaused. Even asking the question “why” poses the risk of taking for granted the existence of purpose as we understand it where there is none to begin with. The absence of an absolutely certain answer does not therefore mean that any alternative that someone can dream up is equally valid; some possibilities are clearly more likely than others. And even if we do assume that science and logic can’t answer the question, how does that change the fact that absolutely nothing we do know about the universe suggests the existence of any God worth the name? Science doesn’t have the answer, I don’t think it ever will, therefore possibly God, therefore agnosticism, Q to tha E to tha muthafuckin’ D?

Listening to Rosenbaum deride the limitations of logic in an essay filled with this sort of fallacious reasoning makes me think of the kind of person who calls tech support, screaming about their shitty computer that won’t work, when they’re too stupid to check and see if it’s plugged in first.

Mossy God

By in atheism, nietzsche, religion, science, spiritual-not-religious

Einstein and Newton found God in Nature and saw science as a bridge between the human and the divine mind. (To Einstein, in a metaphorical way.) To both, to adore Nature, to study it scientifically, was a devotional act. I find it difficult to criticize this position, whatever your beliefs are. (Although I’m sure some commentators from both sides will…) Religions appear, change in time, and eventually disappear. It’s all a matter of time scale. But as long as we exist as a species, our intimate relationship—and codependency—with Nature will remain. To me at least, it’s quite clear what I should be worshipping.

— Marcelo Gleiser

I hear this sort of sentiment all the time, and I still really don’t know what it even means. Most invocations of “nature” as some sort of higher ideal or guiding principle are either examples of romanticism or tautological nonsense. As always, Nietzsche said it best:

You want to live “according to nature”? Oh you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purpose and consideration, without mercy and fairness, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power—how could you live according to this indifference? Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative “live according to nature” meant at bottom as much as “live according to life”—how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?— In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose and incorporate your morality, your ideal onto nature, even onto nature, you demand that it be nature “according to the Stoa,” and you would like all existence to exist only after your own image—as an immense eternal glorification and universalization of Stoicism!

Seriously. You all do realize that it’s not all sunsets and mountain vistas and tranquil oceans, right? Nature itself is one of the strongest arguments against any anthropomorphic notion of a god, with most lifeforms existing to be eaten as individuals before going extinct as a species. Like the man said, the sheer wastefulness, the indifference, the immense cruelty that would be psychopathic if there were any agency behind it — what exactly is there to worship in that? What sort of universal principle (or mind) do you think you’re gaining insight into by studying it? And how does this supposedly transcend the divide between science and religion when countless scientists and laymen are content to study nature without a need to mysticize or glorify it?

You can find inspirational examples of beauty, harmony and order in all sorts of things — music, for example. But if you’re talking about any sort of religion or worship deserving of the term, very few non-intellectuals are going to be interested in pantheism, Deism, Gnosis, or any other vague, abstract principle. They want a God that loves them back (or at least claims to). They want the Sistine-Chapel-finger-pointin’-motherfucker. This just seems like a weak attempt to redefine an attitude of devoted scientific inquiry as “religious”, nothing more than semantics.

Hell Is Other People

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, science

The Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries

The funny thing is, none of the ten are surprising or disturbing to me. What does make me despair is seeing commenters on the Smithsonian’s website, of all places, arguing that they ain’t descended from no ape, or citing the Climategate faux-scandal as proof against climate change.

Sometimes you find remnants of idealism in the strangest places.

Carpe Genitalia

By in history, jests japes jokes jollies, science, sex-you-all

Looking for something else in Andrew Solomon’s atlas of depression, The Noonday Demon, I saw this passage:

(Claudius) Galen also shared Rufus’ (of Ephesus) belief in the disastrous consequences of deficient sexual release. He treated one of his female patients, whose brain, he believed, was troubled by the noxious fumes of her rotting unreleased sexual fluids, “with a manual stimulation of the vagina and of the clitoris and the patient took much pleasure from this, much liquid came out, and she was cured.”

