Saturday, November 20, 2010

Mind Virus

I believe Richard Dawkins coined this term.  That makes sense, given that he is an evolutionary biologist.

The idea is something like this:
Human beings are prone to superstition, the invention of myth and legend based on over exaggeration of real past events, and unwavering belief in anything asserted by parent figures.
Humans are also pretty rational beings, so they tend to integrate all of theses myths, superstitions, and traditions into what might be called a worldview.  This worldview tends to explain the origin of humanity and the world it inhabits, prescribe proper behavior of individuals toward one-another (as well as toward the ubiquitous imagined anthropomorphic forces controlling the world), and address the terrifying concept of the inevitability of death.

However, despite the human tendencies mentioned above, these worldviews and their constituent parts are not invulnerable.  Humans are clever, and very good at pattern-recognition.  When the patterns of the worldview become inconsistent with the observed patterns in the world, humans will often reject all or part of the worldview.  For example, do you believe that spilling salt is bad luck, or saying "Bloody Mary" repeatedly in a darkened room with a mirror will bring forth some unholy being to torment you?  If not, why don't you?
When a young child, I tested the Bloody Mary one.  My friends insisted it was true, but I was skeptical.  However, I was terrified, because I'm human and I tend to accept these superstitions naturally, on some level.  Still, I was not afraid enough that I did not go into the bathroom (half-petrified) and test it thoroughly.  Once experience had failed to confirm the purported truth of Bloody Mary, I came to assume the falsehood of this particular myth.

The idea of a mind-virus is that these ideas, these myths and superstitions, are passed from person to person easy.  However, the human mind has defenses against false ideas (skepticism, rational approach to reality).  The ideas resilient to these defenses tend not to be widely abandoned, but passed on further.  The ideas mutate and grow over time, and the mutations most favorable to the survival of the idea are passed on, where the other ones are quickly abandoned.  This, as I'm sure you've seen, is the source of the term "mind-virus," and I find that the behavior of these ideas are actually very analogous to the evolution of an actual contagious virus.
After all, a virus is just RNA in a protein shell, and is little more than information.  This is hauntingly close to what an idea consists of.  Virii do not reproduce like cellular organisms, they simply deliver the information, which has evolved through selection to hijack existing cells for the reproduction and distribution of the virus.

So, I have been musing over the potential dangers to a mind-virus posed by a human being, and the possible defenses the virus might evolve.

Human Defense: 
Experimental refutation of an idea.  The mind, as I said, can go out and test ideas, and will usually abandon them when they have been thoroughly tested without significant matching results.

Viral Reactions: 
-If the idea cannot be tested, it cannot be experimentally disproved.
-If the idea includes anecdotal accounts of strong evidence for its veracity, it may weaken refutation by apparent (but unverified) counterexample.
-If the idea is tied strongly to another idea which is accepted, the accepted idea can anchor the attached idea by way of the unwillingness to accept the falsehood of the accepted idea (which in many cases would indeed be shown to be false if the connected idea were disproved.)

Human Defense:
Rational inconsistency of parts of an idea or worldview.  Human beings are adept at finding the incongruities of two or more assertions, and will often abandon at least one idea in order to escape from the illogic.

Viral Reactions:
-If an appeal to cognitive dissonance is packaged with the idea, a person might well rationalize away or ignore the obvious inconsistencies.  Often this takes the form of "At least do/try it for 's sake."
-If an appeal to human ignorance is made, a person might accept inconsistent assertions, pending further data.  This is actually the virus commandeering the person's skepticism; it is very true that knowledge gained later might clarify the apparent inconsistency.  A strengthening factor often included is a hint or assertion that such knowledge is had somewhere, and may well be on its way.

Human Defense: 
Experience and a realistic world-view.  Human begin to expect the world to act as observed once they have gained enough experience.  Skepticism is the natural reaction to claims inconsistent with that pattern.

Viral Reactions:
-If the virus comes packaged with some rationalization that seems logical, the inconsistency can be made to seem trivial.  Jonathan Swift's satirical A Modest Proposal is an demonstration of how preposterous ideas can be cast in a light making them seem perfectly reasonable.
-If a virus appeals to deep-seating anxieties common to human beings, the strong desire to escape to safety from these anxieties might cause a person to strongly accept an idea immediately, making skeptical investigation less likely.  Unemployment, disease, death, loneliness, etc, can cause people to go so far as to buy spring water from Tibet and to vote for sketchy candidates making sweeping promises.

