I love to read Nature magazine.  It’s probably my favorite of all publications.  On their website, I stumbled upon an article that many people are likely to be interested in.   Though I’ve heard about this years ago, scientists can now implant electrodes into a person’s brain (subcallosal cingulate to be exact), and by artificially changing firing patterns connected to the frontal cortex, they can remove depression and bipolar disorder.   It’s now going through testing and is proving itself effective in most people (11 out of 12 people are cured).

The effects aren’t necessarily immediate though.  Most patients require a year before drastic effects are seen, but studies are showing that most who undergo this treatment are cured.

Patients who have received the surgical implant describe it as lifting a dark cloud off of them.  They’re once again interested in what’s going on in the world.  It’s no longer a struggle, feeling as if each day they’re having to swim against the tides of a black vortex trying to suck them in.  It’s like a calm.  It’s a change in the brain’s rhythm.

Other patients have described it as turning on the lights.  It takes their focus away from themselves and invites them back into the world.  With that vortex gone, they’re able to climb their way out, their thoughts and feelings begin to change, and over the course of that year they’re able to reprogram their brains.  The device doesn’t give a person happiness, but it takes away what was keeping them from being happy.

I should note that it’s not a total cure though.  Once you turn off that electrode, their depression comes right back.  Even so, it’s wonderful that people can be relieved of such a terrible disease.

Here’s a lecture on the topic if you’re interested.  This seems to be from 2009, so it’s a few years back.  Back then, only around 60% of patients were treated successfully.  You can see that over the past few years they’ve been able to tweak their methods and improve upon them.

When I was a teenager, I used to watch a lot of MTV and listen to the radio.  I’d go play basketball in the recreation center and inside, the radio would be playing music from Matchbox Twenty, Goo Goo Dolls, and Third Eye Blind.   Good memories and good times!  I’d spend hours in the gym shooting around, listening away while I practiced my jumpshot.  But even then, I couldn’t help but wonder why nearly every song dealt with the same set of topics.  They’re always about love, relationships, attracting a lover, mating rituals (hand holding, grooming, fitness displays, etc), reputations, showing off resources, status, dealing with rejection, dealing with infidelity, sex appeal, and so on.   At the time I never could understood why, but after studying evolutionary psychology many years later, it was almost obvious why this is the case.  But as a young man, love never played a large role in my life, so it was always hard to understand.  I was primarily interested in computers, business, and later, science.  It just baffled my teenage mind that the only thing people could think about was sex and relationships.  Not that I’m against either.  It just seemed to me that there should be more running through someone’s mind than just those things.

I’ve always wanted to do a study on this, sifting through a long list of popular music in hopes to prove I’m not crazy.  Turns out researchers at the University of Albany did this very study and they found just what I expected:  90% of all popular music covers themes related to love and reproduction.

… Of the songs that made it into the Top Ten on 2009 Billboard charts, over 90% featured embedded, evolutionarily relevant reproductive messages. These included references to sexual intercourse, body parts, promiscuity, infidelity, sex appeal, and rejection.

Country songs contained an average of 5.9 different reproductive messages per song, with the most frequent being about parenting, commitment, rejection, and fidelity assurance. Pop songs contained 8.7 reproductive references per song, where sex appeal, reputation, short-term mating strategies, and fidelity assurance were the most common. For R&B there were 16.7 reproductive messages per song, with sex appeal, resources, sex acts, and status being the most prevalent.

A further analysis showed that across all three charts, popular songs that made it into the Top Ten contained significantly more reproductive messages than those that failed to rise to the top of the charts.

Source:  Journal of Evolutionary Psychology

Fascinating.  So what were the messages they were looking for?  I found the criteria they used instructive, so I’ll list them all out for you now.  These categories are what you’ll find in nearly all popular music.

1.  Genitalia

Any explicit, implicit, implied or slang reference to genitalia.

2.  Other Body Parts

References to any other body part other than genitalia, including waist to hip ratios and shoulder to hip ratios.

3. Courtship/Long Term Mating Strategies

References to dating, handholding, and other sincere courtship displays and overtures.

4. Hook Up/Short Term Mating Strategies

References to short-term mating strategies such as “hooking up” and overt solicitations for short term relationships.

5.  Foreplay/Arousal/Sex Act Precursors

Any reference to kissing, fondling or undressing, as well as physiological precursors to intercourse.

6. Sex Act

Any explicit, implicit, implied or slang reference to sexual intercourse.

7.  Sexual Prowess

References to stamina, sex drive or other sexually related skills and/or bragging of such.

8.  Promiscuity/Reputation/Derogation

Includes references to promiscuity, as well as negative reputational references, attempts to defame another person’s reputation or make negative social comparisons.

9.  Sequestering/Mate Guarding

Keeping tabs on a mate, watching, guarding, tracking and/or isolating a mate.  Also includes references to privacy, secrecy, and isolation for the purpose of intercourse.

10.  Fidelity Assurance/Abandonment Prevention

Questions or statements to assess the fidelity of a mate.  Seeking information to ascertain the commitment of a mate and prevent abandonment/cuckoldry.

11.  Commitment and Fidelity

References to dedication, sincerity and long term commitments to a relationship such as marriage, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, and husband or committed other.  Also includes honest courtship signals such as diamond rings which indicate a committed relationship.

12.  Resources

Any reference to luxury items, cars, money, or things that denote resources.

13. Status

References to a person’s high standing in society; VIP status, being referred to as the “boss” or a “rockstar” or other high ranking person.

14. Mate Provisioning

Use of status or resources specifically to protect/retain a mate.

15. Appearance Enhancement/Sex Appeal

Grooming, physical appearance, general attractiveness, fitness displays and/or signals, or references to any visual /physical aspect of a potential mate.

16. Rejection

References to divorce, breakups, broken hearts, or discord within the context of a pairbond relationship.

17.  Infidelity/Cheater Detection/Mate Poaching

References to cheating, extrapair copulations, suspicions of infidelity, stealing another person’s mate, or paternal uncertainty.

18.  Parenting

Includes any reference to parenting, child-rearing, or desire for children.  Also includes references to grandparents and grandchildren.

If you want to read the research paper itself, you can find it here.

I often see news articles poking fun at us men, saying we’re obsessed with sex, thinking about it once every hour.  I don’t think it’s fair to say that it’s just us men though.  This type of thinking is ubiquitous among both sexes.  We’ve evolved here on planet Earth as DNA replication machines.  Our bodies want to replicate and make copies of themselves, so finding a mate is imperative.  Most of what our brains think about is securing a mate, creating successful copies of ourselves, and making sure those copies survive and flourish.  Then we all carefully watch as the copies try to make even more copies before we pass on, and such is life.

In a recent post entitled All Attractive Men Are Scum?, I complained about a news article’s claim that a man’s capability to commit to a relationship is genetically determined.  I argued that the studies in the article fail to take into account the environment, and that a person’s character shouldn’t be judged until you actually get to know them.  But to tell the truth, I was a bit disingenuous and didn’t state that there’s also some interesting evidence building up indicating a large degree of truth to what was being said.  Unfortunately, my own personal bias was getting in the way.  I don’t personally like the conclusions some of this evidence seems to suggest, as it doesn’t line up with my view of the world.  As a man, I like to believe it’s my choice whether or not I commit to a relationship, and I can choose my own values.  But considering I try to be intellectually honest at all times, I found myself lying in bed with a deep sense of guilt.  I stared up at my bookshelf at all my neuroscience books and thought to myself, “Do I tell them about the prairie and meadow voles?”  After a fifteen minute deliberation while eating a bowl of Raisin Bran, I decided I would share with you the evidence I was previous withholding.  So, here goes.

