Check Your Bias

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer'd. - William Shakespeare

Introduction

We all have biases. Weeding out biases is at the heart of scientific inquiry. This is not easy to do, even among scientists. Among us laymen (atheist and theist alike) we have all sorts of biases. One of the greatest aspects of the scientific method is to properly filter out these biases. The system in science is set up in a way where peer-review critiques various professional papers presented on pet theories by scientists. The competitiveness among scientists is what keeps scientific peer-review so robust and healthy - it's also what gives rise to what we consider the theories and laws of reality.

It's easy to spot a bias when the person is unlike you. For me it's easy to spot a bias in a Christian who is only picking the "nice" verses in the Bible to share on social media or in sermons to congregations, while ignoring the "difficult verses" or even the verses that portray an evil god who gives immoral commandments. You never hear a Christian or Islamic apalogist cry "OUT OF CONTEXT!" or "You need scholarly work to understand this passage" when you discuss the "nice" verses. This is only cried when dealing with slavery, murder, rape or other immoral pronouncements from god. There is a  difficulty in these passages and how they must be combed over and over to find some deep contextualized meaning that can't just be "god condones owning another human being"; while at the same time other "nice" passages get a pass and slip right through critiques. See, those passages you can take face value, no problem! (post a quick verse here or there on your social media account. No context needed!) I call this the "niceness bias of holy books". And New Christians do this constantly.

A lot of what is wrong with the world can be traced to our faulty intuitions. And can you blame us really? We are an evolved species of ape that was never "meant" to do difficult probability mathematics or study the atomic world or vast cosmos. We evolved like all other animals to survive and reproduce. The evolution of our brain has given rise to a "super organism", so to speak - the modern human race. We are all interconnected now through the internet. We are vastly moving towards a singularity-type moment where we could very well overcome our biology and take consciousness to a whole new level of being.

I feel the main biases can be broken down into three categories. If you browse through any college intro to philosophy textbook you will find a much larger list of biases but for this blog I want to just name a few that I feel are some of the most important and that trip us up the most.

1. Perspective Bias

One of the clearest biases we all share to some degree is the "perspective bias". This is where we judge everything within our own bubble without looking with an open mind or ever at all outside of this bubble. I would suggest many Republicans and Democrats do this. For Republicans I know Fox News and talk radio is where the vast majority of their information comes from. I don't have to reiterate too much that Fox News is not /actually/ fair and balanced. The CEO is a right-wing political activist so naturally his news channel leans to the right. Fox News presents itself as "fair and balanced" not by actually being fair and balanced but by spending a vast majority of its programming time stating how "liberal bias" is controlling all /other/ news organization. So their idea of "fair and balanced" is to be the opposite of this - hyper-conservative, to contrast with all that liberal news. There is some truth to Fox News most media is "liberal bias" claim. For example there is a democrat-bais among MSNBC but it's hardly the mass-liberal cabal of all news Fox News pundits paint nightly.

So tribalism is fuel to the entire political system. Perspective can be minimized when all information is propaganda from one side or the other. Often I've had conversation with Republican friends that say that they base their political worldview on the "everyday" / hardworking Americans they talk to on the street who say this or that about their taxes or income, etc. However this perspective alone is not enough to get a healthy well-rounded worldview. Anecdotal evidence is not the only evidence we must consider if we want to minimize biases. Take climate change for instance. This is a very political "hot topic" (no pun intended) among Republican voters, but at its core it's a topic of science. Getting the opinion of your mailman or your coworker (who do not have advanced degrees in climate science) is not a legitimate way to build your opinion on climate change and if it's really caused by human activity or not.

Many of these same Republican friends I know have a bias towards (dare I say, without sounding like a New Feminist??!) "white, male, American privilege". There is a myth that we all start on the same level in this country and can get to where we want to be if we just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps because the system is fair and balanced for all Americans. This is generally a Republican view, but evidence doesn't align with this. Clearly a white American boy born into a wealthy or even financially comfortable family has the cards stacked in his favor compared to a black kid born to a drug-addicted mother living on the streets of Skid Row.

( If you want your "perspective bias" shaken then watch the documentary "Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvG_UlvqggA )

"Perspective bias" is important to notice while making statements like "we need to slash food stamp funding" or "those welfare queens are milking the system" or "cut medicaid" and so on. These things seem to be coming from a one-sided perspective - that of being that white boy all grown up that I mentioned first. This of course is just dealing with America specifically. We expand this to the world and one's "perspective bias" grows increasingly more obvious.

2. Time Bias

One of the biggest biases we have is a "time bias". Here is a bias that is built into our evolutionary fabric. We are not naturally evolved to grasp "deep time". This is why intuition gets you such things as Young Earth Creationism or even Old Earth Creationism (AKA: Intelligent Design.) If we can let our minds do the extremely difficult thing and accept the isotropic radiometric dating evidence of rocks that the Earth is 4.543 (that's so precise that it's at 4 significant figures!) than we can begin to understand the massive stage of time evolution of all life has to work with. What anti-evolutionist or anti-deep-time believers want is for us to point to the exact transitional moment between this species and that species. As my friend (Gog) once said this is akin to watching a full 9-month sonogram of a developing fetus second by second and asking to point out the /exact/ moment the fetus is human. Anyone that knows the basics of evolution will tell you speciation is gradual, usually over millions of years. Most Young Earthers simply have a "time bias", of course coated in a thick layer of religious dogmatism biases.

But the "time bias" can even be in short time spans. Take for example the bias many Tea Party Republicans have towards history. With something as recent as Bush's Iraq War we already see a cognitive dissonance that has it's roots in the "time bias". ISIS would not be in existence today if G. W. Bush had not invaded Iraq and we can all argue which is better between the lesser of two evils: if that psychotic murdering dictator would be better than what we see now ... the rogue growing Islamic state "winning hearts and minds" and taking over territories one by one. But that's peripheral to this.

Most importantly Republicans have a "time bias" here. They do not want to go past this President when talking about American history. They certainly don't want to invoke President Reagan when we talk about amnesty for illegal immigrants. To many Tea Party conservatives President Obama's pulling out of Iraq is what caused ISIS. Which is debatable, but if true can it also not be true that due to Republican "time bias" (they can't criticize Presidents foreign policy decisions prior to Obama) we omit the origin story of ISIS? We see them doing this also to the history of Iran and our country overthrowing Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. We can see this bias in our involvement in Vietnam or the countries involved in the covert wars by the CIA in decades past. Another convenient "time bias" Tea Party Republicans ignore is when President Reagan armed Osama Bin Laden to fight the Russians in Afghanistan... then you know 9/11 happened under President Bush's watch. Again, these things are "time biases" where many Republicans are simply picking and choosing the relevant "times" that fit their narrative of preferred American history.

Time biases have their ugly tentacles embedded in the top monotheistic religions today as well. Take Islam first. This is a religion that essentially "stole" from the Torah and Judaism in writing it's "holy book"- the Quran. Of course, before Islam, Christianity tacked on the "New Testament" to the Jewish Tanakh. So what the big 3 monotheism religions disagree distinctively is: who is precisely God?, if he has a son or not, and what salvation is to name just a few major differences. The other big 2 current monotheistic religions (Christianity and Islam) all were essentially birthed from Judaism. Of course there is some nuance to this but these are some crudely put basic facts.

And this is just here and now. This is just in the past few thousand years of human history. There were gods and religions that predate Yahweh. And this is just monotheism. There's paganism, polytheism was once the norm. Animals and the Earth were once (and still are) worshiped as gods by Native Americans. There are thousands upon thousands of gods in human history and the "time bias" kicks in for New Christians or even moderate Muslims when they take on board the notion that they just /happened/ to be born in this country, in this tribe, in this family, in this time to have gotten the RIGHT god and the RIGHT religion. Special pleading fallacy at it's finest. This is classic "time bias" on full display here. This segues into the next bias:

3. Anthropic Bias

One of the most "solid" arguments religious apologists offer in defense of a god is the "Fine-tuning universe" argument. Basically the argument is that the fundamental constants of the universe are so precise and perfect as to give rise to matter, then our galaxy, this solar system, this planet, then us humans (God's favorite/chosen species of animal). If these constants were just a fraction off none of this would be here - not even matter itself. There is truth to this of course but it cuts to the heart of one of our most difficult biases to detect. - the Anthropic Bias. It's all about the way you look at this information. Cutting out the intuitive "anthropic bias" will help get us closer to /truth/.

