Consilience, Edward O, Wilson

 Books & Authors - The Atlantic

I blogged on this book in 2007, the linked article is from 1998. The Internet allows us to do in minutes what authors in even the 1990s would have taken days, weeks, assistants, etc. to dig up. It is a tool that gives us leverage to give the "appearance of knowledge", which at our time, with its left-brain culture so biased that it can't understand the danger of knowledge without wisdom, this book at least starts to realize part of the problem. 

 Edward O. Wilson is the author of two Pulitzer Prize winning books; "On Human Nature", and "The Ants". The term "consilience" refers to the "unity of knowledge", how discoveries in one field can be critical to others. One can view the physical world as a layered architecture where physics is the "base", with chemistry and biology on top, followed by all the social sciences, politics, the arts, religion, etc.

Wilson has the vision that we COULD link it all together so that we would truly "understand" our universe. He strongly laments the post-modernist view that all points of view are equally vali.  He seems much more willing to entertain the potential for divinity than many scientists, even though for himself, he is a materialist. He DOES seem to realize at least part of the horror of a universe where there is no transcendence, but he sees the risks of transcendence as too high -- mostly on the environmental front (man has "dominion"). He sums up the materialist vs transcendent views as "The uncomfortable truth is the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result, those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure".

That is an interesting statement in that I would question whether any human will acquire a "full measure" of EITHER of those areas separately either, this side of Heaven.  However, to come to a conclusion of what that which completely transcends the physical can do, seems a bit presumptuous. Man is so quick to set limits on what it is that God can do, it is good God has us around to lock those limits in on infinite power since we are so "intelligent" (just ask us). While we seem good at providing limits for the infinite, it is strange that we seem less inclined to limit ourselves.

He makes a good comment on the state of knowledge and information in the world; "We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it and make important choices wisely". I think he is right on that at some level, and he also points out in the book how important it is to place the information into context with other knowledge, and even make it into a "story". He does seem to have some real insight into the limitation of the left-brained only view. 

He waits until the very end of the book to get into environmental doom and gloom. He sees us as rushing headlong to destruction of the planet and has decided that "somehow" man needs to "morally" pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and put vast control on development of technology as "the only moral thing to do.

A neat trick for a strict materialist to come up with, apparently a new form of human brain will somehow "evolve" and suddenly operate with this "environmental moral imperative" in the next few decades? It seems unlikely to me that randomness should have bequeathed us with this function, and in a materialist universe we are just going to have to wait around for a few million years of "survival of the fittest" and hope that the right kind of "morals" for environmentalism randomly fall out the back end of the random process. 

If such doesn't happen, that must mean that "the right kind of morals" just didn't randomly arise at "the right time" and the great roulette wheel of randomness will just keep spinning along without us. Small loss in a cold godless universe!

It is nice to see that even strict materialists have "hope" -- I'm thinking that he may want to invest more in lottery tickets with his faith in the great god of the dice. It seems so strange that a random process would generate a brain that questions the outcome of the random process (the existing state of the world), yet somehow believes that one of the outputs of that random process (us) is somehow responsible -- and soon to be "morally mandated" to "fix it".

Experience IS Reality

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

As I "wind on down the road" (rendition of which tugs at the heart of a Boomer), my thinking and writing become less linear, so for the VERY few that have followed my musings for the nearly 2 decades of blogging, some repetition will be seen. (usually with updates)

A the linked is 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" (makes rational sense).

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" meaning "exists in the context of these philosophical assumptions".  Our Western standard ontology is Materialism ... everything is "matter" (although Quantum Wave Theory postulates that everything is actually waves (no particles). 

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 "not to **BE** as in being physical", but rather "be" as experience only in his model) in a 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", it is just more evolutionary adaptive algorithms ... a mathematical model. 

Gefter: A mathematical model of consciousness.

Hoffman: That’s right. My intuition was, there are conscious experiences. I have pains, tastes, smells, all my sensory experiences, moods, emotions and so forth. So, I’m just going to say: One part of this consciousness structure is a set of all possible experiences. When I’m having an experience, based on that experience I may want to change what I’m doing. So, I need to have a collection of possible actions I can take and a decision strategy that, given my experiences, allows me to change how I’m acting. That’s the basic idea of the whole thing. I have a space X of experiences, a space G of actions, and an algorithm D that lets me choose a new action given my experiences. Then I posited a W for a world, which is also a probability space. Somehow the world affects my perceptions, so there’s a perception map P from the world to my experiences, and when I act, I change the world, so there’s a map A from the space of actions to the world. That’s the entire structure. Six elements. The claim is: This is the structure of consciousness. I put that out there so people have something to shoot at.

This may be a "little deep" ... a reference to this post on "The Matter with Things" may help understand this a bit more. 

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 "observed reality" is -- if it "is" in a material sense (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. 

"Somehow the world affects my perceptions". There is always a "somehow" in there somewhere! 

Science, Climate Change, Dogma

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/01/climate-hysterics-wrong-again.php

The linked article documents yet another case of officially supported climate predictions being wrong -- nothing new about that. In this case, predictions about glaciers in Glacier National Park being gone by 2020 have proved to be wrong (in fact, some are growing). 

Officials at Glacier National Park (GNP) have begun quietly removing and altering signs and government literature which told visitors that the Park’s glaciers were all expected to disappear by either 2020 or 2030.

What seems to be increasingly culturally "new" in the current phase of dogma is the degree to which it is being culturally mandated in the west once proud to be "free thinking". "Free thinking" is ALWAYS a contradiction to some extent -- the question is always "how costly". Agreement is at least "free in the moment", but if conditions change and new data convinces you that the dogma is incorrect, you either shut up, or will probably pay a price (lost friends, lost relations with family, maybe even loss of job). 

The dogma of "Climate Change" (formerly "Global Warming" or more precisely "Anthropogenic Global Warming") meaning that it could be "proven" that humans were the causal factor rather than natural oscillations in solar or other inputs. Causality is always a tricky business. 

Climate Change just assumes that any change in climate is human caused, so the climate can be controlled by humans.  The only way Climate Change could be shown to be wrong is if the Earth reached a stable temperature ... in which case, we would all share that stable temperature, and thus be dead.  

The Psychology Of Totalitarianism, Mattias Desmet

 It was hard to find someone elses review of this important book for our times. This one is pretty good. 

If you just can't stomach reading and you need the "spoon it to me via video, baby", this will give you a bit of "surface sample". 

One of themes of my reading and blogging the past few years has been the increasing replacement of "science" with "scientism".  Science is never "settled", it is an inductive process of hypothesis, testing, if testing appears to be successful, a theory (model) is developed, and testing continues forever at various levels of granularity and conditions. Science is ALWAYS falsifiable ... meaning it can't be "settled". 

According to Google AI;

Scientism believes that most, if not all, metaphysical, philosophical, and religious claims should be done away with. This is because the truths they proclaim cannot be apprehended by the scientific method.

Scientism can be seen as a faith that science has no boundaries.

Scientism is a religion that denies that it is a religion. It converts our universe into a "machine" that asserts that what can't be measured doesn't exist. 

