IDC gets on board the brain train

An article titled Religion on the Brain (subscription required) in the May 26, 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (Volume 52, Issue 38, Page A14) examined what neuroscientists are discovering about religion and the brain. It is a curious article. The author (Richard Monastersky) seems to be trying very hard to find evidence in support of the idea that brain research is pointing to the independent existence of a soul/mind, but it is clear on reading it that he comes up short and that there is no such evidence, only the hopes of a very small minority of scientists.
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Religion’s last stand-2: The role of Descartes

In the previous posting, I discussed two competing models of the mind/brain relationship.

It seems to me that the first model, where the physical brain is all there is and the mind is simply the creation of the brain, is the most persuasive one since it is the simplest and accepting it involves no further complications. In this model, our bodies are purely material things, with the brain’s workings enabling us to think, speak, reason, act, and so forth. The idea of ‘free will’ is an illusion due to the brain being an enormously complicated system whose processes and end results cannot be predicted. (A good analogy would be classically chaotic systems like the weather. Because of the specific non-linearity of the equations governing weather, we cannot predict long-term weather even though the system is a deterministic and materialistic.)

The second model, that of an independently existing non-material mind/soul, separate from the brain and directing the brain, immediately raises all kinds of problems, which have long been recognized. The scientist-philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) of “I think, therefore I am” fame was perhaps the first person to formulate this mind-body dualism (or at least he is the person most closely associated with the idea) and it is clear that he felt that it was necessary to adopt this second model if one was to retain a belief in god.

But he realized immediately that it raises the problem of how the non-material mind/soul can interact with the material brain/body to get it to do things. Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, with whom Descartes had an extended correspondence, was unable to understand Descartes’ explanation of this interaction and kept prodding him on this very question. Descartes had no adequate answer for her, even though both clearly wanted to believe in the existence of god and the soul. In the introduction to his translation of Descartes’ Meditations and other Metaphysical Writings (which contains extended segments of the Elizabeth-Descartes correspondence), Desmond Clarke writes:

After repeated attempts to answer the question, how is it possible for something which is not physical to interact with something else which, by definition is not physical?, Descartes concedes that he cannot explain how it is possible.

But he tried, using the best scientific knowledge available to him at that time. He argued that the location of the soul’s interaction with the body occurred in the pineal gland.

As is well known, Descartes chose the pineal gland because it appeared to him to be the only organ in the brain that was not bilaterally duplicated and because he believed, erroneously, that it was uniquely human. . . By localizing the soul’s contact with body in the pineal gland, Descartes had raised the question of the relationship of mind to the brain and nervous system. Yet at the same time, by drawing a radical ontological distinction between body as extended and mind as pure thought, Descartes, in search of certitude, had paradoxically created intellectual chaos.

Although Descartes failed in his efforts to convincingly demonstrate the independent existence of the soul, research into the relationship of religious beliefs to the central nervous system of the brain has continued.

Descartes is an interesting character. Much of his scientific work, and even his temperament, seem to indicate a materialistic outlook. But at the same time, he took great pains to try and find proofs of god’s existence. One gets the sense that he was a person trying to convince himself of something he did not quite believe in, and had he lived in a different time might have rejected god with some relief. The article on Descartes in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, 13 June 2006 says:

Even during Descartes’s lifetime there were questions about whether he was a Catholic apologist, primarily concerned with supporting Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned only with protecting himself with pious sentiments while establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic physics.

The article points to reasons for the ambiguousness of his views, which could be due to the fact that there was, at that time, considerable fear of the power of the Catholic Church and this may have guided the way he presented his work.

In 1633, just as he was about to publish The World (1664), Descartes learned that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) had been condemned in Rome for publishing the view that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Because this Copernican position is central to his cosmology and physics, Descartes suppressed The World, hoping that eventually the church would retract its condemnation. Although Descartes feared the church, he also hoped that his physics would one day replace that of Aristotle in church doctrine and be taught in Catholic schools.

Descartes definitely comes across as somewhat less than pious, and non-traditional in his religious beliefs.

Descartes himself said that good sense is destroyed when one thinks too much of God. He once told a German protégée, Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), who was known as a painter and a poet, that she was wasting her intellect studying Hebrew and theology. He also was perfectly aware of – though he tried to conceal – the atheistic potential of his materialist physics and physiology. Descartes seemed indifferent to the emotional depths of religion. Whereas Pascal trembled when he looked into the infinite universe and perceived the puniness and misery of man, Descartes exulted in the power of human reason to understand the cosmos and to promote happiness, and he rejected the view that human beings are essentially miserable and sinful. He held that it is impertinent to pray to God to change things. Instead, when we cannot change the world, we must change ourselves.