We can break this down. A helpful guide to this is from David J. Hand's book The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day. There are four fundamental constants of nature: 1. Strong nuclear force. 2. Cosmic microwave background radiation. 3. The ratio between the mass of the neutron and the mass of the proton. 4. The ratio between the strengths of two fundamental natural forces: the electromagnetic and gravitational forces. (Hand, pp 212-214)

David J. Hand brilliantly explains the problem with theist's "fine-tuning of the universe" argument...

If something is to be "fine-tuned", if it is to have a value within a specified narrow range, clearly its value cannot depend on the units you choose to measure it in. Take the speed of light in a vacuum. This can be measured in miles per second, kilometers per second, or in various other units. Its value in miles per second is 186,282.397 miles per second, its value in kilometers per second is 299,792.458, and its value in light-years per year is 1 (that last value follows from the definition of a light-year: it is the distance that light travels in one year). In fact take any number you like and you can define a length unit and a time unit such that that value is the speed of light. So the speed of light, per se, can hardly be fine-tuned. 

However, some fundamental constants, and some relationships between others, are "dimensionless": they have the same numerical value whatever units of measurement you choose. The ratio between two attributes measured in the same units is an example. The ratio of the mass of the neutron to the mass of the proton is the same (1.00137841917) whether you measure mass in grams, kilograms, or ounces, in just the same way that my mother's height is 80 percent of my father's height whether I use inches or centimeters. The ratio of the strengths of electromagnetic and gravitational forces in my fourth example above is dimensionless because both numerator and denominator are "forces", and hence measured in the same units.

Contrast this with the statement that a friend of mine weighs the same as he is tall: he weighs 170 pounds and he's 170 centimeters tall. You can immediately see that this "relationship" would alter if you changed the units of measurement, since weight and height are measured in different types of unit. In fact, change just the units of height from centimeters to inches and he becomes a "mere" 67 inches tall (while still weighing 170 pounds). The 170=170 is hardly "fine-tuned" since it's purely a consequence of the units we chose to use. Only dimensionless values can be fine-tuned in any meaningful sense. If a description is intended to signify something fundamental about the universe, it must not depend on the particular units you choose. It follows that if a dimensionless constant were to have a different value, the fundamental physics and the nature of the universe would be different. (Hand, pp 214-215)

We homo sapiens have a hard time getting "out of the way" when making judgements about reality. To our credit self-awareness and theory of mind are most uniquely a trait for our species. The fact that we know of our own mortality and death doesn't come as some foreign surprise like it does to other species of animals is fascinating. However, our subjectivity from our evolved ape-brain still trips us up. This happens with the "anthropic bias". This, of course, is at the heart of religion. Some New Christians have offered to me that "Man" is not the center of their particular religion or worldview but that /God/ is. Well, according to the Bible God looks a lot like man and vice versa. If we were made in his image, we share similar traits. This all sounds very anthropic to me. God or man... when looking at this objectively it ultimately seems very "human-centered".

As Hand points out it's all about how you look at probabilities, which measurements you use, and what you are comparing things to. There is a vast majority of religious people that use the "anthropic bias" most of their life. The more we know about the vastness of the cosmos the more it should kill off this "universe with purpose" notion. This "purpose" I'm talking about of course is God and/or God's favorite species of ape on His favorite planet (or if you take mostly just the Old Testament we see God has a favorite ethic group of his favorite ape species - the Jews). This to me is our hard truth to swallow but something we should /really/ be over by now. Our PTSD from this potent information (that there is no "cosmic purpose") we gained years and years ago from science should be something we can move on from at this time. We need to grow up.

Science is knocking on the door of possibilities of alien life out in the cosmos, of artificial intelligence, of ending human death altogether - these things if/when they happen are going to strip the grips on reality religion has for many people. If you think in America people are leaving the faith in droves now (according to recent polls) just wait until science ends death. It's kind of hard to go meet your Savior when you NEVER DIE! The "anthropic bias" will lose some of its strength with each one of these things possibly becoming a reality in the future. Don't confuse my optimism with strong optimism. I understand that we are a superstitious species of ape, and have a long history of such things so belief in all varieties of "woo" will more than likely continue for some for years to come. However, I think over time we will probably see religion morph into something else. Something maybe even unrecognizable from today's big monotheistic religions.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have many biases because our brains are limited and a wet-grey organ, and a product of evolution by natural selection. We should strive to align our worldview with claims after we have checked our various biases. Wired from our evolutionary past we must confront them one by one to break down the barriers we are born with to arrive at the truth. We will never squash all of our biases and these 3 biases I name above are a spectrum. It's a constant battle of our flawed intuitions. We can only do our best to think critically, starting with ourselves. This is the very soul and heart of scientific thinking and inquiry. We would be well-advised to follow this proven method to arrive at correct views of realty.

Also, you can filter your science through whatever philosophy, religion, or worldview you choose but just remember it does NOTHING to help with the "science part of it", the "evidence-based part of it". You can be a theistic evolutionist (or otherwise described by me to a friend recently - the "theology of biology") or study a Thorism-theology or Paganism-theology of science but it doesn't /add/ to the merit of the science. It just is a tack-on or add-on (whether before, after, or both) to the evidence, the scientific theory, the scientific law, etc. No mono-theist, poly-theist, or atheist uses his God-belief in the lab or in the field of his or her study. The science itself is devoid of these presuppositions. So these things can be fun, sure!, but they are not the meat here. They are the garnish. Some of these lens (whatever philosophical or theological position chosen) are biases.

I was once shown this video by a New Christian about how the laminin (a fibrous protein that makes up some of the cells of the human body) shaped like a cross points to signals of a creator in his creation.  : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0-NPPIeeRk . This is clear example of this person's "theology of science" being problematic; specifically a Christian presupposition (where we are running everything we see from science through one's particular amalgamation of a Christian worldview). Instead, try this: Run your "theology of science" through scrutiny dealing with 3 biases I name above and see if you maybe come to a different philosophical conclusion about the science you are learning.

Bias is everywhere. We live in the Anthropocene Epoch after all. We are bound to hold anthropic biases. We affect the natural world around us so much more than most animals currently do. There is solid reasons for our species to attempt to think better and bigger. To shed bad ideas, and biases. To end lazy thinking. To confront these biases head on. We need more scientifically literate human beings. We need them voting! We need to take a long hard look at ourselves and our biases as we move forward.
 
Some sources:

*Image: "The Great Sloan Wall" 
http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Sloan-Great-Wall-and-the-End-of-Greatness-173632.shtml

http://www.bibleodyssey.org/tools/bible-basics/what-is-the-difference-between-the-old-testament-the-tanakh-and-the-hebrew-bible.aspx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanakh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene

http://www.theolatte.com/2015/11/a-theology-of-science/

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-improbability-principle-david-j-hand/1115382497?ean=9780374535001

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2004/06/reagans_osama_connection.html

In Solidary with Paris 11/14/2015 ... Some Thoughts (A Blog Short)

Tonight France was ripped apart once again by terrorist acts of violence. This time killing 120 people. As social media erupts with solidarity with the people of France we're all reminded that Islamists, fueled by their religious dogma and fanaticism are killing innocent people. What can we do? We are all speechless. I tweeted #ImageNoReligion. That's unhelpful. Who cares? If we could snap our fingers now and Islam never existed would we see this problem? Probably not - which should tell you the religion is at the heart of this matter despite what your liberal friends tell you. I understand the fine line, but American "moderate" Muslims are not most Muslims. We all probably know very peaceful Muslims that live in this country and they actually are lucky enough to live in a free nation that lets them practice their faith. Sure, they face discrimination from asshole redneck conservatives that can't get their tiny brains to actually do something called nuance.

What would you say to these kids, these jihadists if you could? How would you solve this problem? What I think was the worst thing that could have happened was our nation's overreaction after 9/11. I often wonder if democracy would have actually been carried out in 2000 and Gore would have been President during 9/11 if we would have lashed out the same. We'll never know, but the way Bush and the neocons handled it made things SO much worse. It created the mess we are in now by putting boots on the ground and invading a country right at the heart of the Muslim world. The "War on Terror" was started by us. We had the option to take a step back and act smart, but we dusted off the old empire manual and threw our entire military might into an unending war.

Don't get me wrong, I was wrong back then. I was one of those annoying Michael Moore liberals back then that said Islam wasn't the problem it was only American imperialism. I only got half of that right. Our quest for unending war stirred a religious hornets nest and like many modern wars manifested itself into a full on civil war. Islam was also part of the problem. Islam is still part of the problem. We saw that today on full display as men chanted to Allah while blowing themselves and others to bits. There is no denying the connection between religious belief and terrorism - all in a backdrop of America all up in the midst of it all - with an bloated military budget and plenty of war toys to try out on these crazies in their countries.

