Is Dieting a Test of Free Will?

Ever since I read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker I’ve been obsessed with the concept of free will.  I’ve read enough books on brain studies in recent years to doubt the existence of free will.  Now I’m not saying we’re all robots, but I question whether or not we’re making decisions on our own, as if we were independent souls sitting in our heads driving our bodies around, and making impartial decisions based on weighing all the evidence and facts.

I remember a freshman philosophy course I took in 1969 and my professor challenging us to come up with an example of free will.  That class inspired many arguments between me and my friends.  Free will is a philosophical concept that few people think about in normal life – mostly because it feels like we do make our own decisions so why even ask about free will.

When Neo makes his choice between the red and blue pill in the film The Matrix, is that an act of free will?  If he’s the One, wouldn’t that make him born to take the red pill?

Everyone assumes they have free will and they are acting on their own volition, but the older I get the more I assume that’s just an illusion.  So I’ve been wondering if I can come up with a test for free will.  I think I’ve found one with dieting.  Our bodies and hunger represent the power of nature and the hardwired programming of genes.  The need to diet comes from our environment, where we constantly learn that fat is sexual unattractive, unhealthy, and like Pavlov’s dog, we’re constantly conditioned that being fat is bad.  Without that nurturing my nature would run wild.

If we have free will we should be able to evaluate all the outside data and decide to diet and lose weight because of its own philosophical merits.  Then why do so many people have trouble dieting?  Is it because our bodies, genes and physiological wiring program us to eat and free will can’t overcome that?

I started a diet today and at this very moment my body is already nagging at me to eat something fun.   “What a puss,” my mind tells my body.  I say no, it says yes.  If I can keep saying no, is that proof of free will?

Now there are two factors here:  free will and will power.   Scientists are throwing water on the concept of will power too.  And what’s the difference between free will and will power?  Deciding to diet might be an act of free will, but failing to diet might be a lack of will power.  And if I succeed in losing weight is it really because I have free will, or has outside stimuli overcame my genetic programming and reprogrammed my eating habits?  Where is the me in all of this activity?

Or is it a case of “I diet, therefore I am.”  (I wish I knew the Latin equivalent to cogito ergo sum that includes the word diet.)  Is thought good enough to prove the existence of free will?  Without thought I’d just eat anything I wanted and never think to lose weight.  However, all those thoughts about losing weight come from the outside world.  If I really had free will, wouldn’t it have been my idea to lose weight? 

But who comes up with original ideas???!!!  Einstein and the theory of relativity comes immediately to mind.   Imagining the concept of space-time had to be an act of free will.  Do we discount the billions of years of cosmological and biological evolution that produced Einstein as not part of the equation, or is Einstein’s discovery of space-time really the universe’s act of free will?  Einstein couldn’t have made his discovery without a long history of other scientists and thinkers.

When I choose to diet, is it my decision, or society’s?  Like Neil Armstrong’s “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”  Can we ever separate our will from the world’s?  The urge to eat is genetic.  How much I want to eat is probably genetic too.  Choosing to eat between steak and veggie burgers would seem like a free will choice, but is it?  If I had never read about vegetarianism would I ever considered the choice?

That’s the weird thing about asking ourselves if we have free will.  Genetics might be our hardwiring, but the environment seems to be doing all the software programming, so where is there room for free will?  Would that be self programming?  Even if I could write my own personality programming, wouldn’t the “free will” writing the programming been created by outside programming or genetics?

If I really had free wouldn’t even the urge to eat be my choice?  Is thwarting the urge to eat free will, even thought he idea didn’t originate with me?  Is free will the ability to choose among the various outside impulses we get from society?  Society tells me not to eat, but advertising on TV is doing a major brainwashing job to get me to eat.  Every time I see a Sonic commercial I want one of their shakes.

Dieting is a test of will power and maybe even an example of free will.  It’s a shame I always flunk it.

JWH – 12/15/12

The New Normal (NBC)–Now and Then

The New Normal – I love the title of this NBC show that premiered back in September, it says so much.  Makes you ask, “What was the old normal?”  Is there such a thing as normalness?  Having grown up back in the 1950s during the Leave it to Beaver and  Father Knows Best normalcy, I can remember a long parade of new television seasons where Hollywood tried to capture the new normalness of the American family every Fall for a half century.