If you travel to the heartland of the United States and walk through the grasslands, you’ll come across two species of adorable creatures – prairie and meadow voles.

Aren’t they cute?  I think so.  So, why in the world are we talking about voles?  Scientists noticed that while both species of voles are very closely related genetically, prairie voles are monogamous, completely dedicated to one partner, while meadow voles are not.  Prairie voles live with their spouses in the same nest, are both actively involved in raising their young, and the males will passionately defend their spouse and children from harm.  Meadow voles on the other hand, their males live in their own bachelor pads.  They knock up the women and then run off, and even the women only care for their young briefly before letting them fend for themselves in the world.  How could two closely related species exhibit such different reproductive and parenting behaviors?

The scientists captured the little guys and took a close look at their brains.  They eventually found out that the only real difference between them was the concentrations of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors.  It’s experiment time!  First they injected the faithful, loving prairie voles with drugs which inhibited the vasopressin receptors.  The once devout husbands soon lost interest in their wives and exhibited the promiscuous behavior of meadow voles.  If the unfaithful meadow voles were injected with extra doses of vasopressin, they quickly bonded with their sexual partners and became monogamous family men, like the prairie voles.  You can also turn the flighty meadow vole females into good caring mothers by injecting them with oxytocin.

Wow.  I don’t think I really need to say much else.  We all want to believe we can choose who we are, and the values which we hold, but do we really?  Quite a question, isn’t it?  Could it be that us human men are driven by the same factors?  Are some men born with more vasopressin receptors in their brains, causing their level of commitment to their partners?  Is the same true for females?  Is a woman’s dedication to her spouse and children dictated by the number of oxytocin receptors in her brain?  The neuroscience textbook I’m reading concludes with the following:

The vole story is a fascinating example of how brain chemicals can regulate critical behaviors.   However, by now you are undoubtedly wondering:  Does this have anything to do with human relationships, faithfulness, and love?  We have only incomplete facts.  There is some evidence from primates that vasopressin and oxytocin levels vary with sexual arousal, and that oxytocin facilitates nurturing behavior in females and sexual assertiveness in some males.  It has also been found in human fMRI experiments that regions of the brain dense with oxytocin and vasopressin receptors are activated when mothers look at photographs of their own children but not when they look at photographs of the children of their friends.

Are oxytocin and vasopressin important for romantic and parental love in people?  Maybe.  It’s too soon to tell.

Source:  Neuroscience: Exploring The Brain, Third Edition, pgs 546-547

I think we can all safely conclude that this is an important issue which needs to be investigated further.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, we humans are more complex than the voles, so it’s not all about just vasopressin and oxytocin, though they’re both critical.

To further illustrate this concept of brain chemistry determining our morality, think about the drug ecstasy.  If you take it, your conscious state is sent into euphoria, you develop a very strong feeling of intimacy with others, everything becomes “one”, and all fears and anxieties go away.  Isn’t it interesting that these are the same factors spiritual gurus talk about?  Letting go of fear, seeing the interconnectedness of everything, self-acceptance, forgiving others, developing emotional intimacy, and so on.  Before ecstasy was made illegal, research was done on it and neuroscientists summarized its therapeutic effects.

“Three neurobiological mechanisms for the therapeutic effects of MDMA have been suggested: “1) MDMA increases oxytocin levels, which may strengthen the therapeutic alliance; 2) MDMA increases ventromedial prefrontal activity and decreases amygdala activity, which may improve emotional regulation and decrease avoidance, and 3) MDMA increases norepinephrine release and circulating cortisol levels, which may facilitate emotional engagement and enhance extinction of learned fear associations.”

- Source, Wikipedia

Studying what drugs do to people’s brains is one of the most fascinating things things to research.  Now don’t go off and start taking ecstasy; it’s a dangerous drug and has some nasty side effects.  I think that meditation, focusing on various peaceful ideas, and other mental imagery causes various vibrations in our neural networks, which stimulate and activate these chemicals, altering our conscious states.  It’s not random that all these things correlate with one another – forgiveness, oneness, intimacy, and so forth.

Along this same idea, one evening I was having dinner with a Christian financial planner because we were working together on a software project.  He started sharing his religious ideas and told me how he believed that when he went to heaven and stood before God, all of his fears would be washed away, he’d become one with everything, his sins would be forgiven, and that he’d be surrounded by love and goodness.  Does that sound familiar?  It’s the same thing!  Give him some ecstasy and he’d have the same experience.  What’s he’s really wanting is a different state of brain chemicals.  There’s no need for anything supernatural, only a deeper awareness of science and how his brain works.

This is a good place to bring up the environment.  Notice that ecstasy decreases amygdala activity, which is our center for fear.  The world is a rough place, and we form mental associations which fire off those fear centers, ruining our conscious state of peace and security.  We all know that if a person has suffered one traumatic experience after another, it has strong effects on their personality.  We also know that some people are able to more easily bounce back from such experiences.  I think it’s ultimately the combination of native brain chemistry and the associations we develop throughout our lives, which dictate our conscious states.  Some people’s brains are more inclined to kindness, intimacy, oneness, and so forth, than others, probably based on the density of vasopressin, oxytocin, and some other types of receptors and chemicals.

I’ve had those types of questions on my mind for years now.  One question I’ve been deeply wondering about is whether or not these sorts of receptors can atrophy from lack of use, or become disconnected from other brain areas.  Everything else in my body seems to wither away if it’s not used.  If I don’t exercise, my muscles deteriorate.  Knowledge I don’t use, I forget.  The brain can also rewire itself, reallocating neurons to different functions.  Can you become more emotional and loving by actively taking part in those sorts of activities, and less so if you rarely have the experiences?  Or is it hard wired?

We’re now rapidly moving beyond my level of neuroscience knowledge.  I would have to dedicate myself more fully to neuroscience if I was to more deeply understand the interplay of all these brain chemicals, so I better stop now.

Society’s beliefs about personal responsibility, values, and what dictates our behavior are being overturned by this sort of science.  Our greatest moral teachers tell us to love one another, as if it’s something we do by willpower alone.  We praise a person who has been married for a lifetime, and condemn those who have never deeply committed themselves.  But let me ask you this:  What if that inner empathy to love your spouse (or anyone else for that matter), which is so passionately espoused by gurus and sages, is really dictated by brain chemistry?  What if the degree of passion a person is capable of exhibiting is dictated by these same chemical receptors?  What then?  And even more intriguing, will we later be able to alter ourselves with targeted drugs, and nanobots, and make ourselves into perfectly loving human beings?  I like the idea that it’s just chemicals and brain receptors because if that’s the case, we can always invent devices to change our brains.

The other day I went online to read the news and came across an article entitled Why Women Shouldn’t Pick Attractive Husbands.  After I finished reading this article, I sat back in my chair in disgust.

First we’re told how terrible Anthony Weiner is, the Congressman who sent pictures of his penis to attractive women over the internet.

