Thursday, March 27th
George Will is at it again
George Will really pissed me off today with his column about supposedly altruistic conservatives: Bleeding Hearts but Tight Fists. He says:
Although liberal families' incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).
What is undisclosed is what percentage of this charitable giving on the part of conservatives goes to the maintaining of the givers' conservative churches, arguably a non-altruistic aim. Will writes:
The single biggest predictor of someone's altruism, Willett says, is religion. It increasingly correlates with conservative political affiliations because, as Brooks' book says, "the percentage of self-described Democrats who say they have 'no religion' has more than quadrupled since the early 1970s." America is largely divided between religious givers and secular nongivers, and the former are disproportionately conservative. One demonstration that religion is a strong determinant of charitable behavior is that the least charitable cohort is a relatively small one -- secular conservatives.
This paragraph reveals the flaw in the logic. There are in fact, four groups of givers, not two. They are:
1. Religious Conservatives
2. Religious Liberals
3. Secular Conservatives
4. Secular Liberals
So, the least charitable of these is secular conservatives, eh? Hmmm...
The really fair comparison is to compare the rather large group of Religious Conservatives to the rather small group of Religious Liberals, rather than lump all the liberals together. But then of course you might get an answer you don't like.
Saturday, March 22nd
Done with philosophy for now
I've set aside philosophy for the time being. Indeed, I'm wondering exactly why it is that I was ever so fascinated with philosophy in the first place. Everything tends to run into a dead end. As a friend of mine has pointed out, if you want to find out about the mind/body problem, forget the philosophers. Ask a neurologist.
So in my current state of being enamoured of science, I've been reading a couple of books about astronomy that are aimed at laymen, Big bang : the origin of the universe by Simon Singh and Alpha & Omega : The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe by Charles Seife. After finishing Singh's book I dove into Seife's book and find I don't like it quite as well. Seife's writing is "quirky," and strangely this bothers me. Strangely, because my writing can be quirky to the extreme. Seife covers in 50 pages what Singh does in over 400, but moves beyond Singh's book by talking about elementary particles. This is as far as I've gotten in Seife's book, and I'll let you know later how things are going.
Maybe my newfound attraction for scientific topics has something to do with dad's death over a year ago. Dad was a scientist, and up until I was about 12 years old or so I wanted to be a scientist, too. I remember pulling Dad's old calculus books off the shelf and thumbing through the issues of Science magazine when I was about eight years old. Of course, that was a pointless exercise!
Years later I can pick up Science magazine and find stuff I actually comprehend, although calculus is still beyond me. This is rather frustrating, because I sometimes run across concepts expressed in calculus in the topics that interest me. Perhaps after I retire from the post office I can pick up where I left off in my mathematical studies.
Tuesday, March 11th
Evolution of the God meme
In "The Selfish Gene" Dawkins writes:
The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be recified in the next. The 'everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
Some of my colleagues have suggested to me that this account of the survival value of the god meme begs the question. In the last analysis they wish always to go back to 'biological advantage'. To them it is not good enough to say that the idea of a god has 'great psychological appeal'. They want to know why it has great psychological appeal. Psychological appeal means appeal to brains, and brains are shaped by natural selection of genes in gene-pools. They want to find some way in which having a brain like that improves gene survival.
I would like to take the challenge posed by Dawkin's colleagues and propose one "answer to deep and troubling questions" the god meme solves, and how it evolved.
Consider the "corner of your eye" experience when you seem to catch a glimpse of something but it isn't there. As you are considering this, remember that the same phenomenon works for hearing. (Did you hear something? I could have sworn I heard something.) Keeping this double phenomenon in mind is important for my theory.
Many have suggested that the "corner of your eye" experience could be ancestral to our ideas about God, but to my knowledge no one has gone beyond saying that "somehow" this happened. I am proposing a possible "somehow."