(Some of the more famous shows about the American family from the last 50 years were My Three Sons, Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Brady Bunch, All in the Family, The Waltons, An American Family, Good Times, Little House on the Prairie, The Jeffersons, Eight is Enough, Family Ties, The Cosby Show, Our House, Married with Children, Full House, My Two Dads, thirtysomething, The Wonder Years, Roseanne,  Life Goes On, Family Matters, The Simpsons, Home Improvement, My So Called Life, South Park, That 70′s Show, The Sopranos, Family Guy, Freaks and Geeks, Malcolm in the Middle, Grounded for Life, Two and a Half Men, Weeds, Big Love, Jon & Kate Plus 8, Breaking Bad, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Modern Family, Parenthood)

But were Ward, June, Wally and the Beav ever a normal family?  ABC, CBS and NBC painted America as if everyone were WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon protestants)  in the 1950s, and even though my family was just as waspy, George, Virginia, Becky and Jimmy looked and acted like nothing we watched on TV.  America wasn’t lacking in people of color or various sexual orientations back in that black-and-white TV era, television just didn’t report on their normal day-to-day lives.  Some of those old gay couples getting married today were together back during the old normal.

My parents were on the ass end of middle class, drank enough to be called alcoholics, fought and smashed things like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and my and I sister ran wilder than any switch or belt could control.  Although television didn’t chronicle my family or anyone I knew, I think it did influence American society, and may have even shaped us.  TV showed us there was no such thing as normal.  Have you ever seen your family on TV?

Conservatives might swear to God that television news is biased to the left, and shows like The New Normal and Glee are propaganda for the liberal lifestyle, but television news reporting and fictional shows have always trailed the changes in society – they have never led the way.  Television has always been the fantasy of how we want to live.  I think America has always wanted television to chronicle the countless types of people that we are, and the accidental byproduct of all this voyeurism was that we have adapted to diversity.  Real life strangers would flair up your xenophobia, but put that same subculture or ethnic group on TV and they became endearing.

Real life and television life seems to have some kind of reverb going, with television echoing changes in society and stimulating society with its feedback.  The New Normal is about two gay men, Bryan (Andrew Rannells) and David (Justin Bartha) hiring Goldie (Georgia King) to be the surrogate mother of their baby.  This arrangement is far from new in the real world, or even on TV, but it’s taken for granted normalcy is a way to convince all those Americans who haven’t gotten the memo, that this is the new normal.

I find The New Normal just as comforting and pleasant as Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet back in 1958.  These happy families, both then and now, make me feel good and wish all families were just as happy.  Like Modern Family, to which The New Normal is often compared, these and other feel-good liberal shows are designed to make us feel better about life in America in 2012, they are our Sunday School classes about how to be good people.  Our economic lives might suck, but at least we’re evolving as accepting and empathetic beings.

Sadly, this doesn’t work with everyone in our polarized society.  We’re still fighting the war between extreme religious belief and the Enlightenment.  I wonder what Descartes, Bacon,  Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau would make of our modern times, and what philosophical issues would they make out of our television shows?

That’s the thing, I don’t think television initiates social change, but soothes us to accept it.  Many Americans don’t like gays or gay marriage, but as a whole, those attitudes are changing.  Last October, GLAAD released a report showing the 2012 television had the highest percentage of gay LGBT characters ever.  Not only are there more gay characters on TV, gay characters are finding more fans, and even the hateful grumpy people who protest their outrage are becoming fewer.

Television makes us comfortable with new ideas.  Television is an agent of integration, and I don’t mean that in just the racial integration sense, but in the integration of all change that’s going on in society.  Television is the spoon that stirs the American melting pot.

Television has been programming my social awareness since the 1950s, and it’s fascinating to contemplate all the changes the TV has made to America in the last fifty years.  If we had a time machine and could go back to 1962 and convince NBC to show The New Normal to America back then, how would it have been received?  Of course the show would be seen as a kind of science fictional view of the future.  There’s more new to The New Normal than two gay guys living together, and besides they did have gay people in 1962 so it wouldn’t have been a totally new concept, but they didn’t have surrogate mothers, or iPhones, video games, an African-American president, global warming, etc.  Change is relentless.

Remember, 1962 was before the sexual revolution of the 1960s.  The pill had just been released a few years earlier and it still hadn’t made it’s social impact.  If you watch The New Normal it has an whole spectrum of liberal ideals integrated into the show that would have been overwhelming to the “normal” people of 1962 to digest.  On the other hand civil rights and feminism had already begun by 1962, so maybe the viewers of 1962 would connect the dots between then and now.  And even though America was a technological giant in 1962, I just don’t think those 1962 TV viewers had any clue as what computers would do to our society.