Clearly he was not orthodox in his thinking. Although he tried to believe in god, it was his emphasis on applying the materialistic principles that he used in his scientific work to try and identify the mechanism by which the mind interacts with the brain that has the potential to create the big problem for religion.

To sum up Descartes’ argument, following sound scientific (methodological naturalistic) principles, he felt that if the mind interacted with the brain, then there had to be (1) some mechanism by which the non-material mind could influence the material brain, and (2) some place where this interaction took place. Although he could not satisfactorily answer the first question, he at least postulated a location for the interaction, the pineal gland. We know now that that is wrong, but the questions he raised are still valid and interesting ones that go to the heart of religion.

Next: What current researchers are finding about the brain and religion.

POST SCRIPT: Documentary on Rajini Rajasingham-Thiranagama

I have written before about the murder of my friend Rajini Rajasingham-Thiranagama, who had been an active and outspoken campaigner for human rights in Sri Lanka. I have learned that a documentary about her life called No More Tears Sister is the opening program in the 2006 PBS series P.O.V.

In the Cleveland area, the program is being shown on Friday, June 30, 2006 at 10:00pm on WVIZ 25. Airing dates vary by location, with some PBS stations showing it as early as June 27. The link above gives program listings for other cities. The synopsis on the website says:

If love is the first inspiration of a social revolutionary, as has sometimes been said, no one better exemplified that idea than Dr. Rajani Thiranagama. Love for her people and her newly independent nation, and empathy for the oppressed of Sri Lanka – including women and the poor – led her to risk her middle-class life to join the struggle for equality and justice for all. Love led her to marry across ethnic and class lines. In the face of a brutal government crackdown on her Tamil people, love led her to help the guerrilla Tamil Tigers, the only force seemingly able to defend the people. When she realized the Tigers were more a murderous gang than a revolutionary force, love led her to break with them, publicly and dangerously. Love then led her from a fulfilling professional life in exile back to her hometown of Jaffna and to civil war, during which her human-rights advocacy made her a target for everyone with a gun. She was killed on September 21, 1989 at the age of 35.

As beautifully portrayed in Canadian filmmaker Helene Klodawsky’s “No More Tears Sister,” kicking off the 19th season of public television’s P.O.V. series, Rajani Thiranagama’s life is emblematic of generations of postcolonial leftist revolutionaries whose hopes for a future that combined national sovereignty with progressive ideas of equality and justice have been dashed by civil war – often between religious and ethnic groups, and often between repressive governments and criminal rebel gangs. Speaking out for the first time in the 15 years since Rajani Thiranagama’s assassination, those who knew her best talk about the person she was and the sequence of events that led to her murder. Especially moving are the memories of Rajani’s older sister, Nirmala Rajasingam, with whom she shared a happy childhood, a political awakening and a lifelong dedication to fighting injustice; and her husband, Dayapala Thiranagama, who was everything a middle-class Tamil family might reject – a Sinhalese radical student from an impoverished rural background. Also included are the recollections of Rajani’s younger sisters, Vasuki and Sumathy; her parents; her daughters, Narmada and Sharika; and fellow human-rights activists who came out of hiding to tell her story. The film rounds out its portrayal with rare archival footage, personal photographs and re-enactments in which Rajani is portrayed by daughter Sharika Thiranagama. The film is narrated by Michael Ondaatje, esteemed author of The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost.

I knew Rajini well. We were active members of the Student Christian Movement in Sri Lanka when we were both undergraduates at the University of Colombo. It does not surprise me in the least that she threw herself with passion into the struggle for justice. She was brave and spoke the truth, even when it was unpalatable to those in power and with guns, and backed up her words with actions, thus putting her life on the line for her beliefs. Such people are rare. I am proud to have known her.

Religion’s last stand: The brain

As almost everyone is aware, the science-religion wars have focused largely on the opposition of some Christian groups to the teaching of evolution. The religious objections to Darwin’s theory of natural selection have been based on the fact that if the universe and the diversity of life that we see around us could have come about without the guidance of a conscious intelligence like god (even operating under the pseudonym of ‘intelligent designer’), then what need would we have for believing in a god?

But while evolution has been the main focus of attention, I see that as more of a preliminary skirmish to the real final battle battleground for religion, which involves the brain.

The crucial question for the sustaining of religious beliefs is the relationship of the mind to the brain. Is the mind purely a creature of the brain, and our thoughts and decisions merely the result of the neurons firing in our neuronal networks? If so, the mind is essentially a material thing. We may have ideas and thoughts and a sense of consciousness and free will that seem to be nonmaterial, but that is an illusion. All these things are purely the products of interactions of matter in our brains. In this model, the mind is entirely the product of the physical brain. This premise underlies the articles selected for the website MachinesLikeUs.com.

