Our garden of relationships

Our human relationships -- our kin and families, our spouses and children, our business and work associates, our neighbors, and now our internet connections, are all part of a web of connections that we must constantly nurture and build and take care of.  It is our garden.

What to do about weeds?  Well here I think the garden metaphor fails.  "What God has put together let no man tear apart."  The scripture is usually applied to marriage, but the reality is it applies to all our relationships, and most especially to our friendships.  To be sure once we get to know someone well we see their faults that may not have been as visible when we first met, but what do you expect?  No one is perfect and we must worry about our own faults and not about those of others, and be forgiving, albeit wise about people.

We are made of stardust

Every now and then people stand in awe that we are made of "stardust," meaning gas and dust made in an exploding star.

That is not really an accurate picture.  We are made from material -- atoms -- that appears to have come out of the Big Bang that was mostly hydrogen and helium.  The heavier elements (the astronomer's "metals") were then cooked from this hydrogen and helium inside giant stars with the very heaviest being made in the moments of supernova when those stars exploded.  This is interesting but nothing to get star-struck about.

Where our mindfulness, or at least the possibility of our being mindful, comes from is more mysterious.  In fact it is absolutely not understood.  Gases and dust particles, even aggregates of them, do not contemplate or take note of things around them.

It is such a gift and we take it so for granted, and go through our lives mostly oblivious to the world we are in and what we are doing and where we are, let alone what our minds are up to.

Unharmonious universe

In fact the universe is not very harmonious.  Take the sun and moon for example.  A decent creator would have made the month an integral fraction of the year, but no, we have to have months of different lengths.  So do a decent creator would have made the day an integral fraction of the year, but no we have to have leap years and skipped leap years and it still does not come out quite right.

Obamacare

The real problem in the States, and one that Obamacare doesn't really address (although a few nods at it are heard now and then) is the outrageous costs of health care.

I'm not in the States and have had only a couple encounters with American health delivery, and it seems excellent, although no better than elsewhere.  But the same services cost me triple what it cost in my country, and let me tell you in Vietnam doctors do all right.

When you see something like this, the first step is not to try to guarantee the best possible care for everyone but to look at the incentives and see what is driving costs.  There is little or no competition based on cost and a lot of competition based on appearances (nice looking buildings, clean gowns, the most modern machines, etc).  This is probably because such a large portion of the population is insured automatically through the employer.  That system needs abandoning so that everyone has a direct interest in shopping around for lower costs.

Another thing of course is the outrageous American legal system, where there is a running lottery seeing who can get rich suing others.  I read about drug companies having to pay huge settlements when something went wrong, and I can see why drugs in the States are so expensive.

Finally, I would observe there seems a dearth of clinics in the States; there are a few but they are mostly related to hospitals and serve the hospital.  This is not a true independent clinic.  Clinics are a much more cost-effective way to deliver primary health care than emergency rooms, which have to be equipped for emergencies and should not have to deal with walk-in trade.

Corrupt bureaucracy and Chinese dynasties

China has had a phenomenon called the "Dynastic Cycle" that I think applies generally, although not in precise detail.  You have a new dynasty come to power, full of energy and determination to change things and make things better.  The bureaucracy is all executed -- all the lawyers and scribes and paper pushers and so on -- and things are trimmed down so they actually function, and the goal is efficiency, not fairness or equality or some other ideological notion.

Over time bad things happen, and each time a bad thing happens a new law is passed and more lawyers and inspectors are employed to enforce the new law, all to be sure the bad thing doesn't happen again.  Also of course natural empire building goes on (bureaucrats are measured by the number of people who report to them, so they tend to look for opportunities to enlarge that number).

So decline sets in until eventually it becomes where bribes are the only way to get anything done, there being so many rules and so many officials living off those rules, and the whole system needs a revolution to clean it all out again.

In support of nutritional supplements

I have a problem with this campaign we are seeing recently of news stories that supplements harm the liver, are a waste of money, and so on, using the results of meta-studies that are pretty much no more rigorous than the studies sometimes used to support false claims.

It is not hard to pick out specific ingredients that do specific types of harm and eliminate them, making a generalized ban on all supplements unneeded.

Obviously controls are needed to assure manufacturing quality and to be sure pills contain what the label says they contain and nothing else.  The campaign should be limited to that.  The effort seems to be to put nutritional supplements under a very similar regulatory structure as now applies to prescription drugs.  I think this would be serious overkill.  Individuals who feel they want to buy nutritional insurance for things like folate and B12 and D3 should be able to do so, provided labels provide information as to maximum doses.  The convenience of packaging such supplements into a single pill should not be interfered with.