Today we have hindsight to see how far we’ve come.  All too often we judge the citizens of the past by the morality and political correctness of today, but let’s reverse the tables.  How will people fifty years from now look back on us in 2012 and will they judge us harshly?  I’m sure in 2062 there will be a sitcom that’s the equivalent of The New Normal, and if we could see that show today, how would we react?

Liberal education marches on.  Will we ever reach an end and be perfectly enlightened?  I’m sure the seeds of future liberal standards of political correctness exist in our day-to-day life now.  Our treatment of the environment and animals will horrify our descendants.  Our polarized politics and fundamental religions will make the people of 2062 scratch their heads in amazement wondering how we could have been so irrational.  Our wasting of natural resources will be judged criminal.  But those are the easy issues.  What are the harder ethical issues we can’t discern with our quaint old-fashioned minds?

What will be the next new normal?

JWH – 12/10/12

Rethinking the Great Books of History

I am listening to “Books That Have Made History:  Books That Can Change Your Life” from The Teaching Company, taught by Professor J. Rufus Fears and I’m wondering if the “classic” books of history are being oversold.

I’m a life-long bookworm.  I got my degree in English Literature.  I study books about books, such as those by Harold Bloom, and I even study the Bible as literature although I’m an atheist.  I wish I had the time to master the great books.  And I started listening to these lectures expecting to expand on my knowledge of the great books of history.  However, Dr. Fears is making me think otherwise.

Books That Have Made History is a popular course for The Great Courses, but I think it has a fatal flaw.  And I’m not the only one to criticize this series, just read the customer reviews at the site.

Dr. Fears approaches these 36 lessons with the assumption the greatest books of history have great moral lessons to teach.  He expects great books to explore and answer four questions:

• Does God or do gods exist?
• What is fate?
• What do we mean by good and evil?
• How should we live?

Dr. Fears teaches these books with a firm belief in the answers.  He teaches each title by fitting them into his own theological beliefs.  In his opening lecture he discusses Dietrich Bonhoeffer and how he was imprisoned by the Nazi’s and hanged on April 9, 1945.  Dr. Fears said Bonhoeffer and the judge that sentenced him to die both read and studied the same classic books of history, and asks:  How did they come to such morally different conclusions?

Dr. Fears assumes the great books of history have answers to the great questions of history.  I think he’s wrong. 

Dr. Fears assumes there is a God, there is good and evil, that we’re expected to live by definite rules, and we have a fate or destiny in our lives.  I think he’s wrong.

Dr. Fears refuses to believe that the universe is accidental, that there is no good or evil, that there are no moral laws embedded in the universe, and the universe expects nothing from us.   I think he’s wrong.

Dr. Fears advocates The Iliad was the Bible for the ancient Greeks like the Christian Bible is for the western world, and that Homer was a singular real person.  I disagree.

Dr. Fears believe Moses was a real historical figure and there’s amble historical and anthropological evidence to support his story.  I disagree and even think many Jewish scholars disagree.

Now my point is not to say I dislike this lecture series because I disagree with the professor.  I’m asking why we should read the great books of history?  If they exist for the reasons Dr. Fears suggests, then I say, let’s forget them.  I’m dead tired of trying to puzzle out truth about reality from ancient thinkers.  I’m willing to read their books to understand the evolution of mankind and its history, but I have no interest in acquiring their beliefs.

Dr. Fears believes studying these books are valuable and relevant to teaching modern people how to think and act.  I think that’s wrong.  I think that’s why our world is confused and full of conflicting belief systems.

Great books make you think about life and reality, but they should give no answers.  Explicit answers are dangerous.  We live in the 21st century and we need to study the moment.  Now it’s actually impossible to study the current “now” in books, since books take years to write.  But for example, if you are studying cosmology, anthropology, or geology, or another other science, you really need to be reading books written in the last five years, and no more than 10 year old.

History and biographies can have a trailing edge of maybe 25 years, but that’s because some topics don’t get written about all that often.

If you’re studying the great books of history, I believe they should be read as primary sources to supplement current historical research.  Your research efforts should go into studying how and why they were written in context of their times, and not use them for acquiring personal beliefs.

This represents a schism in approaching reality.  If you believe that science has been the only consistent human endeavor to answer questions about reality, ancient knowledge will only be superstitious beliefs and endless philosophizing.  If you believe in God, then ancient writings are a goldmine of potentially revealed secrets.  Books That Have Made History falls in the later category.  My thinking falls in the former, so these lectures have little value to me.

However, they do make me ask:  Should or can we write current books that summarize good and ethical behavior for people to study?  If people are wanting to read books about how to live their lives in a “proper” manner, can’t we come up with something a little more current and based on contemporary knowledge?