Or is the mind a separate (and non-material) entity, that exists independently of the brain and is indeed superior to it, since it is the agent that can cause the neurons in our brain to fire in certain ways and thus enable the brain to think and feel and make decisions? In this model, the ‘mind’ is who ‘I’ really am, and the material body ‘I’ possess is merely the vehicle through which ‘I’ am manifested. In this model, the mind is synonymous with the soul.

If we are to preserve the need for god, then it seems that one must adopt the second model, that human beings (at the very least among animals) are not merely machines operating according to physical laws. We need to possess minds that enable us to think and make decisions and tell our bodies how to act. Most importantly, our minds are supposed to have the capacity of free-will. After all, what would be the value of an act of ‘faith’ if the mind were purely driven by mechanical forces in the brain?

It should be immediately obvious why the nature of the mind is a far more disturbing question for religion than evolution is or ever will be. With evolution, the question centers around whether the mechanism of natural selection (and its corollary principles) is sufficient to explain the diversity of life and changes over time. As such, the debate boils down to the question of weighing the evidence for and against and determining whether which is more plausible.

But plausibility lies in the eye of the beholder and we have seen in a previous posting how the desire to preserve beliefs one holds dear leads people to adopt intellectual strategies that enable them to do so.

Tim van Gelder, writing in the article Teaching Critical Thinking: Some Lessons from Cognitive Science (College Teaching, Winter 2005, vol. 53, No. 1, p. 41-46) says that the strategies adopted are: “1. We seek evidence that supports what we believe and do not seek and avoid or ignore evidence that goes against it. . . 2. We rate evidence as good or bad depending on whether it supports or conflicts with our belief. That is, the belief dictates our evaluation of the evidence, rather than our evaluation of the evidence determining what we should believe. . . 3. We stick with our beliefs even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence as long as we can find at least some support, no matter how slender.”

In the discussions about evolution, people who wish to preserve a role for god have plenty of viable options at their disposal. They can point to features that seem to have a low probability of occurring without the intervention of an external, willful, and intelligent guidance (aka god). These are the so-called ‘irreducibly complex’ systems touted by intelligent design creationism (IDC) advocates. Or they can point to the seeming absence of transitional fossils between species. Or they can point to seemingly miraculous events or spiritual experiences in their lives.

Scientists argue that none of these arguments are valid, that plausible naturalistic explanations exist for all these things, and that the overwhelming evidence supports evolution by natural selection as sufficient to explain things, without any need for any supernatural being.

But in one sense, that argument misses the point. As long as the debate is centered on weighing the merits of competing evidence and arriving at a judgment, van Gelder’s point is that it does not matter if the balance of evidence tilts overwhelmingly to one side. People who strongly want to believe in something will take the existence of even the slenderest evidence as sufficient for them. And it seems likely that the evolution debate, seeing as it involves complex systems and long and subtle chains of inferential arguments, will always provide some room to enable believers to retain their beliefs.

But the mind/brain debate is far more dangerous for religion because it involves the weighing of the plausibility of competing concepts, not of evidence. The fundamental question is quite simple and easily understood: Is the brain all there is and the mind subordinate to it, a product of its workings? Or is the mind an independently existing entity with the brain subordinate to it?

This is not a question that scientific data and evidence has much hope of answering in the near future. Eliminating the mind as an independently existing entity has all the problems associated with proving a negative, and is similar to trying to prove that god does not exist.

But since the mind, unlike god, is identified with each individual and is not necessarily directly linked to god, discussing its nature carries with it less religious baggage, and its nature can be examined more clinically

Next: Descartes gets the ball rolling on the mind and the brain.

POST SCRIPT: Choosing god

I came across this story (thanks to onegoodmove) that illustrates the point that I was trying to make on the way people choose what kind of god to believe in. I have no idea if the events actually occurred, though, or if the story has been embellished to make the point.

The subject was philosophy. Nietzsche, a philosopher well known for his dislike of Christianity and famous for his statement that ‘god is dead’, was the topic. Professor Hagen was lecturing and outside a thunderstorm was raging. It was a good one. Flashes of lightning were followed closely by ominous claps of thunder. Every time the professor would describe one of Nietzsche’s anti-Christian views the thunder seemingly echoed his remarks.

At the high point of the lecture a bolt of lightning struck the ground near the classroom followed by a deafening clap of thunder. The professor, non-plussed, walked to the window, opened it, and starting jabbing at the sky with his umbrella. He yelled, “You senile son of a bitch, your aim is getting worse!”