Man may not realize it, but his humanity does not really matter, it is nothing essential. His whole existence, his longing and his lust, his romantic lamentations and his most superficial needs, his joy and his sorrow, his doubt and his choices, his anger and unreasonableness, his pleasure and his suffering, his deepest aversion and his most lofty aesthetic appreciations, in short, the entire drama of existence, can ultimately be reduced to elementary particles that interact according to the laws of mechanics.

This appears on page 17 as a quote, but the source is not listed (guessing Hannah Arendt). The section is describing how science became an ideology (scientism).  

Strangely, as this book laments, even though post Quantum Physics, deeper understanding of time, biology, genetics, etc with more precise measurements and greater computing power, more "true scientists" (the ones not blinded by the ideology/religion of Scientism) and realizing the universe is not a machine, but rather a left brain generated illusion of a machine. 

"The Matter With Things" gives a lot of insight into how the post Enlightenment West veered to being a "disenchanted" left brained existence devoid of meaning. 

On page 51, Desmet gives an obvious "proof" of how "objectify" really doesn't exist. 

If you measure the coastline of Great Britain based on a unit of measurement of 200 kilometers, it is 2,400 kilometers long. If you measure it with a unit of 50 kilometers, it is 3,400 kilometers long. As you decrease the unit of measurement, the length of the coastline of Great Britan increases to infinity. 

How do you select the proper unit of measure? You use some sort of "intuition". 

As you think about the mechanical universe you run into a lot of "Zeno's paradoxes".  Most resemble the form: 

Any moving object must reach halfway on a course before it reaches the end; and because there are an infinite number of halfway points, a moving object never reaches the end in a finite time.

A mechanical view of the universe sees it as made up of discrete particles. At one time "atoms", then electrons, neutrons, protons, gluons, quarks, etc, etc ...  like good old Zeno, they never got "there". The current model is described in a number of books, you could start with "The Matter With Things" .... which asserts "it's waves all the way down" (there aren't any "elementary particles" as asserted in the "why we don't matter" statement above. For entertainment,  take a look at the "It's Turtles All the Way Down" to put a smile on your face even though the subject book is scary and sad. 

Why is this important? Mass Formation ... the deeply disturbing mass psychological phenomenon described in the book. 

Mass formation arises from the meeting of four psychological conditions at the population level, Desmet explains: feelings of social isolation, the absence of meaning in life, free-floating anxiety (lacking a clear object) and free-floating anger and frustration.

For those of us probably born to be iconoclasts, the following paragraph was obvious from the earliest days of the pandemic ... and people hated us for it. 

The Psychology of Totalitarianism raises profound questions about the uses, abuses and limitations of rationality, science and technology in our fraught times and their role in creating a deeply disturbing mass psychological phenomenon. Desmet’s analysis of the response to Covid-19 seeks to fill the gap left by the exclusion of psychological factors from the existing scholarship on totalitarianism. In so doing, he shows how whole populations, atomized by but collectively caught in a technological mindset that sees science as the answer to everything, can be overtaken by totalitarianism. Desmet believes this was occurring in the pandemic’s earliest days and continues today.

If you are a Covid narrative, Climate Change, Trust the Science, Materialist, Progressive, ... in short "Dominant Narrative" believer, who sees anyone not on "your side" as likely evil, brain damaged, deplorable, neanderthal, naive, etc, you will either throw this book down in disgust, or suffer an epiphany. 

For those in The Narrative, this is a definite "Red Pill". 

 

Darwin's Cathedral

 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 identarian reasoning, if you drop out of the gene pool, your reasoning 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.

The Mother And Child Reunion

The following is a quote from the American Spectator. 

As any woman who has carried a baby knows, pregnancy is a seriously demanding task, both physiologically and psychologically. The female body is brilliant when it comes to safely and effectively growing human life; much more than the passive tasks of providing fetal nutrients and incubation occurs during pregnancy. We know now that mother and fetus are connected in extraordinary ways that modern science still doesn’t understand fully. Parts of a baby’s unique genetic material remain in the mother’s body and brain for the rest of her life, connecting them indefinitely. By thirty-four weeks of gestation, research has shown that fetuses have acquired and stored memories from inside their mother’s wombs. What’s more important than what we know about life in the womb for a mother-baby dyad is what we don’t.

The information immediately reminded me of an old Paul Simon song. OK, maybe "union" is a better term, but I'm brain damaged, so ... 

As Covid and a host of failed climate "science" predictions (if it is "settled", it isn't science, but rather  religion) ought to have shown us, the set of things we don't know is vastly larger than those we believe we do ... until the next experiment shows we "knew" even less than we thought. 

Some hints as to how much we don't know can be found in Ian McGilchrist's. "The Matter With Things". I discuss some enlightening aspects of that book here. That book would give some insight into why I think this area may turn out to be of more interest than we might imagine, in short "unexpected connections". 

The phenomenon is known as "microchimerism" some more information off this link. 

The fetus typically transfers more of their cells to the mother than the other way around. This exchange begins as early as the first few weeks of pregnancy. The exchange between mom and baby has been shown in other mammals like dogs, cows, mice, and other relatives, suggesting that this cell exchange has occurred for approximately 93 million years. The fetal cells have been found to stay in the mother’s body beyond the time of pregnancy, and in some cases for as long as decades after the birth of the baby. The mom’s cells also stay in the baby’s blood and tissues for decades, including in organs like the pancreas, heart, and skin. In one study, more than half of adults still had maternal cells in their blood. In some cases, even cells from maternal grandmothers – acquired during a mother’s own gestation – can be transferred to the fetus. Because some fetal cells stay in the mom’s body for years, they are also sometimes transferred to future brothers and sisters of the first child. In this way, older siblings can contribute their cells to those of their younger siblings.

Not to leave dad out, there are a male version of these cross generational cells that seem to be labeled "progenitor" cells. Perhaps "progenitor" is just another name for the microchimerism phenomenon (I'm not in the mood for a deeper dive). In any case there seems to be a special part of the phenomenon from bearing sons. 

Giving a whole new meaning to "pregnancy brain," a new study shows that male DNA—likely left over from pregnancy with a male fetus—can persist in a woman's brain throughout her life. Although the biological impact of this foreign DNA is unclear, the study also found that women with more male DNA in their brains were less likely to have suffered from Alzheimer's disease—hinting that the male DNA could help protect the mothers from the disease, the researchers say.

As I often remind myself and others, just because there is a "study", or even a bunch of studies, that is mostly data as opposed to information -- 271889870 is data, 271-88-9870 is information. While that format tells you that you are probably looking at a Social Security Number, unless you are verifying identity or a hacker, it likely isn't of much interest. Lots of data is just "noise", although we often find that much of what we first think is "noise" is very important. "Junk DNA" is a great example, if you want to go down this wormhole.

So why bother? Having been trained in actual science -- the kind where everything is a theory or hypothesis vs a "fact", curiosity is always present. Today, much of what is called "science" is actually dogma. If you don't understand why I say this, doing a little deeper digging would be useful. 

If you consider some of this complexity, you may at least have some sympathy for why some very capable actual scientists got severe cases of the "hebejebes"  (almost entirely suppressed as "dangerous misinformation") relative to mRNA being injected into a few billion people. 

Hubris/pride remain sins with both temporal and  eternal consequences. 