JWH – 9/12/12

Why Humans Won’t Be the God of Robots

There’s a scene in the film Prometheus where an android asked a human why he would want to meet his maker?  The human replied that he’d like to ask his maker why he made him.  So the android said to the human, “Why did you make me?”  And the human replied, “Because we could.”  And the android then asked, “Will that answer be good enough for you?”

Science fiction has always loved the motif of man being the God of robots and AI machines – but I don’t think that will be true.  Not because artificial intelligence can’t exist, but because of how AI will evolve.

Please read “’A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’: What Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Reveal About Artificial Intelligence” by Daniel C. Dennett at The Atlantic.  No really, take the time to read this essay, if you are at all interested in artificial intelligence because this is an elegant essay about how AI will evolve.  It’s also a unique comparison of Charles Darwin and Alan Turing that observes concepts I’ve never read or thought about before, especially about the nature of evolution.  But for those who won’t take the time to read the article, I’ll summarize.  Darwin’s theory of evolution, according to Dennett, proves that God or an intelligent designer didn’t create life on Earth.  And Turing, with his Turing machine, proves that computers can produce creative output with no intelligent mind at all.  What I get from this is simplicity can produce complexity.

But back to AI and robots.  For a long time we’ve thought we could program our way to artificial intelligence.  That once we learned how intelligence worked we could write a program that allowed machines to be smart and aware like humans.  The belief was if random events in physics, chemistry and biology could produce us, why couldn’t we create life in silicon by our own intelligent design?

The solution to AI has always been elusive.  Time and again we’ve invented machines that could do smart things without being smart.  Machine self-awareness is always just over the horizon.

What Dennett is suggesting, is artificial intelligence won’t come from our intelligent designs, but from programs evolving in the same kind of mindless way that we evolved out of the organic elements of the Earth.  That humans can create the context of AI creation, that humans can be the amino acids, but they can’t be the designers.  The programs that produce AI need a context to evolve on their own.  In other words, we need to invent an ecosystem for computer programs to develop and evolve on their own.  How that will work I have no idea.

This means we’ll never get to code in Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.  It also suggests that complexity doesn’t come from complexity, but the creative power of non-intelligent design.  There’s a lot to this.

I’m also reading Imagine by Jonah Lehrer and it discusses how creativity often comes from our unconscious mind, and through group interaction.  Often creative ideas burst out in an Ah-Ha! moment after we have digested the facts, chewed them over, worried, given up and then forgot about the problem.  We are not even the God of our own thoughts and creativity.  That intelligent design is the randomness of evolution.

Time and again the Lehrer book talks about creativity coming from process and not an individual expression.  If you combine what Dennett and Lehrer are saying you catch a whiff of spookiness about unconscious forces at play in our minds and life in general.  Conscious thinking become less impressive because it’s only the tip of the iceberg that surfs on the deep waves of the unconscious mind.  Evolution is a blind force of statistics.  Is creativity just another blind force like evolution?

If Dennett is right, our conscious minds will never be powerful enough to conceive of an artificial mind.  And Dennett also says that Charles Darwin by coming up with the theory of evolution indirectly proves that a God couldn’t have created us whole in a divine mind.  If you think about all of this enough, you’ll start seeing this is saying something new.  It’s a new paradigm, like the Copernican revolution.  We’re not the center of the universe, and now conscious thought is not the crown of creation.

[I didn’t write this.  Thousands of books that I’ve read did.]

JWH – 6/28/12

Does Science Fiction Hurt Science?

Science is under attack in America today.  There are more anti-science people than scientists.  And by scientists I mean anyone who accepts science as the best method for understanding reality, not just working Ph.D. scientists.  I just finished a book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway and they carefully chronicle how fraud science is being used in politics to attack real science.

Most people have no idea how real science is conducted and communicated, thus it’s very easy to corrupt the general public about scientific knowledge.  Real science is done in peer reviewed journals and is rather plodding.  Popular science writing takes real science and tries to explain it.  This is the first level where unscientific noise enters the equation.  Most people do not read peer reviewed science journals so they must depend on textbook and popular science writers to explain science to them.

The third level down are writers (like me) who take what they’ve read in popular science writing and further spread the ideas or use the ideas in some applied political or practical fashion.  This is were a lot of imprecise and unscientific noise gets spread to readers in general.

I’m a life-long science fiction reader.  I spend a lot of time writing about science fiction and its history.  I grew up thinking science fiction promoted the study of science.  Now I’m not so sure.