Human Defense: 
An understanding of uncertainty, probability, and statistics.  This is related to the experienced, realistic world-view, but is more rational than intuitive.  The unlikelihood of the truth of an assertion compared to alternatives is extremely damaging to an idea.  If you flip a coin and heads comes up twice, there is little reason to assume a biased coin.  If you flip a coin 1000 times in a row and get heads, to suspect the coin is the logical reaction.  It is not that the alternative is impossible, but it is much less likely.

Viral Reaction:
-If an idea comes with an argument containing bad math or unverified statistics, it still creates some apparent credibility of the idea.  "Most Americans prefer green" is far less believable than "60% of Americans prefer green," because the quantitative assumption seems authoritative and precise.

Now, I ask, what types of worldviews and ideas are most resilient?  Things that turn out correct, for one thing.  But also, religions (the ones that last) tend to have almost every beneficial mind-virus characteristic, and so they become prolific and resilient.

Religions make claims on subjects that cannot or cannot yet be experimentally examined.
    -eg The existence of god.
Religions perpetuate unverifiable anecdotes.
    -eg The resurrection of Jesus.
Religions tie ideas together firmly to anchor less-secure ideas.
    -eg If you have faith, you can believe.
Religions tend to make appeals to emotions in order to promote cognitive dissonance.
    -eg Just try it for a while, for (family member)'s sake.
Religion regularly implies higher intelligence and a grand scheme beyond human comprehension.
    -eg We cannot understand (inconsistent doctrine) in this life, but all will be made clear in heaven.

Religions employ flowery rhetoric which seems sound, but actually contains assumptions and fallacies.
    -eg All things have a beginning, so nothing could exist unless there was something (god) to start it.Religions constantly appeal to almost-universal human anxieties.
    -eg Answers addressing "Where did I come from, why am I here, where am I going?"
Religions quote false or unverified statistics and use bad math constantly.
    -eg The watchmaker argument.

You'll notice that these are in the same order as the bullet points I listed above enumerating the various viral survival mechanisms.  Religion nearly universally contains many, many, of each of these mechanisms.
But this makes sense: religions only survive when they are resilient to skepticism and disproof.  Religion has existed most likely since the dawn of human culture, and has evolved over the millennia to be what it is now: very well-suited to the human mind.  Modern religion is a nearly perfect mind-virus.
Any person will agree, I think, that most religions make many false claims (because clearly not many more than one can possibly be correct).  The fact that these religions remain prolific, and their followers faithful, indicates the human vulnerability to viral (and sometimes virulent) ideas.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

God's Appendix

Man is supposed to be created in god's image, right?

In Mormon theology, this is interpreted quite literally as meaning that god has a body, normal human size, male, just "exalted."  Exalted means that it is immortal and has no blood for some reason?  But in every way it is supposed to be analogous to our bodies, just without blemish or fallibility.
I am aware that in other Christian traditions, this bit of doctrine is interpreted much more loosely... god is somehow ehtereal and everywhere at once, so he doesn't have a body per se, but he's like us in some sense.  I guess we can regard god as fundamentally human, in this case, except "higher" in some way.

I was just thinking about what the implications of this idea, that god is like a man, are.  I was of course thinking in the Mormon context because that's how I grew up, so I was imagining a physical god with a body like a human's.

It occured to me:  does god have an appendix?  How about tonsils?  Adenoids?  How about all of our junk DNA, most of which has absolutely no effect in our makeup and development?  If so, why does god have useless organs and parts?  He can hardly be called "perfect" in that case.
How about pores?  Does god sweat?  Can he sneeze?  Does he have to clear his divine ears of heavenly earwax?  It all seems like a pretty funny way to think of deity.

But for that matter, if god can get things done just by speaking or willing, why does he even need arms and legs and fingers, and in short, a physical body at all?

