The Range of Human Perception

Posted on Tuesday 29 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Alternet, Chris Mooney: Why Right-Wingers Think the Way They Do: The Fascinating Psychological Origins of Political Ideology

These experiments suggest that conservatives actually do live in a world that is more scary and threatening, at least as they perceive it. Trying to argue them out of it is pointless and naive. It’s like trying to argue them out of their skin.

Chris Mooney has written on this theme before – he wrote a whole book called The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science- and Reality.

My fascination with his research is not to pester the partisan divide in American politics, but to wonder about the broader implications of how different people perceive the world. The liberal/conservative spectrum is surely a simplistic take on the vast variation among human perception. Is one extreme more ‘right’ or ‘accurate’ than the other? How could one tell? [Science, perhaps?] Or are they just different, selective ways of perceiving the world — each perspective revealing only a part of a greater whole? (Like a Venn diagram of two overlapping circles amidst a much larger set of potential perceptions.)

How could the greater whole ever be perceived? And what about all the parts that lie outside the overlapping but necessarily narrow ranges of this spectrum of human perception?

The issue is analogous to a Facebook graphic I saw today… which, of course, I can’t find now, because Fb changes its selection of posts to display every time you log in (or perhaps I just have too many ‘friends’)… but it was about how humans see only a small fraction of the spectrum, only a small fraction of the audio range, and so on. The point being, there is a larger reality than that with which human perception is compatible. (See Cosmos for examples.)

Ah, here it is: Before you judge other or claim any absolute truth…

Posted in Cosmology, Culture, Psychology, Science | Comments Off on The Range of Human Perception

American Christianity and Conservatism

Posted on Monday 28 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Andrew Sullivan strikes at Sarah Palin’s glib, despicable remark that “Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists” — to which her audience cheered — with this post:

Sarah Palin: Anti-Christian

It reveals that vast swathes of American Christianity are objectively anti-Christian, even pagan, in their support for this barbarism. … In the best recent polling on the question, 62 percent of white evangelical “Christians” back torture as often or sometimes justified, with only 16 percent holding the orthodox position that it is never justified. Now compare those numbers with Americans who are unaffiliated with any religion: the number in that demographic is 40 percent in favor in some or many cases, and 26 percent against it in all circumstances. Is this a function of wayward and uncommitted Christians? Nope. Support for torture is highest among those who attend church at least weekly and lowest for those who rarely or never go to church. In America, torture is a Christian value. And some people wonder why I prefer to term “Christianist” to describe these people.

…

It seems to me, moreover, that torture is a far graver evil, even for orthodox theologians, than non-procreative or non-marital sex. And yet today’s Christianists are obsessed about the latter and not just indifferent to the former, but actually in favor of it. It’s this twisted set of priorities, this exquisitely misplaced set of fears, and this utter ignorance of even basic Christian teaching that reveals all that’s so terribly wrong with American Christianity. It has become its own nemesis.

***

Second, Paul Krugman’s take on why conservatives (some of whom call themselves ‘patriots’) are rallying behind racist lawbreaker Cliven Bundy.

Paul Krugman: High Plains Moochers
Salon: Paul Krugman: Cliven Bundy is proof conservatives are dumber than ever

From the latter:

But that day, Krugman says, is over: “[T]oday’s conservative leaders were raised on Ayn Rand’s novels and Ronald Reagan’s speeches … They insist that the rights of private property are absolute, and that government is always the problem, never the solution.”

The trouble is that such beliefs are fundamentally indefensible in the modern world, which is rife with what economists call externalities — costs that private actions impose on others, but which people have no financial incentive to avoid. You might want, for example, to declare that what a farmer does on his own land is entirely his own business; but what if he uses pesticides that contaminate the water supply, or antibiotics that speed the evolution of drug-resistant microbes? You might want to declare that government intervention never helps; but who else can deal with such problems?

Well, one answer is denial — insistence that such problems aren’t real, that they’re invented by elitists who want to take away our freedom. And along with this anti-intellectualism goes a general dumbing-down, an exaltation of supposedly ordinary folks who don’t hold with this kind of stuff. Think of it as the right’s duck-dynastic moment.