Why, that sly old fox. That is so going to be my new pickup line. All I need now is a white coat. “Yes, it’s imperative we treat those rotting fluids ASAP. No, really, ma’am, you can trust me on this. I’m a doctor.”

Ozymandias’s Lament

By in science, technology, the big sleep

And while I’m quoting from Gray’s book, I thought of it again when I read this article about Stanley Kurzweil claiming that immortality is only twenty years away. Gray refers to Stanislaw Lem’s novel Summa Technologie, in which a ‘phantomatic generator’ enables users to exist in virtual worlds:

Virtual reality is a technological simulation of techniques of lucid dreaming practiced by shamans for millennia. Using fasting, music, dance and psychotropic plants, the shaman leaves the everyday world to enter another, returning to find everyday reality transformed. Like virtual reality technology, shamanistic techniques disrupt the consensual hallucination of everyday life. But with this crucial difference: the shamans know that neither the ordinary world nor the alternate worlds they explore in trance are of their own making.

[…] The phantomat enables us to live, die and be born again at will. By glazing over the fact of mortality, it leaves us with no check on our wishes. Our experiences are confections of our desires, and no longer connect us with anything else…Lem’s prescience regarding virtual reality technology is extraordinary; but the risk of all-encompassing unreality to which he points is itself unreal. The idea that we may be on the way to contriving a fiction from which there is no exit endows technology with a power it can never possess.

[…] Lucid dreaming is a dangerous sport; those who practice it must expect to encounter things they could not have imagined…Lem envisaged his phantomat as a generator of perfect illusions, but any actual machine will be prone to accident and decay. Sooner or later, errors will creep into the program its designers have written for it, and the virtual worlds it conjures up will come to resemble the actual world it was meant to transcend. At that point, we will find ourselves once again in a world we have not made. We have dreamt of machines that can deliver us from ourselves, but the dream worlds they make for us contain rifts and gaps that return us to mortal life.

Personally, I still think that the ultimate nasty surprise would be realizing that knowing you were immortal would actually be a form of hell, a torment you’d soon be desperate to escape from.

Il Penseroso

By in art, music, science

Well, I suppose it depends on how you define depression, doesn’t it? Melancholy has been called the thinking person’s disease, so it does seem that deep thought and the “black bile” go together like peanut butter and chocolate, and in a limited application, it could lead one to find solutions to everyday problems that require extra concentration and willingness to see past surface appearances. But obviously, it doesn’t take much for depression to cross over into being debilitating, and one could probably convincingly argue that too much thinking, especially about the big picture as opposed to a specific problem, will lead one to nihilism. All is vanity. Bring on the heat death of the universe.

I don’t doubt that if I were to walk into a psychiatrist’s office and say, “Hey, here’s what I think about things,” I’d be classified as moderately depressed at least. I’ve never taken medication for it, but not out of any strident anti-pharmaceutical principle. I just figure I’ve managed to make it this far in mostly sound mind and body, and I definitely value the insights I feel I’ve gained by nature of my saturnine temperament. The trade-off is the fact that a lot of energy gets spent just trying to come up with reasons to get out of bed or do anything besides watch TV and play video games.

I’ve always thought of it as being comparable to a pair of colored lenses — when you’re depressed, you still see things the same way and in the same relation to each other; it’s just as if everything takes on a different hue. What seemed golden and bright before now looks cool and blue. Nothing has essentially changed, it all just strikes you differently.

Several studies have found that expressive writing promotes quicker resolution of depression, and they suggest that this is because depressed people gain greater insight into their problems.

To an extent, yes. You’re looking at the proof, even! For a while now, I’ve been facing the imminent deaths of two loved ones in addition to the slightly longer-term prospect of major upheaval on the employment front, and that of course is in addition to the general weltschmerz any person with general awareness and at least a modicum of intelligence feels. Yet, when I’m able to find the time to write and something to write about, I’m content, at least for a while.