If we take the tack that god is not physical, but sort of an incorporeal-but-human being, we come up with some additional concerns:  Exactly how is man in god's image?
I can think of several possibilities, of course.  Our minds, our moral intuition, our imaginations, etc, are all modeled after god's.  We are sentient, modeled after god's sentience.
This is fine as a concept.  However, it collides with some other doctrines that I've considered:

For example, that "God's ways are not our ways."  I've been told this over and over when I have been questioning god's actions, given the world as it is.  Don't try to justify god, his thoughts and ways are so much higher than ours that we can't hope to ever follow them.
I can understand where this is coming from, but it seems inconsistent with the above-mentioned doctrine.  If we are made in god's image but he is not physical, how are his ways not our ways?  Our behaviors are presumably based on his ways.  Maybe it is that we are like children, not quite up to his level of abstraction.  But I really wonder how; adult human beings are capable of extremely high levels of abstraction.  Non-euclidian geometries, for example, represent a very thouroughly-studied field that is purely abstract; it has absolutely no relation to our experiences except the very exceptional case of the geometry which is the one of our experience.  If it is imaginable, we can think about it and study it.  If we can't make any headway in metaphysics, it is logically impossible as Kant demonstrated.  If god has tools we do not, then he is not necessarily more capable than we are, any more than a physics student today is more capable than Isaac Newton.  Just lucky.

So, if god has no body and does not think anything like us, in what way exactly are we made in god's image? 
Is it not more likely that god is made in our image?
He sure tends to conform to the prevailing philosophy of a given people at a given time, but only in that time to those people.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

I wish I could believe in god

It would be great if the truth-claims of religion were true.  It would be awesome if the LDS church were true, the promised results from living a faithful life are pretty darn good.

But I just can't believe god exists.  At least not the god I've been taught about.  The world is not like the world that religions say it is.  It is not like the world one would expect to have been created by a powerful, benevolent being.  The evidence seems completely contrary.  For every person god supposedly helps, dozens of people are left to die by way of disease, violence, starvation, and other unimaginably terrible deaths.
I have been told over and over that god allows evil in the world for free will's sake.  However, this explanation seems weak to me.  If god is so powerful, he might come up with some other way.  I don't think the "best of all possible worlds," as Leibniz concluded the world must be if created by a benevolent god, is one where the prayers of a kid looking for his teddy bear or a woman for her car to start so she can make it to work are answered even as innocent children burn or starve to death elsewhere.  If god exists and is well-meaning, he really, really needs to rethink his priorities.

I've read many times that it takes more faith to be atheist than theist.  While I admit that someone who believes that there is no god and could never be convinced otherwise is probably dogmatically clinging to faith of a kind, I don't think that that's how it is for me.  Presented with the right evidence, I would believe in god.  But it seems more likely than not that there is no personal god, to me, because the world I find myself in is inconsistent with that idea.  So how am I clinging to faith more than a theist, if I interpret things in the most realistic way possible while being prepared to change my beliefs based on new data?

I'm sure there are those who would accuse me of not giving god a chance.  This is bull.  I served a full-time mission working every waking hour, seven days a week, for two years.  I rode a bike through the hail and in 110 degree 90% humidity, being rejected from dawn to dusk in a language I had to learn as I went.  I have always given 1/10 of my income to the church.  I have spent my life saying constant daily prayers, reading the scriptures, participating in church service, and forever ignoring any doubts that came my way.
I would say that 20+ years seems long enough.  If god were going to throw me a bone, I'd think maybe he would have done it by this time.  After all, I've probably lived more than a quarter of my life, and some of my most important decision-making years at that, in his service.

Even if there turned out to be a god who was even slightly interested in human affairs and the lives of individuals, I very much doubt that I was raised in his correct religion.  What are the odds?  Not good.  Ignoring the church's inconsistencies in teachings throughout the last couple of centuries, it occurs to me that maybe god would do a better job promoting the church that he supposedly endorses.

Maybe there is some kind of "first cause" or "creator" of the universe, but there is nothing to indicate this thing's characteristics.  Even its sentience is a completely baseless assumption.  This "god" could very well regard the universe as a toy, maybe it hasn't even noticed humanity in all of the vastness of space.  Or maybe it has, is malevolent, and brings suffering into the world for its own pleasure.  So the entire basis of a rational path to theism is groundless... if you have been personally convinced of god's existence, fine, but you can't use that to convince me, your conversion experience is not even consistent with the conversions of others!

