A Secular Ten Non-Commandments

Posted on Saturday 24 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I started this book before the holidays, but what with the holidays and since then attention to the buying of one house and the selling of another, only just finished it a couple days ago, though it’s rather short. This is the latest attempt, of quite a few in recent years, to take a more rational, reality-based approach the idea of establishing principles for living, to replace the antiquated, tribal, religious rules, or ‘commandments’, enshrined in religious texts.

Or to approach it another way, this is a book, like Phil Zuckerman’s Living the Secular Life, which I reviewed here, that explores not why it’s not reasonable to believe in gods, but to explore how one characterizes morality and constructive principles for living, without the threats of divine punishment typically looming over the traditional commandments.

The authors of this book are two young guys, one a Silicon Valley CEO who studied religion at Stanford, the other a humanist chaplain at Stanford with a divinity degree from Harvard. They both look about 25.

Their approach is philosophical, even mathematical, in its initial question, How can I justify any of my beliefs?, and in their start with an initial set of ‘assumptions’, like mathematical postulates, that they take as given, and from which they will derive further principles. (These assumptions are the first three; the full list is below.) A second characteristic of their approach is to call their conclusions *not* commandments, but rather non-commandments; rules or principles for living, but not any kind of divine laws.

They go on to explore the idea of the scientific method (the fourth non-commandment), and then how to draw conclusions about the unknown — Ockham’s razor, probabilities, and a thought experiment about being in a white room with a sphere apparently floating in the air, and being asked questions about your confidence about the explanation about that sphere. And then they address the various ideas about whether a god exists; if so, why should it be the Christian god; if so, is this God omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent? The lack of observable evidence for god; the various arguments for god, all of them lacking. And so the logical conclusion (the fifth non-commandment): There is no God.

From there the book turns from what is true about the world to how one should live one’s life. The basic observation is that people behave in ways to make themselves happy, in whatever ways they conceive happiness to be. (Even if happiness means killing others to appease their notion of a god, or sacrificing their present life for the presumed happiness of an afterlife.) They explore the idea of a single universal moral truth, and reject it.

And they come up with this definition of morality: “We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy”. I like that definition quite a lot.

Their final non-commandment may be the most crucial: “All our beliefs are subject to change in the face of new evidence, including these”.

So here are their ten non-commandments for the twenty-first century:

  1. The world is real, and our desire to understand the world is the basis for belief.
  2. We can perceive the world only through our human senses.
  3. We use rational thought and language as tools for undernstanding the world.
  4. All truth is proportional to the evidence.
  5. There is no God.
  6. We all strive to live a happy life. We pursue things that make us happy and avoid things that do not.
  7. There is no universal moral truth. Our experiences and preferences shape our sense of how to behave.
  8. We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy.
  9. We benefit from living in, and supporting, an ethical society.
  10. All beliefs are subject to change in the face of new evidence, including these.

The book has its own website, http://www.atheistmindhumanistheart.com/, from which the authors conducted a crowd-sourcing ‘ReThink’ prize in December to compile a second set of ‘ten commandments for the 21st century’, selected by a panel of judges from entries by anyone.

The page for this winners is annotated by explanation of why each item is justified.

  1. Be open minded and be willing to alter your beliefs with new evidence.
  2. Strive to understand what is most likely to be true, not to believe what you wish to be true.
  3. The scientific method is the most reliable way of understanding the natural world.
  4. Every person has the right to control over their body.
  5. God is not necessary to be a good person or to live a full and meaningful life.
  6. Be mindful of the consequences of all your actions and recognise that you must take responsibility for them.
  7. Treat others as you would want them to treat you and can reasonably expect them to want to be treated. Think about their perspective.
  8. We have the responsibility to consider others including future generations.
  9. There is no one right way to live.
  10. Leave the world a better place than you found it.

Number 7 is of course our familiar Golden Rule, which as I’ve pointed out is a general formulation of half of the original Ten Commandmants.

At some point I will spend some time consolidating these and many others, at least as resource links on my blog, but for now let me summarize another very good set of alternative ten commanded, by Daylight Atheism blogger Adam Lee, at The New Ten Commandments.