Suffice it to say that some students were offended by his irreverent remark and brought it to the attention of the Department Head. The Department Head in turn took it to the Dean of Humanities who called the professor in for a meeting. The Dean reminded the professor that the students pay a lot of tuition and that he shouldn’t unnecessarily insult their beliefs.

“Oh,” says the professor, “and what beliefs are those?”

“Well, you know” the Dean says, “most students attending this University are Christians. We can’t have you blaspheming during class.”

“Surely” says the professor, “the merciful God of Christianity wouldn’t throw lightning bolts. It’s Zeus who throws lightning bolts.”

Later the Dean spoke with the Department Head, and said, “The next time you have a problem with that professor, you handle it, and let him make an ass out of you instead.”

The desire for belief preservation.

In the previous post we saw how human beings are believed to not be natural critical thinkers, preferring instead to believe in the first plausible explanation for anything that comes along, not seeing these initial explanations as merely hypotheses to be evaluated against competing hypotheses.

But one might think that when we are exposed to alternative hypotheses, we might then shift gears into a critical mode. But Tim van Gelder, writing in the article Teaching Critical Thinking: Some Lessons from Cognitive Science (College Teaching, Winter 2005, vol. 53, No. 1, p. 41-46) argues that what foils this is the human desire for belief preservation.

He quotes seventeenth century philosopher Francis Bacon who said:

The mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced.

In other words, van Gelder says, “the mind has intrinsic tendencies toward illusion, distortion, and error.” These arise from a combination of being hard-wired in our brains (because of evolution), natural growth of our brains as we grow up in the Earth’s environment, and the influence of our societies and cultures. “Yet, whatever their origin, they are universal and ineradicable features of our cognitive machinery, usually operating quite invisibly to corrupt our thinking and contaminate our beliefs.”

All these things lead us to have cognitive biases and blind spots that prevent us from seeing things more clearly, and one of the major blind spots is that of belief preservation. van Gelder says that “At root, belief preservation is the tendency to make evidence subservient to belief, rather than the other way around. Put another way, it is the tendency to use evidence to preserve our opinions rather than guide them.”

van Gelder says that when we strongly believe some thing or desire it to be true, we tend to do three things: “1. We seek evidence that supports what we believe and do not seek and avoid or ignore evidence that goes against it. . . 2. We rate evidence as good or bad depending on whether it supports or conflicts with our belief. That is, the belief dictates our evaluation of the evidence, rather than our evaluation of the evidence determining what we should believe. . . 3. We stick with our beliefs even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence as long as we can find at least some support, no matter how slender.”

This would explain why (as vividly demonstrated in the popular video A Private Universe) people hold on to their erroneous explanations about the phases of the moon even after they have been formally instructed in school about the correct explanation.

This would also explain the question that started these musings: Why for so long had I not applied the same kinds of questioning to my religious beliefs concerning god, heaven, etc. that I routinely applied to other areas of my life? The answer is that since I grew up in a religious environment and accepted the existence of god as plausible, I did not seek other explanations. Any evidence in favor of belief (the sense of emotional upliftment that sometimes occurs during religious services or private prayer, or some event that could be interpreted to indicate god’s action in my life or in the world, or scientific evidence that supported a statement in the Bible) was seized on, while counter evidence (such a massive death and destruction caused by human or natural events, personal misfortunes or tragedies, or scientific discoveries that contradicted Biblical texts) was either ignored or explained away. It was only after I had abandoned my belief in god’s existence that I was able to ask the kinds of questions that I had hitherto avoided.

Did I give up my belief because I could not satisfactorily answer the difficult questions concerning god? Or did I start asking those questions only after I had given up belief in god? In some sense this is a chicken-and-egg problem. Looking back, it is hard to say. Probably it was a little of both. Once I started taking some doubts seriously and started questioning, this probably led to more doubts, more questions, until finally the religious edifice that I had hitherto believed in just collapsed.

In the series of posts dealing with the burden of proof concerning the existence of god, I suggested that if we use the common yardsticks of law or science, then that would require that the burden of proof lies with the person postulating the existence of any entity (whether it be god or a neutrino or whatever), and that in the absence of positive evidence in favor of existence, the default assumption is to assume the non-existence of the entity.

In a comment to one of those postings, Paul Jarc suggested that the burden of proof actually lay with the person trying to convince the other person to change his views. It may be that we are both right. What I was describing was the way that I thought things should be, while Paul was describing the way things are in actual life, due to the tendency of human beings to believe the first thing that sounds right and makes intuitive sense, coupled with the desire to preserve strong beliefs once formed.

van Gelder ends up his article with some good advice:

Belief preservation strikes right at the heart of our general processes of rational deliberation. The ideal critical thinker is aware of the phenomenon, actively monitors her thinking to detect its pernicious influence, and deploys compensatory strategies.