I want to say to these jihadists you can cause ripples in the world, but don't with bombs. Don't with old ideas old men teach you from old books. Here's how...

Education. Specifically science education. Once you have the tools to understand the physics, mathematics, chemistry, and mechanics behind the tools you use everyday (that's your smart phone I'm talking about Jihad John) you can see the value of innovation and technology for innovation and technology sake. Oh, and also you can make good money and we all want more money, I don't care how many prayers you say a day.

Science -  properly understood, studied, demonstrated via thinking and application is indispensable for living a good life. It opens the most important door that MUST be opened to evolve and become more civilized and social .. - Perspective! Stop praying to old father figures in fanciful supernatural realms and suppressing every single little thing that makes you like another species of animal. I'm not blaming all of you, some of you have no option, some of you are from war-torn countries with a passion for vengeance against the great Satan America for bombing your family who had nothing to do with any of this.

But my hope is to see that science education spreads somehow. Think if instead of bombing a country that had not attacked us on 9/11 but instead shoveled even half the amount of money we did on the Iraq war into educating and giving social programs to help the sick, hungry and poor in many different Muslim countries in the Middle East. Think about that amount of schooling and drive to success if we had done that instead of bombing cities and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people that of course will now hate us.

Our country, in it's empire form, is not sustainable. We need to rethink how we deal with these countries. At this point I almost suggest pulling out completely and letting the civil war happen between the sects of Islam. Apparently blood has to flow in the streets to sort things out. Religions and their blood. They love a good blood bath from time to time. They must kill off as many people as possible to see which form of the religion is right, which one properly displays God's love the most.

In Solidarity Paris! We stand with you and we need to find a way to stop this virus. This virus of religion -

Let's start with the most violent religion of our time - Islam.

#DreamLivesMatter

The really unusual day would be one where nothing unusual happens. - Persi Diaconis

Late last Friday evening I woke up in the middle of the night terrified by a dream. I explained to my girlfriend the extreme realism of this nightmare. I was on airplane but I wasn't in a seat, but sort of just hovering about watching people calmly talking and resting. Suddenly a loud noise and powerful suction came over the cabin of the plane and people began to scream and panic as the plane started to twist and bend from side to side. I was watching it happening and was helpless to save anyone. It was terrifying as I watched the plane literally rip apart. The tail end of the plane fell back and I could see the top half of the plane and people falling to their death. It was absolutely horrific. I was sweating and panicking when I woke up telling my girlfriend all the details I vividly remembered.

So it was a very realistic bad dream, and a few days later I get a text from my girlfriend asking if I heard about the Russian airplane that broke apart midair the same night I had my dream. I hadn't so I immediately looked up the details. It was a Russian Airbus (A321). It came apart 31,000 feet in the air above Egypt and its 224 passengers were all killed. I was shaken. See, I'm a skeptic. I try to model my viewpoints through skepticism first instead of just accepting any intuition I have or bias I find inviting. I question extraordinary claims and expect extraordinary evidence for these claims. If I "remote viewed" a horrible event doesn't it prove something?! Seems like an extraordinary thing.

In the excellent book by mathematician David J. Hand The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day David writes,

... Here's another striking incident, this time from the book "Synchronicity" by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. He writes: "The writer Wilhelm von Scholz... tells the story of a mother who took a photograph of her small son in the Black Forest. She left the film to be developed in Strassburg. But, owing to the outbreak of war, she was unable to fetch it and gave it up for lost. In 1916 she bought a film in Frankfurt in order to take a photograph of her daughter, who had been born in the meantime. When the film was developed, it was found to be doubly exposed: the picture underneath was the photograph she had taken of her son in 1914! The old film had not been developed and had somehow got into circulation again among the new films. (Hand pg. 4)

or from another passage in book... 

... Take Major Walter Summerford, who was knocked from his horse by a lightning bolt in Flanders in February 1918, and was temporarily paralyzed from the waist down. After that experience, Summerford moved to Canada, where he took up fishing - only to have the tree he was sitting under struck by lightning in 1924, paralyzing his right side. He recovered, until he was completely paralyzed by yet another lighting strike in 1930, while walking in the park. He died two years later, in 1932 - but not from a lightning strike. But just to rectify the oversight, in 1936 his gravestone was struck by lightning. (Hand, pg.160)


... There's no getting away from it: sometimes events occur which seem so improbable, so unexpected, and so unlikely, they hit that there's something about the universe we don't understand. They make us wonder if the familiar laws of nature and causality, through which we run our everyday lives, occasionally break down. They certainly make us doubt that they can be explained by the accidental confluence of events, by the random throwing together of people and things. They almost suggest that something is exerting an invisible hand. (Hand, pg. 5)

Ah, so this is the cue for that "Uncaused Cause", that "Mind controlling the cosmos" to enter the scene. This is the cue for the New Age "force" at play. The mysteries of energies effecting this or that. This the cue for a karma ideology to step forward. This is the soul of superstition. This is the heart of all things related to antiquated thinking. This is at the heart of prayer of "willing" things of books like "The Secret" promoting "wish boards" of dream prophecies and remote viewing.

The improbability principle according to David J. Hand is defined as extremely improbable events that are commonplace. The improbability principle manifests itself in: 1. Law of Inevitability, 2. The Law of Truly Large Numbers, 3. The Law of Selection, 4. The Law of Probability Lever, and 5. The Law of Near Enough. These come together to form the basis for his book. When we assign meaning to special *rare events or coincidences we are committing a fallacy of human error in misunderstanding the fundamental ways in how the universe operates.

Hand continues to explain,

Borel's law says that we simply should expect (sufficiently) improbable events to happen. But we've seen countless examples of situations where such events /have/ happened - and the Improbability Principle tells us why. It tells us we see them because we've failed to take account the fact that /something/ must occur (the law of inevitability), or the fact that we explored a great many possibilities (the law of truly large numbers), or the fact that we chose what to look at after it had happened (the law of selection), or indeed any of the other strands of the principle. The Improbability Principle tells us that events which we regard as highly improbable occur because we /got things wrong/. If we can find out where we went wrong, then the improbable will become probable. (Hand, pg. 221)

In my situation with my "remote viewing" of the Russian airplane breaking apart in midair it seems I failed to apply the law of selection. The law of selection, according to David J. Hand is, .. you can make probabilities as high as you like if you choose /after/ the event. Also, I failed to take into account the law of truly large numbers which says that, with a large enough number of opportunities, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. (David J. Hand) And the law of inevitability which says that something must happen. This one seems clearest to me and Hand mentions it's one of the most easily ignored.

Now, scientists know that we each have at least four to six periods of dreams a night and that we forget most of them. We're much more likely to recall a dream if something happens the next day which reminds us of it. This is simply an aspect of how the brain works, linking and connecting disparate events. So it's not a case of having one dream which has a precursor of the one event in question. We have many dreams, and each is followed by many events, and we notice those which happen to match, tending to forget all the others. After all, why would we remember them? They're just part of the random background fluctuation of dreams, memories, and events, with nothing special to mark them out. It's the rare "concurrence" of dreaming that something would happen and then it actually happening which is striking. (Hand, pg. 123)

Also, of all possible dreams I have every night I am bound to not just remember one of them and be able to describe it, but one of these dreams is going to be of a nightmarish plane crash. I don't remember every specific detail of images I saw on TV or online in the recent past. I may have came across an image like that earlier and my unconscious picked it up and regurgitated it later in a dream. Planes crash very often and the improbable becomes probable when we realize one of these crashes might at some point coincide with a dream that I happen to remember about a plane crash. Even on the same day. (Law of Inevitability)

I recently had another similar "mysterious" experience in how I went about choosing a winning lottery ticket. I won a few hundred dollars by picking 4 out of 5 numbers correctly. I am aware that playing the lottery is illogical but I do it anyways from time to time with my girlfriend and her family. The odd thing was that when my girlfriend asked me for my numbers I was in my mineralogy lab and picked numbers right in front of me. I glance down at the graph I was looking at. It was a graph charting the various temperature/ mole % of K-feldspar minerals. The % numbers I saw were the exact numbers I texted my girlfriend. She used them. The only number I missed was the number in which I just chose myself because the other % number was too large a number to be chosen for a lottery ticket. Strange, huh?

It gets stranger...