Now I'm ranting, so I'd better stop.  But people say some dumb things about the way I think, and sometimes it irks me.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Making Watches with Faith

I heard a story fairly recently about two sister missionaries.  They were driving out in the middle of nowhere when their car ran out of gas.  Not immediately knowing what to do, they consulted.  It occurred to one of them that they had some drinking water in bottles in the car.  Why don't they pray that the water be turned to gasoline, and pour it into the gas tank?  They fervently prayed, and emptied the bottles into the fuel port.  Full of faith, they entered the car and attempted to start it.  The water was pulled into the engine, where it caused ruinous damage.  The car, needless to say, did not run.

Everyone laughed at the silly sisters.  Then I said, to test them, "we all know that prayers for real things don't get answered.  Only imaginary things."  The group awkwardly ignored my statement, a little shocked at the suggestion.  But isn't this the case?  Pray for help on your test, and you suddenly remember something you had studied.   Pray for comfort on a hard day, and a friend comes calling.  See?  Prayer works!  But pray for something that probably would not  have happened anyway... you silly person!  That's absurd!
It is postulated that prayers are only answered when they are in accordance with the will of god.  But why would he make his will dependent on prayers of antlike mortals?
"Okay, this is what I want to do.  But I won't do it unless someone prays for it.  Okay... so now how do I do this?  Maybe prompt someone to pray for it?  *prompt prompt*  It worked!"
So god does things only after he gets someone to ask for it.  Doesn't he have better things to do?  That's the same as your friend who says "I had a crazy dream last night."  and looks up at you hopefully, and then further prompts "Man, it was such a crazy dream!" and again pauses.  You throw up your hands and say "I've been listening!  If you want to tell the dream just do it already!"

On an entirely unrelated note.  I despise the Watchmaker Argument.  It goes like this:
You walk up a tall, remote mountain and find a beautiful gold watch, still running, on the ground.
Do you assume that it formed there spontaneously?  No!  You just  know someone made it!
The [universe/humans/earth/etc] is the same way!  You can't tell me someone made it, it's too complex!

Okay, may I please point out how this is a ridiculous straw-man?  Put down with a little less sugary rhetoric:
1. Object X exists.
2. Object X is complex.
3. There exists at least one intelligent being who makes object X.
4. It is very unlikely that object X could exist spontaneously. (from 2)
5. Object X was most likely made by an intelligent being. (from 4,3)
6. An intelligent creator of object X most likely exists.  (from 1,5)

Lovely, isn't it.  But wait?  Looking at the steps of this proof, we notice that one of the assumptions (step 3) is exactly the same as the conclusion (step 6), which depends on step 3!
This is what we call FREAKING CIRCULAR!

I'll throw in an extra two bits for good measure. This argument implies that the existence of a watch spontaneously by chance is unlikely because of its complexity and perfection.  Same with us, right?  But wait, isn't god the most ultimately perfect and complex being in existence?  Hmm.  So while it is unlikely that the watch would exist spontaneously, it is less likely that a creator of watches spontaneously exists!  And it is further unlikely that someone who could design and build the creator would exist spontaneously, without being made.  So if you're going to appeal to probability, you'd better know that while yes, the spontaneous existence of intelligent life like ours is unlikely, you are not getting better odds by assuming a creator.

Monday, November 1, 2010


I was just noticing that I have never felt something so close to conviction, fervor, and zeal as I have recently.  I always had an uneasiness in the back of my mind when participating in and even promoting the church my parents raised me in.  Vague awareness of the cognitive dissonance.  But now, I feel so liberated.  It just feels right to admit to myself that I think that this religion is false, as all others probably are.  Just accepting the fact that I think Joseph Smith was a charlatan is so amazing compared to always pushing back the sinking doubts about his weird stories and dubious character (even back when I avoided anything not published by the LDS church about Smith, regarding it, like a good Mormon, as diseased lies from the devil).
If I were ever to admit this to my parents or church leaders, they would chastise me, I'm sure.  I guess I can't blame them, that's what they're supposed to do based on their convictions.

But being at a religious university, surrounded by Mormon professors and Mormon classmates in a predominantly Mormon area, there is no one with which to share this joy I feel in my freedom to think.  It's damned lonely.
I thought Satan was supposed to use peer pressure and loneliness to encourage me to apostatize.