But in my experience, the same applies to music. Writing a song has the same effect, and it’s not because it somehow “captures” the way you’re feeling, just like how I don’t necessarily write about sad topics when I’m feeling that way. Plus, it’s not even that writing when you’re depressed or frustrated gives you any answers; sometimes, it’s more like it gives you the energy to tackle your problems again. I imagine there’s just something life-affirming about the act of creativity. It’s a small way of shaping order and structure out of chaos. It’s a way of gaining a measure of control over your experience, a way of feeling your own power to affect your life instead of feeling helpless and adrift. And it’s also the case when appreciating other people’s creative output — experiencing good writing or musicianship can be uplifting, whether or not it has anything to do with whatever’s specifically bothering you at the time.

You can force it but it will not come
You can taste it but it will not form
You can crush it but it’s always here
You can crush it but it’s always near
Chasing you home
Singing:
“Everything is broken”
“Everyone is broken”
Why can’t you forget?
Why can’t we forget?

Your Ipse-Dixitism is Hanging Out

By in atheism, fresh hell, religion, science

Stanley Fish gives more attention to Terry Eagleton’s War on Straw. I don’t know who these neo-Victorians are who believe in untrammeled human progress in all departments at the same time; I thought the Second World War, just to name one obvious event, had made it too difficult for most people to subscribe to such a thing. I guess you could find a few somewhere if you care to look hard enough.


But anyway, dig this! The column ends with the predictable attempt to dismiss the intellectual opponents as third-rate, inferior, etc. (in this case, “school-yard” atheism.) Yet Fishleton deploys the age-old schoolyard rebuttal of “I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you” in trying to pretend that the word “faith” means the same thing whether applied to belief in mythological savior-gods or in shared human values that can be discussed, reasoned about, and altered to suit the circumstances.

Agreement is the key: you can either agree on shared values and agree to participate in a system that promotes those values while discouraging others (and yes, you lazy, whiny bastards, this is an ongoing project that requires constant attention and fine-tuning), or you can agree on what the Voice in the Sky commands you to do and save yourselves all that thinking; assuming, of course, you don’t fight to the death over which Voice you’re talking about to begin with. 

Claiming that the latter type is somehow more grounded (in what?) and stable is just as absurd as the more familiar attempts to posit “God” as the author of the Big Bang (which, to the Fishletons of the world, cannot be allowed to stand on its own), while claiming that “God” doesn’t need to be created or explained. Why, I bet even some “school-yard” atheist could explain the concept of an infinite regress to them.

The misology is palpable here. These are the same people who insist that acknowledging the nonexistence of a personal, loving god commands us to live in a perpetual state of war against all, that acknowledging the truth of Darwinian evolution commands us to live for nothing more than the grunting, hedonistic pleasures of fighting, feasting and fucking. Either way, they’re always waiting impatiently to be commanded. A loud noise and a bright flash of light are all it takes to make these twits start genuflecting and groveling in supplication.

Farther, My God, to Thee

By in religion, science, the big sleep

This doesn’t surprise me. Shouldn’t it be a given by now that the people who talk the most about their faith (or whatever their hobbyhorse is) are trying to convince themselves of its validity more than anyone else?

There are lots of books to read dealing with the evolutionary roots of religious faith, or more broadly, our conceptual ability that allows us to have abstract ideas about invisible men in the sky who want you to behave a certain way. One thing I’ve taken away from all those is the suspicion that deep down, there’s some part of the brain that just refuses to buy into whatever conceptual fantasies the cerebral cortex dreams up. No matter how much we can dazzle ourselves with our own bullshit theories, we know somewhere underneath it all when we’re just pulling ideas out of thin air and adding a lot of wishful thinking. Obviously, in the ancestral environment, the ability to accurately perceive empirical reality and react to it would have been absolutely necessary, and I imagine this is what kicks in when faced with life-or-death situations. When believers find themselves hooked up to tubes with a heart monitor beeping nearby, suddenly all that blithe talk about heaven and Jesus doesn’t have the same hypnotic power anymore.

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