Coincidentally, blogger Adam Lee read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (a book I’ve never attempted to read) and wrote an article called 10 Things I Learned About the World from Ayn Rand’s Insane “Atlas Shrugged’. The 10 things:

1. All evil people are unattractive; all good and trustworthy people are handsome.
2. The mark of a great businessman is that he sneers at the idea of public safety.
3. Bad guys get their way through democracy; good guys get their way through violence.
4. The government has never invented anything or done any good for anyone.
5. Violent jealousy and degradation are signs of true love.
6. All natural resources are limitless.
7. Pollution and advertisements are beautiful; pristine wilderness is ugly and useless.
8. Crime doesn’t exist, even in areas of extreme poverty.
9. The only thing that matters in life is how good you are at making money.
10. Smoking is good for you.

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Dignity of our Lives: “I burst into tears”

Posted on Sunday 27 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

There was so much coverage of the right-wing outrage and vitriol over passing depictions of gay families in a couple TV commercials earlier this year, from Coke and then Nabisco, which I saw reported on some of the news sites I follow, that it was very refreshing today to see this post by a gay father about what seeing these commercials meant to him.

Rob Watson: A Gay Dad Confesses: Nabisco and Coke Made Me Realize the Dignity LGBT Families Have Been Missing

Recently, Nabisco stepped into a similar limelight with its commercial “Honey Maid: This is Wholesome”. The thirty second spot shows a baby, in the arms of a man. Another man comes and kisses the baby on the head.

This time, I did not miss the subtlety. The minute I saw that simple scene, I burst into tears. That was me. That was my family. While the Coke commercial may have made history for the Superbowl, Nabisco made history for me. It was at that moment that I realized I had never, ever recognized my real life in a commercial before.

…

I now understood what LGBT families had been missing in the landscape of America — we have been missing from the branding of the national consciousness. Naturally, there have been those who rudely trashed the Nabisco ad as they had done to the Coke ad before it. They did not get to me though or the euphoria of having a wisp of a thread in the public awareness known as the “TV commercial”.

They did not get to me because I see more clearly now what it is they want to take from us. The protest remarks are from ones who decry “normalizing” LGBT relationships and families. They do not want us to have dignity. They want our dignity, even if it is the simple dignity in being depicted in a commercial to hawk cookies. Or soft drinks. Even that is too much for them.

Posted in Culture, The Gays | Comments Off on Dignity of our Lives: “I burst into tears”

Cosmos So Far

Posted on Thursday 24 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I should update my thoughts about the new version of the TV series Cosmos, since earlier I posted a mild critique about it needing to explain the background of scientific discovery – presenting not just the grandiose conclusions humanity has reached about the size and age of the universe, but the reasoning that went into these conclusions.

After seven weeks, on this count, I think the show is doing just fine. This past week’s episode, “The Clean Room”, was especially good, focusing as it did on a single scientist, Clair Patterson, and his decades-long quest to apply observations about radioactive decay to ancient samples of actual rocks, including meteorite fragments, his inconsistent results and therefore quest to remove sources of contamination, and his arrival at a conclusion about the age of the Earth. It was the first of many chains of evidence that support our understanding of the age of the Earth, and the universe.

At the same time, the episode ties this discovery to political pushback. The idea that lead was contaminating the environment was resisted by the petroleum industry (of course! It threatened their profits!), with their own hired ‘scientists’ to dispute any such accusations. It’s a pattern that’s been repeated again and again, by the tobacco industry, and lately by corporations who in their own interest need to dispute climate change science. (The lesson is, as in so many other issues, especially political: follow the money.)

Ironically, the pushback against this episode by creationists, who can’t believe the Earth is any older than some 6000 years because Bible, is that the fact that scientists hired to defend corporate interests disagree with non-affiliated scientists somehow proves that science is inherently unreliable, and therefore you can’t trust anything scientists conclude about anything.

(See this Alternet article:

Each week’s episode drives creationists like Ken Ham and his band of pseudoscientific faith-heads to the brink of insanity. They rush every week to find what things they can find to dispute in each episode. They never actually offer up their own evidence to the contrary, but instead simply attack Tyson for not using the Bible as the source of all science.

)

Sigh.

I also give credit to Cosmos — perhaps not to deGrasse Tyson himself, but to the scriptwriters, led by Carl Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan, though I have no idea to what extent they collaborated – to confronting the myths of creationism and science-denial, almost in every episode. In this one, dismissing the Bible’s many “begats” as an early guess but ultimately a discredited method of determining the Earth’s age. Naturally, these episodes drive the creationists crazy.