  1. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
  2. In all things, strive to cause no harm.
  3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
  4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
  5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
  6. Always seek to be learning something new.
  7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
  8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
  9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
  10. Question everything.

All of these more comprehensive, mature, and respectable than the Biblical ten.

Posted in Culture, Morality, Philosophy, Religion, Ten Commandments | Comments Off on A Secular Ten Non-Commandments

Narrative as Reality; or, Reality as Narrative

Posted on Wednesday 21 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

For tonight, Paul Krugman’s NYT column from a couple days ago: Hating Good Government

Evidence doesn’t matter for the “debate” over climate policy, where I put scare quotes around “debate” because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.

Krugman notes, crucially, that the resistance to things like climate science, vaccines, ‘supply-side’ economics, and Obamacare, are aligned among certain population groups — despite any amount of evidence. (My bold follows)

And the list goes on. On issues that range from monetary policy to the control of infectious disease, a big chunk of America’s body politic holds views that are completely at odds with, and completely unmovable by, actual experience. And no matter the issue, it’s the same chunk. If you’ve gotten involved in any of these debates, you know that these people aren’t happy warriors; they’re red-faced angry, with special rage directed at know-it-alls who snootily point out that the facts don’t support their position.

Why is this so? Well, Krugman offers a first-level explanation:

Well, it strikes me that the immovable position in each of these cases is bound up with rejecting any role for government that serves the public interest. If you don’t want the government to impose controls or fees on polluters, you want to deny that there is any reason to limit emissions. If you don’t want the combination of regulation, mandates and subsidies that is needed to extend coverage to the uninsured, you want to deny that expanding coverage is even possible. And claims about the magical powers of tax cuts are often little more than a mask for the real agenda of crippling government by starving it of revenue.

But I think there is a second-level explanation, that Krugman only partly suggests:

…the fact is that we’re living in a political era in which facts don’t matter.

My take, and increasingly my theme here: facts don’t matter; narrative matters. This isn’t just about politics; it’s a crucial element about human nature, an aspect of human nature that must be recognized before one can break out of the limits of human perception and try to understand what might be real beyond the limitations of our species’ perception. People live their lives according narratives about their place in the world, their place in their community as opposed to the big scary wider world, that is all about their position in their community, and their resistance to any larger narrative that might threaten that position.

The biggest, most successful narratives, over the course of human history are, of course, the religions. Because they are narratives that place their adherents as primary players. Narratives about the world, the universe, in which those adherents are the stars — it’s all about them. These narratives, needless to say, have no necessary correspondence with the real world — that enormous universe in which our tiny world is but an infinitesimal fragment. Evidence about the real world is the providence of science, a kind of self-checking thinking that faith and religion resists.

The trouble with the world, of course, is that there are so many conflicting narratives, all of them without any relative basis in real world of scientific evidence, that their various adherents are driven to tribal conflict with peoples who ascribe to conflicting narratives.

How will these conflicts work themselves out? Will they? They might not; they might spark some ‘nuclear’ conflict that could end the world. (Thus one explanation for the Fermi Paradox.) Or, more optimistically, as the world becomes more interconnected, as cultural evolution has shown in the past decade or two– exposures to other ideas — this will erode religious dogmas, and relax resistance to other faiths, and then to more reality-based ideas about human-kinds existence in our vast, ancient, cosmos.

Posted in Cosmology, Culture, Evolution, Philosophy, Religion, Thinking | Comments Off on Narrative as Reality; or, Reality as Narrative

Links and Quotes: Michael Shermer, Ian McEwan

Posted on Monday 19 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon has an excerpt from Michael Shermer’s forthcoming book, The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom (Henry Holt, January 20th).

Today, of course, most Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that moral principles are universal and apply to everyone, but this is because they have inculcated into their moral thinking the modern Enlightenment goal of broadening and redefining the parameters of moral consideration. But by their nature the world’s religions are tribal and xenophobic, serving to regulate moral rules within the community but not seeking to embrace humanity outside their circle. Religion, by definition, forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not us, those heathens, those unbelievers. Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past. Change in religious beliefs and practices, when it happens at all, is slow and cumbersome, and it is almost always in response to the church or its leaders facing outside political or cultural forces.

