Cupid and St. Valentine

Although I'm sure you all (everyone here but me) already knows this, I just learned something-- St. Valentine is a Christian figure and Cupid is from Greek mythology.

I had always heard of them in the same breath and never gave it a thought until this thread when it caused me to wonder and I looked it up.  Amazing how we take things for granted.

The Skeptical Life

The following are my opinions based on a life of dealing with various forms of mental illness and different kinds of belief.  As you will see, I've settled into a basically skeptical frame of mind, with the attitude of not "believing" at all but only forming opinions, and then only when there is sufficient reason.

Because something gives you joy or relief or peace or whatever of that sort does not make it "real" in any sense of the word.  The only test for truth is truth, and in the long run -- indeed generally all the time -- truth is the best solution.  We have to deal with the world as it is, ugly as that may sometimes be, and not resort to wishful thinking -- that is no better than drinking to cover your problems and is seriously addictive.

  

What tends to happen when one relies on untrue ideas and teachings for happiness is what is known as cognitive dissonance, as aspects of reality begin to intrude and disturb the delusions, making matters much worse.

But how can I tell what is true and what isn't?  There are a number of tests, none of them perfect, but useful regardless.  One of them is whether the genuinely wise of the world believe it -- the scientists and educators and trained specialists who have recognized credentials.  They can be wrong, and this must be kept in mind, but generally following them greatly improves your odds.

Another test is to learn to recognize when you are being "read."  You will hear something like, "I'm picking up that something bad happened to you about twenty years ago.  Well, of course something bad happened to you twenty years ago -- bad things are always happening, but if you focus on this "correct" guess, you are falling into a clever trap. 

Another is people wanting to pray for you or do special things at temple for you.  Do them yourself.  It is hard to be rude to people and tell them you would rather they didn't, so obfuscate the issue -- say something like "I don't trust myself -- I'm skeptical (not about them but about your personal ability to deceive yourself via wishful thinking).  The implication that you are also skeptical of what they say kinda follows without being explicitly stated.  Don't "join in prayer."  They control the prayer and you are being manipulated.  Tell them your prayers are a private matter.

Of course this is when you are dealing with not just outright frauds but people who themselves are deluded or indoctrinated, so they may be very sincere and do good works and so on.  This is of course all just fine, until the indoctrination begins.

Skepticism is the key -- not cynicism, and don't let people use that word (you are willing to accept as true things that make sense and have good evidence).  You don't believe because something is good or uplifting or because of tradition or authority -- you believe because it is sensible, fits the world as we see it with real vision, has evidence and little if any counter-evidence.  The willingness to accept non-belief because there is no belief that works is perfectly fine -- science and philosophy are always progressing and answering questions that once were unanswerable, so who knows?  The ability to say, "I don't know" is one of the greatest ways possible of avoiding delusions.

"Seekers after truth" often amaze me.  If they really were such a seeker, they would take courses in ways of thinking, in logic and especially logical fallacies, in propaganda techniques, in magical thinking, and in cognitive processes.  Instead they seek out cults or at least abandon their natural disbelief when one comes their way.  The default to any assertion is disbelief.  One does not believe things without good reason, not just because someone says it's so.  This is of course obvious, but there are so many devices that people use to get you to forget this that one must travel carefully among the wolves.

Horror movies and travel

I hate horror movies; I see no point in paying good money to have my blood pressured raised.  It's too high now.  They don't bother my sleep though, I guess because I quickly forget them.  

It's a little like travel, which I also hate -- although I just love getting wherever I'm going -- paying good money for the privilege of waiting in line over and over and being treated like an object (the personnel you encounter, if employed by the airline, are always obsequious; if not (such as airport personal or passport checkers) they are self-important and rude.

More on evil brings its own evil

Spiders are definitely beautiful; that is another issue, right now I'm talking about right and wrong.