Anyone can introduce a meme into the social network.  And they can claim the meme is scientific.   99% of Ph.D. climate scientists say global warming is happening, and it’s caused by humans, but if one non-science person who is good at communicating can convince a large group of people that global warming is a fraud, it will be believed, even more so than by the Ph.D. scientists.  The scientists have billions of dollars of the latest technology systematically researching the problem on a worldwide scale, and one person, with no expertise and equipment, but with good communications skills can destroy all their effort.  Ideas are more powerful than science.

We live in a world of seven billion gullible people who’d rather believe what they want than the truth.  People are self-delusional.

Science fiction is a powerful art form that generates non-scientific memes.  Is that good or bad?  Should we worry.

Thousands of years ago some human came up with the idea of angels and the meme has existed ever since.  In more recent times science fiction promoted the idea of faster-the-light traveling spaceships.  Is a warp drive any more real than an angel?  Battlestar Galactica had warp drives and angels.  I thought the show was a lot of fun, but I don’t believe in either, but many people do.  Create an idea and the believers will come.

The innocence of science fiction corrupting minds with junk science depends on fans knowing that science fiction is just for fun.  I’ve argued this point before and some of my friends exclaim that it’s obvious that people know that science fiction books and movies are just for fun.  I don’t agree.  I think some people want to believe that their favorite science fiction can come true.  That the future of mankind includes galactic civilizations, time travel, downloading minds into clones and computers, and so on.

I think great science fiction takes real science and dramatizes it in ways that make readers speculate about the future.  The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is a good example.  Wells used the idea of evolution to speculate about descendants of Homo Sapiens and the extinction of our race and the Earth.  The time machine was merely a gimmick to let the reader visit these speculations, but it’s that gimmick that’s stuck with the popular mind.

Other science fiction throws out far out ideas just to see what people will say.  There’s nothing wrong with fun speculation, unless people consider it science.  Take for instance the current film Prometheus which I’ve already written about.  What’s dangerous is if some people actual start believing that aliens visited the Earth and helped humans develop civilization.  Prometheus is only a continuation of 2001: A Space Odyssey back in 1968 and that led to Chariots of the Gods type thinking.

Now this kind of fun pretending is fine as long as you don’t think it’s science.  Science has a huge problem in America.  Few want to study it, fewer still want to accept it, and many want to corrupt it.  I have to ask if my favorite art form is contributing to undermining scientific thinking?

According to this recent Gallop Poll, 46% of Americans believe God created man in the last 10,000 years, according to Bible history.  Science is competing with that kind of thinking.  Does it help science to have science fiction generating all kinds of nonsense ideas too?  If you understand science, science fiction is fun, but if you don’t, how can you tell if the ideas are real or crazy?

Follow the link to the Gallop Poll and read the statistics about Americans and their beliefs.  They’re closer to fantasy and science fiction than science.  In fact, people who pursue scientific thinking makes up only a tiny fraction of the population.  We all depend on science for medicine, cars, airplanes, computers, weather prediction, etc., but few of us study how it works.  Scientists are the magicians of our times, and few understand how their magic works.

I’ve read popular books and magazines about science all my life.  I think of myself as an advocate for scientific thinking, but I’m far from a disciplined scientific thinker.  Science is a very misused word.  Our society is full of junk science, fraud science, pseudo science, fake science, and an emerging category I’m calling zombie science.

Some computer viruses take over personal computers and turn them into zombie computers to attack other computers and create massive denial of service attacks.  Conservatives waging a war on science and environmentalism have developed fake and fraud science to inject into people’s minds to spread zombie science.  They are taking over people’s minds to create a denial of science attack with their anti-science science.  This is very diabolical, but impressive.  Read Merchants of Doubt for the details.

What I’m asking is in this war on science, is science fiction helping or hurting?

Don’t just toss this idea off.  Think about it for awhile.  Everybody has a map of reality in their heads.  How functional or accurate that map is depends on how well it corresponds to actual reality.  That’s what science is about, validating the input of our senses.  It’s extremely easy to program humans to believe anything.  Not only can we be brainwashed but we all actively promote self-delusion.  Scientific thinking is an extremely hard discipline to pursue, much harder than Zen.

Remember Cypher in the film The Matrix, when he sells out to Agent Smith?  Cypher is willing to accept a delusional world because it gives him what he wants.  Most humans do that.  I wonder if our love of science fiction is like steak to Cypher?