I am suspicious of popular press items that issues these warnings based on little science (so called "meta-studies" where the studies reviewed are selected seemingly to get the desired result) just as I am suspicious of claims appearing in the popular press touting this or that chemical. I am also suspicious of the fundamental regulatory mindset that ends up reducing freedom and increasing medical costs.

Human slavery as an example of moral thought

The modern view of slavery is that it is immoral, and further that the idea of one person owning another is abhorrent and repulsive.

Okay, this is a relatively recent improvement in human moral standards, although thoughtful people through history have had qualms about it, and slavers have never been in the pinnacles of society.

Has what is "moral" changed?  The best answer I think is that slavery has been wrong all along.  It violates the most ancient and basic teachings of compassion and freedom and love.  Any rational approach to ethical deduction comes to that conclusion quite easily.

So what changed?  I would say that what changed is that the apologists for it finally lost the argument, probably because slavery became an economic burden where it had not been before.

What is right and what is wrong stay right and wrong, but human cultural views can change -- a lesson that we cannot depend on our culture to tell us and must work out our ethics for ourselves.

Big Bang and beginning of time

In my opinion the odds are the BB was in fact the "Beginning" of time.  We cannot say for sure and may never be able to say for sure, unless of course someone demonstrates an alternative history to have been true.

The thing to do when thinking about infinity is to avoid that word and use instead "endless."  It helps avoid the mistake of thinking of infinity as a number -- some place in the very very distant past -- and realize that if time is endless then there cannot be a "now."   You can climb out of a well that has a bottom, but you cannot climb out of a well that has no bottom.

If time had a beginning, then talking about "before" that beginning is nonsense.  There was no existence "before," no "eternity" as there was no time to have an eternity.  There was also no causation: if something happened -- anything might happen -- that would be the beginning of time and after that you can insist on cause and effect (although I don't think causation is quite as real as we think it is, for this issue it doesn't matter).

Bible contradictions don't matter, Bible morality does

The game of Bible contradictions is widely practiced, and I have seen lists of hundreds of them, with fundamentalists proudly challenging that there isn't a single one they can't explain [away].

That the Bible was written by different men over a long period of time is all we need know to understand this.  I repeat, it was written by men (maybe a couple women, I don't know for sure).

No one denies that the Bible was written by men; the claim is that they were divinely inspired, but I don't know what inspired means short of it obviously does not mean directly dictated.  The personalities of the authors show through, as well as the exaggerations and poetic language and historical and geographical and scientific ideas of their day, including those that were wrong.

Where I think something that is claimed to be scripture is tested is by its moral teaching -- not what it has to say about sex or drinking or smoking, but what it has to say about how we deal with each other.  In this respect the Bible has much that is good but fails on several serious grounds.  It is homophobic, it clearly fails to condemn slavery, and it relegates women to an inferior status.

One final point here: much of what it has to say on moral questions is outright ridiculous if not harmful, such as the teaching that for a man to lust after a woman is as evil as for him to rape her, or the teaching that no marriage should ever, no matter what, be broken, or the remark that something (I've never been able to get clear exact what) is an unforgivable sin.

Critical thinking and Jesus

One of the worst mistakes critical thinking can help with is helping us not believe things just because we want to believe them.  The temptation to give in to what we want to be true is so strong and gives us such joy that the mistake gets buried in the emotion and we rationalize out of our skins to get there.

I remember in my college days there was an argument over whether the "big bang" or "steady state" universe was the correct view, and I really liked the steady state view.  The big bang seemed contrived and seemed to raise more problems than it solved.  So I came to believe it but as science progressed I realized how wrong I had been and look back at it as a case of my allowing my desires (philosophical inclination) to get the better of me where I should have reserved judgment until better data became available.


We are all "believers."  If my boss calls me into his office and tells me I am fired, I had better believe it and seek another job 'cause paychecks are not going to continue.  Thus the ability to believe has its selective or evolutionary function.

But we must apply critical thinking to what we believe.  Critical thinking is among other things the skills enabling us to see through the tricks and devices of con artists, and the first skill needed is the humility to admit that the magician knows the trick but you don't.  Therefore, before believing that the guy can bend spoons it is good to study some professional magic and see what tricks can be used to do the same thing, and then observe whether or not those tricks are being used.  Studying critical skills is the same as studying such professional magic, but applied instead to the realm of what we will believe.