Watching the Anthony Weiner scandal unfold, it was hard not to wonder how a smart, accomplished, beautiful woman like Huma Abedin got herself involved with a guy like Weiner.

We’re told how he cheated on his wife, and so on and so forth.

But, sexting sexcapades aside, the 46-year-old Weiner, whether you find him handsome or not, is a fit, intelligent, passionate, promising politician with a six-figure income who had a reputation of a ladies’ man and was even named a Cosmo eligible bachelor — the kind of man that many, many women are drawn to.

And that’s where Abedin and other smart, beautiful, accomplished women often make their mistake. The more financially independent women become, the more they prefer good-looking men. But they don’t just want their partners to be hotties; they want them to be masculine, physically fit, loving, educated, a few years older and making the big bucks. Oh, and they also have to really want to be a hubby and daddy.

So what conclusions are we to draw from this?  According to this author, every attractive man who takes care of himself physically, is well educated, and earns a good salary is, more likely than not, just like Anthony Weiner.  Women, you have to beware!  Don’t put yourself at risk.  No matter how charming and wonderful they may be, don’t fall for it!

Do you want to live in a world where your character is judged solely by your looks alone?

They also have supposed scientific “evidence” to back these claims.

And, evidently, it’s working against us. Attractive men don’t make the best husbands, according to researchers. Guys who are rated as the most masculine — a billboard for a man’s good genes — tend to have more testosterone, and men with higher testosterone levels are 43 percent more likely to get divorced than men with normal levels, 31 percent more likely to split because of marital problems and 38 percent more likely to cheat. In other words, they may be better cads than dads.

We’d be smarter if we sought out guys who are uglier than we are because researchers have found that couples in which the woman is hotter than the guy are happier than if the situation is reversed. And since quite a few women have been telling Weiner how “hot” he is, it’s clear that neither Abedin nor Weiner got that memo.

I don’t like this at all.  If we happen to be born with genes which make us good looking, we’re also bound to be terrible husbands.  Our testosterone levels are just too high.  We’re raging with sexual energy and are ready to run off with any beautiful woman which comes across our path.  We just can’t help ourselves.  We’re all just like Anthony Weiner.

This naive view of human nature will make our lives more difficult.  Women, if you’re on a date with an intelligent, handsome man, ignore this article and everything that it says.  You’re intelligent, aren’t you?  I have more confidence in you than this.  It’s not that hard to see whether a man is caring and loyal.  Just listen to what he says, watch how he treats others, and spend a significant amount of time with him — long enough to really get to know him.

Of course, hottie women can also “optimize their looks to find other partners if she’s unhappy,” says Rob Burriss, a professor at England’s University of Chester. Hello, Weiner? And Abedin, 35 — one of Time magazine’s “40 under 40″ young stars in politics — was considered a catch when Weiner started pursuing her a few years ago.

But who can blame her? She, like so many women — and men — pick a mate based on pretty predictable factors, dating back to caveman days when all we were trying to do was survive and keep our species going, according to physical anthropologist and Why Him? Why Her? author Helen Fisher, who has been studying human courtship for decades. We’re drawn to guys like Weiner because they have good genes we can pass on to our kids. The downside is that we take a huge risk on whether he’s going to be sexually faithful to us.

Ladies, don’t you find this insulting?  I have more faith in you than these academics.  I believe you have passions, as we all do, but you are not completely driven by primal cave-woman desires and have the ability to control yourself.  These same people say the same things about us men.  They treat us like the only factors we’re capable of admiring in a woman is a nice ass and big breasts.

I was raised in a Christian home and was taught to love my wife as Christ loved to church.  You give your life to someone and would even die for them to save them from trouble and harm.  You work hard and reap what you sough.  If you exercise, and work hard in school to get a proper education in a relevant and timely field, you reap the rewards of good health and financial prosperity.  The world is difficult, but you have to be wise and manage your affairs with discretion.  If you do so, you can reap the blessings from God for following the laws of nature.  Now I’m not a religious man, but I honestly wish we could go back to the 1950s.  I wish we could go back to an age where there was moral and personal responsibility, and people didn’t have such a low opinion of human nature.  Back then, we were sinners who needed saved by committing ourselves to higher principles.  Today we live in an era of skepticism and determinism.  We’re no longer able to change ourselves.  It’s all in our genes.

I believe I can change.  I believe you can change.  In the words of Rocky, “We all can change!”  If we’ll commit ourselves to higher principles, we don’t have to live by way of our primal passions.  When I study the human brain, I do see the centers of those primal passions, but we also have a frontal cortex, which allows us to bring those passions under our control.

But people don’t seem to respect anecdotal evidence from everyday people, such as myself.  Unless there’s some study to back it, it’s just an opinion.  Well, ok.  Let’s get technical about this.  Such studies as those quoted in the article above fail to take into account the environment.  Depending on whether a person is in a loving, nurtured environment, versus an unloving, hateful environment, they will behave differently.  The very same brain will respond completely differently.  The mindsets of the article create a hateful, suspicious, skeptical environment.  When people don’t feel anyone’s looking out for them, that their lover isn’t loyal to them, that nobody believes in them, and so on, they tend to become just what you feared.  Instead of protecting and helping, they collapse inward, hide, and view others with suspicion.  You want them to love, trust, and be faithful, but then you show them no love or respect, and what do you expect?  It’s no way to live.

But if you need a brilliant professor to point out the obvious to you, here’s Professor Stephen Chorover, a distinguished professor within the MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences department, talking about behavior and its linkage to the environment.
http://www.closertotruth.com/video-profile/How-Brain-Scientists-Think-about-Consciousness-Stephen-Chorover-/1398

In the interview, Professor Chorover makes it quite clear that you can’t analyze brain function without taking into account the environment.  When research is done, people and animals behave differently based on the environment they find themselves in.  Same people, same brains, different behavior.

Take a moment to reflect on what this skepticism does to all of us.  Think of what this does to men’s minds when women believe they have no loyalty and no real affection.  They’ll respond appropriately — they’ll become what you believe they are.  That’s not to say you, the women, should tolerate bad behavior.  No.  But instead of saying, “So you’re interested in my best friend?  *sigh*  Whatever, that’s just how you men are.  You’re unreliable and worthless.”  You instead say, “I’ve known you for a while now and we’ve been through a lot.  I find it hard to believe what I’m hearing about you.  I know you’re better than this.  Or am I wrong?”  Hold that reasonable standard up to them and believe, deep down, that they’ll meet you there.  And if you don’t believe in them, why are you with them, or considering an intimate relationship with them?

I can tell you this.  If you’re one of the women out there who believes this sort of thing, a quality man will look at your character, and what’s he going to see?  You’re out on a date and start tirading about how men are unreliable, untrustworthy, and undependable, what’s he going to think of you?  Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t have any interest in you.  After all, what would you think of a man who was saying all of this about women?  You’d want out of there and go home to tell your friends, “Ugh, I just had a date with a disgusting misogynist.”  Well, quality men think the same sort of thing.  They think your soul is black and there’s no love in there.  But the Anthony Weiners of the world, they’ll charm you, agree with you, knock you up, and then leave you — and sadly, your negative mindset brought all of this on yourself.  Even sadder, you’ll go on and blame men in general for how they’re treating you.  You’re scaring off good men and attracting the very sort of men you don’t want in your life.  You’ve created that environment around yourself and it draws in everything dark and nasty.