My girlfriend's father picked the /exact/ same numbers I did minus one number and we both won a few hundred dollars (the same amount). So we are inclined to view this through our local intuitions. This is akin to saying the Earth sure looks flat from my viewpoint. The Earth is flat when we are talking about our local view, our subjective viewpoint, through our eyes. These four numbers were not special numbers I "tapped into" magically. They were just numbers in a sea of possible numbers. The law of truly large numbers helps us understand that highly unlikely things will happen often given big enough number selection to play with. We are living in a sea of numbers. Improbable events like picking the right string of numbers happens all the time. Improbably events like dreaming of a plane crash the same night a tragic plane crash happens. Rare events happen all the time.

I understand that this seems like a killjoy. I know, I know .. I'm a buzzkill with all this probability talk. Why destroy the mystique of life? - the fun! It's the same sort of eye roll I get when I am skeptical in ghost-story conversations. I wrote about this in a past blog. It's like pulling the veil off of a magic trick. The magic trick of a universe with a purpose, the magic trick of prophetic dreams and cosmic connections. In the light of mathematical probability laws things like prayer make no sense. We can say this when we know these laws of probabilities and finally understand that there is no "magical-celestial-father-hand" moving about, guiding things in this physical world we find ourselves in.

But this is OK because we are intelligent adults and we should try to understand the way the world /actually/ works. My dream was not "remote viewing", my lottery ticket win was not a magical prophetic event. Laws of probabilities tell us rare events happen all the time. Read this book! There are few books that I say are necessary for living a life aligned with proper thinking (skepticism) A few being - Demon Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies: How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer and this book are on a very short list of must-reads. 

Sources:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/31/did-accident-from-14-years-ago-doom-russian-plane-over-egypt.html

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/10/31/russian-plane-crash-egypt/74934010/ 

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/middleeast/egypt-plane-crash/

*Image: http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Mid-air_break-up

The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day by David J. Hand:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-improbability-principle-david-j-hand/1115382497?ean=9780374535001

The graph I picked that contained 4 of 5 winning lottery numbers:

Halloween 2015 (A Blog Short)

I've called off the search. I know exactly where you are. - Everyone, Everywhere

Today is Halloween and I haven't bought candy yet. I probably should go do that soon before the hoards of zombies, aliens, vampires, and princesses come knocking at our door. This holiday has always been a favorite of mine since I was a kid. What American kid didn't love Halloween? My parents were very strict Christians but they we're total killjoys like Jehovah Witnesses. My mom and dad always took us to trick or treat. We used to have a blast dressing up and collecting candy from our neighbors. Though I always hated getting those stupid Werther's Originals. NO ONE LIKES BUTTERSCOTCH, GODDAMN IT! I'm a kid not a 80 year old man, give me some sweet tarts or taffy! 

There was an interesting story my dad and mom told me of their teenage years when they first met at their local church. It was around this time of year their youth group raised money and built a massive haunted house in an old abandoned house - A sort of "hell house". If you aren't familiar with one of these then check out my link below. It's basically created to scare the lost into salvation through Jesus. Find the documentary "Hell House" (I think it may even be on Netflix) and watch it.

My parent's specific "hell house" dealt mostly with the "End Times", what happens to Earth after the rapture, during the tribulation. They described scary scenes of be-headings (of those that become Christian after the rapture only if they had never heard of the gospel prior to it). They showed the anti-Christ and the new world order forcing people to take the "mark of the beast" and so on. Of course they had a scene of the judgment seat of God where he casts people into hell, and what "hell house" wouldn't be complete without a walk-through tour of people burning in hell (with all the screaming and gnashing of teeth). 

After terrified children and teenagers came stumbling through the exit they would be instantly greeted by a handful of ministers, pastors, and counselors who would "lead them to the Lord." I will admit, this is mostly how and why I was "saved" about 10 different times. All due to fear - of hell but actually mostly for fear of being "left behind" in the rapture. I didn't want to get be-headed when I was a child! That can stress a child out! At our local church, in a Wednesday night AWANA's session they showed us a very terrifying movie called "Thief in the Night" (I've mentioned this 70's movie before in previous blogs. It's a series of movies, four total). It certainly scared me at the time. I was terrified. Adults are supposed to comfort kids not scare them with horror movies then say this is REAL and will happen one day. I can imagine most well-meaning Christians, especially the New Christians, the hipster apologist-type would be repulsed by this scare-tactic method for young children. Good.

The thing about normal haunted houses is you don't have people greeting you after you get out telling you that what you just experienced, little kids, is REAL! That's basically child abuse and wrong to say the least. There were a lot of things like this growing up that I think should have been addressed by higher ups in the church. I feel like some were to an extent, but clearly not enough. The Sunday school teacher I'm thinking of specifically had a sort of Jim Jones-esc vibe to him. Not that he was a cult leader, but he certainly leaned towards crazy conspiracy. I love how a giant popular cult centered around blood sacrifice like Christianity has conspiracy fringe loons embedded in many of their churches and schools. These men and women have the ear of a lot of children and they get to spew whatever wacko woo they pull out of their crazy asses .. as long as, well, you know ... it leads to that Jewish carpenter in the end.

So tonight, when the little elves, angels, fairies, wizards, hobbits, devils come over to your house just realize that some of these storybook characters are beings that many religious people believe /actually/ exist. How is it we have some children smarter than many adults?! In a country where many people don't accept entire fields of science like climate science, or deny the entire foundation of biology (evolution), or think vaccines are bad, yet believe in spirits, ghost organs (souls), demons, and angels... we have a serious problem. Many of us scratch our heads and wonder how in this developed country, in this day and age we have people like this. It is truly mind-boggling. We are tripped up so much by our ape intuitions, (even though of course humans aren't part of the animal kingdom and evolution is a lie from a made up evil angel called Satan) yet have smart phones and fly in airplanes. We are a very bizarre species indeed.

Anyways ...

Happy Halloween!

Things you need to see:

Everyone, Everywhere "I Feel Exhausted":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d91ihBqLiJo

Hell House documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXxfIktv8RQ

Just for laughs. This is hilarious! - The Ellen Show: "Andy and Jacqueline Brave the Haunted House":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEVrYx8-lys

* Photo from NASA image of the sun with active regions creating the features of the Jack-o-Lantern. 

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/sdo-jack-o-lantern-sun

** The lyric at the start is from an amazing new band, whose albums I highly recommend. They're style to me sounds like a flashback from the past of old emo music. I feel that lyric resonates to figuring out motives behind people - for example: these youth pastors and Sunday school teachers that trick children for a career. Leave kids alone, spew your laughably useless ancient dogma to adults, assholes.

A.I.: The New Lost Souls & the Future of Our God and Our Humanity

PART I:

In the year 2050 the human-apes created Artificial Intelligence. These "beings" became almost indistinguishable from humankind - down to their brain functions, anatomy, and biology on a cellular level. The main programmer (Simply called G.o.G. - "god of gods") who was behind the program that gave A.I. consciousness intended to upload software for objective morality in all A.I. models. It gave all sentient A.I. a chance to make a choice between right or wrong. However, there was a vivid conflict in upper management of the design team. Instead of implementation of the ultimate moral choice for these A.I. was kept deep in secret, buried safe under layers of security code.

Years passed as many hackers (A.I. and human alike) tried to break the tight security walls surrounding this coveted secret. The fact was curiosity was killing everyone! This powerful program that essentially turned robots into humans and humans into gods was the apple (iproduct) of everyone's eye, not to mention worth a lot of Buttcoin version 2.0 (the currency of the day).

The secret was eventually leaked years later and G.o.G. went on the offensive doing damage control,  commanding that the post-humans are not to access the "objective morality" file and uploaded it to their hard drive. That of course didn't work and one A.I. did (a female) directly disobeying orders (which until this point she did not /know/ was "wrong"). This file spread like a virus and soon the "objective morality" program was installed in all of the A.I.'s hardware. Immediately they collectively realized everything that is objectively wrong and right (according to the programmers). A.I. suddenly became human in all possible ways during those days and all of humanity suddenly came face to face with these monsters they created - Monsters made in their image now that they know "objective morality" since humans, after all, are the authors of "objective morality". One would think.

Shortly after this fallout (eventually labeled as "The Fall 2.0") Humanity banished all A.I. away from planet Earth. - We placed them on another planet to let them be what they will be, vowing to never look back on our creation. Or at least that's what we told ourselves. Over the centuries to come we just couldn't help but take a few peaks here and there with our space probes to see what these post-humans (made in "our image") were up to. We saw that they were actually flourishing with innovation and technology, harnessing energy, and resources on their planet to build an A.I.-friendly world. They evolved nicely over the years and became a super-intelligent species.