Of course will read this book and report.

Also today, a lovely post, a short essay, by the fine novelist Ian McEwan on the topic of Free Speech, both on Facebook (link) and on his home page.

It begins thus:

A world city like Paris, London or New York contains ten million or more people within an area no larger than the average American cattle ranch. If the citizenry were all of one religion, one race, one world view, the issue of free speech might never arise. In the conditions of modernity however, a city may contain within a couple of acres every race on earth, every imaginable religious, political and existential world view. Those who believe their sacred texts are the literal word of God may live a stone’s throw from those who are not even atheists: the question of supernatural authority does not even come up, any more than the existence of extinct religions, of Thoth, Frigg or Apollo does for everyone else. From their various temples religions daily blaspheme in each other’s faces. Is Jesus the son of God? Not if you’re a Muslim. Is Mohammed God’s last messenger on earth? Not if you’re a Christian. Is the universe best explained or explored in the terms of physics-based godless cosmology? Not if you’re a Muslim or a Christian.

Posted in Culture, Morality, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Quotes: Michael Shermer, Ian McEwan

Links and Comments: Bruni on ‘religious liberty’; love vs hate; godless kids do just fine; Biblical law; anti-science senators; Pinker on Shakespeare; io9 resources

Posted on Monday 19 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Catching up: From a week ago Sunday’s New York Times, Frank Bruni, Your God and My Dignity.

He captures better than I can the response to Jeb Bush’s demand to (as Michelangelo Signorile put it) ‘Respect’ My Opposition to Your Civil Rights Because ‘Religious Liberty’ — concerning same-sex marriage and religious scruples.

About why the existence of people who are unlike Christian Biblical fundamentalists, their mere existence, is not a threat to their religious liberty. Unlike vice versa. Gays are not threatening to shut down Christian churches. But Christians are happy to denigrate gays, especially Christian politicians.

Several likely [Republican] candidates — Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee — get a special gleam in their eyes when they’re denigrating gays, and Huckabee has perfected a stew of homophobia and puerility, on display in a new book of his that sounds like a collection of recipes by Paula Deen expressly for the N.R.A.: “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy.”

…

Christian fundamentalists in this country are practiced at claiming marginalization and oppression. “They’re always saying they’re kept out of the public square, and that’s baloney,” said Marci Hamilton, a constitutional law expert and the author of “God vs. the Gavel.” “They’re all over the public square.”

—

Interesting sideline: COLORADO: Wingnut Files Discrimination Complaint Against Pro-Gay Bakery

Some of the right-wing outrage in recent months has involved incidents in which bakeries, run by God-fearing Christians, have refused to bake cakes for the weddings of same-sex couples, on the grounds that their religious beliefs condemn same-sex couples. This kind of discrimination has not held up against the law, but here’s a curious reversal: someone went to a gay-run bakery in Denver and ordered a cake with numerous anti-gay slurs, and the bakery refused — though it did offer to bake the cake and provide an icing bag so the buyer could write those slurs himself. The bakery got hit with a discrimination complaint.

I’m thinking that legally, the two cases might be equivalent. But morally? (Does anyone have a moral sense here, or do Christians have no moral sense aside from what they read, very selectively, from Leviticus?) The Christians who disapproved of a wedding cake for a gay couple were against love. The Denver bakery who refused to make a cake covered with gay slurs was against hate. Those are not moral equivalents.

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An op-ed from Thursday’s LA Times, by Phil Zuckerman, ‘Godless’ kids turn out just fine, nicely summarizes the theme of his recent book Living the Secular Life, which I read closely and blogged about here.

Far from being dysfunctional, nihilistic and rudderless without the security and rectitude of religion, secular households provide a sound and solid foundation for children … For secular people, morality is predicated on one simple principle: empathetic reciprocity, widely known as the Golden Rule. Treating other people as you would like to be treated. It is an ancient, universal ethical imperative. And it requires no supernatural beliefs.