Advances in computer vision are leading to some really interesting possibilities.  In my Space, Time, and the Mind posts I mentioned that I was going to teach you all how you can go from 2D images to a 3D environment.  Sony has developed an augmented reality (“AR”) application allowing them to do just this.  In this demonstration they form a 3D environment from a cell phone camera.  Then they drop animated 3D balls onto the environment which respond to real world surfaces in the room, such as chairs and tables.  They also place an animated 3D model into a bedroom and have it walk around. This technology has almost matured to a stage where it’s becoming practical and useful. We’re VERY close to computers deeply understanding the environments they’re in and interacting with us humans in useful ways.  We’re reverse engineering the brain very quickly and this is allowing machines to think like humans and supplement our minds.

I imagine that this sort of technology will eventually integrate with our brains giving us useful information. Say you were in an airplane and the pilot had a heart-attack. A virtual AR guide could show you step by step how to land the airplane.

Say you were thinking about a recent argument with your girlfriend and you accidentally walk out into the street where a car is rapidly approaching. I can imagine these AR systems warning you with a loud noise and possibly an AR virtual being screaming at you, “Get out of the road, you’re about to be run over!”

Or even more practical, say you walk into a hardware store and are in a hurry. You’re wondering where a particular appliance is. What do you do? You call up a virtual “guide” who then appears within your personal perceptional field, leading you to where you need to go. The same would apply to finding your spouse in a shopping mall. “Where’s Sarah at? Could you lead me to her?” Then a little 3D model appears which walks you directly to her. Even if this didn’t integrate with our brains through nanobots, our cell phones could perform this same function with their cameras.

This system could display names over people’s heads so you never forget someone’s name. It could also give you a brief biography of who they are so you’d know who you’re dealing with, and possibility give you a log of your past interactions with that person. That would help tremendously if you’re a salesmen.

If you’re out for a walk late at night and see a stranger approaching, it could warn you if that person has a past criminal record, or is a sex offender. It could also notify a nearby police officer and if that person tries something, the police could be there in an instant to save you. Your privacy could be “unlocked” and then the police would have a GPS fix on you from nanobots in your brain. Even if the person used some drug on you and you were unconscious the police would be there to save you before you were raped.

This leads to a lot of privacy concerns, but the possibilities for such technology are endless. Overall, this stuff is just awesome.  People are also going to be gaming with AR beings in their bedrooms and on their kitchen tables.  This is so neat. Here’s an upcoming fighting game for the Playstation Portable. It would be amazing to do a finishing move, knocking your opponent off the edge of the table onto the floor!

Nintendo is also making some really creative games. Imagine using your handheld Nintendo to practice archery, shooting at objects across your living room. Looks pretty cool!

It would be totally badass to go the subway and fight random people at Samurai Showdown within the train car there on the floor. Be even cooler when we have virtual reality and nanobots in our brains. Then we can control the AR being with our minds and fight one and one there in the airport waiting area. “You want some of this! Bring it!” Nobody else even sees it happening – it would all happen in our brains. I would morph into Ukyo, the most epic samurai ever. We’d be jumping off of walls, throwing shurikens at one another, and doing back flips from rafters. We could use grappling hooks and swing around, battling in mid-air like those old kung fu movies. As this video shows, Ukyo’s only weakness is a beautiful woman stripping off her clothes. He quickly loses focus and she defeats him, but only for one round.

A recent paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences has been getting a lot of attention.  It covers a very interesting topic:  Why are humans so bad at reasoning in some contexts, yet so amazingly good in others?  It’s argued that human reasoning was not designed to help us discover the truth; it was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.  Our reasoning faculties so often lead to poor outcomes, not because we are bad at it, but because we have a strong tendency to seek justification for our beliefs and actions instead of the truth.

Here is the abstract.

Abstract: Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found.

Though we all dream of a world in consensus, it would be detrimental to our species and future progress.

I just finished listening to a very interesting social psychology lecture. Fortunately, I am able to embed it so I will post it up for all of you here on my site as well.  The professor is Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Virginia.

I very much enjoyed his discussion on the various taboos and “sacred” values held by modern liberals.  I have noticed three of these “taboos” myself but the other two were new to me.  The five sacred taboos Dr. Haidt mentions are 1) Race Differences, 2) Sex Differences, 3) Blaming The Victim, 4) Stereotype Accuracy, and 5) Nativism. Afterwards he gave an excellent example illustrating how they work.

Has social psychology become a Tribal Moral Community since the 1960s? Are we a community that is bound together by liberal values and then blind to any ideas or findings that threaten our sacred values? I believe the answer is yes, and I’ll make 3 points to support that claim.

1) We have taboos and danger zones.

First, we have taboos and danger zones. We social psychologists are normally so good at challenging each other’s causal theories. If someone describes a phenomenon and then proposes a causal explanation, the rest of us will automatically generate 5 alternative causal explanations, along with 5 control conditions needed to rule out those alternatives. Except when any of these issues are in play. These issues turn on the force field, constrain our thinking, and deprive us of our ability to think of the full range of alternative hypotheses. It’s too dangerous for me to work through examples. I’ll just refer you to Larry Summers’ famous musings about why men are overrepresented in math and science departments at the nation’s top universities.

As on one of his 3 hypotheses, he noted that there is a sex difference in the standard deviation of IQ scores between men and women. He didn’t say that men are smarter. He didn’t say that men have higher IQs. He just noted the well known fact that the variance of male scores is larger, which means that there are more men at the very bottom, and at the very top. Might that contribute to the underrepresentation of women at the very top levels of science? If you’re standing outside the force field it’s a good hypothesis, certainly worth exploring. But if you’re inside the force field, it is not a permissible hypothesis. It is sacrilege. It blames the victims, rather than the powerful. The ensuing outrage led ultimately to his resignation as president of Harvard. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.

Source:  Edge.org

As for myself, I’m a member of the minority he speaks of throughout the lecture.  Though I’m not a social psychologist, I am socially liberal yet fiscally conservative.  Any of you who have read my posts on economics have probably gathered that already.  I don’t really fit well into any of the common political molds.

Take the recent financial crisis.  Most in academia hold a Keynesian perspective toward the economy.  I’ve read several Keynesian textbooks, most notably Paul Sameulson’s Economics textbook, and while I generally agree with their perspectives in microeconomics, when it comes to macroeconomics and the business cycle, I’ve never been convinced by their arguments, no matter how many of their books I read.  Also, considering they were unable to notice the housing bubble forming, and the greatest recession since the Great Depression caught them all by surprise, I think their theories are missing something very critical.  While I don’t agree with the Austrian school of thought completely, when it comes to their conception of money and the business cycle, I think they’re closer to the truth than those with a more Keynesian perspective.

Our society and economy have been built by complex bottom-up process, similar to biological evolution by natural selection.   It didn’t develop from a designed top-down process – it grew organically.  It’s messy and complicated, just as biological bodies are.  The economy is beyond simple aggregate supply/demand calculations, economic indicators are too vague to be of any real planning value, and I don’t believe anyone is smart enough to design out the direction of the economy.  I don’t always like how the free market distributes the resources, and I sympathize with their desire for distributive justice, but I seem to have a lot less faith in planning than most liberals do.  There’s too many factors which the planners couldn’t possibly think of and know about.   The Austrian school views the economy in this way and I think that’s what attracts me to it the most.

