Saturday, June 20th
Dave Ramsey and Jesus
Recently I discovered the Dave Ramsey show. Dave Ramsey gives excellent financial advice, but the laugher is that he credits this advice to the Prince of Peace, Jesus. Jesus was a brilliant teacher, but his teaching was primarily for a political situation that does not exist in the U. S. today, and thus his paradoxical economic teaching, as expected, does not apply. Jesus taught non-violent resistance towards unrighteous authority, and he recognized that money was a form of power that, in the situation the Jews found themselves, should be avoided as much as possible. Therefore Jesus taught that his people should not save money:
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal... The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.' Then he said, 'This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.'" But God said to him, 'You fool!'
Jesus' attitude towards money is seen more clearly in his attitude towards debt. He recognized that the creditor has power over the debtor, as Dave Ramsey teaches continually. However, Jesus take on the situation is that such power is to be avoided. Therefore he taught that his people should not take the position of creditor, that they should immediately cancel any debt owed to them, and they should give without expecting repayment:
Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors... And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even 'sinners' lend to 'sinners,' expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back... When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."
[0 Comments]
Wednesday, May 27th
More on the human memome
One of the most involutary beliefs that we have is that we are dualistic beings: we consist of a material body and an immaterial mind. Even those of us, like me, who are physicalists, hold this belief. There is really no contradiction, because "immaterial" is not a synonym for "non-physical." Time and space, the only dimensions that we know of, have physical reality without being a type of material. What else does something have to be to qualify as a dimension? To answer this question we need to examine our memome in more detail. Like so many other species, perhaps all other living beings, we are a purposeful species. Even those who take the philosophical position that there is no ultimate purpose to life continue to live as us all, pursuing food and drink, avoiding pain, going to work and earning money, marrying and having children, and pursuing many other goals as well. To be purposeful requires two things. First of all, there needs to be movement towards the goal. Secondly, there needs to be a solid yardstick against which movement is measured. If there were no yardstick, motion would be merely random, and there would be no purpose. A species that did not have wired into its being both movement towards a goal and a yardstick against which this movement were measured would quickly perish. For our species, and probably many others if not all, space and time provide this yardstick.
We think of the universe as being two things: matter and immaterial dimensions. These seem utterly distinct. Yet in the twentieth century the discovery was made that matter has an effect on dimensions: it can make space/time bend. How is it possible for something material to have an effect on something totally immaterial?One way is to say that space/time is a kind of material. I suspect that when people first learn of the bending of space/time, this is what they think. Nevertheless, physicists tell us that we are to in no way consider space/time a type of material. All of this parallels mind/body dualism. The mind is an apparently immaterial entity that "bends" the body this way and that. When we look out into the cosmos we see matter, an apparently material thing that "bends" immaterial space/time this way and that. This is not as trivial as it may seem: scientists after all are people consisting of mind and body, and when they look out into the cosmos, they see something which is the mirror image of the human mind/body experience.
There is another possible but intriguing parallel between the human memome and the universe in the effect of quantum foam. Just as there is a division in the human memome between a huge number of involuntary beliefs corresponding to our physical world, there is a much smaller percentage of beliefs that do not: our voluntary beliefs. We can choose to believe a wild variety of all kinds of illogical things, such as the existence of ESP, angels and demons, UFO's, etc. We see a reflection of this on the quantum level, where the normal modes of observation reveal a nonsensical array of randomness. It has even been observed that on the quantum level, particles seem to respond according to the expectations of the observer. This raises some interesting questions. Is the mind (memome) of the observer causing the particles to behave in an expected way, or are the particles somehow causing the expectation in the mind of the observer? Both explanations seem ridiculous.
[0 Comments]
Tuesday, May 26th
Genomes and memomes
One way of describing a mind was proposed by biologist Richard Dawkins. He has suggested that a mind is made up of memes, beliefs that are held by the mind. The word "meme" rhymes with "gene" and the parallel is deliberate. Just as our bodies are built and patterned by our genes, our minds our built and patterned by our memes.
What do genes look like? They exist on the 24 human chromosomes. Rather than a gene existing in a specific place on a chromosome, it is spread out in different locations on the chromosome so that the process of untangling a specific gene can be quite complex. Some scientists have undertaken the task of doing this and this task has been labled the Human Genome Project. What scientists have discovered is that the vast majority of genes, well over 99%, are shared by all humans. All our apparent differences are accounted for by a tiny fraction of our total genetic makeup. Even more surprising to some is that we share over 99% of our genes with chimpanzees, an organism apparently much different than a human.
Just as it is possible to speak of a human genome, it is possible to speak of a human memome, and some are beginning to do just that. A memome would be the sum total of absolutely everything that all humans believe. Could it be possible that the human memome looks a lot like the human genome? I believe that is does. Just as humans share the vast majority of their genes, we share the vast majority of our beliefs. I call these beliefs involuntary beliefs, beliefs that we simply cannot stop believing because they are woven into the memome of every human being. Examples of such beliefs are the belief that we exist, that the universe exists, that things can move, etc. etc. A very small percentage of our beliefs are voluntary beliefs, the beliefs that separate us. Such beliefs include but are not limited to political and religious beliefs.
Memomes, like genomes, have evolved over a period of at least hundreds of millions of years. Like genomes, memomes have been selected for and we have inherited from our remote ancestors a highly developed memome. What kind of memome would be selected for? The most successful memome would be a set of beliefs that closely matched what the physical world actually is. The process of evolution however is not finished by any stretch of the imagination and our memome cannot be a perfect match for the physical world. This idea has been expressed by some philosophers, who say the "thing in itself" can never be known. I agree with this statement, but I believe that the "thing in itself" can be approximated very very closely by the human memome.
