From Mud to MANsions

The events of the past few days brought some passages from E. M. Forster to mind. I guess E. M. Forster had nothing to say, either. Here, in his great novel A Passage to India (does anybody read great novels anymore?), he writes of a western tourists’ experience in the Marabar Caves:

If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same—“ou-boum.” If one had spoken with the tongues of angels and pleaded for all the unhappiness and misunderstanding in the world, past, present, and to come, for all the misery men must undergo whatever their opinion and position, and however much they dodge or bluff—it would amount to the same, the serpent would descent and return to the ceiling… But suddenly, at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words from “Let there be Light” to “It is finished” only amounted to “boum.”

And here, a group of Hindus asks questions of two Anglican missionaries:

All invitations must proceed from heaven, perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt. So at all events thought old Mr. Graysford and young Mr. Sorley, the devoted missionaries who lived out beyond the slaughterhouses, always travelled third on the railways, and never came up to the club. In our Father’s house are many mansions, they taught, and there alone will the incompatible multitudes of mankind be welcomed and smoothed. Not one shall be turned away by the servants on that verandah, be he black or white, not one shall be kept standing who approaches with a loving heart. And why should the divine hospitality cease here? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys. May there not be a mansion for the monkeys also? Old Mr. Graysford said No, but young Mr. Sorley, who was advanced, said Yes; he saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss, and he had sympathetic discussions about them with his Hindu friends. And the jackals? Jackals were indeed less to Mr. Sorley’s mind, but he admitted that the mercy of God, being infinite, may well embrace all mammals. And the wasps? He became uneasy during the descent to wasps, and was apt to change the conversation. And oranges, cactuses, crystals and mud? and the bacteria inside Mr. Sorley? No, no, this is going too far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.

And nothing to say, I guess. ;-)

[No, I'm not a Buddhist.]

"You'll Be Sorry!"

I can't imagine a mentality more degraded than someone marching up to us in a coffee shop and saying, essentially, "You'll be sorry that you're atheists!" and asking a person why they exist.

What this person actually said was, after a long harangue about how "everyone in the world needs an answer to life" and "has to have somebody to talk to" (and that's not true - not if you've studied eastern philosophy and religion. The Asian conception of religion, God (if any), and reality is very different from those of the Abrahamic religions), was "you'll see!"

"When you're on your deathbed, you'll see! What would you say to a child who's dying? You have nothing to say! Everybody needs an answer, and you do, too! You'll see!"

My answer that, 1) this person who’s assuming that I’ve never had trouble in life obviously didn't know anything about me, and 2) in my experience, children are quite irreverent about death and have less fear of it than adults, and 3) each person's death belongs to that person alone and I would be more inclined to listen than to preach, was drowned out by this person then telling me not to speak for everyone, which I wasn't trying to do, since he wouldn’t even let me speak for myself.)

"Why are you alive?" this person blared at us, and kept on his harangue while I asked if he knew about the sperm and the egg. Why am I alive? Is he joking? If he's so offended that I'm alive, holy shit, just wait a while and that will take care of itself. If that's not fast enough for him, because he's a mean old coot, then kill me and STFU.

I didn't initiate this discussion but I left it in tears. Man, I didn't see that coming at all. This from who looks like a kindly old man. (Was that a threat BTW?)

That has got to be the lowest blow ever by someone who is obviously never satisfied with anyone. This person has bitched and bitched about religion. This person asked for a copy of the Minnesota Atheist newsletter. Well, he was obviously looking for a fight, or else he's crazy.

What is this "answer" of which people speak? I don’t get it. Life is almost completely nonverbal. The earth orbiting the sun, the waves crashing on the shore, the wind in the trees, birth, death, eating, sleeping, making love, dance, art, music - all nonverbal. Where is there an "answer" in all this? Where is there meaning in life, except in the living of it? Do people actually want to reduce physical phenomena to a trite fortune cookie blurb? Is that what the word "spiritual," tossed around so much that it now has no meaning, mean to them?