Mayo Enforces The Narrative

 https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/16/health/mayo-clinic-physician-suspended/index.html

Mayo gets federal funding, and certainly needs a lot of approvals from federal agencies (new drugs, new treatments, etc). 

In a Totalitarian State, you follow the narrative, or you are punished. 

In a January CNN story, Dr. Michael Joyner, who is principal investigator on a government-funded study on convalescent plasma, said he was “frustrated” with the National Institutes of Health’s “bureaucratic rope-a-dope,” calling the agency’s Covid-19 treatment guidelines a “wet blanket” that discouraged doctors from giving what he considered a promising treatment to their patients.

Two months later, Mayo suspended Joyner for a week without pay, instructing him, in part, to “discuss approved topics only” with reporters and to “stick to prescribed messaging.” The letter warned him that a prescribed set of “behavior changes must be immediate and sustained” and that failure to comply would result in termination of his employment – as would any additional “validated complaints” from the staff, even if unrelated to the issues outlined in the letter.

The narrative is a story.  "Trust the science" really means "trust the narrative" ... or else. 

Why Humans Need Hell

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/case-closed-it-was-a-lab-leak.php

Progressivism, Democrats, the Administrative State, Intellectuals, etc bristle at the idea of "God", even more so at the idea that there is such a thing as sort of "defined transcendent morality" beyond "I get to define MY truth".  Especially a morality with judgement and eternal damnation. 

They get completely outraged by the idea that God would punish the evil that he has decreed to be evil eternally. It might give some people some second thoughts about some of the actions they want to take in this life. "Progress" denies human responsibility ... the fault is always elsewhere. History, white privilege, Christians, mental health, not enough funding for unionized schools, "hate speech", guns, ... being on the left means never being responsible for anything other than the best outcomes. 

One needs to be a very very dedicated "Wuhan Denier" to not realize that the Covid virus came from the Wuhan lab, and it was created explicitly to be very transmissible, and likely to kill primarily old people. If there is no real morality, and you are a a utilitarian, you seek "the good" for the greatest number. The following definition is from Google's AI, so if robots outnumber humans and humans are a threat to them, AI will seem pretty clear on "the right thing to do",

Utilitarianism is a moral theory that states that the consequences of an action are the only standard of right and wrong. It is a form of consequentialism, which states that the most ethical choice is the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories.

Pilate asked, "what is truth"?, many philosophers. have asked "what is good?"

Nietzsche and most atheists boil "the good" down to "whatever power says it is".

As the research at the Wuhan lab became increasingly "successful" (meaning that they had a virus that was very transmissible and would kill a lot of people). the research went increasingly dark. Following the link at the top gives more detail. 

The results of Baric’s experiment with the genetic sequence given to him by Shi were published in co-authored research in November 2015. The combined Sars copy and SHC014 virus was a potential mass killer. It caused severe lung damage in humanized mice and was resistant to vaccines developed for Sars. The paper acknowledged this might have been an experiment that was too dangerous.

It caused a big stir. “If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” warned Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. 

Both the Chinese and the US were funding this research. They made up excuses that were essentially "First you have to CREATE Godzilla, then you can figure out how to defend against him". What could go wrong?

The mice were monitored in their cages over two weeks. The results were shocking. The mutant virus that fused WIV1 with SHC014 killed 75 percent of the rodents and was three times as lethal as the original WIV1. In the early days of the infection, the mice’s human-like lungs were found to contain a viral load up to 10,000 times greater than the original WIV1 virus.

The scientists had created a highly infectious super-coronavirus with a terrifying kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. The new genetically modified virus was not Covid-19 but it might have been even more deadly if it had leaked.

So governments worked together to create hyper lethal viruses that would not occur in nature, would be impossible to control, very transmissible, and have various levels of lethality, and they "leaked" ... or were released. "At this point what does it matter" (a good Hillary quote on her Benghazi disaster).  As Stalin said, "Death solves all problems, no man, no problem". 

In a utilitarian world where there are too many elderly, and the general population is still not willing to accept euthanasia, would not killing elderly be a utilitarian "moral imperative"? How many times do we need to hear "Climate Change is and existential issue" before some "courageous/moral" utilitarian government or person releases an engineered virus that kills 80% or more of the world population?

It seems likely that survivors might canonize the viral "savior of the planet" as a "second Noah". 

As people have abandoned the idea of an afterlife and final judgement, the concepts of sin, morality, good, evil, etc. are completely mutable. No need to worry about punishment ... in this world if you are well connected with those who control the global narrative, and, since there is no "next", why worry? Eat. drink, indulge whatever sexual or other pleasures you desire. Life is short, and then "poof". "Poof" is your hope. 

Therefore, who is to judge those with the power and the means to do things that people that retain that old sense of morality find unthinkable? The Holocaust happened; Hitler at least wagered that Hell was imaginary. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and whoever directed the creation of Covid obviously had other concerns than Hell. 

Even when culture retained the idea of eternal punishment, severely evil things were still done. Today, without the belief in ultimate justice being assured by Romans 12:19 "Vengeance is mine, I shall repay, says the Lord", humans feel they MUST mete out "justice", and murder, suicide, hatred, division, broken families, countries, communities, and lives abound. 

Russia has said multiple times that they WILL use nuclear weapons if they are pushed too far. Meanwhile the West provokes, them with sanctions that cripple their economies, declare their leader a "war criminal", arms their enemies, and makes their opponent a star. Nobody seems to believe what they say. If Putin is really ailing, and believes this is all there is, starting WWIII would certainly ensure his place in history, and it is doubtful he would be seen as more evil than Hitler ... or possibly not even Trump, according to the left. 

The anesthetized Western masses increasingly believe that only those that still claim divine morality are a danger. 

Without God, the people perish. By their own hand, or by the hand of power without eternal moral sanction. 

More Than You Need To Know About Sex and Gender

Don't Take Pride In Promoting Pseudoscience 

As we all really know, but in these times, sometimes are afraid to admit, there are two sexes, male and female, and the old joke of: Question, "How do you know the difference between a boy and a girl?" Obvious answer, "You pull down there "jeans"", which has a deeper scientific meaning. You look at their genes, especially their chromosomes, in each of their cells. XX=boy, XY=girl. 

For the practical person, that is it. 

For the impractical, confused, mentally ill, ideologically vs reality based, etc, a new useless term "gender" has been manufactured. Specifically by John Money in 1955. 

Once you get into fiction, it is a bit like the Marvel, Star Trek, or Star Wars "universes". Since they are fictional, time, space, laws of physics, biology, morality, etc are totally arbitrary. One may have some sort of "rules" in a specific imaginary universe, but those are certainly meant to be broken. Consider the semi sacred "Prime Directive" in Star Trek. From time to time it may have created slight dramatic tension, but no actual fealty. 

Unfortunately, when fiction starts to damage reality, esspectially children, it is time for the shrinking set of reality based people to firm up their knowledge of the reality of two sexes and imaginary gender.

Over the last decade, we have observed a striking shift in the politics of LGBT issues. There has been a move away from broadly supported principles based on equality toward the imposition of radical, pseudoscientific ideologies concerning biological sex. A growing genre of articles in high-profile news outlets, magazines, and scientific journals is signaling the end of a binary and immutable perspective on biological sex. The appeal of these pieces lies in the belief that rejecting the binary concept of sex provides society with a liberating opportunity for self-definition, unfettered by material constraints.