The Law of Gravity

...The Mormon church seems obsessed with gravity.
The recent talk by Elder Packer that has gained so much attention by way of its blatant homophobia included one of these weird references.  In fact, I wasn't even phased, to be honest, by the anti-gay sentiments; it's what I expect.  But when he talked about "a law against nature would be possible to enforce," I immediately thought, "That is the worst metaphor I've heard in a while."
What is there to enforce in a law that permits something?  And if people want to marry people of the same gender, how is that in any way impossible?  The nullification of gravity is impossible (so far as we know), but it seems like the comparison doesn't hold at all when it is held up next to a law allowing people to do something that is completely defined by words and contracts and other arbitrary things.

So, I was reading in Mormon Doctrine the other day (I still read my daily scriptures in case anyone finds out I am a closet atheist, because then they have nothing to berate me with).  Elder McConkie states in the section on "Law" that,

Once a law has been ordained, it thereafter operates automatically; that is, whenever there is compliance with its terms and conditions, the promised results accrue.  The law of gravitation is an obvious example.  Similarly, compliance with the law of faith always brings the gifts of the spirit.

Now, as much as I love this passage solely for the selection of the word "accrue," I couldn't help but notice that the monstrous bad-gravity-metaphor has once again reared its ugly head.  Are you telling me that when I comply with the conditions of gravity, the promised results accrue?  I didn't even know I had a choice!
Okay, so maybe he was going for something like "if you walk off a cliff, the promised results accrue. *SPLAT*"  But it sure doesn't allude to this effect very directly.  I would think something like, I don't know, a vending machine or maybe a light switch or something that has an obvious options->choice->results relationship might better convey his meaning.  Gravity is pretty much G*m1*m2/r^2, no matter what you decide.

Anyway, I decided to go to and investigate: are there more of these references to gravity used to attempt to convince us not to sin?

Here is one that wants to convince you that faith is like believing in gravity through experience as a little child.  You can't see it, but it's there!  Just like the spirit!  (Why do people keep using this same silly argument?)

And here we read that, "The law of gravity is an absolute truth. It never varies. Greater laws can overcome lesser ones, but that does not change their undeniable truth."  So gravity is a good example of a law that can't be violated, except of course whenever some "greater" law overcomes it.  Apparently this "absolute" law is subject to every whim and caprice of god, so what is the point of mentioning it as an example in the first place?

In this one, we are admonished to understand the importance of law.  After all, imagine what would happen if the law of gravity were suspended!  We would all die!  I guess I can't argue with that, although I might point out that in a universe where such suspension occasionally occurred, any intelligent species might likely find itself well-adapted to survive such upsets.  Once again, over-extended as an analogy, but this time it at least makes some sense.

Here we read that "Physical laws, such as the law of gravity, never change; but we change our definitions of them as the scientific community learns more about their operation. Spiritual laws also never change, and we orchestrate our lives according to where we are in our understanding of those truths."  One might wonder why god chooses to let us sporadically work out the truth on some fronts (like gravity) but insists that whatever is said by religion has always been taught.  (Despite the fact that the things said by even a single religion change with great rapidity, resulting in a terribly high incidence of retcon.)
I digress, but again I ask: why the hell use gravity for your metaphor when you have to take such pains to make it fit?

And last but not least, we have an article by Elder Packer written some 18 years ago where he apparently originally used the whole "do you think a vote to repeal the law of gravity would do any good?"  My first reaction was that I see, here is a doddering old man who reused a well-written metaphor from years ago, but not so nimbly this time.  I was ready to give him this particular benefit of the doubt until I started reading what he wrote in the article.  It is just the same thing, trying to use a physical law to justify his declaration of his particular moral beliefs are irrevocable for all eternity.  The article even slightly contradicts itself in giving examples of sure, we could pass a law that does this, but we can't make it right.  So... we can pass these "laws against nature," as well as enforce them, except that we can never redefine morality?  Okay, I guess, but I haven't really been convinced of anything, here.  The acceptance of this doctrine is dependent on the reader already accepting eternal, universal, divinely-inspired law of the packerlicious flavor.

So.  The law of gravity has been gratuitously co-opted by the Mormons to poorly demonstrate the importance of the particular "god's eternal immutable laws" of the time.  One wonders why they leave out the strong and weak nuclear forces, and for that matter the electromagnetic force?  There are literally infinite terrible metaphors that can be constructed by appeal to the physical laws, and I see a lot of unexploited territory here, Elder Packer.