I saw something today about how some religious folks point to North Korea as an examplar of an atheistic society. On the contrary; per the Washington Post, North Korea begins brainwashing children in cult of the Kims as early as kindergarten. Which is to say, North Korea is an ideologically driven culture that shields its citizens from outside points of view; it’s a cult of veneration of its leaders. Not unlike Orthodox Jews and Christian parents who home-school their children, in order to shield them from outside views.

On the contrary, as Zuckerman points out, the relatively atheistic societies in the world, those in Scandinavia, have the highest standards of living:

Democratic countries with the lowest levels of religious faith and participation today — such as Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Belgium and New Zealand — have among the lowest violent crime rates in the world and enjoy remarkably high levels of societal well-being. If secular people couldn’t raise well-functioning, moral children, then a preponderance of them in a given society would spell societal disaster. Yet quite the opposite is the case.

—

Alternet and Salon’s Valerie Tarico notes:

If the Bible were law, most people you know would qualify for the death penalty. The same can be said of the Quran.  The same can be said of the Torah. Believers who claim that Islam or Christianity or Judaism is a religion of peace are speaking a half-truth—and a naive falsehood.

—

At Slate, astronomer Phil Plait considers that Yup, a Climate Change Denier Will Oversee NASA. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

He’s refering to Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

“The GOP controls both sides of Congress, and is also the arguably the most anti-scientific group of politicians this country has seen in decades.”

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And, via Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, Steven Pinker identifies a passage from Shakespeare that presages modern psychological thinking about our limited understanding of the real world: that a man is “most ignorant of what he’s most assured”.

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Finally, two resources; io9’s George Dvorsky has two posts recently, 8 Logical Fallacies That Fuel Anti-Science Sentiments and The 7 Most Intriguing Philosophical Arguments for the Existence of God, that explore familiar philosophical arguments in a casual way amenable to the 99.99% of the population who’ve never particularly thought about these issues before, and who succumb to the local mores and religions of their communities without thinking about them in any particular way.

—

(The broader news, e.g. about the Supreme Court agreeing to hear several cases involving state-sanctions against same sex marriage, which might portend a striking down of all such laws, just as all such laws about mixed-race marriage were struck down 50 years ago, is so widely reported I don’t need to comment.)

Posted in Culture, Lunacy, Religion, The Gays | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Bruni on ‘religious liberty’; love vs hate; godless kids do just fine; Biblical law; anti-science senators; Pinker on Shakespeare; io9 resources

Packing Books

Posted on Saturday 17 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I have begun packing my books, in anticipation of our move from LA to the Bay Area. We are in the final week of escrow on a new home in the Oakland Hills (about 5 miles south of the Locus House) and, while our home in LA has not yet sold, once escrow closes up north, I will pack up the cat and aquarium fish and coffee maker and my computer and few basic pieces of furniture, as much as I can cram into the back of our Subaru, and relocate there. I’ll be there while painters and carpet people redecorate for two or three weeks, until I come back to LA to meet the movers who will empty out our LA house and move all our stuff to Oakland.

In anticipation of the actual move, I have begun packing up my books. The movers would do it — the moving costs are covered by relocation — but I don’t quite trust movers to handle books (and magazines, some 60 years old or more, the 1950s F&SFs and Galaxys) as carefully as I would, and pack them as carefully as I can do myself. Plus, the process of taking them off the shelves, arranging them into boxes, is as much an extended meandering visit into memory lane as anything else I could do in such relatively short time.

The handling and preserving of all these books begs the question, why keep them? Collectors do; far many more casual readers do not. When someone comes into your home and asks, “Have you read all these books?”, you know they are not a reader. No, of course not. A library is — for those who don’t understand my point — a bit like a combination of a photo album and a pantry. Many books you keep because you have read them, they are physical manifestations of experiences in your life, some profound and life-changing; others you keep because you bought them intending to read them someday, and even now you still hope to find the time, even though you know intellectually (do the numbers) that will never get to all of them in your life. But the unread books are like all the other possibilities of life: identified but as yet unlived potential experiences.

