Realitology
“The Study of Reality”
Warning! This Blog Contains Social Commentary, Brilliant Observations, Dry Wit, and Rampant Sarcasm. Use At Your Own Risk.
Posted Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Science, Society on Saturday, September 13th, 2008. Comments(1)
One more installment in my recent anti-religion tirades…
I recently finished the book "Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up" by Jonh Allen Paulos.
It’s an interesting little book that, through mathematics, quite adeptly destroys all sorts of the supposed "logical" arguments for god. Regardless of the religious implications of the book, the author really lays out probability and mathematical principles in easy to understand ways. It was particularly fascinating to me how many things we see around us every day are hugely improbable statistically, yet they happen with great regularity.
Here’s a case in point…
I suppose everyone knows that creationism (the belief that a mystical sky fairy [god] created the universe) has been rebranded as "intelligent design" (ID). There’s been a new PR campaign in the world (mainly USA) to try to "prove" its validity and hold it up as an equal (or better) explanation than natural selection (evolution), and to have it taught in public schools.
Since there is of course no logical or scientific evidence of "intelligent design" [a 2000 year old story book which claims itself infallible is not evidence] , the best argument its supporters can come up with is that the probability that the world as we know it evolved from natural selection is highly unlikely.
Of course their whole "thought" process is severely flawed and show that its supporters have no knowledge of science and no concept of natural selection. They start out with the idea that the universe as it is now was the "goal" of evolution, rather than realizing that there was no end goal, only a starting place with an incomprehensible number of possible changes and outcomes which occurred over billions of years and ended up with what we have now. In other words it wasn’t planned to be this way it just ended up this way as a result of miniscule changes over billions of years.
But anyway, back the idea that the probability of the universe being this way is so unlikely as to be impossible. Paulos give a great illustration of things with an a seeming infinitesimal probability of occurring, occurring nonetheless.
Would you say that the odds of something having a 1 in 1068 probability of occurring would be small? Infinitesimal even? Would something with those sorts of odds ever occur? Just so we’re clear on the number; 1068 is 1 with 68 zeros after it. In other words something having a
1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
chance of occurring. It seems like something like that could never happen.
Well, if you shuffle a deck of 52 cards there is a 1 in 1068 chance of the cards ending up in any particular order. So every time you shuffle a deck of cards the order that the cards ended up in had a tiny 1 in 1068 chance of occurring, and yet it obviously did occur.
You would be justified in concluding that the probability that the cards ended up in that particular order was infinitesimal, but you would not be justified in concluding that since the odds were so small that it could not have possibly occurred. That my friends is what creationists try to do.
Simply because the a priori [rough translation: before the fact] chance of something happening is tiny, you can’t conclude that it could not have possibly occurred. When you shuffle cards they have to end up in some order. Regardless of the probability of any one particular order occurring, one particular order will occur. You cannot logically conclude that the possibility of moving from one order to another via shuffling is so improbable as to be impossible.
So how do we put this back into the real world of natural selection? Simply this: when an organism reproduces, the cards are reshuffled and any number of possible genetic changes will occur (as demonstrated by the fact that every offspring is not a perfect clone.) This particular genetic reshuffling that ends up was itself highly improbable to have occurred, but yet it did occur.
Genetics is of course much more complex than a deck of cards. When genes are shuffled there can be mutations which lead to more possibilities of changes in organisms. If you had a deck of cards that changed a tiny bit with every shuffle eventually it would not look like the deck you started out with. The possibilities of changes would increase the longer you shuffled the deck. If everyone of the 6 billion people on earth shuffled a similar deck then the number of change would grow exponentially. If they passed down their deck of cards to their offspring and the offspring continued to shuffle the deck over their lifetime then then the changes could grow even more exponentially. And if that continued for billions of years then the number of changes would continue to grow exponentially.
Something simple can end up incredibly complex with tiny changes over long periods of time.
That in a nutshell is natural selection.
1- organisms reproduce
2- the offspring is slightly different that its parents
3- that offspring reproduces
4- Its offspring are slightly different that it is
5- ad infinitum
The evidence is right in front of our faces, we witness it every time a child is born and yet some people still want to claim that it doesn’t happen. As I’ve said before, someone who consistently doesn’t believe what they see happening with their very eyes, and who denies reality, is detached (brainwashed by beliefs) from reality. It’s sad on a human level, but it’s incredibly dangerous on a societal level to have people making decisions based on superstition and non-reality.
This whole deck of cards/number analogy thing was based on about 2 pages of Paulos’ book. If you read the whole book you’ll find many more "arguments" for god debunked. It’s a pretty entertaining read. Don’t be put off by "mathematics" in the title.
Posted Humanity, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Society on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008. Comments(2)
The Religious Should Not And Cannot Be Trusted In Positions of Power.
Religion is a mass delusion that has been perpetrated far too long out of fear, ignorance, and power. I understand that people have been raised (brainwashed) that way (me included), but what continues to shock me is that in this day and age, with all we know about how the universe works, people continue to choose to live outside of reality.
Not only is that sad, it’s scary and downright dangerous. Witness the havoc these delusions cause…All the way from the 2,000 years of christian, jewish, muslim, hindu hatred and wars with each other to the parents who withhold medical treatment from their children because they believe that praying to god will cure all. I don’t want to belabor the point—I could give examples of this for another 10 pages.
The ignorance of humans never ceases to amaze me, but I’m especially shocked that this right-wing-religious-nut-Sarah-Palin seems to be so well received. I won’t even go into the effects of cult of personality, or the cult of a semi-not-ugly-face have on people. That’s scary in itself.