Thus, the ideal critical thinker
• puts extra effort into searching for and attending to evidence that contradicts what she currently believes;
• when “weighing up” the arguments for and against, gives some “extra credit” for those arguments that go against her position; and
• cultivates a willingness to change her mind when the evidence starts mounting against her.

Activities like these do not come easily. Indeed, following these strategies often feels quite perverse. However, they are there for self-protection; they can help you protect your own beliefs against your tendency to self-deception, a bias that is your automatic inheritance as a human being. As Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”

The practice of science requires us to routinely think this way. But it is not easy to do and even scientists find it hard to give up their cherished theories in the face of contrary evidence. But because scientific practice requires this kind of thinking, this may also be why science is perceived as ‘hard’ by the general public. Not because of its technical difficulties, but because you are constantly being asked to give up beliefs that seem so naturally true and intuitively obvious.

POST SCRIPT: The people who pay the cost of war

I have nothing to add to this powerful short video, set to the tune of Johnny Cash singing Hurt. Just watch. (Thanks to Jesus’ General.)

The dubious appeal of immortality

During the time I was a Christian, I took it for granted that immortality was not only a Good Thing, it was the thing that mattered most. The idea that if one believes in Jesus (or in some other way meets the needs of Christian doctrine), one is saved and has eternal life is a central tenet of Christianity. The formulation “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” is something that any Christian can recite. It makes up the famous verse John 3:16 which you will often see written on a bed sheet and draped over railings at big sporting events. (This passage is so familiar to Christians that I was able to type it out accurately after all these years without even looking it up.)

What is surprising is that despite all the emphasis on going to heaven as the main point of living, the Bible contains very few actual descriptions of the place and what people there actually do. Even the good folks at Rapture Ready, who are counting the minutes until the world ends and they get taken up, admit that they don’t have much data on this key question. Their page What Heaven Will Be Like is very brief. (Disturbingly, for me personally at least, it says that in heaven the laws of physics do not apply. Why is this information not given to students when they are deciding what to major in? In the unlikely event that I am raptured, all my years of study and work will have been wasted and in heaven I will have to learn a new trade.)

The one really concrete description comes from (where else?) the Book of Revelations and it says that everyone in heaven will live in a place called New Jerusalem, which consists of a cube of side 1,500 miles. Although large (roughly the size of the moon), it should be easy to visit friends since the Rapture Ready website says that people in heaven will be able to travel instantaneously, presumably because of their ability to circumvent the laws of physics that are such restrictive nuisances for us on Earth.

Islam is more detailed than Christianity in its descriptions of heaven. Ibn Warraq writes in Virgins? What virgins? that the Koran gives the following description:

What of the rewards in paradise? The Islamic paradise is described in great sensual detail in the Koran and the Traditions; for instance, Koran sura 56 verses 12-40 ; sura 55 verses 54-56 ; sura 76 verses 12-22. I shall quote the celebrated Penguin translation by NJ Dawood of sura 56 verses 12-39: “They shall recline on jewelled couches face to face, and there shall wait on them immortal youths with bowls and ewers and a cup of purest wine (that will neither pain their heads nor take away their reason); with fruits of their own choice and flesh of fowls that they relish. And theirs shall be the dark-eyed houris, chaste as hidden pearls: a guerdon for their deeds… We created the houris and made them virgins, loving companions for those on the right hand. . .”

So basically heaven for Muslims consists of your choice of food and drink and sex, with no negative after effects. Ibn Warraq’s article describes Muslim commentators who go into even more great detail about the sexual pleasures of heaven, seemingly written exclusively from the male perspective.

I wrote previously that asking questions like where heaven is located and how it is related to life on Earth can make belief complicated because of the scientific problems it creates. First off, how come we cannot detect heaven’s existence although we are now able to probe the far reaches of the universe? Is heaven in some parallel universe, with impenetrable barriers? But they cannot be totally impenetrable since people can get there from here. Since most people believe that people in heaven can see and hear us as we go about on Earth, that means that light and sound waves can travel from Earth to heaven, crossing the barrier. So must it be a one-way barrier? How would such a barrier work to prevent two-way transmission? (This is again the kind of question a physicist would ask, because I have trouble accepting that the laws of physics don’t apply in heaven.)

But another problem is: what is it about heaven that is supposed to make it so attractive? Most people, even if they have no explicit model to work from, envisage eternal life in heaven as where everything is very pleasant and discouraging words are never heard. But surely if everything is perfect, and people in heaven live forever experiencing neither pain nor sorrow, it also has to be dull?

