I am curious about the fascination conspiracy theories have for some folks, including the current anti-vaccine camp.
For instance, how does the world look from within such a view?
When I explore it for myself, I find a fearful world.
The most recent Are We Alone? Science Radio for Thinking Species podcast is on SETI.
I have been fascinated by SETI since I was a kid. Finding another civilization in the universe will be one of the most significant discoveries in the history of humanity.
More importantly, simply reflecting on it – which SETI invites us to – helps us see ourselves more in perspective.
The appendix is shown to support the immune system, in contrast to the previous view of it having no function at all. And what about junk DNA, do we know it doesn’t have a function?
Western science has had a tendency to assume that if we don’t know its function, it must not have one. It is obviously a silly assumption.
So the question then is, where and how do I do the same? Where do I assume that if I don’t know the function of something, it must not have one?
When I look, I find I do it all the time.
Big Integrity is the art and science of coming into right relationship with Reality and supporting others in doing the same. It can be spoken of as “getting right with God,” but religious language is not necessary and may in some circles be counterproductive, given the fact that so many people still have trivial, unnatural views of the divine. (Indeed, as I suggest here, atheist scientists such as PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins are playing traditionally prophetic roles in this process when they speak on behalf of reality.) Thus, I prefer thinking of Big Integrity simply as “being in right relationship with Reality”—both objective reality: the actual, physical Universe that dozens of scientific disciplines help us understand, and subjective reality: the inner realm of meaning, values, and interpretation that has historically been the focus of religion, psychology, and spirituality.
A nice post on the Big Integrity movement from Michael Dowd.
Nature is Satan’s church
- from Antichrist by Lars Von Trier
I listened to an interview with Lars Von Trier where he talks about fear of nature and nature as evil.
It is an interesting topic, and one that is rooted in the cultural distrust of nature in Europe and other places, and also in our evolution.
In reality, Darwin’s loss of faith was, as he recognised, gradual and complex. The reasons were not new – suffering always has been and always will be most serious challenge to Christianity – but they were newly focused. Plenty of Darwin’s scientific contemporaries….. could accommodate their Christian beliefs with the new theory. Indeed, as historian James Moore has remarked “with but few exceptions the leading Christian thinkers in Great Britain and America came to terms quite readily with Darwinism and evolution.”
But Darwin, brought up on William Paley’s harmonious, self-satisfied vision of creation, could not.
From brief and good article from The Guardian.
I enjoyed listening to CDs with NASA recordings of “sound” from space several years ago, and was just now reminded of it.
There are many snippets on YouTube.
Scientific American has an interesting article on depression’s evolutionary roots.
Depression brings attention to a particular topic while reducing distractions, allowing it to be examined and processed more thoroughly. And that investigation can help us function better in daily life.
The idea is of course not new, and it goes well beyond just depression.
When I explore for myself, I find that any hangups, any reactivity, is a glue for attention. It brings attention to the apparent topic of the hangup, and also to the hangup itself.
Whenever there is friction between shoulds and is/may be, there is a knot. A hangup. A tantrum, as Byron Katie calls it.
This book looks interesting:
Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World.
(Via Integral Options Cafe.)
The press release makes some good points, and it is an interesting exploration. Why do we sometimes resist a more rational view? And what can be done about it when we notice it in ourselves, or encounter it in others?
It is also interesting to note that the author appears to mix in his own beliefs which muddles the logic slightly.
Davis laments a modern world in which more people believe in ESP, ghosts, and angels than in evolution. Superstition and religion get particularly critical treatment, although he argues that religion, itself, is not the problem but “an inevitable by-product of how our minds misperform.
It is not quite ESP, ghost and angels versus science and evolution. It is about how we relate, not what we relate to.
It is perfectly possible to be curious about ESP, ghost, UFOs and other mysterious phenomena, and take a pragmatic and scientific approach to it. We can study it through science and be quite receptive and open to whatever we may find.
And it is also perfectly possible to have a blind and irrational belief in atheism or particular scientific models, pretending those views and models are true when we know that atheism is just another unproven philosophy and any scientific model will be outdated and obsolete at some point in the future. (And that goes for our most basic worldview as well, and our most basic assumptions about life and existence.)
When we mix in our own beliefs as Davis does, it is also easy to be caught up in shadow projections. To get caught up in the “I am right, you are wrong” dynamics and all that comes with it.
And as always, this is a mirror for myself. I see Davis being caught up in his own beliefs, so how am I doing the same? How am I doing the same in relation to him right now? Can I find other specific examples from my own life?
In this case, it is perfectly possible – even likely – that I am horribly unfair and assign views to the author that he does not hold. I haven’t even read his book. I am just using it to make a point.