Here is a link to a a review of episode 7 by a better writer than me, Adam Lee.

If I still have a slight reservation about this new Cosmos series, it is that while each individual episode is very interesting, I don’t see a progression, in the way I thought I remembered the original series had – though I haven’t rewatched that show, or more than glanced at Sagan’s book, in 30 years.

Posted in Cosmology, Culture, Evolution, Philosophy, Physics | Comments Off on Cosmos So Far

Today’s Classic Song – Mercy Street

Posted on Thursday 24 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A soul with no leaks at the seams.

It’s about the poet Anne Sexton.

Wait for the last lines:

Anne, with her father is out in the boat
Riding the water
Riding the waves on the sea

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Christian boycotts

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

From Joe.My.God, about numerous recent events.

REMINDER: When major national Christian groups with millions of followers call for boycotts, that is a righteous use of the free market in order to preserve morality, marriage, family, and the American way. But when gay folks call for a boycott, THAT is homofascist intimidation, intolerance, bullying, economic terrorism, a stifling of religious liberty, and an attempt to deny the freedom of speech. And don’t you forget it.

Posted in Culture, The Gays | Comments Off on Christian boycotts

Kalam Cosmological Argument

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

The Kalam Cosmological Argument is one of the traditional, philosophical, arguments for the existence of God. The idea is that everything must have a beginning; therefore the universe must have a beginning, therefore God. (Which those who use this argument naturally assume is the God of traditional western religion.)

This is the kind of argument, like so many similar arguments, that is persuasive only to those already inclined to accept its conclusion. There are of course several problems with this argument. (If it were really a tight philosophical argument, why would the world’s intellects not be convinced and this debate not be foreclosed?) Wikipedia has this post about the argument, with simple refutations and descriptions of more technical responses. For a detailed technical response by an actual physicist, see Sean Carroll: Does the Universe Need God?. And Carroll, who debated the Christian apologist William Lane Craig a couple months ago, specifically addressed this argument, as summarized in his post-debate reflections.

My own take is twofold.

First, the premise is assumed without empirical evidence. How does anyone know that everything that exists needs a cause? And, did the universe actually begin to exist at some point? Perhaps the universe is an exception; perhaps this assumption about cause is merely a psychological assumption by the minds of human beings. (There are in fact cosmological theories that take our universe as one of many, born out of previous universes via black holes, in an endless series. See Lee Smolin, and Stephen Hawking. Or, cf. Hawking, that space-time is a kind of infinite loop; the ‘big bang’ is an apparent beginning only in the way that a circle, or a globe, has a beginning.) Does a circle have a cause? If a circle does not have a beginning, does it therefore not exist by this premise?

There’s a YouTube video about this, which suggests that believing that something can exist without a cause is akin to magic. Well, if the answer to the universe existing is, um er, ‘God’, then why can God exist without a cause? The usual answer is that ‘God’ is outside human understanding or need for a cause, but this is begging the question. Why shouldn’t the universe itself have this state?

Later in the video: it uses one of the oldest, silliest, most easily discredited arguments about evolution and cosmology: that somehow the “second law of thermodynamics” discredits these ideas. Hello? The second law of thermodynamics is as much a scientific conclusion as is evolution, or cosmology. Get it? You can’t use science when it’s convenient for your side, and dismiss it when it’s not. (That is, maybe the second law of thermodynamics is false. That’s as plausible as evolution or cosmology being false.)

Third, the video claims that anything must have a beginning.

Again: Circle.

Second– Even if the video’s argument were valid, so what?

The video jumps from the dubious conclusion about the need for something to have caused the universe to the assumption that this cause must be the traditional idea of ‘God’ – as if the only option for this cause has to be the ‘God’ the arguer happens to believe in. Of course, anyone subscribing to any of the other thousands of religions around the world could use this chain of argument to justify their *own* beliefs.

Really, people of intelligence have been debating these issues for centuries, even millennia. If there were really an argument, or arguments, to ‘prove’ the existence of ‘god’, why would we still be debating this? Mathematics and science has generated arguments based on reasonable premises for millennia (see Cosmos), and the result is our high-technological civilization, where you can post invalidated arguments about the existence of ‘god’ on an internet that depends on a worldwide network of computers and satellites that is a result of centuries of advances in physics and cosmology. While religious apologists fall back on philosophical arguments from centuries past that have been discredited, again and again, by modern intellects. Because they always have an audience of relatively uneducated, credulous people, to support their positions. Is the intellectual capacity of human beings to be dismissed? To some, maybe. Perhaps happiness, in ignorance or delusion, is all that matters.