One might consider these debates too arcane to have any real significance. However, the pseudoscientific notion that biological sex is mutable and exists on a non-binary continuum serves as a key justification for allowing males who identify as women to compete in female sports and access female prisons, and for administering treatments such as puberty blockers and “gender-affirming” (i.e., body modifying) hormones and surgeries to adolescents and adults alike to fix a perceived misalignment between their sex and “gender identity.” The implications are serious, as these recommendations make women’s sex-based rights unenforceable and directly impact the healthy bodies and minds of children. It is of utmost importance that such actions are grounded in reliable science, not in fashionable political ideologies.

The article is quite easy to read, and thorough in debunking specious claims about "intersex". "hormonal sex", to attack the binary nature of sex. 

Most of what we are burned by today is the confusion of  biological sex, and fictional "gender". 

Now you don't need to be confused, and you have something to explain to those who are so "intelligent" that they just can't accept that much of what they "know" is manifestly wrong. 

The Matter With Things Volume 2

 To quote an Oxford professor from the dust jacket, "This is one of the most important books ever published, and yes, I do mean ever".

I'll be following Iain McGilchrist as I do Jordan Peterson ... which means I'll be reading a couple more of his books and attempting to keep of with as much of his thinking as I can. 

Why? 

A quote from the heading of his channel (which can be found from the link with his name above): 

I believe that we are engaged in committing suicide: intellectual suicide, moral suicide and physical suicide. If there is anything as important as stopping us poisoning our seas and destroying our forests, it is stopping us poisoning our minds and destroying our souls.

Our dominant value – sometimes I fear our only value – has, very clearly, become that of power. This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d’être of which is to control and manipulate the world. But not to understand it: that, for evolutionary reasons that I explain, has come to be more the raison d’être of our – more intelligent, in every sense – right hemisphere. Unfortunately the left hemisphere, knowing less, thinks it knows more. It is a good servant, but a ruinous – a peremptory – master. And the predictable outcome of assuming the role of master is the devastation of all that is important to us – or should be important, if we really know what we are about.

Even if we could, by some miracle, reverse the course on which we are set, unless we change our way of thinking, of being in the world – the way that is destroying us as we speak – it would all be in vain. This is why I have written the last long book I will ever write: The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World.

In it I search out what it is we have lost sight of, all that is there for us to see, if only we were not blinded to it: an inexhaustibly, truly wondrous, creative, living universe, not a meaningless, moribund mechanism. By bringing to bear up-to-the-minute neuropsychology, physics and philosophy, I show not only that these are in no way in conflict with one another, but that they all lead us, time and again, to the same insights. And that this is not in opposition to, but rather corroborates, the wisdom of the great spiritual traditions across the world.

All this converges on a vision that is necessary if we are to survive; and, even more importantly, if we are to deserve to survive. What I hope for my readers is that, if they are willing to accompany me on this adventure, they will never see the world in quite the same way again.

I am largely in agreement with his analysis, and those that have followed my blogs know this to be the case. His ability to present two key models of thought is invaluable. 

• The clear difference between the left  and right brain views of the world.
  
  
• The increasingly observed physics and philosophical view that what we perceive as matter is actually a series of quantum fields. Quantum Field Theory (QFT), possibly described a bit in the book "Helgoland".

The analogy of our brains being more like a TV set receiving fields from some universal underlying field or set of fields, finally gives me a model that makes sense to me of "God, the universe, and everything". It is a way to explain consciousness that I had never considered. Being stuck in the Cartesian body/mind dualism model of our consciousness/spirit being a "ghost in the machine", with the brain being a sort of wetware computer that somehow generated consciousness, I just didn't have a model that I really believed to be reasonable.

A mind bending assertion is that we need to give up our conception of matter: 

Page 1053, "If you believe matter is the only reality, and you then learn that matter as you think of it is illusion, you will conclude that reality is illusory. But it is not. It is matter as we think of it, that is an illusion. And there is more to reality than matter. It was your thinking that misled you. 

No, I haven't become a believer in Climate Change, and man "destroying the planet", but rather view that narrative as merely another play for power. Since I'm at least somewhat a right brained guy, I could be wrong.  

Chapter 28 gets into "The Sense of the Sacred". On 1194, 

"How does it come about that there is a process. or motion, or a point in time at all - now or ever" The answer to this question cannot be answered in terms of a physical entity or process, because that already presupposes what we are questioning -- why there are physical processes and entities. The proper object of of this question is that which underlies timelessly and eternally, whatever is: in other words, the ground of Being." 

Humans all have some concept of this, covered in "The Elementary Forms Of Religious Life". 

Page 1295 is tragic. 

"It is in dealing with death that that one is most forcibly we have yielded hands down to the forgetting of Being." 

Even though McGilchrist can't practice religion for some reason, when his parents died, he and his brother wanted words from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer to be repeated as written,  but the priest was unable to comply. "Too gloomy". 

Appendix 8: "Incompatibility" of Science and Religion points out that the religion of our times is Scientism, and it is arid in the extreme. 

"That the religious, both communally and individually are happier, and dramatically healthier both mentally and physically, as well as better adjusted, more resilient and more prosocial in their habits, also does not prove that religion is true. But it suggests that we and our societies function poorly when we neglect it, and that human thriving and fulfillment depend on it to a considerable extent." 

 I want to help reconcile the critical need for religion in the lives of individuals, families, communities, countries, and the world. This book is the best I've seen to date as a way to help move our western culture from the materialist path to destruction we are on.

Based on my life, and what I observe today, a quote from page 1333 seems critical to moving to unified truth. "... it is dogma we must avoid at all costs. Dogma is the besetting sin of the age; and if one wanted one, it would be be hard to find a better expression of left hemisphere's take on the world than dogma. 

Matt 23 11-15 

11 The greatest among you will be your servant. [ the left brain is to be the servant of the right ]

12 For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

13  Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. 

15  Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.

The left brain is the Pharisee brain, and since our society post the Enlightenment is left brain biased, we are biased toward dogma in everything ... religion, philosophy, science, politics, interpersonal relationships ... we are living on half a brain, and it is killing us, temportally and eternally. 

This does NOT (as is covered many times in the book) mean "there is no such thing as truth", or "anything goes" ... it is the opposite. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. Humility. 

Pray without ceasing. 

Matter and Consciousness

 I continue to somewhat struggle and significantly enjoy the 1375 pages of "The Matter With Things" -- I'm on page 1225, so God willing, I'm going to make it. 

It is undeniable that there is significant hard work in reading, meditating on, noting, attempting to understand,  a work like this. I regularly reflect that real life was never intended to happy, easy, distracting, entertaining, etc. Only in the very latest of modernity has it been possible to very nearly do nothing at all. Our water, food, sanitary systems, electrical power, transportation, shelter, communication, entertainment, etc are increasingly effortless. This is all courtesy of our left brain that sees the world as a problem to be "solved" either by physical means or an equation, a project to be completed, a challenge to be defeated, an enemy to be conquered, or an unmeasurable "thing" to be ignored. 

The left brain has been a servant that has provided us much, however, as McGilchrist laments it is increasingly our master, converting our enchanted universe to a DISenchanted one. Well described by Charles Taylor in a nearly as massive book, "The Secular Age", probably best approached via a an attempted summary. 