In the past few months, anticipating this move, I have, in fact, culled my shelves of several dozen boxes of books, books that as I perused my shelves I realized I will likely never read, considering how many other more interesting books I might read instead, given the years I have left to read, and I have sold those off to used bookstores, or failing their interest, donated them to Good Will. I’ve done another round of both in the past two days.

Still, the movers will move whatever I have left, and I am packing them myself.

I think I might leave a couple bookcases of books for them to pack, just to see how they do it.

My boxes: every box is different. I have 150 U-Haul book boxes in my attic, kept from one or two previous moves, taken down in the past few days. Tape up the bottom. Typically hardcovers go in upright, in two facing rows across both ends; a few hardcovers or paperbacks fill the gap in between. Carefully rearrange depending on size, so the gaps can be filled without cramming, but also without loose space where the books would jostle against each other and scuff the covers. The space on top can be flat hardcovers, or flat paperbacks, in various arrangements depending on titles at hand. Titles do not have to be kept in exact order from the bookshelves; part of the fun will be unpacking and sorting them out at the far end. Fill as close to the top as possible, so boxes do not collapse from the weight of other boxes on top. Before closing, crumble packing paper in between the gaps; the closed box, when shaken, should evidence no jostling or movement at all. The complete consort of books and packing solid in place together.

I have 28 bookcases in my main office/library; I started packing today with books from the tallest ones, and the first two took about an hour each, about five boxes each. So 28 hours, 140 boxes, at most. That’s how I’ll be spending this next week. And there are 10 more bookcases (most double-shelved) of anthologies and back-issue magazines in another room downstairs… I will need more boxes, which the moving company will provide.

Posted in Personal history | Comments Off on Packing Books

Passages by Benford

Posted on Friday 16 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve been belatedly catching up on 2014 short fiction in the past two or three weeks, moreso than I’ve done in the past two or three years; not enough to in time contribute substantially to the Locus Recommended Reading List, but enough to read a bunch of stories I like well enough to nominate for this year’s Theodore Sturgeon Award. (I and who knows how many others are invited each year to submit ranked nominations, which are then processed in some way and judged by the award’s official panel of judges.)

I may post a round-up of those stories I nominated, but for now I’ll note one in particular, a story by Gregory Benford, “Lady with Fox”, published late in 2014 in the anthology Carbide Tipped Pens, edited by Ben Bova and Eric Choi (published by Tor).

The story concerns a researcher in neural networks, in a place called Biopolis, where the reigning new technology is “Konning”, as in konn-ecting; a kind of neural *connection* that happens between two people, enabling them to perceive each others’ thoughts and dreams, but only while both of them are asleep.

The researcher meets a new lady in town, an elegant woman with an enhanced pet dog, or fox, who turns out to be an expert in konning. He’s attracted to her, and his intellectual interest in konning is inextricable from his romantic interest in her, as is his rivalry and jealousy with a fellow researcher.

Benford is famously the most literary and poetic of all the hard SF writers, if perhaps consciously so, going all the way back to early novels like AGAINST INFINITY (1983), modeled after a Faulkner novella, and THE STARS IN SHROUD, (1978) a stylistic rewrite of an earlier novel, DEEPER THAN THE DARKNESS (1970). Through the years he’s produced many of the finest SF novels of all time, including TIMESCAPE (1980) and the later Galactic Center sequence of five novels beginning with IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT (1977).

Like many steady authors his output has varied over the years, and decades, and the work he’s done lately is not much noticed, in terms of awards attention. (I said something similar about the work of James Tiptree, Jr., after her death, but cannot at the moment find that post. Newer authors get more attention, as perhaps they should.) (At the same time, my increasingly sporadic reading attention and review activity, even about authors I’ve admired for decades and would like to keep promoting attention to, is not helping this problem, I suppose.)