People will dismiss this idea.  They will say only an idiot will believe the stuff in science fiction, that science fiction is only books you read for fun.  Well, how many people believe in the Bible?  It’s only a book too.  Don’t get infected by zombie science.

JWH – 6/23/12

I am a Scientist

I am a scientist.  Now that’s hard to explain since I don’t have a Ph.D. in a scientific discipline and work doing science experiments.

When most people say they are something, they are referring to a religion.  I’m not religious.  I’m an atheist, but I don’t like of thinking of myself in terms of what I’m not.  I am a person that believes science is the best cognitive system for explaining reality.  Period.  I’m not sure if there are any other contenders.  I’ve written off religion, so what is there?  Philosophy and art?  Scientists used to be called natural philosophers because they studied nature.  It wasn’t until the 1800s that they began to be called scientists.

For years now I’ve been wondering if philosophy had much to contribute towards our knowledge of reality.  I argue about this with my friend Bill who says no, and I defend philosophy with a maybe.  Now The Atlantic has a wonderful article on this very subject, “Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?”

People claim they want to know the truth.  As far as I can tell, science is the only system that has any justification for providing the truth, all other intellectual systems fail in comparison to science.  That’s why I say I’m a scientist.  I believe in science.  I put my faith in science.  However, science isn’t a philosophy or religion.  It’s a system for testing reality and developing a consensus about the results.

Currently, I don’t think science can answer all our questions.  Aesthetics and ethics are two such areas outside of the domain of science, at least for now.  Mathematics is the tool of science, and its own discipline.  Mathematics is the only abstract cognitive system that works well with reality, and thus provides a tool to science.

Religion has no relationship with reality.  It’s purely based on abstract ideas, all theoretical.  Many religious people attack science, or refuse to believe or accept what science has learned about reality.  Philosophers try to embrace science and keep their favorite abstractions.  They hope to connect ideal forms with reality, but that is very hard to do.  Justice is a philosophical concept, as well as a religious concept.  People naturally want justice.  It’s a deep seated desire.  But there is no justice in reality.  If a gamma ray burst hits the Earth and life on this planet is sterilized, does that reflect some kind of justice?  The best we can do is create ethics and laws based on what the consensus of the population wants.

Right now philosophy can claim some value in logic, rhetoric, aesthetics and ethics.

There are two kinds of people on this Earth.  Those who recognize reality, and those who live in fantasy.  But even the fantasy believers accept science to a degree.  How can you get on an airplane or go in for brain surgery without accepting science?  Our houses, cars and gadgets are all products of science.  The food we eat exists because of science, as does the medicine we take, the clothes we wear, and most everything else we come into contact with in our daily lives.

Science won a long time ago when it came to explaining reality, it’s just most people haven’t realized it yet.

When it comes to explaining how things work, science is the only legitimate tool we have.

JWH – 4/24/12

Understanding Reality

Think about cockroaches.  How much do they know about reality?  They have compound eyes that see the world poorly.  They can sense vibration, and they have a sense of touch.  Do they smell and taste the world around them?  I don’t know.  Cockroaches are little biological machines that eat and replicate.  They survive.  Between roaches and humans is an array of animal life with ever improving senses that understand more of reality.  To get some idea how an animal thinks watch “My Life as a Turkey.”  Humans do not have an exclusive hold on consciousness, but our consciousness lets us explore reality far deeper than any other creature we know.

I tend to doubt animals understand their environment in a conscious way.  They react to it, and even develop rudimentary calls that can be language-like that can relate to others of their kind about locations, events or things in their environment.  But I don’t think they ever ask:  who, what, where, when, how and why?  Maybe some higher forms of animals might pine for who, what and where, but I doubt they cognitively ask.

I believe we have a number of cognitive tools that help us analyze, map and understand reality.

Language

Words let us break down reality into parts.  Grammar lets us describe actions with nouns and verbs.  The origin of language let us work with who, what, where and when.

Theology

Theology introduces abstractions that attempt to answer how.  Theology was our first tool that lets us ask why are we here.  Unfortunately, theology is all based on imaginary concepts.  Theology distorts reality.  Theology lets us think we see things that aren’t there.  Theology has imprisoned humans for tens of thousands of years in a pseudo-reality.

Philosophy

Philosophy introduced rhetoric and logic and attempts to understand reality through deduction.  Sadly, philosophy was tainted by religion and sought to reconcile reality with ideal forms of the mind.  It took philosophy centuries to throw off trying to make reality shoehorn into a preconceived concept.

Mathematics

We started counting with language and commerce, but mathematics came into its own with philosophy.  At first mathematics was used in philosophical interpretations of abstractions and ideal forms, but eventually we applied it to analyzing reality.  It became our first tool where consensus and validation was important.