It is I think a common mistake to look at history and see that some horrible evils have in various societies been tolerated and even encouraged, and from that conclude that ethics are relative to the culture.  That is a non sequitur.  Slavery is the best example, but there are of course others.  That slavery has existed (and still exists) does not mean it is right.  It might be compared to someone saying that in all possible geometries parallel lines never intersect.  This was accepted generally for thousand years and even enthroned as an axiom, but now we know it is not true.  In short, in mathematics -- and in ethics -- that something is believed does not make it true -- or right.

How do we determine truth in mathematics?  Or in science?  Of course we never have absolute truth (a complete description) nor do we ever have absolute certainty (there always lurks the possibility of error), but over time mankind has made obvious scientific, mathematical and ethical progress.  We now understand slavery is wrong, and nowadays brand slavers as criminal.  This is done through the use of reason and observation -- in mathematics mainly via "proof" which is nothing more than rigorous reason.  In science via observation, experiment and, in the end, reason (thinking about and interpreting what we see).

The point is we find these things, we do not make them up.  We do not invent science or mathematics or ethics, we discover them, and over time we slowly eliminate the errors and build the edifice of truth that it is all based on.  This edifice, however, exists in a Platonic sense on its own, regardless of what we think or even if we never existed.

On the other issue we've disagreed on here, I would say that in the end justice is inevitable, based on nothing more than the laws of probability.  The vast majority of criminals end up sooner or later in jail or worse.  Those who are dishonest or gossips or self-righteous or judgmental and so on (and to an extent of course we all are) pay for it in all sorts of small ways, via our reputation, the happiness of ourselves and our families, and so on.  Also, I just don't buy it that powerful evil succeeds.  The Hitlers and Stalins of this world come to bad ends and history subsequently dishonors them.

I do not, however, see how this can be said to be the basis of any sort of religion.  It is just natural processes (here again the laws of probability for the most part).  Take a chance often enough and sooner or later you will lose.

Evil brings its own evil

It never seems to occur to most Westerners, Christian or other wise, that moral consequences for our behavior might just be a characteristic of existence, but if you ponder it, you can see how this must be so.  Time and chance must be allowed for, but the probability of bad consequences coming to the bad actor from bad behavior always exceeds the opposite, often to a huge extent.  No god or mystical force or whatever is necessary to bring this about.

That is not true that single events change the course of history and I would like to do everything I can to discourage such nonsense.  Not even Pearl Harbor really changed American culture (although both changed a few opinions, for the most part the population and culture stayed the same).

It is a myth of history that these historic events really change anything.  The laws, the culture, the political system, the religions, the population, the economy -- they all continue.  Real change happens much more slowly, even over generations.  Would-be world revolutionaries suffer from the delusion that some dramatic event can make the world go their way -- they always fail.

The United States, as is the case in all countries where the population has a significant voice in government, is strongly in favor of peace, and tends to violate this only under considerable provocation, and then the population, after a few years, begins to agitate (usually for selfish reasons -- being in a state of war is a tough business) for withdrawal.  It is the reason democracies rarely if ever go to war with each other and is the reason they are not able to sustain the sort of long-term war that would be needed to win in a place like Vietnam or the Middle East or against the Boers (to chose an example other than the US).  Military victories just don't do the job, nor do changes of regime.  Cultural change, as was done in Japan and Germany, is what works.

One final remark; those who oppose violent involvements always call for some sort of "exit strategy."  Of course there can be none such other than victory.  Otherwise one is merely telling the enemy what to do to get the Americans out of the picture.

Of course no one advocates war (I would hope).  Still, if a child is being attacked by a dog and no one else is around, what does one do?  Great powers have moral responsibilities and their populations individually have the moral responsibility to recognize and support this.

Life is Short

A theory (actually one should say an idea or maybe hypothesis, since "theory" really refers to a body of knowledge that puts an explanatory story onto the data) -- but let popular usage be, and call it a theory -- is not right or wrong because it seems outlandish to us, nor because its implications appeal to us or are exciting.  It is right or wrong only if it is right or wrong.