There is a huge amount of possible relationships between science and spirituality.
The most obvious one in our science-based culture is to explore spirituality through science. For instance, we can explore the effects of different practices. How do they show up in how people experience and live their lives? What bodily changes correlate with practices, regular long-term practice, different states, and a genuine Ground awakening? How does it show up in the structure and activity of the brain, the nervous system, endocrine system, muscles and so on? Also, we can explore the science of spiritual practices on their own terms. What works and how? What are the dynamics and mechanisms behind practices from the different traditions? How similar are the ones that appear quite similar?
We can also explore science through spirituality, especially and most productively from within reality awake to itself. For instance, how do current models and views in science correspond to reality as it appears to a mystic? How can they be rephrased so they are better aligned while still staying true to current science?
Equally interesting is how we can use current stories from science as fodder for practices.
Creation is a movie about Charles Darwin and will be out in the theaters at the end of September.
The trailer highlights the tension between one particular image of evolution, and one particular image of God.
It may seem quaint. I know it does for me, having grown up in a culture where most are lukewarm agnostics, where religion plays very little role in society, and where the few Christians have no problem reconciling their religion with science. (Mostly by telling themselves they belong to different realms.)
This amazingly complete 47 million year old fossil was revealed to the public today. It was found in Germany in the 80s, wasy aquired by the University of Oslo two years ago, and is a link in the early evolution of primates. (See official site and BBC.)
Exploring our evolutionary past helps us understand who we are today, and this has many practical benefits. Our evolutionary story informs a wide range of fields, including medicine, sociology and psychology. And through the epic of evolution, we can find and a deep sense of connection, belonging and meaning, which in turn influences our views and actions and may even help us survive as a species.
There is also another side to our desire to fill in our past through genealogy, history, archaeology, evolutionary past, cosmology and more. We can use it to give ourselves a false sense that we understand and know who we are as a species and individuals. We can use it to get a sense of having ground under our feet, a base to stand on, stories that helps us solidify and flesh out our identities.
These stories can be used as material to solidify our identity as a species, culture and individual, and also as an object in the world – a me, a doer and an observer.
This is where inquiry can be very helpful. Do I know that any of these stories are really true? Do I know that they define who and what I really am? What happens when I take them as true? Who would I be without those stories? What are the truth in their turnarounds? (The Work.)
So while all of these stories from genealogy, history, evolution and cosmology can be very helpful in a practical sense, and may even help us survive as a species, it is good to notice how we hold these stories, what happens when take them as true, and find what is more true for us -including that we really don’t know.
Geoff Marcy: The Search for Habitable Planets and Life in the Universe
A good overview on planethunting and why technological civilizations may be rare in the Universe. (One reason: They may not be very long-lived on a cosmic – or even planetary – timescale.)
The search for life in the universe is valueable in itself. At the very least, it is a reminder of how incredibly precious life and this living planet is, and it helps us (mentally) place earth and humanity in a much larger context.
(SETI is also one of many mirror for us, although what I can say about it is just the same as in other posts.)
From BBC’s Life on Air. (Part one of six, go to BBC on YouTube for the rest.)
David Attenborough’s most recent documentary. Well worth watching.
February 12th is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. While reflecting on the life and legacy of this great scientist and devoted husband and father, I’ve been struck by how an evolutionary understanding of the universe has, in fact, REALized my religious faith. I now enjoy all the benefits and blessings of religion from a place of knowledge rather than belief. When I look to the past, I am filled with awe and gratitude. When I look around me in the present, I feel love, compassion, and a desire to do everything I can to ensure a healthy world. And when I look to the future, including a future without me, I feel a deep and all-embracing trust….
- from a post by Michael Dowd on Darwin.
I am enjoying reading Evolutionary Times, and can highly recommend it for anyone interested in science and spirituality. Each post is a gem.
Forty years ago this Christmas, something amazing happened: we visited the Earth’s moon for the first time.
It was the first time humans saw the Earth as a blue marble floating in space, and it gave us the first photo of an Earthrise. (Here is a recent interview with the three Apollo 8 astronauts.)
For the last forty years, we have been familiar with photos of Earth from space. And also the often transformative experiences of astronauts and cosmonauts. (Especially the ones who left Earth orbit.)
It has nudged us to recognize the Earth as one whole. As a living system. And as tiny even in the context of our own small solar system.
In many ways, seeing the Earth from the outside is a recent step in our collective deprovincialization. It is an invitation for us to grow up a little more as a species and global culture.