“Social theory begins with … the discovery that there exist orderly structures which are the product of the action of many men but are not the result of human design.”

- Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek

Just recently I was reading some of Friedrich Hayek’s books, and underlying everything he writes you find the idea that societies and their economies are built by bottom-up processes.  They are not designed from the top-down and therefore many of our traditions, moral codes, and various ways of life can be difficult to understand at times.  The knowledge as to “why” they exist is spread throughout the individuals of the society, and no single person understands how it all ties together.  Many of us take part in events which include strange traditions which we don’t understand.  Many of society’s values and moral sentiments are similar in that they may not make sense to an individual person trying to think about them rationally.  They may have good reasons behind them yet no single person is conscious of them all, or they may have served a past purpose which isn’t of any use now.  Either way, the main point is that these traditions and moral values, regardless of how they may appear to us rationally, are the necessary by-product of the growth of a free society by bottom-up processes.  If you believe in freedom, you have to in some sense accept them, or a least tolerate them.  Many of the themes which I find in Hayek’s work sound very similar in theme to what I find in Richard Dawkins books, like Climbing Mount Improbable.  Take this quotation for example:

“The unwillingness to tolerate or respect any social forces which are not recognizable as the product of intelligent design, which is so important a cause of the present desire for comprehensive economic planning, is indeed only one aspect of a more general movement. We meet the same tendency in the field of morals and conventions, in the desire to substitute an artificial for the existing languages, and in the whole modern attitude toward processes which govern the growth of knowledge. The belief that only a synthetic system of morals, an artificial language, or even an artificial society can be justified in an age of science, as well as the increasing unwillingness to bow before any moral rules whose utility is not rationally demonstrated, or to conform with conventions whose rationale is not known, are all manifestations of the same basic view which wants all social activity to be recognizably part of a single coherent plan. They are the results of that same rationalistic “individualism” which wants to see in everything the product of conscious individual reason. They are certainly not, however, a result of true individualism and may even make the working of a free and truly individualistic system difficult or impossible.  Indeed, the great lesson which the individualist philosophy teaches us on this score is that, while it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization, it may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed.”

- Friedrich Hayek, Individualism: True and False

Compare the similarities to what Richard Dawkins says in his book Climbing Mount Improbable:

It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn’t work. You don’t need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch. Only God would essay the mad task of leaping up the precipice in a single bound. And if we postulate him as our cosmic designer we are left in exactly the same position as when we started. Any Designer capable of constructing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent and complicated beyond all imagining. And complicated is just another word for improbable — and therefore demanding of explanation. A theologian who ripostes that his god is sublimely simple has (not very) neatly evaded the issue, for a sufficiently simple god, whatever other virtues he might have, would be too simple to be capable of designing a universe (to say nothing of forgiving sins, answering prayers, blessing unions, transubstantiating wine, and the many other achievements variously expected of him). You cannot have it both ways. Either your god is capable of designing worlds and doing all the other godlike things, in which case he needs an explanation in his own right. Or he is not, in which case he cannot provide an explanation. God should be seen by Fred Hoyle as the ultimate Boeing 747.

- Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable

I don’t think the building of our economy, society, and moral values is any different at all.  If any human being were asked to plan out an economy and society, with all of its accompanying laws, morals, and legal institutions, it’d be impossible.  To borrow Dawkins phrase, it would require a designer who is “intelligent and complicated beyond all imagining.  And complicated is just another word for improbable”.  That’s why I’m not a socialist and tend to lean toward the right on economic issues.

Another central theme of Hayek is that our system of money works because nobody has to understand the entire picture in order to take part in the economy.  That’s really an amazing thing when you think about it.  You can go to the store and spend the money you earn, and don’t have to worry about how the goods got there, how they were produced, and so on.  This has its downsides as well, such as if the clothing you’re buying was made in a Chinese sweatshop, and by buying it you’re supporting a rather nasty enterprise.  But anyways, I think there’s a big flaw in democracy because it doesn’t follow this principle.  As our society gets more and more complex, in order for us to vote correctly on issues, we need a deeper and deeper understanding of how it all ties together.  We drown in information and can’t decide on the correct plan of action.  I don’t know the solution to this, but what I do know is that every social system which we’ve successful built works because it does not require the individual to understand everything going on around them.  The viewpoint typically from the educated is for us all to be “well-rounded” and at least understand a little bit of everything.  It’s a nice sounding idea, but the more complex society becomes, the harder this sort of society is going to be to build.  We can keep blaming the stupid and uneducated for voting in the wrong politicians, and not understanding the issues, but I don’t feel it’s their fault.  As society gets ever more complicated, we’re all going to be falling into that category unless we somehow modify our brains so that it can process and store more information.  From an efficiency standpoint, having to have each person store practically all human knowledge in their head, we end up with a huge amount of redundant copies of information.   At that point, we have to ask what it even means to be an individual.  If in the future we have technology similar to the Matrix movies where knowledge, skills, and information can be “downloaded” into our brains, and we all know everything, and are skilled in just about everything, the individual is difficult to define.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a philosophical post, and tonight I decided to write down my current thoughts about the nature of truth and knowledge.  So, let’s get right to it – what is truth?

This may sound like a meaningless statement.  After all, truth is, and there’s no more to say.  What exists, exists.  I consider truth to be everything that exists.  Even so, I don’t think that sort of definition and conception of truth helps us out very much.  Why?  Well, we have to learn about the world, and we only slowly acquire a small tidbit of knowledge throughout our lifetimes.  And besides that, our knowledge is oftentimes faulty and in error.  So what is truth to us fallible human beings?  How do we learn it?  What is it and how does it differ from incorrect beliefs we hold?  What are the limitations of human knowledge?  What can and do we know?

I don’t plan to take on those questions in their entirety.  What I will do, however, is talk about the nature of the vast majority of what we humans do know.  To begin with, truth is something which permeates our entire being.  This may at first sound at bit mystical, but by the time I’m finished explaining what I mean, it shouldn’t be mystical at all.  I chose to write this post after reading Bertrand Russell’s The Analysis of Matter, in particular after coming across the following passage:

“It is fairly clear that all our elementary intellectual processes have pre-intellectual analogues.  The analogue of a general causal belief is a reflex or a habit.  A dog goes to the dining-room when he hears the dinner-bell, and so do we.  In the case of the dog, it is easy to suppose that he has merely acquired a habit, without having formulated the induction:   “Dinner-bells are a cause, or an effect, or an indispensable part of the cause, of dinner.”  We, however, can formulate this induction, and we shall then suppose that it is because we have done so that we go into the dining-room when we hear the bell.  In fact, however, we may be just as merely habitual as the dog.  The elementary inductions of common sense are first habits, and only subsequently beliefs.  We may say that if, in our experience, A is accompanied by B either often or in some emotionally important manner, this fact causes first a habit which would be rational if A were always accompanied by B, and then a belief that A is always accompanied by B — the latter being a rationalization of the pre-existing habit.