In reality, though, we can't afford to be so democratic.  We must assess suggestions and decide which should be studied first and which put off until all other possibilities fail, and maybe then we should just put the problem on the shelf as unresolved.  Life is short.

When science is wrong

It seems to me that there is an effort being made to justify attacking the well-established ideas of science (such as evolution, global warming, the absence of psychic stuff, the failure to find Sasquatch) on the sole and flimsy pretense that science sometimes changes its mind.  As has been noted a few times, this sort of stuff comes mainly from people who plainly know very little real science.

That made me wonder just how often science does change its mind about something important -- not what is reported in the popular press but in reality.  The only one I can think of happened early in my academic life -- the adoption of continental drift, and that idea had been supported by paleontologists for a couple decades before the evidence of shifting magnetic orientation in sea-floor deposits made the conclusion inescapable, even to the geologists.

It seems to me science as we have it is well grounded and not subject to much beyond some adjustment here and there.  It is for sure that there are extremely important unanswered questions, such as the nature of sentience, the nature of dark matter and energy, and huge issues like this, but it is unlikely the answers will involve changes in existing science.  When the answers are found, they will be pretty much new structures -- not discoveries that science is wrong somewhere but just expansions of existing knowledge.

The Universe is what the Universe is

I don't know about the design part of your response -- are you suggesting God created the world complicated, with difficult-to-understand principles so as to give us challenges?

I think the universe is what it is; sometimes easy to understand, but the further we get away from what seems intuitive the more difficult it will progressively become to "understand."  This is predictable -- stuff at the cosmic large and cosmically small seem counterintuitive, demonstrable experimentally and often predictable mathematically, but still way outside our daily experience and therefore our intuition has no value.

There are two proposed "interpretations" of the double-split experiment, neither of which comes even close to understandability or acceptability to me at least -- the Copenhagen and the multi-universe or infinitely splitting multi-universe.  The first implies observer interference (even if the observer is just a rock) and the second is just way too extravagant to be acceptable with just one experiment available, although I will admit the experiment does give one pause.

Braying out stupid opinions

It occurs to me that there are those who, when presented with an absurdity, cannot remain polite but have to try to convey how stupid what is being proposed really is.  Then, again, there are those who automatically decide anyone who disagrees with them is obnoxious and insulting.

  

A lot of people have never learned the old axiom that if one knows little about a subject, it is better to remain silent and learn rather than bray out poorly informed prejudices.  The most one should do when it is something out of one's depth is ask questions -- questions, no matter how dumb, are generally received while stupid assertions just irritate and bring out the worst in people.

Suppressed evidence and widespread sightings

The argument that claims of sightings or of massive suppressed evidence is made about almost if not every extraordinary claim, from Noah's Flood to alien pyramid builders to sunken civilizations to ghosts to visits of saints to alien abductions to Sasquatch to -- well, you get the idea.  Indeed, on every one of these topics and others there are books and more books written.

Most of it is I think to get money from the gullible; maybe some of it is genuinely believed (this possibility led me in my youth to read a lot of them).  It's all bunkum and not really all that hard to recognize as such, so that I tend to dismiss people who get excited about such things and try to persuade others as having something wrong -- some tick or another -- in their heads.

Reproduce according to their kind

What exactly is a species?  We know that species evolve into one another (even creationists say as much -- that dogs evolved from wolves, that horses and zebra are related, etc.)  They admit this sort of "micro-evolution."  What they say (at least the ones using Bible phrases), is that a species is a recent term and the unit that can't evolve is the "kind" -- you know, "Each after his kind."

We usually think of a species as a population capable of interbreeding and producing "viable" (themselves able to produce offspring) offspring.  This is of course an arbitrary line, but works reasonably well, at least for living creatures where you can breed them and see what happens.

The fact that living creatures fall into genera, families, classes, orders, and so on, so naturally -- occasionally the DNA, especially at the edges, has corrected a few misclassification -- but for the most part the old comparative anatomy methods did the trick with remarkable accuracy, is testimony that the history of life is one of "macro-evolution" and that the "kinds" of the creationists are meaningless and don't reflect anything real.