Look, normally anyone who says they hear voices is rushed off to psychiatric care and rightfully so. They’d certainly not be trusted to hold public office. BUT if they say the voices are from "god" then it’s like "Oh OK that’s cool…you’re not insane." These people should be getting the psychiatric help they need, not encouraged and allowed to continue in their delusions.
I guarantee a person who admitted being bi-polar or schizophrenic would not even be considered for public office; but here we go again with Sara Palin since people obviously didn’t learn their lesson from 8 years of a president with definite mental issues. I’m not just talking about him being unintelligent, I’m talking about issues resembling paranoid delusions, megalomania, schizophrenia, or personality disorders.
He definitely doesn’t shy away from talking about the voices in his head; but here once again another person needing psychiatric care is given a free pass because the voices are from "god". Freaking scary and directly parallel to such wackos as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or the Ayatollah Khomeini, et al.
[ I don’t mean to imply that everyone who professes to "hear god’s voice" is psychotic. Most are just deluding themselves because they "want to believe" and this is a way for them to "prove" that god exists and is looking out for them. It’s really just the inner voice and self-talk that all humans possess and is part of a human brain’s normal activity.]
I don’t want to go off on Bush’s mental problems too much, but this is an excellent article on them.
http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/011305PaulLevy.shtml
A couple of quotes from the article….
The author quotes Jung in analyzing George Bush’s mental disorders:
"Hysterical self-deceivers, and ordinary ones too, have at all times understood the art of misusing everything so as to avoid the demands and duties of life, and above all to shirk the duty of confronting themselves. They pretend to be seekers after God in order not to have to face the truth that they are ordinary egoists."
The Author:
"At the root of Bush’s process is an unwillingness and seeming inability to experience his own sense of sin, guilt and shame, as if he is afraid of being exposed, of being found out. He’s clearly unable to feel any remorse and experience his own weakness and vulnerability, his own sense of failure. This threatens his narcissism too much. One aspect of Bush’s pathology is ‘malignant narcissism,’ as he reacts sadistically to others who mirror back his guilt and don’t support and enable his narcissism."
AND
"Whereas Hitler’s evil was more overt in its cruelty and sadism, Bush’s dark side is much more hidden and disguised, which makes it particularly dangerous. People who voted for Bush are somehow blind to what is very obvious to others. It’s as if they’ve become hypnotized and fallen under the spell that Bush is casting. Why would people vote for someone stricken with malignant egophrenia? People who support Bush are suggestible and susceptible to the same malady that Bush is embodying, as if they have a predisposition for it (based on their own trauma, dissociated psyche and tendency to project the shadow). Supporting Bush is a sign that a person not only doesn’t see the deadly illness that is incarnating itself through Bush, but is an expression that this disease has taken up residence in their being and is using them to do its bidding."
That’s about as perfectly as it can be said.
I personally can no longer in good conscious just let these religious delusions continue unchallenged; especially when we’re faced with another [vice] presidential term of people who admittedly hear voices in their head and make decisions based on a 2,000 year old book written by bronze-age storytellers.
Most Americans can plainly see the evil that comes from the muslim world trying to enforce their barbaric, 8th century mythology on the rest of the world. Yet sadly [religious] Americans seem blind to the fact that THEIR stated ultimate goal and worldview is the exact same thing. But I suppose that’s inherent in the religious person’s psyche…to kill or convert the infidels. Again another false and needless problem caused by people making life-threatening decisions based on 2,000 year old mythology.
We as a country and as a world cannot continue to let people who hear voices in their head and who are so disconnected from reality that they believe magic sky-faeries rule the universe…we should not and we can not any longer let these obviously unfit people rule the United States and the world.
We need to call a spade a spade and not give people who are obviously disconnected from the real world a pass just because they pull the "religious card". Let us at least call it what it truly is…a delusion. And delusional people have no business making decisions for society.
Posted Nature, Philosophy, Psychology, Society, Weird on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007. Comments(0)
This is awesome!
In a rapid fire test of mental addition, monkeys performed almost as well as college students, showing they’re no slouches when it comes to number crunching.
The macaques got their sums right 76 percent of the time, while the students got the correct answer 94 percent of the time in a series of increasingly challenging maths tests. more….
First off, I don’t know if this is good news for monkeys or bad news for college students. I guess it give new meaning to the phrase "a monkey could do your job." And secondly, I enjoy saying the word "macaque." Macaque, macaque, macaque, macaque. If you don’t shut up I’m gonna smack you upside the macaque. That has a nice ring to it.
Seriously though, I hope this is one more piece of ammunition to help people realize that it’s not OK to abuse, perform cruel tests on, kill, eat, or destroy the homes of our non-homo-sapien relatives because "they’re just animals." This is not anthrophomorphism, but rather a recognition that humans aren’t the only creatures on earth to feel pain, have emotions, and in fact be intelligent. (George Bush excluded.)
Besides that…monkeys don’t join fraternities/sororities, look down on other "lesser primates", drink too much beer, have unprotected sex, and produce more vapid idiots like themselves. Unlike some of the apes I’ve seen at college.
Posted Music, Psychology on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007. Comments(5)
Reading this post about a guitar solo got me thinking about how people interact with the world. Seems like a stretch doesn’t it? The guitarist in the video is technically very good. There’s no doubt about it. However to me he’s also quite soulless—kind of like an animitron. His playing reminded me of a couple of things that I’ve seen lately.