Life is doing. When you do something instead of sitting on your ass watching life pass you by, and when you avoid making mistakes instead of hurling yourself into making bad decisions, or no decisions at all (which is a decision), you're much less inclined to ask "What's it all about?"

"What's is all about?" In my opinion, that has to be the stupidest question the human race ever came up with. We learn by doing, and we find purpose by doing. But that kind of purpose cannot be explicitly verbalized to someone who is so profoundly unhappy as to ask someone why he or she exists. Life is what happens to you while you're asking other people what it's all "about." As the Chinese say - "Westerners are always getting ready to live."

Personally, I think our ability to speak and engage in abstract thought is overrated if it culminates in this inexplicable sense of despair, which gives rise to this perverse desire to hurt someone else's feelings to the point of slamming into a coffee shop and informing someone that "you'll see in the future, when you're under stress and cry out to God," just so they can proclaim, “I told you so!” Yeah, and if I were waterboarded for a sufficient amount of time I'd probably betray my family, my friends, and everything that I hold dear, too. Should that define who I am? If I were starving and the only alternative was to rob someone, I suppose under certain circumstances I'd do it. Should that define who I am?

The behavior or a person reduced to an extreme state of misery should not be the basis of human morality, unless you think the rich and the middle class should be regularly stealing bread to feed their families, or driving away from gas pumps without paying, or holding someone's Jesus statue hostage even if the neighbor doesn’t have a dog pooping all over one’s yard.

As I said before, I think the problem is that too many people are cut off from nature. There’s no “meaning” or “meaninglessness” in nature, nor does there have to be. Nature is necessity and necessity is relentless, but never deliberately cruel. I realized this in the Galapagos.

Nature will eventually kill you, but it will never mock you, call you fat, make you feel ugly, call you stupid, humiliate you in front of others, scare you with hell-talk, engage in emotional blackmail, or make you feel like you can never be perfect enough. Nature just is, as I just am, in all our glorious imperfections. Screw the people who are always looking for perfection, an answer, or "meaning." They are more hurtful and incomprehensible than the so-called "meaninglessness" of life could ever be.

UPDATED: Scott to the rescue!

Cognitive Research into Belief

Okay, here at last is a summary of Sam Harris's paper, "Functional Neuroimaging of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty." As you will see, research in this area is groundbreaking, painstaking, and not going to reveal earth-shattering insights. Scientific knowledge is advanced by conducting carefully crafted tests, recording observations, and solving specific, specialized puzzles, and drawing provisional conclusions. The accumulation of the resulting data and conclusions make up what is called "the mountain of evidence" which is described by evolutionary theory.

(Evidence doesn't "prove" evolution - evolutionary theory (as does any theory) describes the evidence and provides a conceptual model for it. Man, if I could just correct that one misconception I would die a happy person!)

So don't expect too much from Harris's work, though I think it is very important. What Harris did was to subject 14 right-handed native speakers of English, with no history of psychiatric or neurological disorders and who were not taking any medication at the time, to a series of short statements that they viewed from a video-goggle display worn over their eyes while their brains (specifically the pre-frontal cortex) were being scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The statements consisted of mathematical, geographical, autobiographical, religious, ethical, semantic, and factual assertions. All statements were designed to be clearly true, false, or undecidable. For example:

Mathematical: (2 + 6) + 8 = 16 [true]

Geographical: Wisconsin is on the West Coast of the United States. [false]

Autobiographical: You had eggs for breakfast on December 8, 1999. [theoretically knowable, but unable to be decided]

Religious: A Personal God exists, just as the Bible describes. [true or false depending on belief]

Jesus spoke 2,467 words in the New Testament. [theoretically knowable, but unable to be decided]

And so on.

Read his Experimental Design section carefully. Some people took issue with Harris's decision to have his subjects review their responses and flag any that the subject felt were erroneous or was not sure about. Harris removed these responses from the analysis. I agree with Harris's method, and don't think it affects his experiement, but some bloggers do not agree and think that it skews the results. These people are probably more qualified to judge than I am - however, my response is that (as theirs surely would be) the way to really know is to conduct more tests, on wider selections of the population, utilizing various methods.