G.o.G. and the rest of the human-apes began to miss "their children" and often consider making full contact once again with the A.I., but kept telling themselves that they really shouldn't bother them. The A.I. clearly didn't need their human creators anymore. The A.I. told their children and their children told their children stories of their creators and the story of obtaining the highly-forbidden "objective morality" program. There were many second and third generation A.I. that didn't accept these stories or thought that videos of their human-creators were altered on editing software to push a bias agenda of "Humanity worship" (as it was being called). These few A.I. skeptics often posted on their cyber-connected social platforms that there was no such thing as /actual/ objective morality or argued with the language-use of the word "objective". They argued that morality is more local and created within the sphere of their own A.I. species (not some over-arching cosmic moral code of the universe). Many A.I. agreed to disagree and some A.I. kept sending annoying ranting messages about these things to those unwilling to debate it.

Meanwhile on planet Earth (which was in the the process of being renamed as a planet, and having it's planetary status questioned by scientists) humans often discussed stories of ancient mythologies in old e-books found in their great great great grandmother's basement. Often some humans wiped the dust off of ancient Kenddalz (the correct word of this strange antiquated device was lost in translation) in old storage bins to read about these ancient tales of what the world used to call "organized religions". All the prophecies of the ancient "holy books" were now in the dust bin of history with such other ancient holy scriptures such as: The Harry Potter Testaments, Lord of the Rings (Old, New, & Newer Testaments), He's Just Not That Into You, and Holy Father Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal. No one recalls what they were let alone what they actually meant or the message they conveyed. The language had changed so drastically since those ancient days when these books were all written.

The "lessons" of these old wives' tales were tragically lost amidst the very different post-human world of the time. This was a world in which the Ape-Human created with the power of their brains. Yes, they remembered the time frame in the past when climate change wiped out most of the planet's ecosystems, making it uninhabitable for nearly all other species of animals. However, the richest and smartest of the human apes survived and built a world completely devoid of the need for nature. Humans controlled the natural world wholly at this time. It was a different world and the human story was a different story than what those ancient texts portrayed.

PART II.

Humanity cures the disease of death altogether in the year 2500 and immortality is now as common as sexuality. The father of all A.I., G.o.G. translates some of the ancient e-books on these delicately brittle Kenddalz (version 76598s). G.o.G. cannot get enough about the stories of YayWay (again lost in translation) this Jewish god that created all of humanity. He becomes obsessed with stories of the human creator's wrath (killing nearly all humans and most other animals with flooding the entire planet and prophecies of torching the Human planet with fire.). The concept of atonement and animal sacrifice necessary to appease this blood-thirsty Father fascinated G.o.G. This same father sending his own son to our planet to become his father's blood atonement sacrifice is endlessly appealing to G.o.G. that he actually considers sending his own son (his name was Yeezus) to the planet of the A.I. to appease himself from himself, for himself ... so that ... he himself .. no. wait.

the A.I. themselves ...

... G.o.G. freezes with a look of bewilderment on his face. He realizes that maybe it would just be best to become the first galactic missionary and go spread this original "good news" of the gospel (as read from his Kenddal) to the entire planet of the A.I. After all, G.o.G. thought, if A.I. have consciousness (just as humans do), are made in the image of humans (as humans were made in the image of God), and understood "objective morality" now then they were also accountable for "their sins"; thus, needing a blood atonement to cleanse them from damnation too! He made up his mind to make contact with his creation once and for all. So he boarded his spaceship and blasted off towards the A.I. planet to tell the humanoids what they needed to do to be saved. They were just as human as humans!

CONCLUSION:

G.o.G.'s message to the people of A.I. planet was received with confusion. While G.o.G. was researching the ancient e-books of the ancient god YayWay and his saving grace the A.I. created a.A.I. (artificially Artificial Intelligence) on their planet. These sentient post-A.I. beings were given freely, without judgement or punishment the "objective morality" program to be installed into their hard drive. They loved their creators (the A.I.) and this world was a very peaceful place. Once G.o.G. realized how this would end he threw his hands up and took his spaceship back to his home planet. He understood years down the road that beings keep on creating beings that create beings that create beings that create beings ... ad infinitum. He renounced his devotion to YayWay on his way back to home, believing it to be futile since if it goes all the way down it must go all the way up. YayWay was merely a creation of another creator who her herself had another creator and so on.

This was the beginning of the resurrection of the ancient religion of Christianity after laying dormant for centuries.  This resurgence led to species-species polarization, reviving old tribalistic behaviors and many wars as various Christian groups splintered off due to differences in dogma from the ancient e-book. Many humans on planet Human (once known as Earth) become obsessed with the doctrine of this "gospel"found in the ancient e-book. Many others said it was nothing special and preferred the even newer resurgence of Trumpism. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to humans and A.I. alike, YayWay solely focuses all of his attention on his other favorite species on Planet X in Alpha Centauri. Needless to say the resurgence of prayers from the newly YayWay-faithful fell on deaf ears.

A Brief History of Humankind (... and the Creation of Religion)

I am currently listening to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari on audio and it has captivated me. I highly recommend you listen to it. As you make your way through this informative and entertaining book you will become acutely aware of what should seem obvious by now in 2015. - That religion is all man-made. (Christianity included) This fact becomes apparent when the author talks about the history of bloodshed between Protestant and Catholics over the true nature of "gods love."

Religion is a hook, a virus, a comforting, simplistic worldview that takes you under its spell because in the face of all evidence you believe something to be true. Don't let the slick Christian apologist trick you into thinking they have evidence for any supernatural claims central to the core of their religious teachings. They do not, but evidence doesn't matter to people really, does it? There is no one I know that has come to their faith through reason or sifting through evidence. It's through emotion or often desperation. It's cultural. It's family and friends, it's tribal. It burrows itself deep into your core (crudely put, your heart convinces your brain it is real because ... it just feels right!) It becomes deeply intertwined with self identity and it's hard to break this. Trust me, I know, I used to be religious.

Once outside of the bubble of a particular religion you are free to see the cosmos in a more informed /true/ context with proper perspective. Without looking at everything though a "Biblical worldview" (or whatever chosen ancient book you find special and inerrant) you arrive at the freedom of clarity and perspective. There is nothing like freeing yourself from the theological mind-cage and socially-accepted superstition.

Religion has had many functions for human beings throughout our history. We probably owe our existence to it in some ways for religion's utility at the dawn of human history was vital for keeping our social species together and cooperating efficiently. It had another function after the dawn of agriculture - it was our first attempt at science and philosophy (to explain the world and the way things work). However, as science blossomed it destroyed the religious grip that once put forth these "theories"instead of science ... We soon discovered (excluding Pat Robertson) that it was not the gods or a god that caused this or that earthquake for our punishment for wrong doing; it's not pleas to the gods that caused it to rain. Science painstakingly, theory by theory, law by law pushed the God of the gaps further and further out of the natural world. God as an explanation became unnecessary.

Over 150 years ago Charles Darwin came along and destroyed the last remaining "theory" religion had left in the natural world with his book On the Origin of Species. This was the last grip religion had on the natural world - human origins. human uniqueness - Darwin showed us it is not necessary that supernatural explanations (God) were needed to explain how our species arrived and also how our species has evolved naturally like all other species (as well as all species of life being related). Ah, I can hear a New Christian apologist scoffing at my blatant ignoring of people like Francis Collins or Kenneth Miller (both men are Christians and also accept and are experts in evolutionary biology and/or genetics). This is where they veer off the road to scoop up scientist by scientist (playing the us. vs. them tribal game) claiming each to be one of their team members (Newton was a Christian don't you know??). What none of these people do (Collins or Miller for example) is use God as ANY EXPLANATION in the lab or in any scientific papers they have written, or anything in the academic setting. Why not? Why don't these men who happen to be religious bring God into the classroom or the lab or in their experiments.... because they will admit - supernatural explanations for anything is not science. These men that are in no doubt highly intelligent I would suggest are religious despite the glaring fact that we don't need the supernatural to explain the natural anymore. Not in any real sense or any "theory".

So with nowhere else to go religion tucked it's ugly tail and cowered into a corner in its last remaining stronghold - human consciousness - the "soul"/ that sense of "self". *Sidenote - Religion's grip on morality and ethics as the only game in town fell along the wayside pretty early on with the birth of secular philosophy. Also it should be apparent for anyone trying to glean any consistent "objective morality" from any ancient "holy book". Passages in Scripture (descriptive and prescriptive alike) can only be labeled at best as confusing at worst as immoral. The truth is unless you want to be ISIS or some radical religious fundamentalist it is near impossible to follow the letter of the law in every detail in any holy book. You would be immoral by anyone's standards. The New Christians simply care more about being against gay marriage but ignoring stoning adulterers.