Science

Science is a system for testing reality.  Answers only count if they are consistent, reproducible and universal.  Mathematics became the cognitive tool of science.

Technology

Technology allowed us to expand our senses.  Telescopes and microscopes see further than our eyes.  Other technology allowed us to look into the reality where our senses can’t perceive.

The first three cognitive tools we developed, language, theology and philosophy often distort reality, or create illusions and fantasies.  Most humans never get beyond those three tools and even though they perceive reality far greater than a cockroach because of their superior senses, language, theology and philosophy often just confuses their minds.  Our brains are so powerful that they let us see what we want to see.  Our minds can override our senses and alter reality.  Theology has always been more powerful than any drug, especially combined with the power of our imagination.

The Limits of the Mind

Math, science and technology have expanded our awareness of reality out to infinity in all directions, including time.  How much of this reality humans can comprehend is yet to be determine.  Most humans on planet Earth cannot get beyond theology which blinds them from seeing true reality.  Most religions have incorporated bits of philosophy to make their religion logical and understandable by rhetoric, but its foundation is based on illusion and quicksand.  In recent years theology has even attempted to incorporate science but its been a pathetic failure.  Those people whose only cognitive tool for understanding reality is theology cannot comprehend how science works, if they did, it would destroy their theology.

There are many other tools for understanding reality, such as art, literature, history, journalism, poetry, drama, etc.  They are all subjective, but they have their pros and cons.

JWH – 3/6/12

Accepting Reality

For most of the history of mankind, gods or God, explained reality.  God made us, the plants and animals.  Any event in nature, whether good or bad, was caused by gods or God.  Then science came along and explained rain, thunderstorms, earthquakes, eclipses, droughts, stars, planets, and so on.  When science explained the origin of animals and people, some religious people rebelled.

We now have people that reject science because they want to keep God.  They feel science is explaining away God.  I’m afraid they are right.  But instead of accepting reality and letting God fade away, like the gods before monotheism, they are rejecting reality.  When I was very young I rejected God and accepted science mainly because of the size of reality.  Reality seemed too immense to have been created by one being, especially one in our image.  Take a look at this video to see what I mean.

God was a great concept when our awareness of reality was small but once you realize the size of reality, age and scope, even at the limits of what we know now, that knowledge changes everything philosophically.  Humans can’t be the crown of creation.  We can’t be the center of the universe and the focus of God’s attention.  We can’t be special if we’re so small and insignificant.

So what is our place in the reality?  Years ago I would have asked, what is our place in the universe, but it appears our universe might be one of an infinity of universes, and this round of 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, only a single bubble in a foam of universes.  Science now talk of the multiverse, but I prefer the term reality to encompass it all.

Humans are here in this vast reality by an accident of randomness.  We won’t always be here.  Reality existed before us, and it will exist after us.  Being here is the biggest miracle we’ve yet discovered.  It’s a miracle that outshines any miracle ever recorded in all of the religions of the world.

I think its time we reject the theory of God and start accepting reality for what it is.  Start asking questions about what existing in this vast reality means.  Becoming self-aware in this immense reality is a great opportunity.  Instead of destroying the Earth and committing species suicide we need to think about what we could become.  Don’t ask what is our purpose.  Under religion our purpose was to obey God.  Reality doesn’t work that way.  We each have to find our own purpose if we want one, but reality expects nothing of us.  We can’t have a personal relationship with reality.  Each of us is an awareness of reality, but most of us pretend we’re not here.

Erase all the past thoughts of religion and philosophy.  You just woke up in an unknown place.  Take stock in your surroundings.  You know that old saying, think global but act local – do the same for reality.  Our philosophy should be based on our best picture of reality.  Start with cosmology and work your way down.  Most people define reality by their very small personal delusions.  I say, any philosophy that doesn’t account for the size of reality dooms itself to a cockroach mentality.  A cockroach scurries about satisfying its personal urges unaware of its environment.  A cockroach does not know it’s in your kitchen because it doesn’t see the big picture.

There is only one human endeavor that tells us about reality, and that’s science.  I suggest starting at the top, and work down.  NOVA presented a wonderful four part series called The Fabric of the Cosmos hosted by Brian Greene based on his book of the same name.

Fabric of the Cosmos 1: What is Space?

Fabric of the Cosmos 2: The Illusion of Time

Fabric of the Cosmos 3: Quantum Leap

Fabric of the Cosmos 4:  University or Multiverse

Maybe there’s still room for religion in reality, I don’t know.  But any religion that ignores what we know about reality is delusional.