One example I might mention regarding religion -- all the prophesies about Jesus that supposedly came true (mostly this derives from the book of Matthew, who was the main pusher of this idea).  If you study critical thinking, you learn that there is such a thing as "stacking the deck," which is shorthand for claiming things that on the surface look true but where details are left out that have a different effect.  Thus, when one looks at these prophesies carefully, one finds all kinds of problems with them.  In some cases they weren't prophesies at all; in other cases they had other fulfillments; in other cases the story is constructed so as to make a fulfillment seem as though it happened.


A similar case of stacking the deck comes from the claim that the existence of Jesus is well documented, when the fact is the opposite, that we have no eye-witness records (the earliest New Testament books cannot be proven to have existed before several centuries latest although most scholars from clues inside the books give them a late first century date).  The very earliest mention of him outside the New Testament is known to be a later fraud.  This doesn't get mentioned by those who cite it (Josephus), even when they know about the controversy. 

Dream interpretaton

I wonder that of all the paranormal things that skeptics hereabouts demolish so well, they leave dream interpretation alone, as far as I've seen.  Interpretations of various sorts of dreams are offered and no one raises questions and to how valid they might be.

A couple things bother me.  First, dreams are not remembered well enough or in enough detail, and then described well enough, for anyone to be sure some critical detail has not been omitted.

Second, and more important, I think the idea of dreams as symbols is largely discredited, and even more symbolic messages.  Our dreams have to do with what is happening in our lives.  I bought an aquarium and a couple nights later I dream I'm a guppy swimming around enjoying the patterns of light reflected off the marbles and the play of water currents on the ferns.  Symbolizes nothing; just ideas floating in my head being played with and explored.

Or again, some dream is supposedly a symbol of some sexual suppression.  I don't buy it.  My sexual frustrations and so on get played out in real dreams about real sex.

One dream I reported was cleverly interpreted by someone with an implication of descent into Hell.  Don't make me laugh.  All I did was exit an apartment building the normal way, by going downstairs, albeit in a car, and I arrived on the street and everything was hunky-dory.

And of course there is my regular dream about riding on the back of a cobra through the grass.  I regularly have that dream because it's fun and I have some control over my dreams.  It has nothing to do with danger or protectors or power or the cobra that is part of the Buddha's enlightenment story.  It's more akin to a carnival ride.

What I'm saying is that I think dreams have to do with us here and now, maybe what we want and maybe what we fear, but more often just what we are doing.  I generally enjoy my dreams, and remember them better than most people, but I don't try to interpret them.  I think they are me interpreting and organizing my life, not deep powers sending me messages.

Buddhist sensate animals

I can't resist the temptation here to insert a pitch for one of my favorite Buddhist teachings, applied to modern biological understanding.  Some animals are sensate and respond to instincts reinforced by pleasure/pain centers in the brain.  Their behavior is still largely instinctual but, unlike, say, an insect, the "instinct" has a pleasure enforcement, is not just a mechanical reflex.  The animal experiences its existence in a way different from that of a programmed machine.

This is to my mind a huge step; it means behavior can be much more flexible (you don't get lobsters following each other forever in a circle) but still programmed.  In effect the outcomes rather than the details of the behavior are what are inherited.  The word for this is sensate.  The animal experiences emotions.

We too are under such a system (although like all animals we also have some behaviors that are still reflexive).  What sensate existence allows though is the development of intelligence and greater and greater flexibility (the appearance, in other words, of consciousness and free will).

Electrons going through slits

Let me see if I have this right.  The electron going through the slit can be seen in one of two possible ways.

One way to see it is that the electron goes through every possible path in reality, which would mean essentially an infinite number of parallel universes has to be created on the, all otherwise identical, so this one little electron going where it is going to go, and it goes to all of them, each in a universe.

The other way to see it is that the electron goes through every possible path in some sort of virtual or suspended way, which is not resolved until someone observes the results, and then the path of the electron "collapses" to one of the possibilities -- in short, everything is virtual until there is an observer to make it real.

You will excuse me, Horatio, but there does seem to be something very wrong in the state of Denmark.

A short anti-Muslim rant

I'm not sure what is religion and what isn't.  A few "hard" Communists around here (yea there are a few still around) view any non-physical non-materialist understanding of even human behavior as superstition.  I tend to view their dogmatism as not terribly different from a religion, but most Communists relegate Communism to being a philosophy of politics and history, and allow that mind and spirit may be unknown and undescribed phenomena.