There’s a sort of unsettling, alien quality to their computers’ results. When the teams examine the ways that singular value decomposition is slotting movies into categories, sometimes it makes sense to them — as when the computer highlights what appears to be some essence of nerdiness in a bunch of sci-fi movies. But many categorizations are now so obscure that they cannot see the reasoning behind them. Possibly the algorithms are finding connections so deep and subconscious that customers themselves wouldn’t even recognize them. At one point, Chabbert showed me a list of movies that his algorithm had discovered share some ineffable similarity; it includes a historical movie, “Joan of Arc,” a wrestling video, “W.W.E.: SummerSlam 2004,” the comedy “It Had to Be You” and a version of Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House.” For the life of me, I can’t figure out what possible connection they have, but Chabbert assures me that this singular value decomposition scored 4 percent higher than Cinematch — so it must be doing something right. As Volinsky surmised, “They’re able to tease out all of these things that we would never, ever think of ourselves.” The machine may be understanding something about us that we do not understand ourselves.
From an interesting NY Times article on the quest to improve Netflix’ recommendation software.
Aurora borealis as seen from the International Space Station. (Source: NY Times.)
A new study published in PLoS One today reveals that hatred isn’t the blind, irrational emotion it might seem. In fact, hate activates the brain regions associated with higher reason and the ability to predict what other people will do.
- Source: i09
Hate isn’t the same as anger, but may be close enough for what I’ll explore – briefly – here.
(When I look at it for myself, it seems that hate is just a particularly persistent and strong form of anger, one that is fueled and maintained by stories taken very much as true, and that the essence of it is anger.)
Academic psychology is still in its infancy, and is still exploring the basics, which is good. In many cases, research helps confirm and refine common perceptions, and it sometimes also come up with quite counter intuitive results – which is even more helpful.
In this case, the general findings seem quite close to how we – or at least I – experience anger.
It clears out the cobwebs. Brings clarity. Focus. Single pointed attention if needed. Energy. And a “get things done” impulse.
I keep hearing folks saying that we use only 10% of our brains, most recently at a potluck this weekend.
It is obviously a myth if taken literally. Even on the surface, it makes little sense. Why, for instance, would we evolve a brain that is only partially used when it is so enormously costly in terms of energy? And brain imaging shows that we use all parts of the brain, although all parts are – thankfully – not highly active at any one time.
The intention behind the statement (apart from revealing to the world an appalling lack of understanding of common-sense principles of evolution) is obviously to remind us that we have untapped potentials.
I had forgotten and this recent photo reminded me: My name is one of a quarter of a million names on that little disc attached to the Phoenix spacecraft, now safely landed on Mars.
I have written earlier about some aspects of the bigger picture of space exploration, so I won’t repeat it here. But it does give me pleasure to think that if there are future colonies of martians (humans), this little disc and its content will be displayed at their museum.
Seen in the context of Earth reproducing itself – through humans and terraforming – that disc represents the contemplation of reproduction, and the first steps of the foreplay.
I especially like Carl Sagan’s greeting, which is part of the rich content of the disc.
I was reminded of this part of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series yesterday, after Michael Dowd’s talk.
And we, we who embody the local eyes, and ears, and thoughts, and feelings of the cosmos — we’ve begun at last to wonder about our origins. Star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of 10 billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter — tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and, perhaps, throughout the cosmos.
Carl Sagan, Cosmos
This made a huge impact on me when I saw the series as a kid, and it was a seed of a deep shift in my orientation to life.
Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow are back in Oregon, giving a string of presentations in early April.
They will be in Roseburg April 9, Eugene April 10, Portland April 12 and 13, and Salem on the 16th.
If you happen to live around here, it is well worth attending. They are both amazing speakers in the area of evolution and spirituality, and Michael often uses the aqal framework to organize his presentations.
If you live somewhere else in the US, you can find their schedule on the Thank God for Evolution website, where you will also find audio and video snippets.
Over the years, NASA scientists have found several anomalies in the trajectories of different spacecraft. They speed up slightly, in a way that cannot be explained by the models NASA use.
One explanation is that there is something with the spacecrafts themselves which systematically makes them go faster than expected, or that there is an unknown external influence. But none such conventional mechanism has been found.
The other, more interesting, possibility, is that there is something we don’t understand about the habits, or “laws”, of the universe, and maybe specifically gravity.
Scientists – and most people in general – understand of course that our maps only have a temporary and functional value. What they refer to is always different from and more than what any map can cover or appear to explain.
When we use terms such as “laws of nature” it is easy to forget that this is the case. A law seem so permanent. So this is a good reminder that even our most basic maps about how the universe functions are still just maps, in need of revision now and then as any of our other maps.