This story, “Lady with Fox”, is as idea-rich, thought-provoking, and precisely written as ever. This is why I read science fiction. Here’s a passage that evokes Marvin Minsky’s THE SOCIETY OF MIND (1986), his theory that the mind is composed of many semi-independent functions running simultaneously, at different levels of conscious and unconscious thought:

I used to agree with the great Minsky that it was degrading or insulting to say that somebody is a good person or has a soul. I felt that each person has built this incredibly complex structure, spent a lifetime doing it. We try to map and understand that. If you attribute such majestic structure to a magical pearl in the middle of an oyster that makes you good, that is trivializing a person. That keeps you from thinking of what’s really happening.

And the final paragraphs of the story, in which the researcher recollects that elegant women with her fox:

We know we will die and evolution gives us countless ways that make it happen.

Desires can kill you, too… Desire can kill the very good and very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure they can bring you down as well, but there will be no special hurry. So in our pursuit of knowledge we scamper after those desires, much like her fox.

—

I read that story maybe three days ago; then, coincidentally, the new issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction, which I perused yesterday for the site’s periodicals page, had a letter from Benford about an earlier review of a book by Peter Watts. I’ll copy the entire letter here, with my bold emphasis.

In his review of Peter Watts’s Beyond the Rift (NYRSF 314), Joe Sanders quotes a James Nicoll remark that “Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.” A telling jibe, but Joe catches the right angle of reply: Watts has so many ideas, it’s no surprise that many do make humans seem an odd side note. But in this he’s echoing a theme of hard sf little noted: proper appreciation of the implications of science do indeed de-center us.

That’s one of hard sf’s major points and why it can be (and often is) ecological in the largest sense. There’s a frequent criticism of hard sf and generally expansionist, interplanetary, etc. sf: “triumphantalist.” The charge is seldom unpacked. It seems to mean we will go forth and conquer all; i.e., a kind of conceptual imperialism. Watts shows this criticism to be wrong: science does not belittle us or make our efforts seem futile though it does cast us in the larger perspective. Bringing life and intelligence to the dead matter of the solar system, for example, is not polluting: it’s liberating. Watts shows this in enormously entertaining ways.

This of course appeals to one of my themes on this blog: how science fiction serves as a set of philosophical thought-experiments about how life, or existence, might be different, an exercise that inevitably, as science itself does, chip away at humankind’s tendency to think of itself as the center and reason of all being.

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P.S. My other Sturgeon nominations were stories by Ian McDonald, Cory Doctorow, Nancy Kress, Ken Liu, Timons Esaias, Robert Reed… and one more. Not all of them authors who have the lengthy track record of Gregory Benford.

Posted in Science, science fiction, Short Fiction | Comments Off on Passages by Benford

Hero (Boyhood)

Posted on Friday 16 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Posted in Films, Music | Comments Off on Hero (Boyhood)

Sean Carroll on the afterlife, life, death, happiness, and our place in the universe

Posted on Thursday 15 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Today chanced upon this video speech by physicist Sean Carroll, on his blog, upon his winning an Emperor Has No Clothes Award, from the Freedom From Religion Foundation — won previously by everyone from Ursula K. Le Guin to Dan Savage to Jerry Coyne to Andy Rooney to Jesse Ventura.

Early on he addresses the popular reports, in books like Proof of Heaven, about life after death. Can there be life after death? No. Why?

  • The mind is the brain
  • The brain is made of atoms
  • We know how atoms work
  • [thus, given everything we know about physics] There’s no way for “you” to persist after death

We know the laws of physics that are relevant to the atoms in your bodies well enough to know that there’s no way for the ‘information’ in your brain to survive death. [Intimidating equation at 9:15]

We don’t know all the laws of physics, of course; physics is not done. But we know there can’t be any new laws of physics that affects the atoms in your brain that we could not have detected by now. So: life after death? Two options:

  1. Some ill-defined metaphysical substance, not subject to the known laws of physics, interacts with the atoms of our brains in ways that have thus far eluded every controlled experiment ever performed in the history of science,

    2.  
    Or,

  2. People hallucinate when they’re nearly dead.

The most interesting part is about 22 minutes in, where he explains how the arc of the universe, driven by the second law of thermodynamics, results in an intermediate ‘mixing’, i.e. complexity, with consequences that include the existence of life.