And that is the key problem. I cannot conceive of any way of conceptualizing heaven that is not also mind-numbingly boring. The only way to overcome that is to think that our personalities in heaven also change so that we never get tired of unchanging perfection. (“Wow, this grape is delicious! Wow, so is the next one! And the next one!…”) But then people become boring.

For example, suppose you are an avid golfer and your vision of heaven is where you can play everyday in perfect weather. Does being in heaven mean that you hit perfect shots each time? But if you do and your opponent does too, wouldn’t that take the fun out of the game? Golf is trivial, but I cannot think of anything at all that would not get tedious very quickly if one was assured of constant success. Pleasure in life goes along with failure. Take away failure and pain and loss and I am not sure what pleasure means.

The only thing that I personally can see that is good about immortality is that I may learn the answers to some difficult and unanswered questions that may elude me in my lifetime: Is quantum mechanics the ultimate theory or is there a deeper underlying theory? What exactly happens when the quantum wave function collapses in its interaction with the observer? How can one unambiguously draw the quantum/classical system boundary? How does the brain produce consciousness and the appearance of free will? Why do so many people find Julia Roberts attractive?

So basically, my own idea of heaven is to have the equivalent of unlimited high-speed internet access and subscriptions to science journals. But even that would be boring if I had to wait around a long time for Earth-bound scientists to find (if they ever do) the answers to those questions. On the other hand, if people in heaven already know the answers to these questions and told me as soon as I got there (not that there’s much chance of that), then there would be nothing to look forward to.

I can think of many, many things that would be wonderful to experience for a very short time but all of them would bore me totally if they went on indefinitely. It reminds me of the time, soon after high school in Sri Lanka, when I had a temporary job working in a chocolate factory. I was told that we could eat all the chocolates we wanted and since I loved chocolate, this sounded like heaven, and everyone envied me. But after a week of eating chocolate, I was sick of it.

MrBoffo.jpg

I am becoming convinced that we have pleasure on Earth precisely because it is unpredictable and transient, it is mixed with pain and failure, and we know that everything, including our lives, will eventually come to an end. We experience happiness and pleasure at moments in time, but for those moments to occur they must be preceded by periods of anticipation, disappointment, and failures. Take those things away and there is no pleasure either

It amazes me that I never asked any of these questions or thought of any of these things until now. Even during the many years I was religious, I never questioned then what form eternal life would take and whether it is such an unequivocal Good Thing after all. This is surprising because I was always curious about other things and trying to make connections.

Is there something in the way we are taught our religious beliefs that gently steers us away from these questions because they are so problematic? Why had I never probed deeply into what heaven might be like?

In the next posting, I will look at what research in cognitive science says about why we don’t ask questions or look for answers to certain questions, even when it might seem obvious that we should do so.

POST SCRIPT: Our tax dollars at work in the DHS

Ray LeMoine writes about his weird experience at the hands of Department of Homeland Security officials on his return to the US after traveling in the Islamic world.

Choosing the god we want

The series of postings on the burden of proof in relation to the existence of god (see part 1, part 2, and part 3) produced some very thoughtful comments by readers that explore many facets of the issue, and I would urge those interested to read those comments.

What initiated that series of posts was Laplace’s comment that he had no need to hypothesize the existence of god to understand the workings of the universe. I agree with that point, that whether or not one believes in god is a matter of choice and that there is no evidence for the existence of god that is compelling in the way that science requires in support of its hypotheses. In the absence of such compelling positive evidence, I simply proceed on the assumption of non-existence of god.

But the issue of choice is not just between the existence and non-existence of god. Religious people who personally feel that there exists evidence for the existence of god also have to make a choice, except that in their case they have to choose what kind of god to believe in. Believing in a Christian god means rejecting a Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or other vision of god.

But the need for making choices does not end there. Even if one has chosen to believe in a Christian god, one has to make further choices. The fact is that there are many different kinds of god portrayed in the Bible – vengeful, loving, murderous, merciful, just, capricious, cruel, generous, and so on. A god who can order every living thing in the world to be drowned except for one family and two representatives of each species (in Noah’s flood) is revealing quite a different attitude to life and death from a god who tells Abraham (Genesis 18:16-33) that he cannot bring himself to destroy the wicked town of Sodom because of the possibility that it might contain even as few as ten righteous persons who did not deserve to die. It is impossible to make the case that there is a single vision of god in the Bible, unless one also asserts that human comprehension is too weak to understand and resolve the different portrayals into one non-contradictory whole.