And there are of course other areas where we forget this. In fact, whenever we identify with a story, we forget it, even if it is as simple as “she should do her dishes”.
So anomalies – whether in science or daily life – is a good reminder to look at whether we take our maps to be more than just a map, and maybe to revise them as well.
See the Wikipedia entry on the flyby and pioneer anomalies, and listen to the most recent Planetary Radio for an interview with a JPL scientist on this topic.
As soon as we take ourselves to be an object in the world, there is an impulse to feel connected, to find that wholeness we feel – and rightly so – is missing.
One of the ways to find this sense of connection is through the Universe Story, with all its minor stories woven in at different size levels (holons in a holarchy) and areas of life. The history of the universe is our history. We are made up star stuff. All life on earth shares the same basic building blocks. We share the same ancestors. We are the ways the universe touches, sees, tastes, knows itself.
It is beautiful, poetic, scientific, aligned very much with spirituality (at least certain forms of it), and gives a deep sense of connection, belonging, shared existence, and meaning.
It also widens our circle of care, compassion and concern, our circle of us. If this human self is a local expression of this universe and its evolution, and the earth and its evolution, what can I leave out of my sense of us? There is really nothing that can be left out.
The more we learn about these connections, the deeper we can feel it. And one way we can learn about it is to read books like Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. (On my reading list.)
Few things are as interesting as UFOs.
Not because of what they may or may not be, although that can be interesting enough, but because of what they say about us.
The world is our mirror. Whatever we see out there is something we recognize from in here.
And in the absence of real data about UFOs, they become a blank slate for us to fill in with our imagination. UFOs become the perfect all-purpose projection object. A nice ready-made rorschach test. Just as it is with other things we may not know much about, like crop circles, ghosts, reincarnation, awakening, other cultures, or whatever it may be.
We get to fill it in with what is alive here now, but doesn’t quite fit our self image, so we put it out on UFOs – or something else – instead. They will save us. They will eat us alive. They represent a galactic brotherhood.
Can I find each of those qualities in myself? Yes, very much so. And if I get really familiar with it here, UFOs are suddenly not so interesting anymore, at least not as saviors or man-hunters or an evolved brotherhood or whatever else it may be.
We also get to see how we relate to unknowns. Are we OK with it? Fine with acknowledging that we don’t know, and that there are many possible explanations for it? (Without closing the door on any of them.)
Or do we right away cling to a story about it, telling ourselves and others that this story – somehow, magically – is true? Do we tell ourselves they really are aliens? Angels? Beings from another dimension?
Or do we tell ourselves it is all bogus, delusions, fantasies, daydreams, wishful thinking?
In each case, we cling to a story as if it was true, even in the absence of real data. In both cases, we find something to believe in just because we want to, because it is – somehow – more comforting that way.
And finally, how do we deal with it in the real world?
It is a world-wide phenomenon, so why doesn’t it yield more serious research?
Why do scientists shun the subject? Are they are afraid of being associated with crackpots? Do they let fear get in their way of research that would reap insights into psychology and sociology, and possibly other areas?
If so, what does that say about science?
An interesting article on one of the more eccentric cosmological theories: Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?
The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.
Stories reflect what is alive for us here now, and cosmological stories such as this one are no different.
They are a projection of a story happening here now, making the content of the story appear out there, in the world, as substantial and real.
And they are (often? always?) a projection of something alive here now, outside of the story itself.
As I explored the sense fields today (visual, sound, taste, smell, sensation, thought) and how thoughts mimic the visual field, I realized that the Big Brain theory is a close reflection of how our visual imagination recreate the world.
If I close my eyes, I find that my visual imagination (thoughts) can create images of my body, of specific body parts, of my immediate surroundings, the room, the building, the town, the region, the country, the earth as a whole, and so on. And in each case, my imagination only creates the bare minimum. It creates fragments, which is all that is needed.
Say I have my eyes closed, or it is dark, and there is a sharp sensation. My visual imagination will then map this onto an image of the body, telling me that it must be my big toe that is hurt. Or there is a sound, and my visual imagination tells me it is a car passing on the street down the hill from the house. Or somebody talks about the moon, and I have a visual image of the moon.
In each case, the universe – as it is created in my imagination – happens in fragments, using as little energy as possible.
So whatever merits the Big Brain theory has, for instance in terms of generating new cosmological insights or models, it also mirrors what is going on here now. It mirrors how our visual imagination works.
This is maybe an obvious example of how our stories reflect what is alive here now, but the simplest examples are often the clearest and best ones, and invite us to explore it further on our own. How is this true for other cosmological stories, either from science or mythology? How is it true for any story?
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