JWH – 2/11/12

Who Are the Abolitionists of Our Times?

What peculiar institutions do we embrace today that modern abolitionists see as evil?

Humans are an evolving social species and in every era some people see further than others.  They understand that common assumptions are wrong.  19th century abolitionists could see that slavery was a vile institution where most were blind to its cruelty.  They wanted to abolish a long held practice that other people embraced dearly.  This brought about the war of America against itself that was so violent that no other enemy has ever come close to hurting us so much.  And even though the war came to an end in 1865 some people are still fighting it today.  It’s very hard for people to change.

What I ask:  What evil do we embrace that is invisible to the society at large that a few people rightly want to abolish today?

The list could be quite long and it might take a century or two before the issues become obvious to everyone.  Evil is not invisible.  Evil doesn’t take a century of social evolution to see.  Evil is ignored.  Everyone in the 19th century should have seen that slavery was evil.  Southern states embraced slavery because it benefitted them economically.  They had to rationalize the practice.  The framers of the Constitution had to carefully dance around the issue in words.  Our forefathers accepted a level of cruelty in life that we can’t rationalize, but instead of feeling enlighten, we have to ask:  What cruelty do we rationalize so easily?  What vile practices do we embrace because we don’t want to see its evil because it profits us?

The first thing that comes to mind are animals.  Factory farms are nightmares of animal cruelty that slaughter billions of beings each year.  We’re also destroying animal habitats worldwide and causing extinctions only slightly slower than mass extinction events.  Given our trends, we’ll start surpassing some of those events soon.

The second thing that comes to mind is how we’re destroying the environment for future generations.  A century from now the the people of the world will hate us far worse than we ever hated slavers, colonialists, Nazis, Communists, terrorists, serial killers or child molesters.  Our excesses will make us the worst of the worst.

Most people today if confronted will go, “Huh, not me, I’m not doing anything wrong.”

And you can’t claim ignorance because we do have our own abolitionists.  They are out there.  They are telling us what’s wrong.  We’re just not listening.

JWH – 2/5/12

God, An Imaginary Friend For Adults

“There are no atheists in foxholes” is an assumption by the faithful who feel in times of stress all people will turn to God.  When I’m sick I want to talk to God too.  The older I get the stronger my atheism gets, the more I feel like I’m just talking.  I don’t expect a reply.  When we’re alone, fearful or in pain, we realize how powerless we are.  So it’s quite natural to think, “God, get me out of this!”

Who are we talking to?  Ourselves, of course.  But we’d like to think that someone is listening.  That’s why people believe in a personal God – to have a listener, to not be alone.  Lonely kids make up imaginary friends, well adults make up God.   We don’t like to be alone in the universe.  Nor do we like to be helpless.  The desire for an all-powerful, caring, father figure is completely understandable.  Even if he’s going to let us suffer and die, we want someone to talk to.

On the other hand, are we really alone in our heads?  We tend to think of our thoughts as ourselves, but if you observe closely, they aren’t.  Descartes, “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore I am” is another illusion.  Pay close attention to your thoughts and you’ll realize the quality you feel as Me is actually listening to your thoughts.  The Me observer is so close to the thoughts that it thinks its doing the thinking.  Stare at something and not think, and then watch when a thought arises.  There is a separation.  In other words, you aren’t alone.  It’s you and your thoughts.  The observer and thinker.

Animals are observers like us, but without thoughts, or a thinker.

Now here’s the kicker.  It’s the thinker that needs to talk. It’s the thinker that needs to communicate with God.  If you just BE and turn off your thoughts you’re just an observer, there is no God, or even desire.  It’s the thinker that wants, that desires, that creates God, and all the other stuff, like mathematics, history, philosophy, justice, love, etc.  It’s the observer who is aware, who is conscious, and who dies.

So, why does the thinker want to create God?  Why does the thinker need this imaginary friend?  Before awareness in animals there was no observers of reality.  Hydrogen became stars without notice.  Animals perceive reality through an infinity of senses.  Animals can feel the warmth of the sun without knowing what it is, because they don’t have language to think.

Then we came along and started thinking.  Thoughts see things that don’t exist in reality.  Thoughts see other thoughts.

Why? 

Our thinking minds are quite creative.  It’s my thinking mind writing this now.  And my Me-ness observes that.

Children create imaginary beings to have someone to talk to.  We create God to have someone to talk to. 

What we really want is another thinker to talk to.

JWH – 1/21/12