General propositions may thus form part of our thinking from the start.  Such general propositions are merely the verbal expressions of habits.  The hand-eye co-ordination becomes firmly fixed as a motor habit, and then, when we think, we conclude that what what can be seen can often be touched — in fact, that it can be touched in circumstances which we know in practice, though we might have difficulty in formulating them exactly.  Such general propositions are synthetic, and are in a certain sense a priori; for, though experience has caused them, they are not obtained by inference from other propositions, but by rationalizing and verbalizing our habits;  that is to say, their antecedents are pre-intellectual.  The trouble with them is that they are never quite right.  Common sense, do what it will, cannot avoid being surprised occasionally.  The object of science is to spare it this emotion, and create mental habits which shall be in such close accord with the habits of the world as to secure that nothing shall be unexpected.  Science has, of course, not yet achieved its ideal: the Great War and the earthquake in Tokyo took people by surprise.  But it is hoped that in time such events will no longer disturb us, because we shall have expected them.”

I think this short passage captures what truth is in us humans.  The process by which we come to understand the world starts at an unconscious level.  First our eyes gather light from the external world and this light creates pulses which make their way through our brains, like a series of complex parallel circuits.  I mention light in particular because over 50% of our brain is dedicated to visual processing alone, and most all of these processes happen unconsciously.  But, other parts of our body are also sending signals up to the brain as well, and these signals are being processed in the same way.  This includes our hands, feet, ears, etc.  A great deal of complex processing takes place and we’re not conscious of any of it.  It’s mechanical and simply happens.  To a very large extent, we live in a biological robot.  This becomes obvious once you study neuroscience and observe what happens to people when various areas of their brain are damaged.

Consciousness, which is the world you and I feel and experience, is like the tip of an ice-berg which is submerged in the ocean.  Only a small tip sticks up from the surface.  About three years ago I did a pretty detailed study of the works of Sigmund Freud and I believe there’s a great deal of truth to his iceberg theory.

For example, you’re conscious of thoughts bouncing around in your head, and you’re also aware of being in a 3D world, of objects existing around you, such as your computer chair, books, a coffee mug on the desk, etc., but we all know there’s a great deal more to our brains.  Take your memories for instance.  Have you ever had a moment where someone asked you a question, and you knew that you should know the answer, and then you waited for your mind to remember the answer?  A coworker may ask where your other coworker is and you remember her telling you where she went but you can’t remember what she told you.  So you sit there for a moment, waiting for your brain to process its memory databank and spit back up the information to your language systems so you can tell your friend where your coworker is.  None of that happened at a conscious level.  You didn’t experience any sensation as your brain chugged through its database of information, querying for an answer to the question you were asked.  It just happened.

There are lots of things like this.  Take love for example.  To a very large extent, love is involuntary.  It just happens.  Fear simply happens.  Feelings of guilt and shame simply happen.  You don’t typically induce them through will power.  I certainly never have.  I’ve never been successful at making myself romantically attracted to someone, no matter how much I may think it over at the conscious level, telling myself, “She would be good for me.”  One of Freud’s biggest insights was that a lot of our desires, wishes, and past memories exist at an unconscious level, and that by linking them to words you can bring them up to a conscious level, and then you can better understand why you’re having the feelings you’re having.  I find that sort of thing fascinating, and it actually lead me to read most everything the man ever wrote. 

But before we find ourselves going too far astray, the main reason I bring this up is because most of what we know and understand is at an unconscious level.  It seems to be of an informational-processing type nature, taking in raw sensory information, and processing it, and then relating it to past experiences (our memories).  This incredibly complex process is done for us automatically, without any thought or effort on our parts.  Our brains build up a vast database of information and experiences, which it organizes and sorts in various useful ways for us.

This brings me to one of Steve’s comments which he left on my post Albert Einstein’s Beliefs Toward God,

From what I’ve read of and about Spinoza, I’m still not sure I comprehend what he meant by “the intellectual love of God,” yet the expression resonates deeply with me. Ken Wilber thinks Spinoza’s philosophy was flawed because it relied too much on reason and not on more compelling mystical apprehension for its insights, but I suspect that, at least for some of us, the intellect, properly used, is the royal road to understanding ultimate reality or, at least, it’s an approach that compliments the intuitively or transrationally mystical one.

I’m not 100% certain what a mystic insight entails, but I personally interpret this comment as referring to unconscious brain activity and its relation to consciousness.  If that’s the case, then I feel that love, joy, and even the experience of seeing the world around me is a mystical insight.  But how does this differ from the rational world?  The world of intellect?  The world so often associated with learning and education?

I think it’s unwise to make a sharp distinction between the two mainly because if you study the brain which generates both, they’re all interconnected in a giant, complex parallel circuit, where the wiring goes both forward and backward between brain areas.  It’s all connected together.  Everyone knows that learning by experience is the most powerful form of learning.  But why is that?  Why can’t you learn by simply reading books?  Why is it so important that you go out there and have experiences, instead of just reading about the experiences of others in books?

Words can only relate these unconsciously generated mental objects together.  I know I’ve used this analogy before, but it’s such a good one that I want to use it again – when a couple is in a loving relationship with one another, there is a lot more existing in their brains than the word “love”.  As the two spend time together, a vast neural network is being established, literally binding the two people together, almost like a wireless connection.  There is a lot more to it than words.  There is a lot more to it than the “rational” logic, words bounding around in my head, sort of understanding.

You don’t have to be able to define love to know what love is.  You can find a simple country farmer who has been happily married to his wife for twenty five years and ask him, “Define love for me”, and he may be unable to.  It’s likely that he’ll respond, “You know, I never really thought about it in that way.”  But that doesn’t matter.  He understands love and I would argue he does so a lot better than many romantic poets who have lived with seven different wives and fathered fourteen illegitimate children.  That’s because knowledge does not have to exist at the level of words and logic in order for a person to possess it.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

- Oscar Wilde

Many of the brain’s operations perform logic and complex processing unconsciously and can lead to a deep unconscious understanding of things, even if that knowledge does not reside at the level of words and mental objects which we describe with words.  Many people may like to run off with this and claim to understand all sorts of things which they have no clue about, but it’s a subtle concept.  In the case just described, the unconscious understanding of love the farmer has for his wife would be how well he treats her on a day to day basis, even if he’s not consciously striving for a definition and organized set of principles behind his loving actions.

Also, the converse is true.  Someone may be able to regurgitate a beautiful and flawless definition of something yet have little understanding as to what it really means.  If you spend too much time in books, and not enough time living, getting out there generating new experiences, your knowledge will be of this sort.  You’ll be very bookish, and appear to understand a great deal, but when you’re around others who actually understand the subject at a level deeper than mere words, as the conversation progresses on, it will be apparent to them that you really don’t understand what you’re talking about.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for 10 or 15 years, and come out at last with a belly full of words and do not know a thing.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

So what is knowledge?  I think all of our knowledge has its roots in the unconscious mind, and only a small fraction of it surfaces up to consciously as the world we experience, such as the objects we’re perceiving in the world around us, and the words bouncing around in our heads.  I said before that truth permeates our entire being.  What did I mean by that?  I mean that it’s more than words.  I feel it’s the entire process of how our body reacts to the situations it’s placed in.  Take knowledge of my house for instance.  As I walk through the hallways toward the bathroom, information related to the layout and structure of my house is all stored in various areas of my brain.  (I’ve written a little bit about these areas before).  In fact, though you probably don’t think about it, your brain has mechanized motor procedures which it executes to perform the tasks you do everyday.  I sometimes make myself pay attention to these simply because I’m so interested in mental cognitive processes.  For instance, when I go to brush my teeth, I notice that I always use my left hand to open the bathroom mirror, my right hand grabs the toothbrush, my left hand then frees itself and grabs the toothpaste, and so on.  I then situate the toothbrush just so, put the toothpaste on the head of the toothbrush, screw back on the lid, place it back in the proper place in the bathroom mirror, and so on.  It’s a procedure which my brain has memorized and executes again and again, flawlessly every time.  When I was a little kid it was trial and error and my mom had to oversee me put toothpaste on the toothbrush and help me through it.  It was difficult. (In fact, I remember my mom doing just that!)  Now I can do it effortlessly, and since I do this frequently, my brain has no trouble remembering it.  Most of this knowledge exists at an unconscious level, but it’s also possible for me to link the process to words and explain it all to you, as I just did.