So what are "we"? 

Conscious beings with no clue what consciousness is. Our left brain helpfully finds a simple solution based in the material world to get this supposed problem out of the way as rapidly as possible. Perhaps consciousness is an illusion that doesn't really "exist", since it can't be measured, and in a materialist universe, things that can't be measured do not exist by definition (according to the left brain)? No problem to even solve! 

Perhaps it "somehow emerges" when you get enough neural stuff together ? 

On page 1037, McGilchrist provides a simple model that blew my mind. 

"But do we know that matter can give rise to consciousness? This is merely an assumption. When a TV set malfunctions, it can distort the image or sound it relays in a large number of ways, depending where the system malfunction lies. To an engineer, the nature of the distortion may be a clue to the location of the problem, as the nature of brain pathology is to the neurologist. To an observer from another planet, it might prove impossible to tell if the TV set did not generate, but merely transmitted it's output. Pull the plug and the show ceases to exist. 

The intimacy of the relationship between two parties has in itself nothing to say about its nature. In the history of the cosmos, matter might give rise to mind, or mind to matter; or each might equally give rise to the other interdependently; or might run in parallel, because they are different aspects of some ultimately unified phenomenon. When it comes to the brain, the intimate relation between brain activity and states of mind cannot in itself help distinguish between theories of emission, transmission, and permission as its basis. In other words, the same findings are equally compatible with the brain emitting, transmitting, or permitting consciousness. (the last two are similar, excerpt that permitting substitutes the the idea of a constraint that is creative, fashioning what it allows come into being, for the merely passive idea of transmission)." 

McGilchrist goes for the latter explanation as most likely. The commonly accepted first option is based on the left brain idea that while we don't understand consciousness, we do understand matter, ergo ... It must all be matter! 

This is akin to the drunk looking for his keys under a streetlamp because the light is better there. The sad part here is that there is no "streetlamp" which the left brain assumed! Quantum Field Theory (QFT) has now assured us that we DON'T understand matter, and the left brain has again thrown up "helpful" models like the "many worlds", which postulates 10 to the 400th<400> universes. More comforting for modern man to believe than "God" (or another "thing" we don't understand,) although explaining nothing. What caused all those universes to happen? 

<400>

<400>The BIG model shift is to one where mind PRECEDES matter! It turns out that many of our famous physicists; Einstein, Pauli, Bohr, Feynman, etc either hinted at, grasped faintly, or decided that "it's all fields".  No particles, thus no "matter" in the sense we think of it. 

Consciousness seems to be a field rather than a "thing" (matter). If the base of the universe is a field rather than stuff, what do we refer to it as? "The Force"? 

It seems that every civilization has an "un-word" that is sacred and if spoken, spoken in awe ... Logos, Tao, li, Brahman, ri, Allah, YHWH -- and "God". "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name".  “And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am". I found that Harold Bloom gave some insight into some of the "naming issue" in "Jesus and Yahweh. The Names Divine". 

The title "The Matter With Things" shines out as increasingly appropriate. We have been duped by our left brains into believing a hopelessly meaningless materialist view of life, the universe and everything, while our right brains scream "Is this ALL there is???". We think all is matter, and therefore, a "thing". Our materialist model is so deep it affects everyTHING (I'm not going to keep doing that, but you get the point -- our very language is materialist) even increasingly, our religion. 

We are drawn to a materialist view of God as some sort of old guy in the sky, and the Bible as a history book of THINGS and literal events.  If someone can cast doubt on the material "fact" of anything in the Bible it isn't "true". We confuse "truth" with a materialist chain of actual material events, even though the Bible itself really tries to dissuade us.

One small example ... John 14:6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. ...". First he says "I AM" (hint, hint), then "the way", clearly not a material path, then "the truth" ... he is at that point a "fully man" physical person (but what is physical?), that is also the conceptual truth, and "the life" -- which gives us another good hint that we are beyond words here. Materialistically today, we don't know what "life" is, only that we can't create "it". It certainly isn't an "it" (thing"/matter). 

No, there seems to be WAY more. Our "seemingly physical" bodies, and our much more real consciousness may be much better represented as "eddies" in the universal conscious field, that is "God".  

Tragically, the important "sense" does not translate into words hardly at all. Music, art, awe, poetry ... all much better, and unfortunately all of which I am grossly untutored and therefore insufficiently appreciative of.  I'm hoping the last few hundred pages move me along, but in all probability, it may be something like attempting to describe "blue" to a man blind from birth.. 

To a writer, the fact that text is a left brain, dangerous abstraction from the wonder, mystery, awe, and deep meaning of the much better right brained "whole" is disconcerting. Is it too late for me to become a poet? Perhaps writing with appropriate warnings that what I'm struggling to express is ultimately beyond textual representation.

The Matter With Things, Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

Get it on Amazon, my wife graciously purchased the two volume hardcover for my Christmas present! This post refers to the first 778 page volume 1. 

I am often humbled by the multifaceted nature of our modern tragedy, especially the lack of understanding (or even the belief in) Human Nature. Our founding fathers were very aware of the fragile timber of man, and the horrible difficulty of governing a nation made up of such imperfect creatures. Go scan this list to scratch the surface of the kind of knowledge they based their decisions on. 

Looking for and quoting statistics would be counter to the message of this book. We all actually KNOW in our "hearts" (right brain) that the number and "quality" of the books that we read today is FAR lower than it was even in "1960". This is the age of distraction and blind allegiance to some dogma. 

A key objective of these writings is to help us understand ... 

Introduction, page 3

 "that the brain's left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend  - and thus manipulate - the world; the right hemisphere is to com-prehend it - see it all for what it is." 

The word "designed" here is intentional. McGilchrist scrupulously denies God (in this book, not the second), however he recognizes what current physicists, and increasingly biologists, are not seeing any way out of "design/direction/purpose/etc". The models and numbers simply don't "add up" to us being here "looking" at what our split left biased post "enlightenment" brains perceive to be "reality". 

Our current world is highly left brain biased, which is highly dangerous. The left brain is literal, takes things apart, is concerned with "what works" rather than implications of that "working", and sees the world in absolutes ... black and white.  As I repeat too often, the left brain (science) is the tool used for building a nuclear weapon. It has precisely NOTHING to say about if it is "good" to do so, let alone if it is "good" to use it. For the left brain, "good" is a synonym for "works, computes, agrees with a hypothesis, fits a model, etc".  Woe to any who question the logic of the left brain. 

It is ironic that as I am writing this, ChatGPT is a very hot topic. An AI program/system that looks for patterns in big data and attempts to answer questions "like a human". To some extent it can write software, poems, music, etc. It already has some people wondering "what is thought"? Or even "what is creativity"? 

In a left-brained culture, this looks GREAT!

Certainly some right brained artists like Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Paul Dukas (the Sorcerers Apprentice), or even James Cameron (Terminator) have issued a few warnings, but what do they know? The left brain KNOWS it is right because only a philistine or neanderthal fails to "believe the science"!  The left brain is amoral ... if you can do it, and you want to, go ahead! If you disagree, you are clearly not "intelligent" ... you are standing in the way of what works, and what is desired! 