Suppose it were true that over 99% of our beliefs were involuntary and less that 1% were voluntary. This less that 1% of our voluntary beliefs certainly seem complicated enough and nearly impossible to untangle. However they are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to our involuntary beliefs. Therefore untangling our involuntary beliefs seems like an impossible task. I believe, however, that there are a set of people who have made great progress in mapping our involuntary beliefs. These people are called physicists. Just as some biologists have made a life work out of mapping the human genome, physicists make a life work of mapping the human memome, that is, the part that consists of our involuntary beliefs. I know that this seems fantastic. Can it be true that we all believe all the weird and sometimes seemingly contradictory stuff that physicists come up with? The answer is: not on a conscious level, but buried within our memome is the capacity to know and believe all of that stuff. Just as most of us don't know or care about the mapping of our genome, most of us don't know or care about the mapping of the involuntary part of our memome. I also believe that in the same way that we are over 99% genetically identical with our closest relative, the chimpanzee, we are over 99% similar memetically. Chimpanzees perceive the world physically almost identically to the way that we do.
[0 Comments]
Saturday, May 16th
Postal Thoughts
Recently the attention of the nation was turned briefly towards the problems of the post office when postmaster Jack Potter appeared before congress. I followed the story with more interest than others perhaps, because I am a mailman. The little bit I heard from the news about the session made me wonder whether much was accomplished by the whole business. I failed to hear anyone get to the crux of the matter. The economic problems of the post office can be summed up easily in two words: falling productivity. The fact is that circumstances are conspiring to make falling productivity within the post office inevitable, and ultimately the post office itself must fail.
A simple example will make this clear. Imagine that Fred the mailman has been delivering the mail on Oak Street for twenty years. It takes Fred one hour to deliver Oak Street. Back in 1989 the 100 households that Fred delivered on Oak Street received on average 6 pieces of mail per day. However because of the increase in use of electronic communication they now only receive 5 pieces per day. It still takes Fred one hour to deliver Oak Street, however he is only able to deliver 500 pieces per hour. His productivity has fallen by nearly 17%. If we multiply this hour times the millions of work hours the post office must spend annually to physically deliver the mail, the problem is clear.
Economists tell us that the only thing that can sustain a real increase in wages is an increase in productivity. The converse is true. A case of decrease in productivity can only be offset by a decrease in real wages. Fred's union has made a good case over the years that Fred is in fact working harder and harder and therefore deserves higher and higher wages. The argument is appealing, but immaterial. It is not hard work that merits higher wages, but more productive work. Another simple example will make this clear. Suppose that there are two workers. One is breaking concrete with a jackhammer and another is using a sledgehammer. There is no doubt that the worker using the sledgehammer is working harder, however he is working less productively.
We are living in an age when one industry is being slowly replaced by another. Electronic communication is replacing paper communication. Although there may by minor ebbs and flows in the volume of paper mail, inevitably mail volume will continue to decline and, inevitably, so will the productivity of the post office. The question is not if the post office will become an unsustainable institution, but when.
Congress has a responsibility to oversee the transition from a nation with a post office to one without one. Obviously the post office cannot simply be closed anytime soon without major repercussions, economic and otherwise. However we cannot continue to pretend that a crisis is not inevitable. Postmaster Potter's most controversial proposal, that mail service be decreased from six days to five is a good one, because it will increase the productivity of the nation's letter carriers. In the example given above Fred was delivering 600 pieces of mail per hour in the course of a 6 day week. If in twenty years mail volume has dropped by about 17%, this means that if mail delivery is reduced to five days, productivity can be reestablished to the point it was twenty years ago. For similar reasons, an eventual four day delivery week (when the time is right) would be even better.
We have a blind spot where the post office is concerned, because it is such an ancient and omnipresent institution. Similar blind spots have caused trouble in the past. At the turn of the last century, the horse and carriage industry was replaced rather quickly by the horseless carriage industry (the automobile). Predictably, those within the horse and carriage industry were the last to see this coming.
[0 Comments]
Friday, March 27th
good quote
There is an inherent dichotomy between studying the trees and seeing the forest. I think a big part of the problem is how we historically view the function of decision making. The attraction to the beneficial and repulsion of the detrimental is the primordial biological binary code on which all our thought processes are based, not some overarching conflict between good and bad. Amoebae distinguish between good and bad. We are just very complex manifestations of that basic impulse. Between black and white are not just shades of grey, but all the colors of the spectrum. The problem with idealizing good vs. bad is that it creates a brittle linear morality, where if a little of something is good, than a lot must be that much better and anything at all bad, is all bad. There is no conceptual valuation of reciprocity, reaction, balance, laws of unintended consequences, etc. This complexity is usually derided as moral relativism and everyone chooses sides.
The conceptual flaw with moral absolutes is that the absolute is basis, not apex. It's zero, not one. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell.
— John Merryman, Sparks, Maryland
[20 Comments]
Tuesday, January 20th
Is it goodbye to Clintonville?
It's been a while since I've posted anything on this blog, and I feel the need to write. This is a good thing- my mood has been rather blah for some time. I finally went to the psychiatrist and pitched the idea that I have an anxiety disorder- and I got my antidepressants. I think they're really helping. Right now I'm only on 10 mg, but I'm getting ramped up to 30 mg. Hopefully things will be much better then.
Nancy and I are in the process of trying to buy a condo in Upper Arlington. We're going to miss Clintonville, but, we both have the feeling that we have "done" Clintonville and it is time to move on. Of course, we're not that far from Clintonville and we can always return to visit our favorite haunts.
For some time now I've participated on a pantheist list, and I'm really enjoying it. There is a lot of discussion of god from a non-theistic point of view. I find this superior to the atheistic viewpoint, which, it seems to me, is more anti-theist than atheistic.
[0 Comments]
|