There’s a vast library of information existing within your brain about all kinds of things from your everyday experiences.  It includes things like the proper force to apply with your arm to open the shower door, how to situate your hand as you grab a knife from the kitchen drawer, and exact arm and hand movements to put your car keys into the ignition.  I can speak briefly about all kinds of things I know, but I’ve never really felt compelled to utter in words.  I know the exact feel of my computer chair, how it feels on my back and rear-end, the feel of my house-shoes, the taste of orange juice, the smell of burning wood from the fireplace, and the list goes on.  If we were to think in terms of data storage on a computer, I’m sure there’s terabytes of information in my brain, all filled with information like this.  Most all of my brain is dedicated to “understanding” and dealing with these sorts of things.  Most all of our brains do so flawlessly.

Unfortunately we don’t celebrate this form of knowledge, though I believe we should.  The other day I mentioned that in the future I think we’ll celebrate the fact that we’re conscious and alive.  I don’t want to talk about the typical education system, which would be very difficult to fully discuss, but I want to bring up one point – a lot of what’s taught in schools and universities operates using areas of the brain which are dedicated to logic, abstract predictions of future events in very complicated scenarios, and language and speech, all of which utilize a VERY small fraction of what our brains are “intended” to do.  Most of our brain power is allocated to do other things.  We’re taught the definitions of many bold-faced words and regurgitate them back on our exam sheets, work for hours memorizing calculating procedures, and sit quietly as idle spectators as professors lecture to us.  Don’t get me wrong, the things we’re taught in school are the greatest gifts we could possibly be given.  That information and training allows us to do things and control this world in ways previous generations could have never dreamed.  Even so, that doesn’t mean that learning by these methods is enjoyable.

Whence it comes to pass, that for not having chosen the right course, we often take very great pains, and consume a good part of our time in training up children to things, for which, by their natural constitution, they are totally unfit.

- Montaigne

I find it strange that we have a brain which can do so many things well, yet we don’t praise the things it can do.  Our brains are terrible at performing logic and doing computer like computations.  I’d go so far as to say our brain’s ability to do such things is rather pathetic.  Very little of our neurons are dedicated to doing those sorts of routines.  But even though we have bodies which can do amazing things, such as move around incredibly complex environments, avoid obstacles, identify and eat food, dance, sing, run, and play sports, we don’t feel such things constitute true “knowledge”.  That sort of thing is too easy, and near everyone can do them.  Considering that people always want to feel superior to others around them, we’ve invented things like IQs, and tell those whose brains are a little worse at performing these logic and computer-like computations that they’re no good.  If you can tell me whether an infinite alternating series converges or diverges, then you’re intelligent and we’ll label you a genius, but if not, you’re not “smart”.  I feel this is because most people lack a knowledge of how the brain works and they don’t appreciate all the other things it can do.

No matter how intelligent you may become, I bet that the vast majority of your knowledge is about everyday events.  As for the other small percentage which we consider “higher” knowledge, I think even that is heavily rooted in everyday experiences.   For example, the thought experiments and analogies you’ll be using to help understand the higher, more abstract concepts will be rooted in these experiences.  To most all of us, this is what truth and knowledge entails — our knowledge of the little pocket of the universe which we’ve experienced.  I feel strongly that this is the mystical reality — the world we’ve been given.  You may not like it, it may be boring, but it’s the world anyway, and the fact that we’re alive in a place like this is by far the most mystifying thing I can think of.   If we forget that this knowledge is the most important form of knowledge (mainly because it’s what we experience on a day to day basis), we lost sight of reality.  I personally feel that the higher forms of knowledge should be focused on improving the day to day experiences of people’s lives.  It’s also important to dream and think big, mainly because big ideas set our course for where we’re going in the future.  But we can never forget about our everyday lives.  I feel that every atom of the universe, by the infinite relations it holds to other atoms around it, and the laws which govern it, contains the secrets of the universe in its entirety.  If you look close enough at the everyday events around you, you’ll soon start to realize the secrets of space, time, and everything else.  To understand great things, you don’t pursue “big” ideas, you pursue a god-like understanding of what causes the “trivial” everyday events around you.

Several months ago we all heard Bill O’Reilly offer his proof for the existence of God by simply stating, “the tides go in, the tides go out, never a miscommunication.”

I had completely forgotten about this until just earlier today when I was reading Bertrand Russell’s book The Analysis Of Matter and I came across the following (I boldfaced key points):

“Common sense does not initially distinguish as sharply as civilized nations do between persons, animals, and things.  Primitive religion affords abundant evidence of this.  A thing, like an animal, has a sort of power residing within it: it may fall on your head, roll over in the wind, and so on.  It is only gradually that inanimate objects become sharply separated from people, through the observation that their actions have no purpose. But animals are not separable from people on this ground, and are in fact thought by savages to be much more intelligent than they are.

…

The notion of cause is part of the apparatus of common sense.  I do not think it would be true to say that common sense regards objects as the causes of our perceptions; it would not, unless challenged, think of bringing in causation in this connection.  It looks for causes when it is surprised, not when an occurrence seems perfectly natural.  It demands causes for a mirage, a reflexion, a dream, an earthquake, a plague, and so on, but not for the ordinary course of nature.  And the cause which it looks for, wherever the event concerned has great emotional interest, is pretty sure to be animistic:  the anger of the gods, or something analogous.  The idea of universal causation, and of causation divorced from purpose, belongs to a later stage of mental development, and marks the beginnings of philosophy and science.“

Bill’s conception of God and reality reminds me a lot of egocentrism in the sense Piaget used the term.  I’d like to quote a passage from Henry Glietman’s textbook Psychology:

The inability of preoperational children to consider two physical dimensions simultaneously has a counterpart in their approach to the physical world.  They cannot understand another person’s point of view, for they are as yet unable to recognize that different points of view exist.  This characteristic of preoperational thought is often called egocentrism.  As Piaget uses the term, it does not imply selfishness.  It is not that children seek to benefit at the expense of others; it is rather that they haven’t fully grasped that there are other selves.