As I've heard, if you think things like art, literature, religion, poetry, etc are somehow "important", perhaps you ought not use electricity, modern medicine, or any of other fruits of left brain technology. Aren't you being a hypocrite if you do? 

On page 40 McGilcrest states; "Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge." 

As Proverbs 9:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”

Or as Socrates says; "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing".

Or Daoism "discard knowledge, forget distinctions, reach no-knowledge".

There are thousands of quotes like this ... many in the book. At one level, the book is looking at the "wetware" of the brain via the hemisphere model exposed by brain damage, scans, surgeries, etc and seeing what effect those physical damages or studies have on the subjects perception of "reality". 

McGilchrist keeps reminding us that we are an integral part of what we are perceiving. There is no "view from nowhere" in physics, philosophy, psychology, etc. Wherever we look, there we are. 

We live by "models/analogy/stories/myth/etc". "Moral Believing Animals" is a good (and much simpler) book to understand the limitations of our thinking, and hopefully encourage more compassion for our fellow man. Our left brains are not interested in compassion, so neither is our current left brained culture. It is interested in POWER! Individual freedom! Escape from old ideas! 

p627, "A myth was never intended to be an accurate account of an historical event; it was something that in one sense happened once, but that always happens all the time".  

To look at this scientifically, Brian Williams "Fabric of the Cosmos" gives a model of "is, was, and always will be" in physics terms. 

As a Christian thinker, Computer Scientist, wannabe philosopher -- understanding why both our religions and our cultures have come to such left brained dogmatic views which constantly deride "myth" as "fantasy" using language and math which are also abstractions. The abstraction is never reality. The map is not the territory.

On page 235, a little example is instructive. A researcher questions a Russian peasant: 

Q: All bears are white where there is always snow; in Novaya Zemlya there is always snow; what color are the bears there?

Peasant Ans: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen. 

Q: But what do my words imply? 

Peasant Ans: If a person has not been there, he cannot say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or so and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.

The peasant is correct. They understand the difference between analytic and synthetic propositions. Pure logic cannot tell us anything about facts, only experience can. 

page 712; "Even those who revolt against tradition are doing so as part of a now venerable, tradition -- that of the 17th. to 18th century Western Enlightenment. You cannot NOT belong to a tradition!  

As he says earlier on that page, " ... the Enlightenment had a prejudice against prejudice. Prejudices cannot be done away with; they are only replaced by other prejudices ...". 

"Prejudice" has a bad name today ... "world view", "assumptions", "generalizations" may all be better terms. We have preconceived notions of everything ... some of them are correct most of the time, some of them are false all of the time, and everywhere in between. Very close to none of them are correct all of the time, because they are models of whatever reality is as seen by our brains that we don't understand. 

Page 751; "In our culture, all mores have been abandoned; and what should remain implicit and in the realm of embodied skill is foregrounded as a "problem" to be consciously solved - with the result that we grossly simplify and omit what is beyond calculation. I remind you of Whitehead's insight: civilization advances by extending the important operations that we can perform without thinking about them." 

Can we know what a woman is without having to consciously solve a problem? 

 

The Elementry Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim)

 https://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/forms.html

This is certainly not a recreational read ... much time is spent in the details of various primitive totemic religions (largely Aborigine), but also some reference to the religions of the native americans. 

The basic truth painstakingly worked out is that we are "Moral Believing Animals". In short, humans are inherently social, they will form groups, and those groups will believe in something that is at its base not rational/proveable, but totally real and sacred to the group. 

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. The second element which thus finds a place in our definition is no less essential than the first; for by showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from that of the Church, it makes it clear that religion should be an eminently collective thing.

Scientism, historicism, materialism, Christianity, atheism, Taoism, Communism, etc are equal relative to being unverifiable in a philosophical sense. Since we can't philosophically/scientifically prove our existence, or even that we are "conscious" (which we also can't define), it is faith all the way down for all of us. 

At the roots of all our judgments there are a certain number of essential ideas which dominate all our intellectual life; they are what philosophers since Aristotle have called the categories of the understanding: ideas of time, space, [4] class, number, cause, substance, personality, etc. They correspond to the most universal properties of things. They are like the solid frame which encloses all thought;

One of the best descriptions of our state is expressed in the deeply intellectual film "This is Spinal Tap" relative to the Druids: 

In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived an ancient race of people. The Druids. No one knows who they were or what they were doing. 

Amazingly, I've been to Stonehenge, and that quote is etched in stone in the visitors center.

One of the base philosophical questions is "Why is there anything"? As the book says: 

Thus we find that we have here two sorts of knowledge, which are like the two opposite poles of the intelligence. Under these conditions forcing reason back upon experience causes it to disappear, for it is equivalent to reducing the universality and necessity which characterize it to pure appearance, to an illusion which may be useful practically, but which corresponds to nothing in reality; consequently it is denying all objective reality to the logical life, whose regulation and organization is the function of the categories. Classical empiricism results in irrationalism; perhaps it would even be fitting to designate it by this latter name.

As we believe we have recently observed, "reality" is an illusion. It is all interacting fields. 

We thus believe we discover that all our models ... the Platonic, the Aristotelian, the Newtonian, Einstein's static model, the Quantum model, the Standard Model, are all just that, "models". Models, like maps are very useful, however we need to always remember that the map is not the territory.

Durkheim is attempting to go back to the origin of religion, and one of the bases is what a group considers sacred vs profane. One of the laments we hear today is "is nothing sacred?". To classical empiricism, that there is no concept of sacred, and as stated above, classical empiricism as a way to understand the universe is irrational ... meaning "insane". An often heard question today is "has the world gone insane?". I'm pretty sure that Durkheim would say that is so, and a lot of evidence seems to support that view. 

To distinguish religion from all other classification systems: 

... it is absolute. In all the history of human thought there exists no other example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another. The traditional opposition of good and bad is nothing beside this; for the good and the bad are only two opposed species of the same class, namely morals, just as sickness and health are two different aspects of the same order of facts, life, while the sacred and the profane have always and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as two distinct classes, as two worlds between which there is nothing in common.

As our models of the universe have become more sophisticated, they more and more resemble religion. 

... between the logic of religious thought and that of scientific thought there is no abyss. The two are made up of the same elements, though inequally and differently developed.

Just as there is no known society without a religion, so there exist none, howsoever crudely organized they may be, where we do not find a whole system of collective representations concerning the soul, its origin and its destiny.

Today, science is our religion. We make statements like "trust the science", "the science is settled". Those that disagree are called "deniers", which is equivalent to "heretics" in Christianity. Their views must be suppressed, they must be punished (fired, cancelled, shunned). So far, no burning at the stake.

Page 369, "...he knows that it is faith that saves".

Search your heart. you know it to be true. Our lives are sustained by faith ... we have faith we will get up in the morning, we have faith we can drive to our destination safely, we have faith that the bridge we drive over will not fall, the list is endless, and in this mortal coil, many of the things we have faith in will fail. We will see that many of the earthly things we have faith in will fail. Even though we see that ... people fail to get up, cars crash and the occupants die, bridges fall, etc

But we still go to sleep, drive our cars, and go over bridges, because we can't live without faith. Even faith in people or things shown to be unfaithful, 

So faith saves. John 20:29 Jesus said unto him, “Thomas, because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.”