It is easy to see how an ancient anthropoid that was ancestral to, say both humans and chimps, would develop the "corner of your eye" instinct. An anthropoid with this feature would have an advantage over an anthropoid that did not. Responding to a "threat that is not there" will, on some occasions, actually save your life when the threat really is there. More importantly, it will give you a "hair trigger" that will make you more likely to respond to tiny sensory stimuli that end up being real threats.
However this instinct (and at this point in evolutionary time it still is an instinct) would be inextricably linked to another instinct: the fight or flight instinct.
In this population of early anthropoids, there will be a bell curve of how the fight or flight instinct will be played out: in the middle of the bell we will have anthropoids that are equally likely to fight or flee, but as we get on either side of the bell it is apparent that we can divide these anthropoids roughly into two phenotypes: those more likely to fight and those more likely to flee.
I believe that humans are one modern species that developed from the "fighters". What would be selected for in this phenotype? More intelligence, including bigger brain size. Greater overall size and a more complex social structure would likely develop. In time language would develop as well as a primitive kind of reasoning, in which the fight or flight instinct can more properly be called a fight or flight decision: a rational choice is made to fight or flee.
Now let's leap forward a bit in evolutionary time and consider another primitive type of being that is fully human, or nearly so, and has developed a fight or flight choice response, language, and a complex social structure. This social structure looks roughly like a tribe, with a "chief" and some number of "indians." A situation has developed where the tribe occupies a bit of land which supplies their food needs. A rival tribe exists with which there are numerous skirmishes that have escalated to the point where a "fight or flight" decision must be made by the chief. Should they stay and risk annihilation at the hands of their enemies? Or should they leave and go in an uncertain search of a new place, risking the same fate? How would such a primitive "chief" decide? Since he has developed language he will have a primitive concept of "voices," and there will be two primary voices he will listen to. There is his "inner voice," or subjective voice, which in a particular case, tells him, "Fight!" However there is an "outside voice," the voice of the "indians," which in the same case, may tell him "Flee!"
The chief will weigh these two voices and in many cases his choice will be what we call a "no-brainer." The chief makes a quick decision and that is that. However, there will be a sliding scale of increasingly difficult decisions until the weight of the voice saying "fight!" is exactly, or near exactly the weight of the voice saying "flee!" The choice is essentially random.
What would help immensely here would be the existence of a third voice to break the tie. And, of course (in the chief's mind) there is one! His anthropoid ancesters long ago developed the "corner of your eye" response and an analogous auditory response. Since this third voice certainly exists as a meme (in the chief's brain, or primitive mind perhaps) it would be very valuable to know if it had an opinion to offer in the fight or flight decision.
This idea of a third voice explains a lot about our religious behavior. Prayer, of course, is asking the third voice for an answer to a particularly knotty problem. In the days when the "chief" lived two primary amplification methods would be tried to get the third voice louder. One primitive method of amplification would be to ask the voice (or to use the modern word, the "god") a question and cast lots to discover the answer. This method is mentioned in the New Testament as the way the disciples replaced Judas upon his death, and many believe that the "Urim and the Thummim" of the Old Testament were two lots corresponding to "yes" and "no." A second method would be to take a visible object such as a piece of wood or stone and use it as a focusing object. These wouldn't be completely random items, but would be chosen by our primitive chief through a primitively rational process. The "corner of your eye" experience causes a human to quickly look in the direction of the imagined movement. His eyes will be drawn to whatever object they chance to fall on. Keeping his eyes focused and undestracted on this object would help in the quest to understand what the elusive third voice was saying. Later, of course, the wood or other object was carved into the shape of an animate object to facilitate better hearing of the god, and later still the physical object would be replaced by scriptures.