An interesting demonstration of egocentrism involves a literal interpretation of “point of view.”  If two adults stand at opposite corners of a building, each knows that the other sees a different wall.  But according to Piaget, preoperational children don’t understand this.  In one study, children were shown a three-dimensional model of a mountain scene.  While the children viewed the scene from one position, a small doll was placed at various other locations around the model.  The child’s job was to decide what the doll saw from its vantage point.  To answer, the child had to choose one of several drawings that depicted different views of the mountain scene.  Up to four years of age, the children didn’t even understand the question.  From four to seven year olds, their response was fairly consistent — they chose the drawing that showed what they saw, regardless of where the doll was placed (Piaget and Inhelder, 1956).

In the same way that small children can’t comprehend other minds and different points of view, those like Bill O’Reilly can’t comprehend a universe existing that is unlike the mind of a human being.  They’re unable to understand a universe devoid of human intent and purposes.  Bill imagines a great and powerful being, which is invisible, with motivations, thoughts, and desires similar to his own, and that this being orchestrates all of these events for some grand plan where the human race is smack dab at the center.  Interestingly, when scientists from all across the globe pointed out to him that the tides are caused by gravitational influences from the sun and the moon, and that we’ve known this since Issac Newton, he quickly posted a reply, basically saying, “No, you guys don’t get it.  That’s not the sort of why I’m talking about.”

He seems to be demanding a human like motivation and purpose for the tides.  If you explain the universe in terms different from human mental processes, the event has not been explained.  You could direct him to the nebular hypothesis, but then he’d say, “How’d the gas and dust clouds get there?”  Then you could direct him to the Big Bang, baryogenesis, and nucleosynthesis, but he’d just keep begging the same question in an infinite regress.

If you haven’t noticed, everyone’s talking about Charlie Sheen.  It seems the media wants to destroy the man, and I find that bizarre.  I just finished reading an excellent article entitled The Cannibalization of Charlie Sheen, by Anthony Gregory.  The author brings out some important points, and I wanted to share them with all of you.

Indeed, the main mystery is why so many entertainers have jumped on the bandwagon to belittle the actor. Why are so many glitterati pointing their fingers and laughing, judging, and psychoanalyzing Sheen from afar? And even if it was kind of funny the first time to compare his eccentric quips to the ranting of the dictator Qadafi, isn’t it a bit unseemly for so many to be piling on with such insults?

A look at the supposed reasons why Sheen has deserved such ridicule and voyeuristic attention can help dispel a number of myths about the media, the press and the dominant national culture. Specifically, we now see the “socially liberal” media is not quite how it’s normally understood.

If we lived in a reasonable society, the most serious accusation would be that Sheen has assaulted women, which he denies. But this has not been the focus of the attacks on Sheen. It should probably be the only charge that comes close to rising to the level of news. But according to today’s zeitgeist, his other alleged sins are far more severe.

Consider the endless fascination with Sheen’s drug use. The media are in many ways pro-drug. Rock music and most popular music, going back to jazz, has been shameless in the glorification of narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens. Comedies on networks and cable give a wink to casual drug use, or even outright encourage it. We’ve had three presidents in a row who admitted to having used marijuana, and almost no one in even the “serious” press condemns this outright.

Yet Sheen’s alleged abuse of drugs is now everybody’s business. Not only do the new-born Puritans in his profession point to these supposedly unique personal failings; TV quacks diagnose his “addiction” from a distance, just so the whole nation can prove their allegiance to the therapeutic state by shaking their heads at the shame of it all.

One such comedy would be Pineapple Express, starring Seth Rogen.  In Seth’s own words, it is a “weed action movie.”

Seth is almost universally loved, yet he doesn’t even try to hide his drug use.  When I’m in the supermarket checking out, I’ve seen him on magazine covers many times.

I even just recently saw Conan O’Brien visiting DC Comics, and they drew him up an action hero.  It’s hilarious.  But look at the belt buckle.  It’s a marijuana leaf.

I don’t smoke weed and never have, but studies have shown that it’s less harmful than alcohol.  But maybe that’s the thing.  Maybe Charlie Sheen is doing harder drugs like cocaine, whereas marijuana is considered ok.  I find it difficult to understand the media and our society’s rules.

The hypocrisy is even more shameless on the question of Sheen’s sex life. Everyone in the media believes in sexual tolerance, surely. Marriage need not be between a man and a woman. It can be between two men, or two women. Yet the fact that Sheen wants to “marry” two consenting women – a practice common in many societies for millennia – means there must be something wrong with him, something that makes him especially freakish. People should be allowed to do what they want in their own homes – that is unless we are talking about a weirdo, a megalomaniac, a man who has fallen out of favor with the mainstream.

And I grow tired of all the political correctness.  They’ve tried to label Sheen as an anti-semite.  Just if you guys didn’t know,  Sheen himself Jewish.

To add to the perfect storm, the TV star has violated one of the greatest doctrines of political incorrectness. Although Sheen himself is Jewish, he has committed the grave sin of involuntary anti-Semitism. This piece in the Telegraph, drawing a bizarre link between Sheen, the Pope and Julian Assange, describes the key allegation as “Charlie Sheen’s renaming of the producer of his former sitcom Chuck Lorre as ‘Chaim Levine’, carrying with it as it does two suggestions: one, that Jews are the controlling forces behind the US media, and two, that they have disguised this fact about themselves and need to be outed.”

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Political correctness is probably the mass media’s most tangled web of double standards. Making fun of some groups is always more OK than other groups. Hollywood has always jumped on board with ugly nationalist racism when directed against an enemy of war; it has always been willing to make fun of helpless and harmless religious minorities, unprotected ethnic and immigrant groups and people with some disabilities and diseases (but not others); and the old, the ugly and the fat are generally fair game. Hollywood will even make fun of blacks, Jews, gays and other official victim groups, but only in certain contexts, and the rules always shift and are somewhat unpredictable. And if the wrong entertainer slips up in an interview or even off camera, there will be hell to pay, even if what was said was objectively no more demonstrably hateful or mean-spirited than prime time TV during sweeps week.

Moreover, as much as the liberal media love to claim openness toward questioning authority, some political positions are just considered too beyond the pale to tolerate. Sheen has wandered too far into embracing “conspiracy theories” and so the guy is not defensible. His views are not within the respectable range of opinion, like the belief that it’s fine for the U.S. government to invade and occupy foreign countries, detain suspects without trial, and run up trillions of dollars of debt like it was nothing.

I think Anthony Gregory is right.  Take this next video for instance. Americans seem fine with ridiculing our enemies of war. Nobody seems bothered by skits like this.

Also, religious groups are insulted all the time, yet there doesn’t seem to be much, if any media outrage. Take these next clips for instance.

If you’re religious, a Christian especially, I can see why you’d find these sorts of clips offensive. Here we see Jesus defecating on our former president, the God of the universe portrayed as a small reptile, and Jesus slowly dying as He suffocates in his own blood. Family guy does this same sort of thing, insulting monotheists and Christians alike. If you just sit and think about it for a moment, these things are a lot worse than anything Charlie Sheen said yet nobody cares.

Chuck isn’t completely innocent in this either.  He was insulting and prodding Charlie.  Take this vanity card, which aired on national television after their last episode of Two and a Half Men.

There’s a lot of hypocrisy and double standards in the media. To say the least, they’re not very consistent with their values. Regardless of what you may think of Charlie Sheen’s lifestyle and behavior, it doesn’t warrant even half of the coverage it’s received. Let’s leave people alone and mind our own business.