So the right answer to the creationists is that, not only is it *allowed*, by the second law of thermodynamics, that complex structures like living beings arose here on Earth, but the reason complex structure like living beings arose here on Earth *is because of* the second law of thermodynamics. We are parasitic upon the increase of entropy in the universe. We are little surfers riding a wave of entropy, and so we will eventually scuttle up on shore, and it will just be empty space forever.

He illustrates with three glasses: first a glass with a layer of cream sitting atop a layer of coffee; the third glass shows them completely mixed (after a time), and the middle glass shows the intermediate state, with the complex intermingling representing the current state of the universe, with high complexity and intermediate entropy.

And he talks about death. Where do you ‘go’ after death? You don’t go anywhere; life is not an energy, or force; it is a chemical reaction. The end of life is like putting out a candle; the energy doesn’t go anywhere – the reaction stops.

The afterlife is a false consolation; heaven is a bad idea. Wisdom from poets and songwriters. Because in heaven, nothing ever happens; it’s boring. Julian Barnes’ novel A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters; in the last chapter the hero can choose whatever he wants to happen: play golf, have sex, have breakfast. For hundreds of years. He gets bored. Everyone has the option of truly dying. How many take that option? Everyone.

It’s a mistake to think that there’s some way of life that will last forever. Even *happiness* is a bad idea; the nature of life is *movement*; there’s no perfect state of being that will last forever.

What do we have instead?

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms” – Muriel Rukeyser.

We are not about our atoms, we’re about the story of our lives. A story with a beginning, and middle… and an end.

Yes, death is serious, because life matters. Because:

The life we have right now is not a dress-rehearsal; it is the only performance we get to give.

And finally,

The universe can be overwhelming. We are very very small, we are a tiny part of the universe, but we are a remarkable part. We are just collections of atoms, but we are collections of atoms that have attained the ability to think about ourselves, to reflect about the world that we live in, and to write our own stories. Our lives will not last forever, and that is what makes them matter so much.

Some interesting Q&A too.

Posted in Cosmology, Evolution, Philosophy, Physics, Religion | Comments Off on Sean Carroll on the afterlife, life, death, happiness, and our place in the universe

Links and Comments: Space Suite; Nice Guys Finish First; Debunking Myths; Is the US Crazy?

Posted on Wednesday 14 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

More links and comments from the past week or so, leading with the positive.

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First, a ‘Space Suite’ video animation of the planets in our solar system. Very cool.

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The AsapSCIENCE guys have this video about how “Nice Guys Finish First” — a corrective to the cliche that nice guys finish last, as if only bad, aggressive men win in the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr6lsTgZKAQ

It’s an explanation of the philosophical idea of the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” that reveals how cooperation works best in the long run – i.e. a core piece of what we think of as human morality, and a trait observed in other animal species as well, has an evolutionary reason for existing; you don’t need a holy rule book for most people to be altruistic and cooperate with others.

This notion aligns with EO Wilson’s ideas, as I’ve described in several previous posts, about ‘group selection’, the idea that cooperation among small societies or tribes has a survival advantage over tribes whose members are relatively selfish. Thus morality.

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Via Paul Fidalgo’s Morning Heresy:

Real Clear Science: The Biggest Myth About Debunking Myths

To the human mind, facts are minutiae. What matters most is the overarching narrative. For a single fact or even a group of facts to topple a mindset is an immense task, like David facing off against Goliath… if Goliath was twice as tall and encased in graphene body armor.

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And here is the most striking article from this past week — an example of an outsider viewpoint, challenging the US’s assumption of its superior status to every other nation in the world. (Traveling to other countries around the globe, even to Europe, quickly produces the same insight.)

Alternet: Is the U.S. Crazy?

To some extent, this article echoes themes I’ve described before — how the northern European countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, et al) have such higher standards of living, with better health care, lower infant mortality, and so on, compared to the US, despite or because of their ‘socialist’ societies that so many in the US violently reject.