It is clear that what most religious believers have done is chosen what type of god they wish to believe in and what type to reject. In the contemporary political context, some Christians have chosen the gay-lifestyle hating god, while others have chosen a gay-lifestyle accepting god, and so on. Depending on what choice was made results in each person having to explain away those features that seem to contradict the view of god they have chosen. This partly explains why churches tend to splinter into so many different denominations and why there are so many disagreements about what god expects from people and how god expects people to behave.

If you want to believe in a kind and loving god, you have some stiff challenges to overcome, not limited to the appalling massacre of people in the great flood. For example, take the story of Abraham and Isaac. For those not familiar with this story (Genesis chapters 21 and 22), Abraham and Sarah did not have children for a long time and finally (when Abraham was 100 years old) she gave birth to Isaac. But then god decides to ‘test’ Abraham and asks him to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering. Abraham obeys, making all the preparations for this horrendous sacrifice until at the very last moment, just as he is about to kill the boy, god stops him. God is impressed by Abraham’s unquestioning obedience and rewards him.

This story is disturbing on a whole host of levels. What kind of god would ask a parent to kill his child as a test of faith? And what kind of person would be willing to kill his own child to prove his faith? If we knew of anyone today who was planning to sacrifice his child to prove his worthiness to god, would we not feel justified in labeling that person as dangerously hallucinating and do everything we could to stop him, including forcible restraint and even incarceration? So why is Abraham’s behavior seen as somehow noble? And why is god given a pass for asking someone to commit murder? Even if one were to assume that god and Abraham were engaged in some monstrous game of chicken, not believing that the sacrifice will be actually carried out but simply playing mind games, waiting for the other to relent first so that the murder is avoided, this episode still does not reflect well on either party.

Or take the tsunami which killed hundreds of thousands of people in South East Asia in December 2004. I moderated a discussion of faculty members from the major religions to discuss the question of theodicy (theories to justify the ways of God to people, or understanding why bad things happen to good people). But the very topic of theodicy assumes that what we think of as bad (such as the deaths of children) are in fact not deliberate acts of god. Why should we think that? How do we know that god did not deliberately kill all these people out of a sense of whimsy or out of callousness or because he was bored or because he likes seeing people suffer?

The answer is that we don’t really know the answers to these questions or to the ones raised about Abraham and Isaac because we have no way of knowing the true nature of god even if we believed in god’s existence. What most people have done is choose to believe in a god who would not casually murder people. They are not compelled to make such a choice by anything in the Bible.

This illustrates a paradox. Believers in a god will often explain away disturbing facts by arguing that we mere mortals cannot really understand god’s ineffable plan, but at the same time argue that they know god’s nature. The reality is that people are choosing a god that is congenial to their world-view.

Choice is always involved whether one is a believer or not. While believers choose one vision of god and reject all others, atheists go just one step further and reject all visions of god. It is not such a big step.

POST SCRIPT: Update on net neutrality

As I wrote earlier, the net neutrality amendment was defeated in the House of Representatives. The issue now goes to the Senate, which is where there is the best chance of writing it into law. The excellent website Talking Points Memo is maintaining a list of which way each senator is leaning on this issue for those of you who want to try and exert pressure on your own senator.

For more information on this issue, updates, and contact information to take action, see SaveTheInternet.com.

War and Death

I always liked Chandi. He was my cousin’s cousin, not a near relative, but his family and my family and the family of cousins in-between have been close since childhood. Sri Lanka is a small country, which makes it is easy for children to spend a lot of time with one another and thus one became very close with one’s childhood friends. Although Chandi was five years older than I was, and I was closer in age to his younger brother and sister, age gaps among children in Sri Lanka are not as distancing as they seem to be in the US, and Chandi had an easy-going, friendly, warm, and generous nature that made people like him.

On my return from Sri Lanka last year, we stopped for a few days in London and Chandi and his wife Anula (who also happened to be visiting London for a family wedding) came to visit us and we caught up on all that happened to our respective families in the decades since we had last met. Chandi was that same gentle and fun-loving person he had always been. As is usually the case when you meet up with good friends whom you’ve known for a long time, we just picked up from where we had left off and it was as if no time had elapsed since our previous meeting.
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Saving the internet: The importance of net neutrality

[UPDATE: Read this Democracy Now transcript for clarifications on the net neutrality issue.]

After singing the praises of the internet in the last three posts, it is now time to sound the alarm. There are serious threats underway to undermine the very features of the internet that have made it the democratizing force it has been so far, and these efforts should be resisted strongly. Last night, the House of Representatives voted down (268-152) an amendment that would have placed into law a provision that would ensure something called ‘net neutrality.’ The issue now goes before the Senate. Founders of the web like Tim Berners-Lee argue that we could be entering a ‘dark period’ in which a few suppliers would be able to determine what users could do and see on the web.