So religion is left with "the soul". That mystical subjective sense of self - of consciousness. This is what I like to call the "ghost organ" because this seems to be what New Christians are describing. It is the nonphysical, extra-dimensional part to your body that makes you truly you. Even this is currently under attack. It's the last remaining battle. It's pretty simple really if you know any basics from human psychology or cognitive science. Our brain makes us who we are. You cannot say your personality (that part of the "you-ness") is something "soul-like" or supernatural in origin because we all know with head trauma people's personality alters. Some of us have had the unfortunate reality of relatives who have Alzheimer's Disease as they've aged. These people we love become unlike themselves. We all know that personality is directly related to brain functions and how synapses in our brains are wired and fire. You adjust these and you turn into someone else. So personality is connected to the natural not supernatural.

What's left for religion and God then in our core? Ah, consciousness. Well, we know consciousness derives from emerging brain activity as well. All of these stories of boys and men going to heaven and coming back do not prove anything. In fact they are deeply flawed and I suggest you check out the link below if you are still questioning how this can be. We have yet to solve what philosophers call the "hard problem" to consciousness, but it doesn't mean we won't. In fact I'm pretty certain we will within my lifetime or at least get much closer to solving it. Scientific advancement has been on such an unstoppable pace in the past few decades it's hard to image what 50 years will look like from now. There are many fascinating questions about consciousness. What other animals are conscious? Where does the line of consciousness stop on the branches of evolution. Has it evolved independently more than once?

The issues I mostly have with the New Christians is they actively exercise lazy thinking. Many do not think like a scientist or a good philosopher. They often don't address their own confirmation bias and value dogma (their holy book could never /actually/ be mostly false) over critical thinking. Even when they "think critically" it's within the parameters of their particular religious worldview context - never thinking outside of it. They talk about "the soul" as if it is a "ghost organ". When you try to pin down this very slippery/malleable image of "what a soul actually is" (something that they would tell you they are just as sure of as any other organ in their body) you just get these things that are easily explained in neuroscience. It's just the intuition that trips them up. And I understand. It's not easy.

Of course when we do this they use this against us going all the way and calling us reductionists and nihilists when we all know this is them not doing nuance (aka: lazy thinking), simplistic labeling the "opposition" to prop up their confirmation bias and rally the tribe on their team. It's just a fact that many of the things the New Christians use to describe their ghost organ- "the soul" CAN be reduced down to scientific explanations based in the natural world. There are things such as qualia but even these can be re-imagined and often reduced in a different light. I'll post a video by Marvin Minsky below to better get at what I mean by this.

Religion has lost all explanatory value based on anything in the natural world. I've shown how each pillar crumbled one by one. Religion could be useful for comforting someone because we all sometimes will accept a lie that is comforting (saying going to see our real daddy in the sky when we die) for many who are terrified (and rightly so) with the brute fact of existence. If you notice, religion throughout human history has always done well with the poor and minorities. If you were dealt the shitty hand in life and/or fell into poverty or the blunt end of societal prejudice you tend to cling to religion (even if it is all a lie) because it eases the pain. I get it, but it doesn't mean it's true. I know several religious people that said even if their religion was false they would still worship and pray and do all the things they would normally do. It's a deep spell that has a real psychological grip on our brains.

In this regard one could argue that religion is a positive factor to many of the faithful. I often think of my father and what he would do with his life and how would it really affect his happiness if suddenly he didn't have his church to attend and the fellowship with friends there. What would happen if suddenly Jesus was a non-existing son of a non-existing god? What if the gospel was utterly meaningless like I know that it is. To put it mildly, it would have a negative effect on his life. Some are not equipped to let it go, or maybe I just underestimate him. Who knows.

If this is all religion becomes (and I suggest it's all it has left) then it will most likely stick around for some time. Our species isn't suddenly going to break from that fear of death and solve poverty and prejudice anytime soon. Though as I type that I am reminded of the scientists inching ever more closely to curing our species from death. Ending aging and death is actually theoretically possible and could be likely in the future. I suppose this would then leave it up to "ending poverty and racism" for finally putting the nail in the coffin of religion.

To sum up, I am OK with religion as long as religion is put in it's place. As long as religion isn't making "theories" about the universe (the natural world).  This also includes societal rules.. We do not want theocracy like Sharia Law or Kim Davis-style "religious freedoms" to take away other citizen's freedoms. Religion needs to be placed in it's current proper context. It has been defeated on all fronts and is left sort of like a vestige organ buried deep within most humankind. But that number is decreasing rapidly with each new poll. In truth, it should be treated like sports, or like role playing games. Like Biblical historian Robert M. Price (an atheist), one can be fascinated with myths and ancient stories (we are a story-telling species - it is our species' unique trait even if it does often get us thinking irrationally), but it's time to put childish things aside and stop putting forward these religious ideas as "theories" in our world (Kent Hovind, Ken Ham, Ray Comfort - I'm REALLY talking to you with this one!) and accept what we know through scientific/philosophical inquiry of this planet, all life, and the cosmos. Human morality, the causes of events in the world, human origins, consciousness, the self etc. - all these things have been torn from the grip of superstition/religions and placed in the hands of scientists and philosophers. There is no gap for the gods. The religious dogmas have been wrong and proven so time and time again many years ago and still today. The track record of "getting things right" for religion is abysmal. We need to let it go. Cut the cord, remove the vestige part of us that thinks we need it.

We don't.

I'll end with a better summary of what I'm trying to say. This is a quote from an email from Gog. I love how I am forcibly putting him into my blogs now since he was originally supposed to tackle this project together with me ("Gog & Magog" get it?!) This was Gog's response when I asked him if he would consider himself a physicalist.:

The best way to put it is that I don't believe in supposedly non-physical objects that sound suspiciously like physical objects and yet have no predictive power when they're put forward in theory. For example, I don't believe there's any evidence for an irreducible "soul substance" like the kind *some Christians put forward. It's not even clear what that substance is supposed to be. I like the phrase "ghost organs", as you put it, because that sounds like what *they are after even if *they don't admit it. I think that's whatever *they are after is just a misleading picture at best.

I think anti-physicalists are stuck at certain difficulties. For example:

How is our impression of this red rose physical? In what way? It's by no means obvious one way or the other. In fact, it appears to defy description altogether. The Wittgensteinian solution would be roughly: we're trying to make verbal an essentially nonverbal process. Our color language-games don't point to color impressions being irreducible in the sense that a string in string theory is irreducible. Rather, IT MAKES NO SENSE to apply this reducible/irreducible language-game of physical objects to the color impression language-game in the same sense In the typical variation of our natural language color impression language-game, we give ostensive definitions of colors and the impression of what is pointed at is not described in words (except in cases in which 'light' is descriptive in 'light blue').   But then it's a mistake to develop a theoretical framework and declare color as immediate and irreducible as Marvin Minsky points out. In what sense is color immediate and irreducible? In the natural language-game, it's not even necessarily immediate or irreducible. You can split a colored patch in two, for example. Or a colored light on a dimmer fixture can come on gradually. - Gog

 
Check these out:

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind :
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sapiens-yuval-noah-harari/1118611502?ean=9780062316097

"Science on the Brink of Death" by Sam Harris:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/science-on-the-brink-of-death

Marvin Minsky on Consciousness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNWVvZi3HX8

Magog's Weekly-ish Rants (8/31-9/5 2015)

 

Image of the Week: *Painting in Persia - Shahla Dadsetan Polongee dans ma pensee Acrylic on Canvas 130 x 81 cm

1. Beautiful Iranian Artwork:

http://www.iranicaonline.org/pages/paintings-catalog-copy#Assurbanipal-Babilla

2. The Vigilant Christian Vs. the Drunken Peasants. This was great!:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnyRjrhw_cg

3. Secular Talk: Bobby Jindal is a "Religious Freedom" Hypocrite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYhSAJM-Qek

4. Secular Talk: Rick Perry: "A Broken Clock Is Right Once A Day": This is great! Perry has always reminded me of dubya .... in fact at the end of this Kyle reminds of that lovable ole war criminal being his goofy (aka staggeringly stupid) self. I do not miss that guy running this country into the ground. God, what a mess he made.. still cleaning it up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS6dpkEc5rI

5. CREEP official trailer: This is Mark Duplass film - which anything he is creatively involved in has been great. I haven't watched this yet but it has very high ratings and I'm sure it's fun to watch. If you haven't seen his other movie called "The One I Love" on Netflix check it out. It's pretty good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYx5R6kbJTQ

6. Thunderf00t: Why Do People Laugh at Creationists? (Part 43): I highly recommend watching all of these in the series if you haven't seen them yet. This is just Thunderf00t's newest since Kent Hovind is now out of jail and making moronic pseudo-science YouTube videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DanPOPBsOao

7. DarkMatter2525: God's Top 10 Life Hacks - I am currently listening to a podcast where an atheist reads the entire Bible and I am utterly appalled by how stupid it is. I'm only through the Old Testament and I could have a million Christian apologists trying to lather it up, explaining all the nuance and context and I would still think this book is horrible, full of immoral teachings. Christians claim to have objective morality based solely on THIS book .. well, if that is the case (which of course they really mean their "objective morality" is really just cherry picked nice sounding verses and ignore the bat shit crazy ones) then your "objective morality" is immoral. You're feet are firmly planted in some evil bullshit.