Defining science

Some tell us science is a way of seeing the world; others tell us it is a method; a few (the real philosophers I suspect) tell us that to be science an idea must have certain characteristics -- mainly that of being testable -- I think that is generally but not always true and that it is worthwhile to throw about wild speculations with the possibility that someone will think of a clever way to test it.

Well, of course, but does that distinguish "science" or just sane thinking?

I think of science metaphorically as a huge rambling edifice, with no plan or pretense of any control, going in every which direction, with pieces constantly being added.  Most of which gets added is small and not much noticed except in the dedicated peer-reviewed journals, although sometimes something big gets tacked on.

From time to time an error gets added to the edifice, and sooner or later (usually sooner) has to be removed or maybe remodeled, but for the most part the edifice we have it is sound and will stay as it is indefinitely, with occasional new paint.

Given the presence of a gun

Given presence of a gun, a spate of depression becomes a suicide,
a family fight becomes a murder,
a confused old man going in the wrong house is dead,
an automobile cut-off ends in a dead baby in the back seat, \
a disturbed high schooler ends up killing twenty or more fellow students.

Yes, Susan, there is a reality

Depends on what is "reality."  I kick a stone and hurt my toe (this has been done before) and say that proves the stone is real.  But it proves nothing of the sort.  The stone as I perceive it (something solid and capable of hurting me if I kick it) is an illusion.  The reality is the stone is an aggregation of atoms held together by electronic forces and it is these electronic forces that give the illusion created in our brain of solidity.

Still, electronic forces and atoms are real too, until you look more closely and see that they too are not what we at first thought.

The thing is illusions need some sort of underlying reality (even if it also turns out in the end to be an illusion) to generate the appearance -- layer after layer after layer of illusion, each in its turn generating illusions.  You can't have the illusion of rain in the desert without real atmospheric things going on to generate the appearance.

The one reality I feel quite sure about is that the reality we experience of substance and color and heat and all those things is all generated by our brains to give us an interface for dealing with the incoming sensory experiences, themselves all generated by their own set of illusions.

Religious fervor declared a mental illness

I'm not sure what is meant by "fervor" in the "religious fervor," (although I'm sure the official decision tried to define it).  Personally I think any "belief" is a form of mental derangement -- we should stick to having opinions and not commit ourselves emotionally to them.

(Anyone who practices introspection much, and does it with a good teacher, learns how to identify beliefs and distinguish them from opinions.  Basically a belief is something we assume and don't question, or if we do question it, we suffer guilt or fear or other negative emotions -- religions sometimes use this to prevent people from questioning their dogmas.  We assume that what goes up must come down, even though we intellectually know better, the belief is just part of the furniture that we sit on without noticing.)

Take belief in the Bible -- how many people believe in it and could never bring themselves to see it as just a possible attitude and one probably wrong?  Instead, they refuse to allow doubt to enter their head, and won't read stuff that might raise such doubts.  To me this sort of thing (whether religion or politics or whatever) is a mental illness.

My mom use to tell me stories about how precocious I was when I was an infant and toddler -- things I have since learned from others were all in my mom's head.  I believed them for a long time, and finding out I was not so special caused me considerable hurt, although of course in the end I am better off.  That just shows children believe (don't have opinions about but believe) what their folks tell them -- reason for adults to be very careful about what they indoctrinate their children with -- to my mind a form of child abuse.

Life has ups and downs

I learned many years ago that happiness and depression, not quite but close to the reverse sides of the coin, are basically personality traits with external events having a surface but not deep impact (bad events don't phase happy people and good events don't help the depressed all that much).

Within reasonable limits, we should be allowed to be what we are, and others should be sensitive to this.  That said, clinical depression is a disease (maybe an inherited one like a tendency to acne but still a disease) with potentially lethal consequences, no less than cancer or heart disease, and therefore to the extent medical intervention is possible it should be utilized.

Still, short such extremes, it is not necessary or even desirable to be happy all the time.  Life is Yin and Yang.