Modern religions offer clues that they evolved from their remote ancestors. Fundamentalist Christians believe that they have a perfect inside voice (the Holy Spirit who lives in each true believer), and a perfect outside voice (the voice of Jesus). Christians speak of going to their "prayer closet" (to shut out outside noise, or the "outside voice") and listening for God as a "still small voice." Buddhists on the other hand try hard to shut out their "inside voice" by meditation on a problem with a difficult but trivial answer, such as, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" The purpose is to quiet the "inside voice" to the point that it becomes so close to completely quiet that "enlightenment," which means hearing the elusive third voice, occurs. When one achieves this enlightenment, one is able to untie knotty problems that are not so trivial.
If all this seems fantastic, remember that our early ancesters had it much tougher than we do when it comes to questions of survival. They faced multiple threats to their existence every day that we can only imagine. To use a modern term, they were "jumpy" to the extreme. It is small wonder that they imagined their world to be full of unseen beings. It is only natural that "gods" should evolve from the "corner of your eye" experience, since this experience was far more common in the dawn of human existence, and a base of memes from which to make rational decisions much less developed.
My theory also explains why theists are always saying, "There are no atheists in foxholes." A soldier is subject to many random variables over which he has no control, any one of which may end his life. There is increasing pressure to look for an alternative, any alternative that will increase the odds of survival. So, in theory, the pressure of a foxhole is so great that no atheist, no matter how strong willed, can resist praying. And this gives us a clue as to why the god meme developed. To use Steven Jay Gould's term, the god meme was a spandrel to the underlying evolution of a rational mind. An animal when faced with only bad options will pace back and forth in its cage because it acts only on instinct. But we are not like animals with instinct. Pacing back and forth mentally will eventually drive a rational creature insane. A creature with a rational mind must have some kind of "safety valve" to keep this from happening, and the god meme fits the bill perfectly.
Sunday, March 9th
Fred the Mailman
Well, I really feel like a mailman after yesterday! In case you missed it, we set a new record here in Columbus for amount of snow in a 24 hr period. "Set" is not really the word: "shattered" is more like it. I think the old record was something like 9.7 inches. At port columbus we got 20 inches yesterday.
And I was out in it.
It's not the first time I've carried in record setting weather. Some years ago I carried when the air temperature was 22 below. That's without the wind chill.
The reason that this is significant for me is that I went into this winter season with severe doubts about my ability to make it through the winter. Although a number of people have told me it was irrational to believe it, I couldn't help myself. Of course, I haven't made it through yet...
The house looks great with the piano in place. I wondered when we got it back if I would be motivated to play. I had almost no drive to play my keyboard at all. But, in fact, I play the piano nearly every day and it is quite satisfying.
So my old keyboard is now up for sale...
Monday, March 3rd
Happy birthday to me (number 50)
I haven't had much to say lately about my personal life, using this blog mainly for my flights of theological and philosophical fancy. Unfortunately for me, these musings probably led me into the throes of another manic attack which peaked last Friday. I didn't have to be hospitalized this time, but I did have to leave work and get put on a new medication. So now in addition to the lamyctal I'm also taking zyprexa. This is only until I get in to see the psychiatrist (this coming Friday) when I expect they will switch me to abilify.
Prior to my manic phase was my birthday week. Nancy noticed that I was feeling down. I don't tend towards severe depressive phases, so I guess I spread it out over the whole week. There were exiting things about my birthday week. We finally brought my baby grand piano home, and we had a dinner gathering on my 50th birthday with relatives and a few close friends. Afterwards we all went to Ashley's to sing karaoke.
I really had fun, despite my apparently depressed mood. I was puttin' away the alcohol like I used to in my youth, finishing off with a shot of Glenfiddich. Pretty good stuff it was.
My mind is still running around, mostly in circles I suppose, with grand philosophical ideas. Hopefully the medicine will bring me more down to earth. Then I'll get to inflict more theological and philosophical wierdness upon the blog world again.
Which reminds me: isn't it wierd that on your 50th birthday you've really had 51 birthdays? Because on your first birthday you have had two birthdays (your actual day of birth plus the one today) and on your second birthday you've really had 3 birthdays, etc.
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