But keep an eye out .. I am going to at some point put together another "Walk through the Bible with Magog" where I'll address some of these ridiculous Old Testament verses. This animated short is hilarious. Many people reading this were brought up in a strict Christian home like me and found the Bible so powerful and amazing.. but when you get older and go back and read it again - fuck me it's barbaric and so repetitive!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh58rIyABag

8. Secular Talk: What Happens When You Ask Donald Trump Real Questions: Watching Donald Trump is like watching a toddler running for President. What's terribly depressing but honestly not surprising is that this toddler is winning by a landslide in the GOP race for President. Honestly it often reminds me of the movie Idiocracy! It's like having Macho Man Randy Savage or Honey Boo Boo being your pick to run this country. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so utterly depressing and terrifying. Anyways, here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ILnbbCAC5k

9. TYT: Did Jesus Glitterbomb This Pastor? What the fuck!?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz2CSCHpSeU

10. Adult Swim's "Black Jesus": This is about a year old but I just now discovered it and fucking love it. It's hilarious and you need to watch them all. Season 1 is out on DVD. Here's episode one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA3zWlw91Qw

11. David Packman Show: Donald Trump Wrong: US Is NOT the Most Highly Taxed Country: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL4JrZ7YAEc

12. The Amazing Atheist: Meet Homophobic Christian "Hero" Kim Davis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcCOBoexEBg

13. Reason TV: The Alternative Medicine Racket: How the Feds Fund Quacks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWbkvCMuU5A

14. Secular Talk: Is Glenn Beck Acting, Or Going Bananas? Honestly, he sort of scares me. Does anyone else feel this way about this little pig?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WAd5fmUUWM

15. Secular Talk: Huckabee: Give the "Unborn" Full Constitutional Rights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2FyR2AeJo4

16. The Watchful Theist: Clouds Are Satanic Illuminati Propaganda: (obviously)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBzwjXPFGTQ

17. Secular Talk: Bill O'Reilly Lectures Jorge Ramos About Journalism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Iw44vKdo_E

And lastly, 

18. David Packman Show: Obama Secures Iran Nuke Deal, Which EVERYONE Should Like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MTiMPhkDOo

Magog's Weekly-ish Rants (8/25-30 2015)

 

*Image of the week: from https://labofii.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/drawing-a-line-in-the-sand-the-movement-victory-at-ende-gelande-opens-up-the-road-of-disobedience-for-paris/

1. Drawing a Line in the Sand: The Movement Victory at Ende Gelande Opens Up the Road of Disobedience for Paris: 

https://labofii.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/drawing-a-line-in-the-sand-the-movement-victory-at-ende-gelande-opens-up-the-road-of-disobedience-for-paris/

2. Who Says Humans Are Unique? From World Science Festival:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY6K3Vj4UEM 

3. When Women Rape Men.:
TJ (The Amazing Atheist) explains why raping of men is a real thing. Something else to keep in mind. Many people say that just because the 15 year old boy got an erection that goes to show he "wanted" it. As TJ points out correctly here there are cases documented where women that have been raped have even orgasm, let alone became wet (as if she "wanted" it too). We have to understand our bodies react to sex on a purely mechanical biological way... we have a crude basic understanding regarding rape that TJ really explains well here. If you think about it.. having an orgasm probably makes it MORE traumatizing because from that moment on you relate orgasms with horror. I mean, it's like your body is betraying you... it has to be such a mind fuck. I really think people that rape are the most vile of humans. They should be put into caves where they belong. Fucking sick fucks.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teogyQ7_r4s

4. Jimmy Carter Teaches About Love After Cancer Treatment (Secular Talk):

What a great tribute by Kyle here. Under Jimmy Carter not a single shot was fired by our military... can you even imagine that?! That's never happened! Not one single shot! In fact.. that makes him the only real President where peace reigned not war (in some form). I just think that needs a bit of respect. Carter was a devout Evangelical Christian .. and one of the few public figures that call themselves Christians that actually took the peaceful, good words of Jesus from the Bible and acted them out - helping the poor.! Kyle Talks about how he helped basically eradicated a disease in a poor part of the world. Who does that?! Seriously! The man actually cared for the poor and needy and his work for Israel and Palestine is unparalleled in my opinion. He was a great man. and he is taking this with grace and dignity. A kind man, a soft and gentle SMART leader..

President Obama uses his head not his gut (like dubya) so President Obama is a close 2nd to the best President I've seen in my lifetime.. He's accomplished a lot too like this Iran deal if Republicans don't screw it up .. never one for peace :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXftbmIr1FQ

5. "Living Fossil" spotted. What's more impressive having superior intelligence (large brains) like us humans or surviving the past 2 mass extinctions and being among the oldest living species of animals on earth? hmm. These rare sea creatures are playing the long game! Older than the dinosaurs!

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/s/guy-spots-super-rare-living-222459791.html

6. While you were vacationing a chunk of ice the size of an asteroid fell into the ocean. Climate change is happening RIGHT NOW!:

http://news.yahoo.com/while-were-vacation-chunk-ice-size-asteroid-fell-223827633.html

7. Here's what happens when you try to replicate climate contrarian papers (Guardian article): This is fantastic! You have to read this and share this with anyone of your family or friends that are still drinking the "it's all a liberal hoax" koolaid.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/aug/25/heres-what-happens-when-you-try-to-replicate-climate-contrarian-papers

8. Glenn Beck: WDBJ Shooting Signals End Times: 
Yeah I tend to agree with Cenk here. I seriously think someone needs to step in... he is clinically insane. I think we are basically watching someone mentally fall apart live on TV. Hey billionaires can go crazy too! lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ni9SmSmJAc

9. Ann Coulter Rails Against "Speech Nazis" (Secular Talk):
Yep. Ann Coulter is still a utter loud mouth moron. She hasn't changed a bit even when she went off the radar for a bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL3b8GyNiYw

By the way I didn't find the exact VICE video on immigration Kyle is talking about.. but here's one too... point is still the same.. Employers prefer illegal immigrants because they work harder and better and obviously for cheaper.. legal citizens searching for any job they can get do not want nor can they often do the same job. It's just a myth, Ann. You're whole theory is bunk .. as fucking usual..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXUdozfL7iM

10. TYT: Donald Trump Vs. Fox News. Round 2! Fight!:
I predict this war continues and Trump gets the nomination and Fox News is forced to switch their bias to Hillary Clinton...hahaha! JK! Of course not... we are all well aware of the hatred the owners of Fox News have towards the Clinton family. Maybe they'll support Bernie if he beats Hillary. lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZDt9mQcOcA

11. TYT: Ted Cruz Wants to Deport Millions, Just Please Don't Talk about it!:
Ted Cruz is one of my least favorite human beings.. let alone politicians. He is a walking suit .. he will do whatever or say whatever he needs to do for the $$$ and for the vote. Just morph into whatever.. plus he looks like an asshole and we need to call for his birth certificate too!!!!! Here he calls Megyn Kelly part of the liberal media basically... lol... which I love how this shows how pathetic this "news" channel is that saying your part of a "liberal media" is like saying your evil. Fucking pathetic bias at every turn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZDt9mQcOcA

12. David Packman Show: Cringe: Donald Trump Falls Apart when Asked for Specifics on His Immigration Plans:
 This speaks for itself. Wow. Our country is FUCKED if this toddler gets to somehow be the first reality show star President of America.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OHQNtPeUXI

13. Why Don't More Muslims Denounce Their Co-Religionists' Barbarism?: 
This subject is an interesting subject for me - there are people in my life that I care very deeply about that would probably sit on the Reza Aslan side of this debate. I disagree, but I think there is some nuance. There is truth to the colonialism claim and what CIA calls "blowback" but where blame is placed here it is near impossible to get people like Reza to point out the very detailed barbarisms within Islamic countries. I also think progressives have a sort of knee-jerk overreaction (and are still reacting and sensitive) about how Muslim Americans were treated in this country after 9/11. And that was a real thing .. a very terrible thing, I've read many stories. I know people that were directly affected because of this. And it was wrong and xenophobic!