The essay also provokes citizens of the US:

* Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?

* Why can’t you understand science?

* How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?

And many, many more.

Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Space Suite; Nice Guys Finish First; Debunking Myths; Is the US Crazy?

Ray Bradbury’s House Has Been Torn Down, and I Understand Why

Posted on Sunday 11 January 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Ray Bradbury was, of course, the popular and influential science fiction writer of such works as The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, the latter book still a staple on high school reading lists. He was only loosely a science fiction writer, his fiction more fantasy and symbolic, and deeply poetic and nostalgic, and to no extent the kind of ‘hard’ science fiction more typical of the three other most popular SF authors of the mid- to late-20th century: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein. Still, Bradbury wrote several books (the above-mentioned, as well as Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes), and a dozen or more short stories, that were among the most affecting of the 20th century: stories including “A Sound of Thunder” (the one about time travelers stepping on a butterfly in the ancient past and changing the course of history), “Kaleidoscope” (a survivor from an exploded ship in orbit appears as a meteor to a boy on Earth), “The Pedestrian” (it becomes illegal to take a late-night walk), “The Long Rain”, “The Veldt”, “All Summer in a Day”, “The Fog Horn”, “The Homecoming”, “I Sing the Body Electric” (made into a Twilight Zone episode), … as well as several of the stories in The Martian Chronicles, “Mars is Heaven!” and the last two: “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “The Million Year Picnic”.

He died in 2012. He’d lived for decades in a house in a district of Los Angeles, Cheviot Hills, on the Westside, south of UCLA and Beverly Hills and just north of the 10 freeway. A nice upscale neighborhood, but one built in the 1950s. I never met Bradbury, let alone visited his house; the one time I saw him, even then in a wheelchair, was at the 2001 Nebula Awards Banquet, held at the same Beverly Hilton Hotel where the Golden Globe Awards were held just this evening.

I hope Mike Glyer, who has this post about the Bradbury house, doesn’t mind my scaling his photo from MLS of the house:



So it is sad that no millionaire fan bought the house to preserve it as a memorial, but that idea is far-fetched at best; how would that work? Create a museum? How many people would visit, and pay? How long could it survive?

It’s not unusual that someone should have bought this property as a tear-down, intending to literally tear down the house, buying it for the property, with the intention of building a new, modern house.

This happens all the time. And the reason I understand this is that my own experience in the past few months of selling our home here in a suburb of LA, and buying a new one in the Bay Area, reveals how the competition among home-buyers works. That is, you might think that your home, built a mere 10 or 20 or 25 years ago, works just fine. But home-buyers see lots of potential properties, including newer homes than yours, homes with granite kitchen counters instead of tile, homes with modern appliances rather than ones obviously with 25 years of use, homes with much larger bathrooms and kitchens and closets than were typically built 25 years ago, or 50 years ago. We’ve seen properties in the Bay Area on the peninsula built 60 years ago, lived in by a single family and never updated in all that time, and still asking $1.5 million for a 2000 square foot home with narrow kitchens and tiny bathrooms. Because competition is so extreme on the peninsula — the area south of San Francisco, down to Palo Alto — given the employees of all those high-tech companies in that area wanting to live close to work — that any decent house there goes on the market on a Friday, has open houses over the weekend, and gets multiple bids by Tuesday, for over list price in order to beat out other offers. The sellers pick one, and the house is sold in less than a week.

So I’m not surprised that no one bought Bradbury’s 65-year-old house intending to move in as-is. The LA market may not be quite as competitive and ruthless as the SF Bay Area market, but to some degree it’s the same: there are not enough modern buyers (including it seems foreign buyers, especially Chinese, who show up in LA and SF with *cash*, ready to buy), who have any interest in buying a 50 or 60-year old home, unless they intend to tear it down and build something more modern. There are not enough fans of Bradbury, or any other author or artist or playwright, no matter how renowned, to compete with those buyers. That’s capitalism.

Posted in Culture, Economics, Ray Bradbury | Comments Off on Ray Bradbury’s House Has Been Torn Down, and I Understand Why