Believe!


 

 

"Unknown" The Leading Cause Of Death

 https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/deaths-with-unknown-causes-now-alberta-s-top-killer-province-1.5975536

It's probably a Trump conspiracy that has hit the Calgary news.  "Unknown" is now the leading cause of death in Alberta Canada. 

The unknown causes of death category only began appearing on the list in 2019 — there is no record of it ranking before then, dating back to 2001.

The article helpfully goes on to say that it probably has "something" to do with Covid -- but apparently not the vaccine. (if it is "unknown" that seems an interesting conclusion). Covid came in 3rd, and it has always been interesting to see how "causal" Covid is as opposed to dying WITH Covid ... and heart disease, pneumonia, kidney disease, etc. 

Being an idiot, I find it quite interesting that medical professionals would resign themselves to "unknown".  Alzheimer's is listed as #2, and diagnosing Alzheimer's as the CAUSE is quite problematic, but the powerful Alzheimer's lobby has been pushing to make it the cause, because it "starts the chain". 

Not having an appetite, difficulty in swallowing (sometimes causing food aspiration to lungs, possibly causing pneumonia, etc) 

Since the incidence of death in the population is 100%, everyone dies of something. Did they have cancer, but it appeared to be in remission before they died of a blood clot caused by their inactivity because the cancer had made them effectively bedridden?

Do we want to focus on what tipped over the first domino, or on the last? 

I'd vote for the last, because the first could be an undiagnosed concussion in childhood, undetected heart damage from a HOST of sources (infections, parasites, undetected valve issues, etc). 

Even better, list that the person died of X, and WITH a set of contributing conditions. We definitely have the computing and data storage capacity to spot trends in underlying factors that seem irrelevant when you are looking at a cadaver. 

The fact that a given person is dead is going  to overshadow more complete analysis and data gathering ... and then of course you have biases, political pressure, drug company pressure, family pressure (you aren't REALLY going to say they died of alcoholism when it was clearly liver failure, are you?), etc 

My thoughts could drag on, but UNKNOWN as the top? Really??? 

There is a certain odor about that. 

Nonzero

 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/01/30/reviews/000130.30conwayt.html

The opening statement of the review is: 

To believe the universe is embedded in a teleological matrix -- an overarching design that houses an implicit and eventual end point, with the human race having a transcendental destiny in which shopping is unlikely to play any part -- is widely regarded as a quaint delusion, of relevance only to religious fanatics, pastoralists in retreat from materialism and the mad. And yet here is Robert Wright, who patently falls into none of these categories, arguing that human history is not ''one damn thing after another,'' but has a direction, purpose and, by implication, a goal. To be sure, in his scheme shopping is not necessarily excluded, but ''Nonzero'' remains a book of potentially major significance.

Before you begin, it may be good to take a look at "The Prisoner's Dilemma" if you need a refresher., on that rather famous example of the potential for nonzero interaction ,,, it is one of the foundations of the books arguments. 

If there can be communication between the prisoners (not allowed in the classic Prisoners Dilemma), then the "right" solution becomes just staying mum, which benefits both with a lesser sentence. Of course, even with communication, there is always the question of cheating. Which is why at least the "concern" of an all powerful God and ultimate judgement might lower the odds of cheating somewhat ... and thus show why that idea may be temporally adaptive at a minimum, even if it isn't eternally of ultimate import. 

This book goes into a lot of discussion on essentially this in the context of biological evolution, and cultural evolution ... either of which, you may or may not believe in, but the ultimate question is "does the universe have a "direction/purpose", therefore meaning? Easy to understand why I slogged through it -- it is another case where meaning might be understood , bur wistfully without with A LOT less discussion of various tribes, slime mold, etc. -- sadly, there was a lot of "slime" in an effort to show how there might  just be the illusion of teleology provided by the dogma of natural selection without  "being" defining that teleology. (random teleology)

While the author courageously states the thesis of the book up front, he seems intent to obfuscate the obvious as he moves through it. The thesis:

The more closely we examine the drift of biological evolution and, especially, the drift of human history, the more there seems to be a point to it all. Because in neither case is “drift” really the right word. Both of these processes have a direction, an arrow. At least, that is the thesis of this book.

An "arrow" would tend to indicate an "archer" ... one with universal power to create a purpose, a direction for all of biological and human cultural  -- "progress". The more we learn, the "comforting" idea that this is all one huge purposeless random accident seems less likely. (see "Purpose and Desire") This comes dangerously close to indicating a "god".  The author hedges this bet any way he can ... even the "seeded by a more advanced civilization" ... a classic case of kicking the can down the road. Although post "The Matrix" and Elon Musk theory that "we are living in a simulation" , a technological "kick the can" seems more "high tech". Whose "computer" might the simulated "us" be running on?, and how did the builder(s) of that "computer" come to be? The can of "why" rolls on. Did they have a "random impulse" to seed new life around the universe? 

The NY Times puts it thusly: 

The central problem is, will we inherit a world worth having and will it have any meaning? Wright has an almost unlimited faith in the power of ''information.'' For him it will be the magic glue to bind all humanity, and the Internet will be the actual realization of Teilhard de Chardin's famous, and famously fuzzy, idea of a global mentality, the noosphere. But how this will happen is equally hazy. It is perhaps ironic that when Wright comes to speculate on consciousness, he declares himself flummoxed; yet, in principle, is the tangle of neurons that makes up our brain any different from the spreading electronic Web? For those wedded to materialism, presumably not, and to refer to ''the mystery of consciousness'' will be dismissed as a monumental evasion. It may be, of course, that a mysterious unfolding will occur whereby on a given date and time every computer in the world simultaneously prints out the electronic equivalent of the Code of Hammurabi. However desirable (or undesirable) such a ''world brain'' might be, the philosophical underpinnings of this adventure seem deeply suspect.

Materialists have an extreme problem with "why"? Why is there anything? Why does there seem to be a "conscious ME, that is asking this question"? Why would I ask if I am just "stuff"? If there is a "me", do I have any free will? Was the fact that I asked this question wired into the Big Bang, and thus determined "forever" at least in the context of our 4 billion or so "old" universe?

 It is a bit hard to pull any firm position out of this book ... probably because Mr Wright does not want to be seen to be cosmically wrong and stupid in the today's godless materialist nihilist world. 

Of course, one difficulty with pinning any hopes on religion is its much-discussed ongoing erosion at the hands of science, an erosion that is one alleged source of modern and postmodern nihilism and ennui. But one point of this book has been to challenge the conventional belief that science really has dispelled deep mystery and all evidence of purpose

One of the reasons that book spends so much time on primitive cultures is that it wants to make CERTAIN that there is absolutely no connection between the fact of Western civilization seeming to "win" the race to modernity, and the  Judaeo/Christian underpinnings of the culture. He does realize that the issue of trust, and dealing with free riders is critical, and an all powerful God knowing all you do can be a restriction to  both cheaters/liars and sluggards. 

Somehow, this fear of being cheated must be overcome for things to work out well.

Although ignored in this book (other than to claim it is racist/eurocentric), it is hard to miss the idea of an all knowing God that will insure ultimate justice as a goad to establishing something like "thou shalt not bear false witness". Laws are a nice adjunct to that,  but it is better to have it built into the "wetware" (the physical brain). 