One characteristic I have found in religion, except for most Buddhists (though by no means all Buddhists) is that they assert doctrines -- things that are true and things that are false, end of subject.  This is maybe the main reason religions in history have such a bad record.

When religions (and other ideologies) do this sort of thing (I am right and that is the end of the subject and anyone who disagrees is engaging in something bad), I think they need to be opposed.

In today's world probably the worst for this sort of thing are the Muslims, although a lot of Hindus and Roman Catholics and followers of a few extreme Protestant denominations, are right up there with them.  Is my saying this "bashing" their beliefs?  To live in a Muslim country and have been born a Muslim but to not believe is extremely dangerous.  Such people exist but they keep their thinking to themselves.  Can this be the sign of a genuinely "true" and good religion?  To live in a Muslim country and not be a Muslim is to have to put up with all sorts of daily inconveniences and rules.  Muslims living in non-Muslim countries insist that they be allowed special rights that they deny those back home.  It really sticks in my craw.

We can be a bit air-headed and say all belief is good, or something like that, since many beliefs do achieve great good, but it isn't true and needs dealing with honestly.

Mark Twain's opinion of faith

What was said is what is important, not who said it, although if you are famous you are more likely to be heard.  Mark Twain and I agree pretty much on the nature of faith -- that it is belief in what you want to believe rather than belief in what we have good reason to believe.

I don't suppose in most cases such faith does much harm, and sometimes it it is helpful, but sometimes it does harm.

Roman Catholics, and probably others, teach us that faith is an act of grace from God, that we are given it, and some are not, kinda arbitrarily.  Most Protestants take a slightly different tack and say that we need but ask for it and it will be given.

I think that it is intellectual dishonesty: wanting something (especially things we've been indoctrinated with) to be true and using these teachings to allow ourselves to believe them in spite of their inherent irrationality -- even making a virtue of the irrationality.  I think we are born with an instinct to believe what the group believes, and in early societies this instinct served those groups who adhered because of it, but natural selection is not interested in truth but in survival and reproduction.  Hence when we doubt we feel fear and guilt -- the instinct's way of getting its way -- and when we give in and believe we feel joy and peace.  It's all subtle biology overcoming or rational nature and is what keeps unbelievably unbelievable religions going.

Advanced alien life

Given that "super-earths" with masses half to three times that of the earth appear to be common in the habitable zones, I would be inclined to imagine advanced life on such worlds as being squat with either lots of legs or very thick short ones.

Maybe a cylindrical body about a meter or so thick and a couple meters in diameter, a few centimeters above the ground with hundreds of little feet, equipped with various orifices and tentacles and sensory projections.  We evolved from arboreal creatures and so have opposable thumbs and color stereoscopic vision and a basic vertical orientation.  More massive planets probably wouldn't offer such an environment.

Sorry no Vulcans

I think, either with a long-lived species or one that has stopped aging or with generational ships or maybe some technology we haven't thought of, travel between stars is possible, but not ever going to be a daily occurrence.

For that reason and that we haven't been visited, I think we are probably very close to alone.   Life is probably common enough, of the single celled sort, but there is no sign of the advanced technologies that would have star ships.  That is probably because the universe is actually a dangerous place and a planet like the earth is extraordinarily lucky to be able to have the billions of years of evolution needed without an occasional sterilizing event (we have barely missed having one several times).

Ghosts as subject for scientific study

As I see it ghosts (spirits of those who have died) is contrary to the prevailing "physicalist" or "materialist" view of the vast majority of modern scientists.  I would say this is the ruling "paradigm," but I would appreciate it if I got that word off a bit: dictionaries are no help.

That means that scientists are not going to risk their careers investigating something they already know is nonsense.  It would be like asking one to investigate moon rocks for evidence of the presence of cheese.  Also, of course, a few have actually ventured into the area and come back empty-handed.  Scientists don't waste their time investigating things already disproved.

So the field is left to two other groups: those with a different belief-set who really want to somehow prove science "wrong" (although, ironically, were they to succeed science would merely co-opt them and alter its belief-set accordingly -- science does this on rare occasions -- and whoever was responsible would go down in history as having been a great scientist).  Then there are charlatans making money off it selling books and whatnot.

I personally think it is all a waste of time, not because I have a strong physicalist bias in my thinking, but because the reports have been around long enough with nothing convincing to the objective observer coming out of them that by now it is pretty plainly a mix of fraud, both venal and pious, superstition, delusion and over-active imaginations.