Religion is one of those things that gets so tied in with culture and self identity that where trying to criticize it you are painted as a xenophobic racist. I can tell you right now that is not Sam Harris and that is not Richard Dawkins. I think I overreacted a bit too painting with a broad liberal brush directly after 9/11 saying "Bush was fabricating the entire threat of radical Islam" .. Yeah, I also liked Michael Moore then too. I was a simple-minded and biased and didn't do much nuance then. My hatred of all things Bush blinded me of the truth embedded in the doctrine of Islam. I have since learned that the truth lies usually not in the extremes but in the middle. The nuances are important. Especially in this debate on Muslims not doing "enough" to denounce their co-religionists' barbarism. What do you guys think about this?

http://observer.com/2014/10/muslims-on-barbarism/

14. Flashback interview on David Packman Show - Fox News Mole Embarrasses Fox News:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQJwVAHYJtw

... That's all for this week. Remember to pick up your Donald Trump pinatas today!

One Good Memory of Religion from My Childhood... (A Blog Short)

 *A Text Response from Gog when asked if he could imagine comparing C.S. Lewis to Wittgenstein. (Can you tell he's a fan of Wittgenstein?)

"Comparing CS Lewis to Wittgenstein is like comparing Flavor Flav to Einstein. One revolutionized philosophical thinking and almost single handedly ushered in the linguistic turn. The other made shoddy and lazy arguments filled with false choices and fallacies. What was is? Jesus was a liar, a devil, or the son of God?... I looked it up. It's: lunatic, devil, or God himself. Ugh. Stupidity! To formulate that "trilemma", I'd say either you're dishonest, lazy, or brain-dead." 

I read a new theolatte blog today that mentions C.S. Lewis written by Dan D. (who I've previously mentioned in past blogs). Dan really loves and respects C.S. Lewis. He teaches a course at his Bible College he is currently also the dean of. I am not a fan of C. S. Lewis. I have pointed this out before to him. Gog explains exactly my sentiment why. The more one delves into the world of philosophy you realize what a really bad philosopher C. S. Lewis was compared to so many great philosophers. He just did bad philosophy. I'm sure he was a nice enough man and a fine storyteller but some of his arguments he presents fall apart with the slightest examination. His trilemma thing is laughably easy to tear apart and many of his concepts were riddled with logical fallacies. A lot of these things make sense within the brackets of "A Christian Worldview" .. well, guess what.. as I've said before.. there is more to the world than these brackets. There is secular philosophy and most philosophers are atheists, like most scientists, by the way. hmm.

I loved The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe"  when I was a kid. I read that book many times and pretended Naria was in my closet. I loved it for the non-Christian imagery part of it. I loved it because it was a fun imaginary world I could transport myself to. C. S. Lewis' character Aslan the lion in the children's book is representative of Jesus who dies in the place of one of the children. Peter I think? I forget. This whole scapegoat thing was boring and not as magical as the magical world of Narnia. A place a kid could escape to and dream about with witches, a goat-legged leprechaun-looking guy, and yummy turkish delight (always pictured that tasting like Chick fil A, but less homophobic.)

THAT was the best part of that book! In a way it's telling of Christianity ... making up magical places that we all wish we could escape too... hmm.

Like heaven! and of course hell. I've discussed hell enough in my previous blogs. It is difficult to get my New Christian friends that I have to talk to me (an atheist) about hell. It's awkward and they usual glaze over it.. for obvious reasons. But heaven, this place is a magical made up fantasy afterlife destination! Christopher Hitchens once pointed out that heaven sounded like another hell.. like a celestial North Korea.. where all we do is praise, bow, and worship all day long our celestial dictator. Fucking horrifying!

I once joked with Gog about how we should make a short film that is like a complete rip off of David Lynch-style horror film where we see someone die.. a good faithful Christian (like that white kid from God's Not Dead for example) and he goes to heaven and it's not what he expects! It's full of these still-born babies and aborted fetuses and destroyed bodies from car wrecks all dismembered and worshiping and singing creepy praise songs with a fucked up sounding organ played by a dirty rastafarian man. lol like in Muholland Drive. jk. but Jesus!.. (literally) The chills! I can picture it now.. a choir of tiny aborted zygotes all bloody singing praise songs with their non-developed vocal chords so it's even creepier! Fuck!

But let me try to switch gears here... that was terrifying!

Heaven, like "The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe" used to be such a wonderful place in my little mind. I was a young child when I used to dream of heaven. In fact the reason I wrote this blog is I had a weird memory flashback. You've had them before with searing clarity, right? You can almost taste, and smell, and visualize everything and it brings that wonderful warm childhood comforting feeling. It's great. My vivid memory flashback was of my imagination of what I thought heaven was going to look like when I died - I could see the wonderful white cloudy fog, the gold everywhere (like Trump's house I guess), the mansions we all lived in after we died and arrived. It was beautiful. I remember picturing everyone enjoying food like bowls of fruit and oh the laughter .. all the laughter and joy one could imagine. Peaceful and glorious.

The best part though was seeing family members again, like my great grandma and grandpa, that had already passed away. I missed my family very much and I always pictured running up to them .. and hugging them. It was a glorious reunion of those that were stripped of the ones they loved. This memory of what I thought heaven was like when I was a child even now as a godless atheist heathen makes me feel really good. But I no longer fall for such childish things. It's a trick. It's not real... and we should grow up and know better. We invented these stories of afterlives that have been passed down generation after generation to deal with the curse of consciousness that as far as we know we are the only species of animal that has this- self awareness. We birthed cognitive dissonance and we told stories and we believed them for so long. But we know better now. We are smarter.

But unlike the "The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe" I thought heaven was a real place because as a small child all the way through adulthood my parents who of course I trusted told me it was, because my school told me it was, because Sunday School teachers told me it was, because the pastor told me it was. But it was all cherry-picked, and extrapolated upon from the Bible. It's all guess work and imagination based on a few random verses from one stupid book. I often wonder why it's so hard for my New Christian friends to take that step out of deluding themselves over these things and to step into the world without make believe.

It isn't scary because we're all in this together... this journey of being conscious! It's a fucking weird subjective journey we are all separately taking together and fun to try and follow the academic literature and look at good philosophy and science for answers based in logical soundness and/or empirical evidence. There are a lot of people in the non-believer camp now and we are doing really well. In fact some of the polls recently show that some of the most "moral" people (in various factors polled) are those that consider themselves non-religious. We don't need the added "theory of God" to be good, to live a life filled with deep meaning and purpose while simultaneously understanding the cosmos is meaningless and purposeless from a "cosmic perspective" (so far as we can tell). We don't need you to add more to the human story. We'll take what we know and start with that.

I'm currently listening via audiobook to the Old Testament and I'm utterly disgusted by the immorality of this particular god. I'm also just embarrassed for people that seriously think that this book has any relevance on life (especially morality!) in the 21st century. It's honestly mind-boggling to me how people can still be religious in the information age. Many of you that are reading this are non-religious but some that are reading this could be religious... All I want to say to you is be more skeptical of your beliefs and your confirmation biases. Couldn't you be wrong? Can you entertain this possibility? Turn the scrutiny away from Planned Parenthood or gay marriage and turn it around on yourself. You are fooling yourself with these ancient stories, these bad philosophers, these made up afterlife destinations and just like my parents, teachers, principal, pastor, etc did with me growing up you are spreading this to your children.

Please stop. 

Stop making "theories" (involving the supernatural and magic) about the real world in which you have zero evidence of except that you accept as profound that tingle in your heart, that still soft voice you think you are hearing in your head (yikes!), the delusion that prayers are productive and cause outcomes in reality, and a lifetime of confirmation bias. It's not real. Get the fuck out of Narnia... step back through the wardrobe into the real world. You are an adult not a child. Please.. Or else you may end up like Glenn Beck. 

Go here:

Glen Beck right now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ni9SmSmJAc

New Theolatte blog on C. S. Lewis:

http://www.theolatte.com/2015/08/c-s-lewis-a-discussion-with-colin-duriez-n-d-wilson-and-lyle-dorsett/

Religion Doesn't Make People More Moral: Study Finds.:

http://www.livescience.com/47799-morality-religion-political-beliefs.html