Posted in Atheism, Cosmology, Psychology, Science, Thinking | Comments Off on Kalam Cosmological Argument

The Reality of Sexuality

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

From a few days ago, this post by Andrew Sullivan, on his blog, about a recent discovery of a particularly weird animal sexuality.

The more we learn about nature, the more the notion that the universe reflects a cosmic version of human heterosexuality gets discredited. Gender can be fluid in some species; in others, females have the testosterone; in this case, females have dicks. And rather elegant ones at that. We now know what Victorian scientists discovered but hid: that same-sex behavior is also endemic in the animal kingdom, unusual, but widespread. We know that some humans are born with indeterminate gender, that others have a gender that belies their external sex organs, that others still have no problem with their gender but are emotionally and sexually attracted to their own.

The reason why this matters is that the vast apparatus of “natural law” still permeates a huge amount of our thinking about human sexuality and emotion.

In the case of the Catholic Church, a crude and outdated version of natural law is integral to arguments about the “objective disorder” of homosexuals; among many evangelicals, gender diversity is regarded as something that needs to be beaten (sometimes literally) out of a child; reparative therapy is still lamentably used to terrorize the psyches of those born with a different nature. But almost all of this is based on something that has been exposed definitively as untrue.

The fact of the matter is, for whatever (as yet not completely understood) reason, homosexuality is not uncommon among many animal species, and has been part of human societies forever. (There is also evidence of homosexual behavior among many animal species, so the peculiar argument that humans should limit their behavior to what is ‘natural’ among other animals fails on more than one ground.) The difference in human societies throughout history is the way they respond to this situation; whether they accept the variations among human sexuality and the resultant relationships, or whether, in the name of (subconsciously driven) species survival or religious rectitude, demonize them. It’s rather analogous to how parents regard their children; are children only worthy to the extent they perpetuate the species?

The faithful, who defer to ancient religious texts written by primitive folks who believed the world existed only as far as their eyes could see, are living in a fantasy world. And who either don’t understand, or simply reject, the real world.

Posted in Culture, Science, The Gays | Comments Off on The Reality of Sexuality

Bunnies, Eggs, Spring

Posted on Sunday 20 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Everyone’s posting about Easter today, so I’ll acknowledge two or three of those posts, that capture better than I have time to do myself why I find the whole Easter tradition fascinating as a cultural development, but implausible and uninteresting as a religious observance.

Jericho Brisance: Infographic: Taking Easter Seriously [or, do believers realize how inconsistent and contradictory the four gospel accounts are?]

CJ Werleman at Alternet: Celebrating Easter? Which Contradicting Biblical Account of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection Are You Going to Pick? [or, how do believers rationalize the discrepancies between the gospels, written decades after the event by writers who “hadn’t even met Jesus, and [..] hadn’t met the people who had allegedly met Jesus”?]

And this history lesson in a Facebook graphic [that is, that like Christmas, Easter is a Christian holiday piggybacked an on earlier, pagan holiday, in this case Ishtar, a goddess of fertility and sex. (Spring!)] Oops, never mind! Debunked, at least the part about Ishtar=Easter. Still, the spring/rebirth theme is pretty obvious.

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There Is Only One Where This One Was

Posted on Sunday 20 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Saturday night’s concert: LA Philharmonic, Disney Hall, Philip Glass’s “CIVIL warS”, as discussed in an earlier post. Fabulous concert, with noticeable and intriguing differences in dynamic balance and tempo in the performance compared to the two recordings I have, and with bonuses: two intermediate passages of additional music, 3 or 4 minutes each, one between the prologue and Act One, as the chorus comes on stage; the other between Acts Two and Three, as two the soloists slowly leave.

(It’s the sort of supplemental music that I gather composers are often asked to provide, just in case; depending the staging. If you suspect Glass composed music by the yard, well, so did Tchaikovsky.)

I was not bothered by the staging issues the reviewer found foolish; I thought the staging worked well enough for a piece with operatic elements but which is not an opera, but an orchestral work with the full orchestra in view, (and a chorus on stairs behind), and various soloists coming and going on and off stage.

LA Times review

Here’s the final act:

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