Here’s the issue. Currently, you (the end user) can use any browser you like and go to any site that you want and the speed and ease with which you can access them is largely determined by the content creators and consumers: i.e., the server at the other end and your own computer. The general features of the connecting medium (whether cable, phone line, or wireless) play a neutral role in this process. Think of the medium like the role that roads play in transport. Everyone can use them equally, although each user may use a different kind of vehicle.

But the big telecommunication companies (telcos) that own that connecting medium (AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth) are arguing that since they are the ones who own that infrastructure, they should be able to use that control to generate additional revenue by providing different levels of service (affecting speed and quality) depending on how much people pay. It is as if all roads become toll roads and how much access you get to them, how quickly you could get on them, and how fast you can go on them is determined by how much you pay the road owners.

As the Washington Post reported on December 1, 2005:

A senior telecommunications executive said yesterday that Internet service providers should be allowed to strike deals to give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users, a controversial system that would significantly change how the Internet operates.

William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.

Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth’s offering.

This has huge ramifications for the internet, as the website SaveTheInternet.com points out. Here’s a sample of the threats (more complete list here):

Google users – Another search engine could pay dominant Internet providers like AT&T to guarantee the competing search engine opens faster than Google on your computer.
Ipod listeners -A company like Comcast could slow access to iTunes, steering you to a higher-priced music service that it owned.
Political groups – Political organizing could be slowed by a handful of dominant Internet providers who ask advocacy groups to pay “protection money” for their websites and online features to work correctly.
Online purchasers – Companies could pay Internet providers to guarantee their online sales process faster than competitors with lower prices – distorting your choice as a consumer.
Bloggers – Costs will skyrocket to post and share video and audio clips – silencing citizen journalists and putting more power in the hands of a few corporate-owned media outlets.

The telcos are using their money (and correspondingly huge lobbying muscle) to try and get legislation through Congress to enable them to do this, and are being fought by grassroots groups. It is speculated that one reason that phone companies so easily (and secretly) gave phone records over to the government in its NSA phone monitoring program was because they were trying to curry favor with the administration concerning this legislation, hoping for this big payoff in return.

This is an important issue and could determine whether the internet remains an egalitarian force or goes down the road of big corporation control that way that newspapers, radio and TV did. In the early days of each of those media forms, it was relatively easy for people to enter into it. It did not cost a lot of money to start a newspaper or radio station, although TVs were more expensive. But then big companies aided by a friendly Congress started dominating the field and nowadays one has to have enormous wealth to start up. In the case of radio and TV, the government has colluded with the big companies by taking the public airways (the broadcast spectrum) and giving it away free to private companies to make exorbitant profits. If you or I were to start a radio and TV station and broadcast it over the public airways, we would be prosecuted.

Newspapers, radio, and TV have ceased to be representative of the interests of ordinary people because they are not owned by them. They now represent the interests of their owners and shareholders. It is the internet, still an embryo medium, that still has the ease of entry to make it a democratizing force because, at least in principle, anyone can gain access to it to spread ideas. It is this that is threatened by the attacks on net neutrality. History has shown that once we let the big companies muscle in and dominate a media system, we cannot get it back.

Considering how much we all use the internet, this issue has been surprisingly below the radar. People seem to assume that the internet will always be the way it is now. But just as the democratic aspects of the internet were not an accident but deliberately designed to be so by its pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee, keeping it that way will also require deliberate efforts by us. We cannot take it for granted.

Case has many tech-savvy people who have a much better idea of the implications of surrendering net neutrality to the big telcos. Lev Gonick, Case’s Vice President for Information Technology as early as last year had a very detailed and informative post on this topic. We need to build more awareness on this important issue. Perhaps we should have a concerted effort, with more bloggers expressing their views on this issue.

For more information on this topic, see the very helpful FAQ put out by the Save The Internet coalition.

Why I love the internet-3: How blogs have changed the pundit game.

In the previous post, I discussed that the main role of columnists and pundits was to act as sheepdogs for us, herding us into pens that limit the range of opinions we are allowed to express and be taken ‘seriously.’ To be frank, I rarely read any of the newspaper columnists anymore. However, since they do appear regularly in the Plain Dealer, I occasionally glance at them while reading the paper. I can usually predict what they are going to say on any given issue and the first paragraph usually confirms my prediction. There is almost never any new information or data or perspective that I find enlightening, whether it be from the ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ columnists. But what those columns do give me one useful piece of information and that is to tell me is what the acceptable range of conventional wisdom is, what I am supposed to think.
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