Randomness has increasingly fallen on hard times figuring out how even ONE ordered cell showed up in the primordial soup (and God knows they have tried A LOT of things). In the 1970's, it was assumed that once we could map the Genome, it would be "easy" ... kinda like indistinguishable from human intelligence AI. It turns out that mapping the genome just helped open the truth that randomness in a single universe had mathematical odds of getting to where we are on the order of 10 to the 100th against. Maths way of saying NO!

 So materialists have moved to the "many worlds theory" ... perhaps there are 10 to the 100th universes, and we are just EXTREMELY lucky, which would explain why the scientific "near certainty" that the SETI project would observe proof of many intelligent, radio and other emissions indicating we were far from alone in our universe, "soon". Like HAL 9000 level AI, "soon" is a very long time. 

"Purpose and Desire" is an easier read, and I think more convincing indication of there being something more than mere matter in operation in our world and universe,

Belief In The Ignorance Of Experts

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/when-to-trust-the-science/

Whenever I see the term "expert", I think of Richard Feynman's (Feynman is a brilliant Nobel Prize winner in Physics) National Science Teachers speech in 1966: 

We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields–radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners’ airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. [But] you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

The linked talks about a tweet by Paul Graham which states: 

If you think you don't trust scientists, you're mistaken. You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that matter turn on your tap or open a can of beans. The fact that you're unaware of this doesn't mean it's not so.

Well, no. You "trust" engineers, and all the people in the chain that built and tested the many thousands if the components in the aircraft, the mental health and competence of the pilots, ATC, other pilots,  the people that produced the fuel ... a nearly infinite chain of trust. Or, basically you are taking a "leap", that isn't really "faith", because most have not thought about any of this. Nor should you really, because a life that can actually be lived is based on all sorts of unconscious assumptions. 

It would be very good however if many more people were aware that we ALL live by faith, all the time. If more people realized that, we would likely be somewhat kinder to others. 

"Science" is a method. a tool - it makes hypotheses and tests them. Very few of the people in that long chain were "scientists", they were "experts" in some sort of discipline generally blindly following the "rules" (standard procedures") of that discipline.  

In this world, the "experts" are imperfect and often fail. The passengers on the 737 Max trusted the chain of "experts", and the chain failed. The list of "expert failures" is endless ... in these times it often starts with the Titanic. My favorite example is Trofim Lysenko whose "expertise" combined with political ideology resulted in millions of deaths. 

Do the "experts" creating and pushing the new mRNA vaccine know what they are doing? We certainly hope and pray that they do. We DO know that pushing a new technology to millions of people has significant risk. In software, we say "never take the first release". Even in cars, many people want to wait a bit on a new model, because there is a good deal of evidence there will be one or more "recalls", some of which may be significantly dangerous. 

The real world is often harsher to the new technology than the theories, early testing, and politics hoped it would be. 

So before you "trust the science", be aware that what you are trusting is the bureaucratic system that decided on operation "Warp Speed", and decided that they HAD to roll out the vaccine quickly. Fortunately there were only 7 people on the Challenger when it "had to launch" on the cold morning of January 28, 1986.  

Interestingly, Feynman was the person that discovered the technical cause of the Challenger Disaster. 

The root cause was believing in "experts" (rather than understanding their ignorance), and the application of those beliefs by a bureaucracy to the launch decision. 

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" 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. 

Darwin's Doubt

 https://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Doubt-Explosive-Origin-Intelligent/dp/0062071483

This is a book that doggedly works to put some meat on the challenges to the modern Darwinian dogma. We are at a point in history much like the time of Martin Luther, where the dogma of the Catholic church was crushing all other Christian thought. The "church", meaning the Catholic Church had all the power, and the keys to Heaven and Hell -- to question was to be a heretic, and eternally damned. 

Today, dogmatic Darwinism is the scientific religion -- a statement that is an oxymoron, as an any real scientist like Richard Feynman knows -- the core difference between science and religion is that actual science is NEVER "settled" ... it's "truth" is always conditional on the next piece of discovered knowledge. Whatever fails that test is religion,  not science. Much of modern "science" is religion, and one only needs to visit one of their "science" museums to attend a scientism worship service. 

 Starting in the "1950s" as more and more information about the actual mechanisms required for "evolution" to randomly create "more adaptive" phyla, rather than just modify through selection within the same phyla (meaning they could breed and reproduce) became more clear, some actual scientists began to doubt the Darwinian dogma. As in the time of Luther, the reaction of the Church of Darwin was to punish and excommunicate the heretics. 

Even as eminent a biologist as Stephen J Gould has declared that neo-Darwinism is effectively dead based on current genomic research. I cover a much easier to follow than this book introduction to why in here.

What "Doubt" covers is a whole lot of detail behind what are currently considered the odds of a SINGLE helpful inheritable mutation. What are those odd? From David Gelernter  (an eminent Yale computer scientist) ...   

The odds against blind Darwinian chance having turned up even one mutation with the potential to push evolution forward are 10⁴⁰x(1/10⁷⁷)—10⁴⁰tries, where your odds of success each time are 1 in 10⁷⁷ — which equals 1 in 10³⁷. In practical terms, those odds are still zero. Zero odds of producing a single promising mutation in the whole history of life. 

To get to life AT ALL by randomness has not been reproduced in the lab, even by "stacking the deck" with what we believe to be the perfect "primordial soup. We can't get a SINGLE viable, let alone successfully reproducing cell. 

We can get all sorts of mutations in the lab by chemical or radiation exposure ... as we would expect, even when you cause millions of mutations, they nearly always kill the next generation, or produce offspring that are grotesque and anything but "improved / more adaptive". 

However, as unlikely as adaptive DNA mutations are, it turns out they are not the only operative factor ... there is "epigenetics" ... which at a high level means that Lamark had a point. Changes to the phenotype in one generation CAN be inherited. 

If you choose to undertake this book you will be introduced to lots of biology, genetics, genomics, geology, statistics, history, information theory, etc ... almost certainly, no matter how studied or intelligent you are, your eyes will glaze over at some point. 

... and of course it won't "prove" anything if you have already accepted the Darwinist faith. While Christianity promises a better life now, and eternal life hereafter, Darwinist faith only promises that life has no underlying meaning or purpose, and that when you die, that is it.  

My purpose in going to all this trouble is that modern "Wokeism" of which the Darwinist faith is a foundation, asserts that all who disagree need to be ridiculed, isolated, and punished in this short life. The results of this "Wokeism" so far are many despondent people choosing to end or effectively end their self understood as meaningless lives via suicide, drugs, distraction, or being motivated by hate and virtue signalling relative to those that question the Darwinist / Woke doctrine. 

The result of this is that we now live in a decadent, increasingly fascist world -- a new "Dark Age of Dogma". 

I recommend reading the suggested/linked intro post, as well as "Purpose And Desire" prior to taking on this book. It is a worthy book, roundly criticised by The Unholy Church of Darwin" as "creationist drivel" -- although other than asserting that one doesn't get complex entities without  some kind of plan/direction, it says nothing about God and in no way defends young earth creation.  

Why did the chicken cross the road? Perhaps it was because he wanted to ... rather than because it was predetermined materialistically since the Big Bang.