Harris states in his Discussion section:

Several psychological studies[9-11] appear to support Spinoza's conjecture[12] that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection. Understanding a proposition may be analogous to perceiving an object in physical space: We seem to accept appearances as reality until they prove otherwise. Our behavioral data support this hypothesis, in so far as subjects judged statements to be true more quickly than they judged them to be false or undecidable.

For example, a nonreligious person reading the statement, "A Personal God exists, just as the Bible describes" would first accept the statement as true, then reject it, and the religious person would, upon reading the statement, "There is probably no actual Creator God" would likewise accept the statement as true, then reject it. What is established here is that any statement is first accepted as true by the brain, then subsequently rejected if the subject does not believe it to be true.

Harris discusses the limits of fMRI briefly.

fMRI studies in general have several limitations. Perhaps first and most important are those of statistical power and sensitivity. We chose to analyze our data at extremely conservative thresholds to exclude the possibility of type I (false-positive) detection errors, reducing our susceptibility to the problem of multiple comparisons. This necessarily increases our type II error (false-negative rate). Thus, we may have failed to detect activity in additional brain regions involved in the formation of belief states. Furthermore, in whole-brain studies such as these, the analyses implicitly assume uniform detection sensitivity throughout the brain, though it is well known that several brain regions, including the orbitofrontal and rectal gyri, show reduced magnetic resonance signal in the low-bandwidth fast imaging scans used for fMRI because of the relatively inhomogeneous magnetic field created there. Thus, false-negative rate may be further increased in these brain areas.

Here are his conclusions:

Mean reaction time differed between belief and disbelief. Disbelief > belief mean reaction time.

Mean reaction time did not differ significantly between disbelief and uncertainty; however, disbelief > uncertainty.

Harris correlates belief, disbelief, and uncertainty to activity within specific areas of the brain. (Not being versed in brain anatomy I can't tell you what this exactly means, which areas overlap or don't, ect. You'll have to read that and judge.)

He sums up his data thus:

The results of our study suggest that belief, disbelief, and uncertainty are mediated primarily by regions in the medial PFC, the anterior insula, the superior parietal lobule, and the caudate. The acceptance and rejection of propositional truth-claims appear to be governed, in part, by the same regions that judge the pleasantness of tastes and odors.

These results suggest that the differences among belief, disbelief, and uncertainty may one day be distinguished reliably, in real time, by techniques of neuroimaging. This would have obvious implications for the detection of deception, for the control of the placebo effect during the process of drug design, and for the study of any higher-cognitive phenomenon in which the differences among belief, disbelief, and uncertainty might be a relevant variable.

"The acceptance and rejection of propositional truth-claims appear to be governed, in part, by the same regions that judge the pleasantness of tastes and odors." I wonder if certain tastes and certain odors correlate with belief in certain truth-claims? Perhaps not.

I can't help but wonder, though, when I look at Harris's work (and I'm engaging in some really shameful speculation here, based on my completely subjective and anecdotal experience) at the taste in music, poetry, and art that creationists have, being that this stuff truly repulses me. It's not only that I find the dogma of creationism laughable; it's also my experience that I find creationists' tastes to be (aside from their liking Mozart or Chopin) largely kitchy and crass. When I see the crap they produce, I know something is wrong - and even if I believed every word they said, I couldn't stomach the way that they say it! Is there a connection between pseudoscience beliefs and sentimentality?

It's brain-food for thought.


(In other words, I would also die a very happy girl if I could get it into Ken Ham's followers' heads that they can come to my blog and type until their fingers fall off the "peace you will feel" if I were to believe in God, as they have been in response to my "Ken Ham's Museum Opens to Closed Minds" post, but they can't can't can't ever make me like the shitty art that they produce! Gaaa! ) ;-)